1. Africa Addio (1966)
Africa Addio... Just whispering the very name of the film brings me a queasy feeling to my stomach and a cold piercing through my heart. This is the film that has affected me the most in my career as a keen cineaste. Directed again by Jacopetti and Prosperi, Africa Addio (which you may also know in a shortened form as Africa Blood and Guts) captures the decolonisation of Africa and the resulting civil unrest. Viewers are very divided over this film - some see it as pro-colonialism, some see it as antiapartheid and empowering for Africa. It is either totally racist and a film that Roger Ebert said "slanders an entire continent" or a historically accurate period of history where the colonialists were sent packing as they should not have been in Africa in the first place. The film makers basically call Africa a crying baby that was abandoned by her parents when she needed them most. Jacopetti and Prosperi film some very frightening stuff. The helicopter camera pans over thousands of Arabs in Zanzibar. Thy are in holding pens or running for their lives because they are being massacred. Some of them are running desperately to the sea in a bid to escape, but there are no boats waiting for them. The next day they are all lying on the beach dead. This is the only evidence that the Zanzibar massacre happened. In a way the film is very exciting as Africa experiences a new dawn and a new freedom, you are shown the enthusiasm of the natives but the film soon grows ugly. There are scenes of protracted animal slaughter that make Cannibal Holocaust look like Wildlife SOS. I couldn't bear these scenes - it was such gratuitous slaughter of magnificent African beasts. But the slaughter is symptomatic of the chaos that happened in the wake of colonialism. People are killed on camera. In one sequence a white mercenary shoots a black man at point blank range. Jacopetti and Prosperi were nearly jailed for this film under allegations that they staged the the shooting specifically for the camera. They managed to beat the rap. But it seems peculiar that they found themselves in so many places in Africa where all the action was happening. Scenes of great ugliness - like a huge pile of severed hands - are juxtaposed with scenes of great beauty - like the Boer family emigrating in the sunset with their wagons. It is a very impressive production that has been little seen or given little publicity - probably due to its inflammatory content. I don't know what to say about its politics and I have an M Phil in Ethnic and Racial studies! On the one hand I think that the film makers just stumbled across the path of neo-colonialism and merely capture what they found on film. The chaos, brutality and confusion are all real. On the other hand I feel that bizarre shots of the South African white girls trampolining and clad in bikinis running to the sea are summing up a white in Africa ideal. It has mixed messages and throws a bit of everything in the pot. At the end of the film, neither the white race nor the black race come out of Africa Addio smelling of roses. It is a fantastic piece of polemic film making whose themes are still as relevant as they were 50 years ago and are still bound to provoke heated debate among its viewers. For the sheer amount of controversy it produces, Africa Addio is number one on the list.