Cine Excess Reviews: CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST
rating: 1
I first endured Ruggero Deodatos Cannibal Holocaust as a lazy undergraduate. It was the sort of movie you watched in a state of half-dress, usually in a dressing gown and with your girlfriend reminding you to re-stow your Gentlemans relish, lest you upset your visitors. The man whod brought it round on pirate VHS, was a fan of hardcore Italian pornography, specifically the work of Rocco Stiffredi, and banned video nasties. Collectively these two categories made up 95% of his film collection. The other 5% was Disney, naturally. Watching the new, that is to say, restored cut of the movie at this years Cine Excess ahead of its release on Blu-ray from Shameless Screen Entertainment, one can understand how the pornographic sensibility, the addiction to sensation, body horror, penetration and degradation, could inform the desire to see Deodatos film. The line that separates extreme human sexuality from hardcore depravity is slight and Im not sure my supplier would have recognised any distinction at all. (Warning, for those unaware of this notorious film please be warned that the film stills are extremely graphic and could be disturbing to some) Id like to be the first, if I may, to partner Cannibal Holocaust with Sidney Lumets Network. Paddy Chayefskys screenplay, a furious and cutting media satire, remains one of cinemas most incisive treatments of televisions ability to distort, exploit and condition its audience. I cite it because in Deodatos mind he was making a companion piece. The difference is that whereas Chayefskys treatment was the beneficence of a sharp intellect, using understatement to hammer its message home (has there ever been a better deadpan denouement than the line, so ends the story of Howard Beale, the only man in history to be killed because he had lousy ratings?), Deodato became confused and made the very thing he was ostensibly criticising.
Holocaust, inspired by its directors hatred of hypocrisy in the Italian news media, with the stations condemning movie violence showing, and in some cases staging, real world horrors for their voyeuristic viewers, was conceived as a tract on sadism, exploitation, cultural illiteracy and the insensitivity of news gatherers. Its curious then, that Cannibal Holocaust remains a film that invites you to attach those self-same labels to its cavalcade of grotesquery. Put that to Deodato, and I did, and you get a shrug of the shoulders and a wagging finger the same old blinkered journalists whove misunderstood his intent. The difficulty with film, however, is that its not like a half-remembered conversation; the evidence is up on screen. Forever. That its shot with a pornographers eye is indisputable. The score that opens the movie over aerial shots of the Amazon would have made more than John Holmes ears prick up. The style announces that this is a movie thats going to celebrate natures bounty and her beauty. Deodatos intent was to undercut and provide a counterpoint to, the violence, both physical and sexual, that followed, but actually, his treatment follows the period porn movie precisely; its back to nature and then on with the penetration and the tearing and the uninhibited camera. The idea was that in reviewing the plight of documentary filmmakers who first antagonise, then defile and desecrate the home of these Amazonian cannibals, mutilating real animals along the way, wed understand the lengths that perfidious westerners would go to in order to gain notoriety in the name of anthropology. This team, had nature and the mindless prehistoric tribes people, not overwhelmed them, executing a sort of proxy revenge on behalf of a fully masturbated but now post-orgasmic and guilty audience, intended to deceive the home crowd, editing the footage into something labelled authentic. What, you may ask, could be more cynical? 
Deodatos decision to present the movie as authentic, a move so successful that Italian prosecutors had him arrested for the alleged murder of the leading actors, was supposed to teach the audience a lesson. The film would act as like a news reel in reverse; the audience would watch it, expecting something safe and prefabricated and instead witness horrors with a naturalistic aesthetic so raw that it would turn their stomach. Theyd leave the cinema having learnt an important lesson about media exploitation and feeling worse for their insatiable voyeurism. The problem is that Deodato has relied on that self-same tendency to build the movies notoriety over the intervening decades. He stokes it and plays to it at every given opportunity. This is a film that revels in its violence and misogyny, and while the teams attempt at constructing a set of events is condemned, mirroring Deodatos own deception, the treatment of both animals and prosthetic humans is, for the filmmaker, manifestly self-indulgent. Its the ending that gives the game away. Arguably, if the point was to highlight that sensation, culled from the misery of others, for the purposes of entertainment, is wrong still the official line after 30 years, then the appropriate ending would be for the team to get away with it. After all, the media gets away with it all the time, Deodato would argue, and what would stoke audience indignation more than to have been privy to the process of constructing a narrative at the expense of others, only to see the filmmakers proudly present it at the close? Instead, the pornographer in Deodato demanded a money shot; thus a film that wags its finger at its audiences lust for gang rape, murder, female suffering and other big names from the school of cruelty, concludes with a sequence designed to satisfy those self-same cravings. 
The cameraman who raped a tribal girl has his penis severed, the woman who stood by while her team mates gang raped the same woman, who earlier watched as the men beheaded a turtle, is punished in kind; not because she did any of those things you understand but because shed didnt object, which is rather unfeminine, so were permitted to enjoy her violation and destruction as a means of gaining some belated satisfaction. Whether Deodato was conscious of his own hypocrisy is unclear; he hasnt answered those questions satisfactorily, but what is clear is that Cannibal Holocaust remains a gore whores primal fantasy. Much has been written about its treatment of animals, but I suggest this is gross sentimentality. More interesting and more pertinent, are questions raised about the instincts indulged at the cameras behest. Deodatos film both asks the question and provides an unpleasant answer. 
Cannibal Holocaust played at this year's Cine Excess Film Festival.