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After filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi spent years
concocting wild, questionable, notorious and highly sensationalist
(pseudo-)documentaries like Mondo Cane and Africa Addio,
films that deliberately mixed real and fake footage for maximum effect
rather than anything else, they made this film about slavery set in 19th
century USA, which is of course entirely made up from fake - or
rather directed - footage because of obvious reasons, yet Jacopetti and
Prosperi still want the film to be understood as documentary, even if they
repeatedly and intentionally break the realistic mood fo the picture, like
when they go through 19th century cotton fields by helicopter (which is
clearly visible in several shots and audible) in the opening sequence or
in a later sequence we hear the engine of their car when there's no need
for on-locaation sound.
But even apart from such obvious deviations from realism, the film -
which depicts the plights of the black slaves from the point of their
arrival in the USA to their various working situations, to a farm where
they are raised like cattle and up to the situation of the contemporary
Afro-American - is not so much a documentary per se but leans towards the
grotesque quite deliberately, also in its choice of historic figures and
their (presumably) authentic quotes and its often excessive cinematic
language, excessive not only in the depiction of violence and such but
also in its setpieces featuring much more trivial things like an army of
slaves doing (and unintentionally messing up) the household, the scenes at
the slave market or at the slave-breeding farm. So excessive are these
scenes in fact that they tend to be comical (even if it is black and/or
gallows humour), and the scenes also show that the notorious duo
Jacopetti/Prosperi were actually fine filmmakers with a true cinematic
vision - once they left the field of pseudo-documentary behind (an even
better example of their talents is their next film, Mondo
Candido, actually).
That all said, Goodbye Uncle Tom is certainly not a film for
everyone, its main message is much too twisted and unclear for the
politically correct crowd, and some of the scenes are most certainly hard
to swallow (especially a scene where one of the filmmakers deflowers a 13
year old black girl - not shown in all explicitness - comes to mind), but
if you understand the film not so much as a documentary and/or message
film but a grotesque work of art, you will find this one quite enjoyable
...
The only thing that's really problematic about the film is
that the filmmakers thank Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier ... now
that's one man who doesn't need any thanks (according to estimations he
had up to 30.000 opponents killed during his reign of terror) ...
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find Goodbye Uncle Tom at adultvideouniverse.com
