Tribal Laws: Cannibal Verite and Italian Phago-realism
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santanyana, The Life of Reason, as quoted by the introduction to Cannibal Holocaust
When a film's distributors create a historical framework for the presentation of a film, it is rare that they will quote a celebrated philosopher and describe said film as the product of “a bygone era of extreme irresponsibility which no longer exists, and hopefully will not exist again.” This preface then has the gumption to quote Thomas Jefferson, as a way of emphasizing the importance of this film. This is striking as horror films are often implicitly taken to be extreme exercises of free speech— but Cannibal Holocaust's attitude toward this is as subtle as anything else in the film, which is to say, the inverse of subtlety. In a way, it seems disingenuous, but in examining the film as a whole, this introduction is entirely appropriate. The quote from Santayana is oft repeated by people who have never heard the author's name, but Holocaust is at least smart enough to know who it is quoting. At first, this appears pseudo-intellectual, but it is slowly revealed to be a phrase not just relating to the film as exploitation and Grand Guignol grotesquery for its own sake, but as a reflection of society.
Gruesomely violent horror films like this one have reputations that precede them, and because of this, high art aficionados and culture snobs tend to overlook their significance. But to combat the evils of our age's current incarnation of hyperrealism and Baudrillardian disconnect, it is necessary to examine works that exemplify them or criticize them. Cannibal Holocaust belongs not only to the pantheon of grotesqueries represented by horror film, but is also to a series of important cultural artifacts that represent our age. It is a work that is harshly critical of many things of our age, while of course playing a role in them— as it is another form of media.
Regardless, Cannibal Holocaust is an exceedingly discursively conscious horror film that engages in post-colonial discourse, evoking the spirit of Edward Said and Albert Memmi. The most flagrant problems addressed by these two thinkers, especially the doctrines of the subjugation of the “other” as well as orientalism, are at the crux of the conflict in the film. Cannibal Holocaust is far more about society's reflection of the native and other than it is about the “other” or the native itself.
This comes about in many instances. The first appears when anthropology professor Dr. Monroe first arrives in the jungle to find a group of young filmmakers who have vanished while making a documentary in Brazil. A question is raised about whether or not anthropologists can possibly act without regard to their own interests. It is put quite bluntly and rightly by the leader of the expedition, a colonel in the Brazilian armed forces: “If hellholes like this didn't exist, you'd have to invent them.” Despite the need to converse with natives of other cultures, the question always remains if this need isn't also coexistent with a want, either to experience the other— or to dominate him.
A factual account of one man's experiences with a cannibal tribe, Keep the River on Your Right, seems to grant credence to this idea that the colonizer or civilized society's wants to absorb the native and otherwise defeat him culturally. As Tobias Scnheebaum himself said, “I wanted the wild man inside me, masticated, absorbed.” In some ways, the attempt to be a part of the tribe— to experience the inner circle of primality while understanding it— places one on the outside of it as well, and only allows for the constructs of society to seep in. Despite the inherent homosexual practices of the tribe Schneebaum visited, one wonders if his desires weren't motivated by personal gratification as well as research, based on revelations like this. Someone marginalized in society— such as a gay man— begins to want to consume something else that is foreign, it seems.
Perhaps this is why Professor Monroe in Cannibal Holocaust is a character of extreme naïveté, despite his knowledge of the subject of anthropology. He, for some reason, has not yet attained that desire Schneebaum speaks of— to dominate— because he is still in good moral standing with regard to the cannibals. He only ventures forward when he sees a ritual rape about to be committed. The same occurs with the protagonist of a later film, Cannibal Ferox, who seeks to prove that the notion of cannibalism is a racist invention of civilized society against so called “natives.” The difference is simply that Monroe can live with himself afterwards, knowing at least that he has contributed to the curbing of this cultural hegemony. The latter must deal with something far more sinister, that everything she once knew about cannibals, or sought to prove about them, is utterly wrong.
In either case, it could also be the case that Monroe, the academic at the center of Cannibal Holocaust simply refuses to act on his impulses, as he realizes the implications of such an interference in the native tribe. As George Orwell said, “When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” In not attempting to force himself on the other culture, Monroe may be in his own mind placing himself on a moral high ground. So in some sense, any action on the “civilized” or colonizer’s part appears to favor the his own sense of superiority in a cultural sense. At the very least, it appears to favor his sense of self preservation.
There are many ways that this is conveyed, not just in the characters, but in the film's sense of its setting from the very beginning. New York looks as uninviting as any savage country, where the peaceful river of the Amazon belies something more sinister, but appears altogether serene. Before introducing us to the barbarity of what occurs in that jungle, we are introduced to a familiar city landscape that is intimidating, its tall buildings obscuring the sky, its multitudes scurrying like ants.
Such attempts to equalize the environment of the “Green Inferno,” the jungle of the film, with New York City— the organic jungle with the concrete jungle— a common trope. Nonetheless, this makes the film cognizant of its political positions early on, showing that man's grasp on what he deems civilization is short sighted at best.
The entire crux of the film's barbarity of the cannibals to the young anthropology students seems to be reversed once the students' intentions are revealed. The filmmakers have absolutely no respect for their surroundings and simply take what they please. But it is not as though they revert to a primal state. They retain all of their “civilized” behavior while engaging in the slaughter of animals, burning of villages, and rape of native women. It is not as though, like Joseph Conrad's mad Colonel Kurtz, they have “gone native,” but rather they are embodying something societal, the colonizer exerting his force over the colonized. This is why it is revealed that the cannibals, in consuming their flesh left by the other more violent “tree people,” were merely chasing white man spirits out of the jungle, exorcising foreign entities from their habitat.
Of course, all of these actions perpetrated by the decadent amoral young filmmakers are caught on tape. This film within a film highlights the clash of cultures in a way that showcases long held colonial beliefs in a new media setting, predicting reality television and our relentless appetite for images of death.
The ritual rapes, impalements, and other such tribal warfare of the cannibals invite our disgust of the barbarity expressed by men onto women. But in these same acts as perpetrated by the filmmakers later, all femininity is treated chiefly for the subject of pleasure rather than an identity unto itself. Thus, women are not treated very well by either society, but this film is not a feminist attack on male attitude— The film simply expresses the tribal society's instigation of these practices as “cultural.” It is rather an attack on cultural relativism while maintaining an attack on absolutism. Since it is wrong to do nothing while such things occur, it is also wrong to inject in favor of the more civilized society because that society is simply is simply doing so for the sake of contrasting the colonized with the colonizer.
The tribes presented are the real-life Yacumo, Ya̧nomamö and Shamatari— portrayed to evoke a hyperrealistic and an orientalist view of the “other” by these presenting non-cannibalistic tribes as cannibalistic. But it is hard to criticize the film on this level, as very few films can reflect actual practices and experiences of native peoples. It is rare if documentaries can do so, let alone narrative film.
The film plays with these ideas as well, by presenting actual documentary footage within the film's verisimilitude. The Last Road to Hell is the chief representation of this. The film within a film within a film, the documentary shot by the three young filmmakers prior to their Green Inferno excursion, It showcases actual conflicts in Nigeria, and one Cambodian film comprised of real documentary stock footage. It appears as artifice, as though it were created as part of the film when in fact it features actual events. The filmmakers deaths were taken to be real by the Italian government, but are in fact complete artifice. In this way, Roberto Rosselini's influence is tangible, as Deodato— like many Italian filmmakers— was mentored by the great Italian Neorealist. His cinema verite / Neorealist sensibilities shine through in this film through the use of seemingly real footage and real footage that become nearly indistinguishable from one another, but in which the footage dealing with centralized white characters who are placed in an unfamiliar environment This strange paradox allows the film to function in a manner that sets it above its contemporaries, in which real footage is taken to be real within the world of the film, but since it is part of the film, is passed over in the mind of the audience. The false footage of the filmmaker's deaths is more real than real, and is taken to be so realistic that it led to Deodato's arrest.
The lack of attention the actual stock footage of The Last Road to Hell has received despite the documentation of genocides and other horrible events captured on film, as opposed to the attention on Deodato's feigned murders, speaks to the phenomenon of “genocide numbness.” People expect other countries to commit mass murders, they don't expect civilized members of those societies to be part of them or to be victimized by them.
With this in mind, it is necessary to examine the film's attitude toward media. Media is becoming something so entirely subjective that it really does not matter in any way what is real, so long as perceptions and commentaries can be attributed to it. The actual content doesn't matter, so much as does what can be said about it.
The film exemplifies this with an early attack on democratized media interpretation. When confronted with the prospect of showing the possible deaths of the camera crew on national television, a producer says, “They’re all dead— let the people be the judge.” The judgment can only be made based on the avatars of the dead people that are no longer present to tell their story— and it falls on society to judge. This is a Network-worthy attack on what our current society has become, in which everyone can have a say on even the most virulent, repugnant and sensitive matters, regardless of their actual knowledge or expertise on the subject. And why should anyone trust the seething hordes of New York as seen by the film's perspective, the people interviewed who don't seem to have any motivation other than their chosen vocations or tunnel vision? Implicitly, the film makes the very serious, correct, and dangerously prescient claim that mass democratization, vox pop culture and such do not necessarily make a better society and are in fact deadly.
The documentary style of interviews with families in cinema verite style lends credence to the film's verisimilitude, while also allowing it to function as a media critique. One way in which the media is critiqued goes along with the idea that technology contains power alien to the natives, and thus seems supernatural. One of the film's most seemingly overused motifs is that the natives understand how the silver boxes (film reels) give the white filmmakers power— a power which brought carnage. The silver boxes give the white man power, as the silver boxes happen to be the source of the white man's ability to capture people on film, and in some ways capture their souls. Cannibal Holocaust makes it known that destruction comes with the simulation of image, and the power to create and destroy worlds is contained in a mere lens. The natives are cognizant of this, and it is revealed that they in order to cast out white man's spirits, enact a cannibalistic ritual that they might otherwise not have done. Had they not been attacked by both the spiritual violence of their images being replicated and their villages burned for the sake of good footage, who knows if they would have eaten their flesh.
In another interesting way, the film presents a conundrum with regard to the animals killed onscreen. It was strangely utilitarian in the way that the animal cruelty, such as the live disembowelment of a sea turtle. The meat was used to feed the native actors, members of indigenous tribes. In the director's commentary, Deodato defends his actions by mentioning that the “Indians” were happy, eating for three days. In a sense, Cannibal Holocaust and films like it are more than just movies, but cultural experiments, in which people of other cultures act as representations of themselves that are exaggerated, but still benefit in ways that preserve their native way of life. And the filmmakers appear to be acting in their own interests.
The problem is, those experiments become nothing more than extreme examples of the media they critique. And in doing so, more films of lesser cultural value, that still retain some semblance of the thematic content of the stronger films, follow in their wake. Cannibal Ferox is such a film.
Cannibal Ferox introduces the ideas of the investigation into cannibalism more thoroughly, by bringing up a liberal society's want to justify the “noble savage” and then casting it into all doubt— but in an exploitative way, for the sake of cruelty. Holocaust is superior in its willingness to treat the material more seriously, and more ethically minded, but in an aesthetic sense so that it does not become a message film, although as some have charged it is too moralistic.
Cannibal Ferox follows the story of a female anthropologist, Gloria, who seeks to prove that cannibalism is the invention of racist whites, orientalists, and others who have sought to make people seem more other than they really are and justify imperialism and the subjugation of people. During her quest she encounters a man named Mike who comes telling stories about ritual cannibalism he witnessed. However, it appears that Mike himself castrated a man in front of the natives to show his strength and might, and changed his story to smear the natives. At this point, it would seem as though Ferox were a film that put forward the same message as Holocaust, but in an act of revenge for Mike's transgression, they systematically hunt down him, Gloria, and everyone else traveling with her— Mike is castrated and his genitals eaten. Gloria survives only to return to the United States and receive her Ph.D, her thesis declaring that cannibalism is a fiction.
In this way, the morals are reversed, and it seems to vindicate the very idea that the cultures engaging in cannibalism are savages. Still, Cannibal Ferox at least operates under the presumption that cannibalism occurred under the pretense of the evil Mike character's provocation of the natives, and that, with the death of the conscious native who allows the anthropologist to escape, any reconciliation of values between the two cultures is impossible once that line has been crossed.
Castrations, mammarial impalements, decapitations and untold eviscerations take hold in Cannibal Ferox as the main attraction, smuggling in social commentary but for the sake of sheer exploitation. While Cannibal Holocaust examines these matters in a serious way, despite claims to the contrary, and is at least somewhat culturally informed— it spawned films like Ferox which undo its goals.
