anthony-rigoni
Africa Addio(Also known as Goodbye Africa or Africa: Blood and Guts) is one of the most interesting documentaries I have ever seen. It portrays Africa in the 1960's compared to the Africa today. This movie was created by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi(Remember Mondo Cane?), who spent three years documenting the most shocking, disturbing, surprising, and even strange events ever caught on camera. From the lynching of Muslims at Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, Taganikya(now Tanzania) to poachers(white and black)running wild to slaughter animals as they please. From the execution of a criminal(ate a guy's liver and burned 27 kids alive) by a mercenary to the trials of criminals involved during the Mau Mau Uprising(Including flashbacks of the crimes taken place(One included dead baboons on nooses and then the cows with severed tendons by Jomo Kanari). And from the tragic story of a baby zebra who lost its mother to the mercenaries battling against the Simba Rebels at the Congo(Which also included the gruesome aftermath of the massacre at Stanleyville(Now known as Kisangani)). While human and animal deaths are grotesque and not for the faint of heart, there were historical events(The Zanzibar and Mau Mau incidents) that have taken place. Oh, did I mention the part where Jacopetti(Yes, that was him on camera when he and Prosperi were taken out of the car at Dar Es Salaam. I think. LOL) and Prosperi nearly got iced? This movie was so reckless, so intriguing, so dangerous that is sparked a firestorm of controversy. You simply can't find any documentary like Africa Addio anywhere else!
Reed Richards
somebody say, "Disgusting!" and when I realized I was the person who had said it (I was alone) I also realized that I didn't just mean the movie was disgusting but that I was disgusting for sitting through it. You want a spoiler? Here's a spoiler: the movie shows people getting killed, the camera sharing the killers' point of view, and not just once but twice, ad hoc executions of men, the second of whom is desperate to survive, to explain himself, but instead he is shot point blank twice by an affectless white mercenary, who says, "I'll do it," and walks up to him and shoots him dead. No due process, no proof of any crime except the voice-over's say-so. The first execution, about a minute earlier in the movie, is by a firing squad, sloppily carried out, and once the man is on his knees, face in the dirt, either dead or seconds away from it, a final, egregious shot is fired, apparently hitting the victim in the face and sending up a splash of dirt and blood.If you haven't figured out by halfway through that this is the direction the movie is headed in, then you have been sucked in and manipulated by probably the most cynical excuse for a documentary ever made. Red flags immediate go up with the film's opening claim that the camera is completely objective and only reports what it sees. The film then proceeds systematically to contradict this claim by mocking everything that comes before the lens. The movie pretends empathy for the displaced, abused and murdered whites in Kenya, then shows them behaving ridiculously and exposes their complacency. A white judge sentencing Mau Mau rebels to extremely harsh punishments (though not necessarily harsh for their crimes) stifles a yawn. Telling details, you'd think, cleverly captured, except when they take their place next to other instances of derisive sound effects and people (supposedly) saying ludicrous things in ludicrous voices with their backs to the camera.The movie combines its mocking with the kind of prurience you'd find in 1950s "sun worshipper" magazines and then with out and out salaciousness. In a scene obviously staged, the movie illustrates its completely racist point that black men, given the opportunity, lust after white women, by putting a group of clueless Africans in front of a white stripper. They don't seem to know how to react as she caresses her body, and when she encourages one man to remove the pasties from her nipples, and he does so only because he was instructed to, the poor, embarrassed man is left looking at the pasties in his hands as if he doesn't know what has just happened. The bizarre scene is then punctuated by a revelation of the stripper's face, which has been angled away from the camera to this point, and it is horsey and grotesque, with a smile that reveals frighteningly long, vampirish teeth.If you've been fooled into thinking the film has any empathy whatsoever, you should be undeceived by the episode in which the film makers, along with some German colleagues, try to land their two planes in rebel territory in Zambia? Rwanda?, the Germans landing first and being swarmed by rebels who take them captive and burn their plane. The Italian film makers get away as their plane is shot at, leaving the Germans to their fate, and the movie excuses itself from any followup when the voice-over says, "At least they were still alive." It occurs to you at this point that the Germans may have been patsies, decoys sent in to test the waters, the proverbial canaries in the mineshaft. It occurs to you that the film makers are guilty of much more than just disingenuous bad taste. By the time we get to the animal carnage it should be clear that what we are watching is pure adventure porn. It finds the place in the viewer that is disgusted by man's inhumanity to man and to nature, panders like crazy, and then treats us to scene after scene after scene of slaughter and dismemberment. Is there empathy for the animals? Can you imagine there is in a movie so up to its chin in blood and guts? The movie goes so far as to show stillborn calves being pulled from slaughtered elephants. Point of view is a real issue here. These film makers had to have participated willingly in these travesties (including the human murders at the end) in order to turn them around and toss them in the viewers face, purposefully making you feel implicated, while they throw their hands up and say, "Hey, the camera only reports what it sees." This is a movie that lies even when it tells the truth. This is a movie that pretends sympathy with the animals while displaying almost complete ignorance of their habits and behavior. This is a movie that can't tell the difference between a stork and a vulture. This is a movie that cheapens the value of a human life for the sake of a spectacle. This is a movie that wallows in rotting corpses, the victims of political upheavals, the aftermaths of colonialism and other versions of political opportunism and corruption, and then ignores politics, ignores causes, for the sake of wading into rivers of blood, and then the movie says, "Don't blame us. The camera only reports what it sees."
cultfilmfan
Africa Addio, is an Italian film with English subtitles. The film is a documentary about Africa, including scenes of animals being poached, a civil war and a revolution and a bunch of tribes being slaughtered. The film came out in Italy in 1966 and then came to North America in 1970 entitled Africa: Blood And Guts, and had 37 minutes cut from it's running time. Winner of The David Award for Best Production at The David Di Donatello Awards. The version I saw of the film was the 139 minute director's cut. The film is a very good looking film with great cinematography and production design. The film is also very interesting and is very powerful and disturbing with some of the images it shows us. After awhile the film started to feel long though and felt like it dragged on a little bit too much the last half hour or so. Some parts were also a little confusing but generally this is an entertaining, interesting and powerful film that is just as shocking now as it was in the 60's.
movieman_kev
I recently picked up the "Mondo Cane collection" from Blue Underground. The forth of the official Mondo films is "Africa Addio". A film which indicts the English empire from withdrawling from Africa, at the same time showing Africans themselves participating in Zenophobia, animal cruelty & mass genocide among other things. It also seems a tad one-sided for a documentary. (Granted not NEARLY as much as Micheal Moore's latter day more incendiary hack jobs) Blue Underground also choose to put this out on 2 disks. One being the English version, the other being the longer International one. Both are presented uncut, but the International version seems more fair-minded, providing a back story to why the things onscreen are happening.My Grade:B-
