Southern Discomfort

Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) - Directed by Gaultieri Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi

If you read the reviews of Jacopetti & Prosperi's Goodbye Uncle Tom (or Adios Zio Tom, in its native Italian) on-line, you'd be forgiven, from the fan-boy slaver, of thinking that this was the ne plus ultra of 70's exploitation, a 2 hour wallow in the excesses of the 19th century slave trade. It is and it isn't. No-one after watching it would deny that this is exploitation at its most base and, in polite circles at least, most unmentionable, but it's both more than that and less. What's really more shocking - the content of this docu-drama or the fact that Hollywood was still making films eulagising the slave-master relationship like The Song of the South in the late 1940's?

Goodbye Uncle Tom follows the successful formula Jacopetti and Prosperi established in their previous 'mondo' documentaries the most famous of which were Mondo Cane (1960) and Africa Addio (1965). The film is really a collection of sequences rather than a coherent narrative. There's no points being raised here (though more on this later) beyond 'Isn't slavery degrading?' and 'Do you want to see?' The movie starts with a sweeping aerial shot from a helicopter of a cotton/sugar cane plantation in the late 19th century American south. Typically for a J&P film, the title sequence is accompanied by a song from regular collaborator Riz Ortolani that is too eye-blindingly sweet to be called saccharine. Following this sequence we then run headlong into a series of sequences with no real discerable narrative which includes a discussion at a dinner table with the plantation owners about how their slaves are sub-human (complete with slave children running around under the table like pet dogs), a slave sale, scenes set within a slave trading ship, a cathouse with black slave prostitutes, capturing and punishing escaped slaves....I'm sure you get the point. The film is full of unabashed full-frontal male and female nudity, a fair bit of (fortunately not especially graphic) violence and obviously a racial charge quite unlike that of any other film I can think of.

Where Goodbye Uncle Tom differs from other films on a similar subject (including exploitation fodder like the so-bad-it's-terrible Mandingo and its pointless sequel Drum) is that it makes no real attempt to place its atrocities in any kind of context. Again, this is a particular Jacopetti and Prosperi trait. For the exploitative way the film is shot, they really do step away from the action and let the viewer decide. This is fine for a film like Africa Addio, which after all is a genuine documentary with multiple valid viewpoints in terms of how it can be interpreted, but it much less successful in Goodbye Uncle Tom because no sane person would ever conceive of a set of circumstance in which slavery could be considered with anything other than contempt and disgust. Nevertheless, because of the lack of a narrative and the way in which Jacopetti and Prosperi let their film's imagery stand on its own merits, Goodbye Uncle Tom is a film that manages to be more offensive than the likes of Drum or racially-charged exploitation flicks like Robert Endleson's Fight for your Life, but much less easy to dismiss, a fact that may have prompted Pauline Kael's infamous railing against the film and the difficulty it has subsequently had finding distribution. If you're simply documenting established and authentic historical activities, when does that documentation become exploitation?

The exploitation movie is the septic tank of cinema art - no-one wants to talk about it, but it serves a vital function. Goodbye Uncle Tom, for all the exploitative elements it contains serves a similarly vital function. Only Exploitation film-makers would have the moxie to take the debasement inherently inter-twined with the slave trade and film it straight. If they'd left it like that, then one could debate the merits of the docu-drama approach to the subject matter and whether the approach justifies the footage. Unfortunately Jacopetti & Prosperi felt it necessary to tack on an ending which is as clumsy as it is uneccessary, and which creates, then muddies the subtext of the film entirely.

This finale tries to place the previous hour and ten minutes of barbarity in a modern context as a contemporary black actor sits on a beach and reads a copy of Thomas Ruffin Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner, leader of a 19th century slave rebellion in which a number of white slave-holders were murdered. This is intercut with a home-invasion sequence in which black men invade a modern white house and attack its occupants. It's difficult to see what Jacopetti and Prosperi were hoping to achieve with this sequence, other than perhaps an utterly cack-handed attempt to link slavery with the rise of the black-power movement in contemporary America. Attempting to contextualise the film in any way is a mistake (for reasons mentioned above, it doesn't need it) but to do it in such a thoroughly ham-fisted way is unforgivable. It's almost as if the two film-makers lost their bottle at the last minute and attempted to 'legitimise' the bulk of the film by trying to tie the historical elements to a modern social 'problem' (as they see it). In doing so, they demonstrate a complete ignorance of 20th century American history and trivialise the civil rights/black power movement to the point of offence.

Even with the ill-conceived finale, Goodbye Uncle Tom is not a film without merit, at least technically. It looks stunning (if you can get hold of anything other than an nth generation bootleg) and has a visual scope far beyond anything in comparable contemporary exploitation film-making. Production design is similarly impressive and Riz Ortolani's score, whilst a shock to those more used to his understated scores for films like Cannibal Holocaust, is a lively proto-disco pipe and drum effort. What disturbs is the fact that the film was shot in Haiti, then in the grip of the foetid Papa Doc Duvalier regime. It doesn't take a vivid imagination to picture Jacopetti and Prosperi's direction being filtered through Duvalier's odious Ton Ton Macoute secret police, machetes in hand, out of shot. Tellingly, no actors are credited during either opening or closing title sequence. Knowing this, and watching the film unfold makes one rather less forgiving of the film-makers, regardless of their intentions.

Goodbye Uncle Tom did play UK Cinemas in the late 1970s though the final reel was excised entirely. Without this sequence, one can only imagine the impact the film must have had. It's not a film for the sensitive and it is flawed in all manner of ways, but it cannot easily be dismissed, not least because, whatever the intent of the film-makers themselves, the sequences they filmed bear at least some relationship to the events they sought to portray. It's far too easy to turn away from the action and blame the film-makers for re-creating it, without blaming ourselves that it exists to be recreated.