Disney's recent policy aimed at underlining the problematic nature of minority representations and especially indigenous communities in the last century has raised quite a few criticisms by virtue of the perspective used, which ultimately betrays an ill-concealed Eurocentrism and evident hypocrisy all western in style. The analysis of a controversial and epochal film like "Cannibal Holocaust" by Ruggero Deodato, released in theaters 41 years ago, can help us understand why.
di Marco Maculotti
The question on the representation of minorities and in particular of indigenous communities has recently risen to the headlines, by virtue of Disney's controversial decision to affix a disclaimer to some of his old animated films - including Peter Pan e Dumbo - present on the Netflix platform, due to some scenes in which certain communities such as Native Americans and African Americans were represented so problematic, that means stereotyped. If the critical review of the works of the past is certainly nothing new for the great American animation houses (on YouTube you can easily see various cartoons, produced between the 20s and 60s, which have been censored and banned from television programming. for the same reasons), what may be surprising about this decision by Disney is the perspective through which the issue is interpreted.
If in the past the cartoons were censored because they were considered problematic they actually showed entire non-white communities according to some well-defined negative clichΓ©s (among which we can mention the low predisposition to work, a disproportionate and almost animal libidinal charge, as well as physiognomic characteristics typical of the "mentally disadvantaged"), those to whom Disney has today decided to affix a disclaimer and to advise against minors under the age of seven are not distinguished by particularly hateful representations of the ethnic communities in question, rather limiting themselves to translating their image (obviously stereotyped, like any character and situation of any Disney product) based on paradigmatic cultural, anthropological and sociological factors of the respective communities: the Indians ofNeverland in Peter Pan (1953) they live in the traditional encampments of teepee, they play the drums and dance around the bonfire, they smoke the calumΓ© and decorate their thick hair with eagle feathers, and in all this, frankly, no matter how stereotyped it may be, nothing of problematic.
Similarly, it seems excessive to stigmatize the representation of crows in Dumbo (1942), zoomorphic alter ego of African Americans, only because the leader of the latter is called Jim Crow: evidently a (about nice) play on words (crow in English it means βcrowβ) which recalls the laws of the same name, approved in the 30s to regulate social and community relations between US citizens of European origin and those of African origin. Even those who pretend at all costs to read in them a neglected and merciless image of the African American community are wrong: in the Disney cartoon the crows are Dumbo's helpers, and as such they accompany him until the final revenge, which would not have been possible without their help.
We must therefore think about what kind of representations they should really be considered problematic and which stereotypes are to be considered really uneducational for the young public to the point of advocating their banning. That the entire US film industry until at least the 60s was based entirely on stereotype (and this, of course, not only with regard to non-white ethnic communities) is hardly a surprise.
As for the question of the representation of Native Americans, just think of the entire western genre, based on the dichotomous opposition between cowboys and Indians. A Manichaean conception that sees absolute Good in the former and Evil in the latter, then? It is undeniable that in a large part of the genre this reading existed and was predominant, however it was not as granitic as one might think: just mention films like A Man Called Horse (βA man called a horseβ, 1970) e Jeremiah Johnson ("Red crow you will not have my scalp", 1972), films in which the world of the natives, represented according to canons faithful to ethnographic studies (see for example the famous scene, in A Man, of the "Sun Dance"), it is suggested how positive pole in contrast with the baseness and cruelty of the British colonists.
Yet, based on the perspective that Disney has adopted, even films such as the aforementioned could be considered diseducative, because they too are made based on a representation stereotyped of the natives, it does not matter when this stereotyping is actually plausible and even, as in this case, positive. In conclusion, more than the representation itself of the ethnic communities in Dumbo e Peter Pan, the demonization by Disney (and other giants of cinema and animation) of any type of representation based on historical-anthropological characteristics seems problematic to us: to the point that, if on the one hand it is now almost mandatory to include actors of all ethnicities in any film or TV series in the name of a self-styled diversity, on the other it is strongly discouraged to represent non-white characters in contexts ... non-whites (!), connected with ancestral identity and traditional beliefs, which could somehow make them appear "different" or "uncivilized" in the eyes of the average viewer who benefits from viewing the products in question.
One cannot pretend not to see one in all of this great contradiction: in the name of an alleged "diversity", any non-white character is flattened like a speck, and behind the ideological shield of the "war on stereotype" the aim is to extend to any ethnic community of the terraqueo the ways of thinking and to act only by Westerners, in order to avoid offending someone precisely by virtue of its "diversity" (which should normally be viewed in a positive light), thus betraying one conception indisputably Eurocentric, that is to say exactly what they would pretend to deny with similar "battles".
Having made this necessary premise and moving on to the Italian cinema scene, as a representation of the indigenous one cannot avoid remembering the so-called βMondo Movieβ strand, halfway between the documentary and the mockumentary, set predominantly in Black Africa (Dog world, Goodbye last man, Goodbye Africa), and then that Cannibal Movie, which instead prefers the Iberian-American area, especially the Amazon rainforest, and certain islands located between Southeast Asia and Oceania.
The film we will discuss here is ascribed to this second trend, namely Cannibal Holocaust by Ruggero Deodato, released in 1980 and highly criticized at the time by both the "champions of diversity" and animal rights activists. His fault? Having taken one for good bestial representation of the "savage", quite the opposite of Rousseau's dogma. But those who criticized the film ignored and did not understand two fundamental points: first of all that the representation of indigenous communities (which in the film are different and heterogeneous in their behavior) was absolutely plausible (the actors, on the other hand, were Indians in flesh and blood, and not white stunts with the red face), and secondly that, in the general economy of the film, the way of being of the so-called "savages" was not too subtly placed in contrast, and in a perspective positive, to that of documentary makers and major American television networks, which all considered proved to be finally, as per laconic gloss, the real cannibals. The problem, according to Deodato himself, did not concern the violence of the film, but the inability of the spectators to pay attention to the story on the screen and to frame it with the right historical and sociological interpretation.
What ennoblesΒ Cannibal HolocaustΒ and gives it cinematic and artistic dignity is therefore, first of all, the (not too) veiled message of the film, which by the way Deodato himself has avoided defining horrorrather, affirming that "it is limited to dealing with real things." His is a strong criticism addressed to the alleged "civilized world" and ultra-capitalist, and you can guess it from the first scene, in which while a journalist talks about cannibals the camera frames the metropolitan life of New York. Deodato lashes out against the hypocrisy of Western and "progressive" man, capable of atrocities far worse than cannibalism and tribal rituals, to the point of planting the seed of doubt in the spectator's mind and making him question about behaviors specularly cannibals Western man, completely overturning his expectations as a spectator (usually the films "Cannibal" showed the natives in the role of ruthless matadors of naive Caucasian explorers).
The film opens with a disclaimer curiously of the opposite sign to the recent one of Disney, in which distributors justify their decision to put such a film to the press and present it uncut, which would risk impairing its meaning, and cite a sentence by George Santayana as justification for the choice:
Those who cannot remember the past are bound to repeat it.
The first scene of the film takes place in the heart of the Amazon rainforest: from a glider in flight the viewer glides over the majesty of the virgin jungle, and the music with which Riz Ortolani invites us to watch it recalls the soundtracks composed for the Italian films of the 60s and 70s of the so-called "Exotic" veinΒ (Bora-Bora,Β Free love,Β The body), films imbued with petty ecological philosophy and based on myth of bon sauvage which had the declared purpose of enhancing the simplicity and the dreamy character of life in those places. However often this declaration of intent was reduced to a mere pretext to be able to show the itchy viewer uninhibited young girls intent on dancing naked in the ocean or flirting on the water's edge with the protagonist (obviously white) on duty.
The result most of the time was halfway between one contemporary and naive reinterpretation of the myth of the golden age and a sort of almost documentary film on phantom territories still virgin (but in reality achieved by "progress" for several years already). Although sometimes the directors did not disdain the deepening of magical rites and folkloristic narratives (see eg. The serpent god e Love meeting. Bali, both released in theaters in 1970), most of these films were reduced to an exercise in style focused on demonstrating the compatibility or otherwise between the modern world and worldview tribal, and above all on a certain component soft core, designed to meet the tastes of that slice of the population of the Western world who, in the midst of the sexual revolution, dreamed of leaving everything and boarding the first plane for the atolls of the Pacific. In other words, yet another Eurocentric perspective and slyly winking at a diversity that, on balance, is expressed only from a sexual point of view, according to well-established stereotypes deriving from stars and stripes cinema.
It is pleonastic to point out how Cannibal Holocaust is partially inspired by certain clichΓ©s of the exotic trend only to mercilessly reverse the perspective. From one of the first scenes in which the recovery team comes across the natives, Deodato points out the irreconcilable gulf between the two cultures, avoiding portraying natives and westerners as natural allies, brothers long separated and finally found under the aegis of universal love, as often happened in the films of the exotic vein of previous years. The scene we are referring to is that of the punishment of the adulteress: the spectator feels invaded by a feeling of atavistic terror and total repulsion, and the fact that he is called into question in the first person is certainly not accidental or gratuitous: Deodato immediately wants to make the viewer take a position, reminding him of his western, civilized, modern way of thinking and living, in antithesis with respect to the aberrant traditional practices of Indians.
However, the second part of the film (βTHE GREEN HELLβ) completely shuffles the cards on the table, showing without filters the harassment of the members of the American documentary troupe against the indigenous, including the fire in a village (hence the title of the film, which therefore places the natives not in the position of executioners but in that of victims of the aforementioned βholocaustβ). The more the BDC reporters go on watching the tapes, the more absurd and repulsive the images become, until they reach the culmination of the unjustifiable. In one video, the members of the crew are seen who, after having immobilized a young native that they had accidentally stumbled upon, rape her savagely in turns. In the immediately following scene, the woman's corpse is found horribly impaled and her tormentors, mystifying reality, make up a phony version of the facts to make the viewer believe that they have found her in those conditions. "We cannot support these barbaric practices, we deviate from them clearly," says the voiceover while the abomination is filmed; meanwhile, the face of another of the reporters turns into a merciless grin.
Ortolani makes the most ingenious musical choice of all for this scene: in sharp contrast to the chilling images, he opts for a dreamy and crystalline melody of strings that further increases the grotesque element of the situation. It is a fact that the choice of a given type of music can easily divert the viewer's thoughts onto pre-established tracks: Similar techniques have been used as propaganda tools practically since television was invented. And what the troupe's tormentors are doing is precisely propaganda, mystifying the facts and wearing the mask of the politically correct in front of the cameras, feigning horror in the face of the moral and cultural backwardness and the presumed barbarism of the natives.
From this scene onwards the climax of ferocity ascends to almost unbearable levels. From the videos it emerges that the crew has fallen victim to the ambush of another tribe of natives and that they have been brutally torn to pieces: one is beheaded and quartered, his colleague is repeatedly raped and then dismembered. Even the members who would have the chance to escape and save themselves remain on site to film everything and choose to put fame and wealth before their own survival. On the other hand, for the consumer West, what value can a life have that does not lead to the accumulation of money and the achievement of media fame?
There is however, as has been said, an exaltation of the good savage, seen in contrast to the white man: the reflection that Deodato tries to arouse in the mind of the spectator is rather based on the acceptance of the natural order of things,Β homo homini lupus, no one excluded, "savage" or "civilized" as it is, and on the assumption that, however barbaric and ruthless you may be, you will always find someone of more barbaric and merciless of you, who will rightly pay back all the evil done to you with interest.
Nothing could be more distant than the para-paradisiacal conception of the exotic genre of the 60s and 70s, as well as the total overturning of today's Hollywood and Disney dogma: here it is not non-whites who give up their ancestral identity (with all its positive and negative sides) in the name of an alleged "fight against stereotypes" and an ill-concealed Eurocentrism which sees Western civilization as the only truly civilized and acceptable one in cinematic representations, but on the contrary it is the whites who cultivate in their own intimate, far from acquaintances and cameras, atavistic impulses of death and stained with bestial actions and almost tribalized, which cinema history has usually reserved for the "savage", or at most the psychopath.
With the difference that, compared to Indians, for Western members of the troupe these behaviors are not ritualized, and therefore fall outside an "ordered" customary code which only, from a social point of view, could give meaning to violence towards others: the ferocity of the "savages" can be just as abominable, but it responds to precise social and utilitarian criteria, although obviously criticizable (the massacre is a consequence of their atrocities against the natives; the killing of the adulteress, although obviously barbaric to say the least, responds to a precise community code that has governed the entire life of the tribal community for millennia, and so on ). From this point of view, the chaotic gratuity of the behavior of Westerners in Deodato's film de facto the only ones real "Savages" and "cannibals", as indeed the laconic concluding remarks underline:
I'm wondering who they are, i real cannibals.
And with Deodato, more than forty years later, we ask ourselves too.
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