I went to a Secret Cinema screening the other day and the guy who runs the show over there got up and a made an impassioned plea to support repertory cinema and spread the word to our friends (Well, impassioned for the Secret Cinema guy, he's pretty mellow and has a really dry sense of humor). In case you don't know, repertory cinemas are places that show classics, older films that are not quite classics and occasionally newer movies that don't make it to theaters, usually foreign (I'm talking about Africa foreign not, like, Pedro Almodóvar foreign). So, go see repertory films . . . and the Ritz doesn't count, try IHouse, Exhumed Films, Andrew's Video Vault or Secret Cinema. Well, that's my plug for today.
The program began with some short films. The first one was an off-brand Soundie called Jungle Rhythm. A Soundie was essentially a music video made for video jukeboxes that were commonly found in bars and nightclubs in the 30's and 40's. This one featured a chick in a skimpy outfit dancing to a vaguely tribal beat. You could see, like, half her belly-button, it was pretty hot. The second short was called Adventure Parade: South Africa or maybe it was Adventure Paradise, my notes are unclear and I don't really remember anything about it. The final short was an educational/propaganda film produced by a group of missionaries called African Cousins. I was a little worried that this one was going to be way racist but it turned out to be a very positive look at a community in Africa and how similar they were to Americans (at the time we had considerably more people growing up on farms in this country than we do now). The whole production was geared toward children, complete with cheesy narration and my favorite part was when the narrator described how a young boy scoffed at an ancient ritual to banish evil spirits explaining that the boy had learned that there were no such things as evil spirits in his Sunday school class (where he, presumably, learned the much less-silly idea about the three good spirits).
Then things got underway with the main attraction, Karamoja!, a documentary about Uganda (who's history of genocide was made into a major motion picture starring Forest Whitaker, not Don Cheadle). This film was made by a dentist who was informed that he only had six months to live. This man, who had never made a film before, decided to grab a camera and head off to an area that had been undisturbed by western culture bringing with him a small crew (one of who he wound up marrying early in the process).
When this movie was released in America it was presented as a Shockumentary, a kind of exploitation film that could get away with showing violence and nudity under the auspices of educational fare. And although this film has plenty of violence and more full-frontal nudity than you'll ever see in a non-pornographic film, it's also a sensitive look at a culture that's remained unchanged for thousands of years. The violence is mostly directed at animals, which can be hard for some people to watch, but it's all part of surviving in a harsh environment and probably more humane than our industrial slaughterhouses. And even though there's plenty of nudity, none of it is sexual. It's just that Africa is really hot and these people have never heard of skin cancer, there's really no reason for them to not walk around with their junk hanging out.
It's an odd juxtaposition, the sincere attempt to understand an alien culture packaged as a sleazy sex and violence expose, but that's what makes repertory films so fascinating.
No comments:
Post a Comment