#jacopetti

During week five, especially in response to the local production of To Kill A Mockingbird,the elements of production became a major topic. Our professors tried to guide us away from discussing the content, and towards a thoughtful analysis of the production. How and why are these elements selected to further the goals of the creators? I want to try and apply that critical framework to this film. The answers to these questions are variable, and not really what I am interested in, at the moment. I am most intrigued by the idea of criticizing a performance,  but not necessarily the content.

Form/Genre: Why is this in the form it is? Why is this a film and not a play or a novel? Why choose the style of documentary?

Setting: The filmmakers claim that the point of the film is to trace the roots of the racial tension in the 1971 United States. How does the juxtaposition of contemporary and historical serve the goal of the filmmakers?

Goodbye, Uncle Tom is a 1971 pseudo-documentary made by seminal mondo filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. The conceit of the film is that contemporary Italian documentarians are creating a film capturing the gross injustices of the Antebellum South. The film is gross, lurid, hyper-violent, perverse and incredibly hard to stomach.

Just like the American institution of slavery.

The argument there would be, no, this film is not exploitative, it is realistic. Is it disgusting when a 13 year old slave is sent to the cameraman's guestroom as a present from the plantation owner? Of course. Would it have been particularly shocking on a major plantation ran in the 1850s? Perhaps not.

Roger Ebert, in his 1972 review, gave this film zero stars and wrote at length about how the realistic abuse seen in this film is wrapped in the cloak of historical accuracy to disguise its true nature, racist sadism.

Much like an opinion that was espoused during our discussion in class on week four, which explored the disgust people felt at post 9/11 memorials that featured imagery of people falling/jumping from the Twin Towers, Ebert wrote

Their vomit-bag of racism and perversion-mongering isn't even covered up with the usual slime of sanctimonious BS.

There is an idea that gross performances of gross incidents cause insult to the people effected and that certain topics are untouchable. This raises the question, however, that if we shield ourselves from the grossness, do we tacitly allow ourselves to sanitize our memories of the past. The untouchability of rightfully painful events is a dangerous quality, as it not only silences people who would argue that the U.S. deserved 9/11 or that Africans actually had a superior quality of life when enslaved.

Goodbye Uncle Tom trailer (by 4Xderrick)

In the weeks between my last posts and this, our class has focused on how we memorialize tragedy, and by extension, how we perform said memorializations and how we use those performances to affect a certain (often politicized) message.

We read works from theater scholars on their reaction to 9/11, the play The Exonerated, which led to discussions of casting and celebrity, and discussed the elements of a local stage production of To Kill A Mockingbird.

The 1971 film Goodbye Uncle Tom is a fantastic example of how all of these factors can collide in a performing arts setting.