CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST - part 3

*The following is the third part of a four part review/analysis of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.  

TO FILM OR NOT TO FILM?

With regard to documentary filmmaking, where is the line drawn between morality and verite? Where do our boundaries lie?

If a documentary filmmaker films someone robbing a convenience store, is he too guilty of the crime? By watching it unfold, are WE somehow complicit? The average viewer would answer no to both questions but why? "Well, the filmmaker would be putting their own life at risk if they attempted to stop the robbery.” Fine, I will accept that. But what if the subject of the documentary was the one committing the robbery and the filmmaker was filming it for the sake of the film? Would he be more or less guilty given these circumstances? Any reasonable, moral person would have to answer yes, he would be more guilty. By not preventing the crime from taking place (a crime in which any number of things could have happened, even murder) or by not placing a call to the police, the filmmaker has become complicit in the crime and culpable to punishment. The only crime he would have committed by reporting or preventing the robbery is the crime of breaking the rules of verite.

But I ask again are WE complicit in the crime by watching it without resistance? To a degree, I believe we are. Passively watching atrocities can be cathartic, even educational, but our rapt attention and eagerness to seek out "that which should not be seen" gives these films their raison d'etre. With regard to the Mondo film, that may seem especially unreasonable to most, but who were these films made for if not for an audience craving fresh shocks and horrors? Without an audience there would be no reason for these films to have proliferated as quickly as they did. Our bloodlust and morbid curiosity were the motivating forces. In some small way, we helped create them through our desire to see atrocities and our willingness to support those filmmakers making them.

That is not to say that we wished for hundreds of animals to be savaged and murdered, or for innocent people to have been treated in the same way. We are not guilty of committing murder, prostitution or rape. But audience demand was the driving force behind these films and the desire to earn a quick buck and a mention in the book of notoriety turned ordinary men into monstrous opportunists lining up to take the money we were so eager to give them.

THE GREEN INFERNO

The third and final chapter of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is by far the strongest. In a weirdly horrible way, it is also the most entertaining. The culmination of Deodato's carefully exercised strategy, the final part of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, which I will refer to here as the “Green Inferno Footage", is nauseatingly powerful and, despite the shoddy effects and obvious visual tricks, incredibly convincing. The only weak link in this chapter is the acting, but the conviction of the direction and the unrelenting pace makes that bitter pill much easier to swallow. To this day, the Green Inferno Footage remains some of the strongest stuff produced in the Italian horror industry.

There is a brief prelude before we set down to watch the recovered footage. We see Prof. Monroe trying his best to interview the families and associates of our four deceased filmmakers. This lays out the dynamic of the relationship between the four. Alan is the ringleader, Faye is the desperate clinger, Jack suffers from hero worship and Mark is an enabler. They are called "prima donnas" that get "high ratings". They are little more than instruments of destruction masquerading as journalists. Their high energy and juvenile facade (evident when they pose at the airport with their guide Filipe and play keep-away with Faye's panties) masks a deep well of cruelty.

The brief piece of silent footage from aboard the plane is the only time we see the Green Inferno from the outside. It's the closest we get to an establishing shot of any kind. Once they set off into the jungle, we are trapped there with them. The thick jungle all around us confounds our sense of space. Everything looks the same. Everything feels the same. The sense of claustrophobia is overwhelming. Though the scenes in the Green Inferno are shot with two cameras (mostly from Jack and Mark's perspectives) it's difficult to tell who is shooting who, how the shots match from one to another and the timeline we are experiencing. There are no night time scenes in this final chapter of the film. Everything is set during the day. How long have we been in the jungle? How much of what we are seeing is from day one or day three? The whole last chapter of the film feels like one long, terrible fever dream.

No matter where we look, there is only death.

*It's important to note that what we are seeing is edited footage compiled by a studio editor. As it stands, the new edit of the footage seems more like a greatest hits package than a true documentary. These four filmmakers would have brought miles of film with them, much more than what we are seeing. We are told, as a way of sewing up this plot hole, that much of the footage was ruined due to the environment and improper handling of the stock. What we see of the expedition is all that remains. And what we see is a true Mondo film.

MONDO TACTICS

Everything we've seen so far has prepared us for a violent excursion into hell itself. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST doesn't disappoint. Within the first ten minutes of the Green Inferno Footage, we witness two scenes of animal cruelty. The first, an almost innocent scene, is of Mark pinning a butterfly to a board. The second is much stronger.

The filmmakers pull a sea turtle out of the water. At first, the scene looks a bit like the hunting scene from NANOOK OF THE NORTH. It's not immediately obvious that the animal is alive at all. When they pull it from the water, it becomes all too apparent that it is. Without a moment's hesitation, they chop the head off of the animal. Not content with showing this first graphic act, Deodato films, mostly in close-up, the complete dismemberment of the animal. Several of the actors have a hard time concealing their very real revulsion. Deodato pushes his cast through to the very end. They pry open the shell, revealing the soup of internal organs and Deodato films them, for no real purpose, playing around with the insides. The animal is cooked and eaten.

Jacopetti and Prosperi were disgusting opportunists who used staged scenes of animal slaughter to bolster the shock value of their films. For CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, a film so very openly critical of these kinds of filmmakers, to use the exact same techniques is a bit odd. It is also unavoidable. Faking the scenes of animal butchery would have been preferable but probably destructive. There would simply be no way of doing it convincingly. It is, I'll admit, completely hypocritical of Deodato to resort to using the exact same tactics that he is condemning, but it is essential to not only the strength of the film but to the point of the film as well. By showing this monstrosity, Deodato is laying bare the tactics of the Mondo filmmaker.

"This is how it is done”, he is telling us. "Are you not entertained?"

The following couple of scenes better illustrate the kind of people we are dealing with. When a large, possibly poisonous spider drops down onto Faye's shoulder, her companions stop to film her screaming before finally removing the spider and hacking it to pieces. Alan's expression before the cut says it all. His smirk, a mixture of sadism and sarcastic concern, speaks volumes. A little later, Filipe, their guide, is bitten in the leg by a snake. They waste no time in severing his leg. Alan asks if they’re still filming. "Yeah, I'm getting it all," Jack replies. They place a hot machete against the wound to cauterize it, all in close-up. Mark's expression before the cut recalls Alan's expression from the previous scene. The mutilation is what they're really concerned with. Saving Filipe's life is of secondary concern.

The opening scene of the next reel, the filmmakers crossing a river while a camen slowly approaches, is a standard issue scene from almost every wildlife survival show ever made. Utterly unconvincing, I'm not sure this scene was intended by the filmmakers to represent reality at all. It looks constructed to spice things up a bit, an attempt to sell themselves to the audience as adventurers. They stumble across a group of Yacumo slaughtering a few tree monkeys. In close-up, a Yacumo severs the top of a monkey's head with a blade then feasts on the warm brains. The filmmakers watch from a distance. Jack shoots one of them in the leg so they can follow him back to his village. When they arrive, one of the major atrocities, though faked, of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST occurs.

The filmmakers arrive in the village. If we expected savages, we are sorely mistaken. The Yacumo village is full of women tending to babies, children playing games, and men huddled in groups. No one raises a hand against the four Caucasians in their midst. They are completely docile, struck by the sudden appearance of the filmmakers. The filmmakers wander through the village and come across a pig tied to a stick. Mark shoots it in the head, prompting Alan to remark that

"Things like this happen all the time in the jungle! It's survival of the fittest! In the jungle, it's the daily violence of the strong overcoming the weak!"

Of course death happens all the time in the jungle, as it does all over the world. But not this kind of death. Not in this kind of way. Not for the benefit of entertainment.

Alan and company round up all the Yacumo they can into huts and set the huts on fire. As the terrified Yacumo try to escape, they are forced back into the flames. All the while, Riz Ortolani's beautiful, majestic score plays in the background. The filmmakers stand and watch the fires rise. "Just like Cambodia", one of them says as the lush, romantic theme soars on the soundtrack. Once the fires have gone out, Alan and Faye have sex while the remaining Yacumo sit huddled in the background. What is normally a tender scene is perverted by the setting.

With this, the first stretch of the Green Inferno Footage comes to an end.

End part 3. To read Part 4, click HERE.