Secret Africa (1969)

After the exertions of last week, I'm afraid we're kicking the week off quietly with a brief 'Random Movie Trailer'.  Writing about Brutes and Savages has left me in the mood for more Mondo.  Real Mondo, of the Italian variety.  While Jacopetti and Prosperi might have been the pioneers of the genre, other film makers were equally prolific, most notably the Castiglioni brothers, who turned out five films between 1969 and 1982, kicking off with Secret Africa.  While Jacopetti and Prosperi's films tended to be globe-trotting affairs, in their search for the weird, wonderful and shocking, the Castiglionis focuse their efforts entirely upon the so called 'dark continent'.  Whether they were inspired by the success of Jacopetti and Prosperi's epic Mondo Africa Addio, I don't know - that film certainly showed that Africa was a rich source of the kind of material beloved by the genre.  Moreover, as Africa Addio had shown, the uphraval and instability that followed the colonial withdrawal from many African states provided the sort of environment in which Mondo movie makers could thrive.

Unfortunately, these five films are currently next to impossible to obtain on DVD in English for affordable prices.  This trailer for the first of them, however, gives a taste of what to expect.  It's all there - the gory animal killings, the 'primitive' rituals, the promise of sexual rites, poverty, disease and a focus on jiggling bare breasts.  Indeed, the trailer keeps on cutting back to those breasts, but, like National Geographic, they are there for purely informational and educational purposes.  While it might be entirely exploitative in its treatment of its subjects, it is striking how similar some of the imagery, even in this trailer, of a poverty-stricken continent, are to that which we were to see in subsequent news reports on the famines blighting various African states in the eighties.  The continent's problems were there all along, it just seems that back in the sixties and seventies the only people chronicling them for mass media were Mondo filmmakers.  While they might have been exploiting the troubles of the continent for the purposes of entertainment, at least they can't be accused of promoting any kind of 'white saviour syndrome', as many of the charity efforts still operating today have done.  Africa, it seems, is always being exploited, one way or another.