Cannibal Holocaust Long before pseudo-documentaries like "The Blair Witch Project" had
even been heard of, Ruggero Deodato began filming what would become
one of the world's most famous horror movies ever made. The story is
about three young filmmakers who travel deep into the Amazon jungle to
make a documentary about cannibal tribes and their natural habits. Two
months later they vanish. A professor from New York begins his journey
to search for the missing filmmakers.
The film takes us deep into the jungle where the law of nature still
prevails and determines life and death. On his search, the
professor becomes acquainted with different tribes of cannibals that
live near riversides and beaches. He is first met with distrust and
suspicion. Later on, he finds out that the cannibals have killed the
filmmakers, something he cannot understand, but which surely must have
something to do with the attitude of the tribes.
While home, he's asked to hold a series of documentaries about the
filmmakers and air the films that they shot while in the jungle. When
exploring these films, the professor realizes the brutal truth: the
filmmakers have burned down villages, raped women and killed animals.
They have therefore been slaughtered and eaten by the tribes, as an
act of pure revenge.
"Cannibal Holocaust" is not your regular horror film. It's shot in the
now-common "shockumentary" style, where the viewer is treated as
beholder of a real documentary, giving the film an authentic feeling,
as well as an uncertainty of what exactly is going on. This film often
goes from theatrical to documentary type of shooting, where the latter
serves as presentation of shocking material and is the main driving
point behind the entire work. Many scenes are surprisingly brutal and
rough, including actual killings of turtles, pigs and monkeys, as well
as graphic depictions of rape, mutilation and slaughter.
While this film shocks, it also brings up a subject of relevance:
today there is a collision between traditional culture and
Americanized consumer culture. We in the West often like to believe
that our culture is the dominating and "civilized" one, but who is the
real savage? Ruggero Deodato asks us this question in his portrayal of
ignorant white teenagers burning down villages and raping women. It's
easy to condemn this film for provoking a feeling of cultural
relativism, but this is not the case.
On the contrary, "Cannibal Holocaust" seems to suggest that evolution
is dynamic: each tribe organizes itself after its unique habitats and
surroundings. The cannibal tribes use ancient rituals and strict
cultural sacrifices in order to maintain a form of eugenic standard.
The peoples of the Amazon jungle live close to nature and see it as its God. When the filmmakers intrude on their natural environments, they see people living in "the stone age", without access to cars or
computers. They therefore believe that they are "above" the primitive
tribes, resulting in the total lack of respect for humans, culture and
nature alike.
Ruggero Deodato is an excellent director and knows how to push the
lines in order to provoke realism and cultural debate. By forcing us
to behold the conflict between our Western view on ancient cultures
and presenting a world of natural selection, murder and sacred
marriage, we automatically re-value our respect and understanding for
nature and the people who have chosen to live by its laws as well as
our own culture and way of living. As such, "Cannibal Holocaust" is a
truthful, although sometimes brutal, insight into the conflict of
modernism and naturalism, and its impact on us living in the Western
society today. -Alexis
-=-
300 In short, this is a comic book turned into a movie with video game
aesthetics, telling the tale of the 300 Spartans who died fighting
back parts of the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The very
fact that the introduction rather cheerfully depicts the eugenic
conditions of Spartan adolescence, and that the almost two hours of
film are filled to the brim with (some, historically accurate) lines
mirroring Spartan warrior ethics, could make this movie into a nice
slip road from a seemingly endless stream of movies focusing on the
quite tiresome theme of modern individualism.
But that's only on the surface. In one scene, the Spartan king
Leonidas (Gerard Butler) lectures on the importance of the army
keeping together, using their shields to protect each other, and
consequently creating a strong unity. In combat, this unity is
initially kept, but then each Spartan runs along towards his own
one-on-one battle, showing off a few hokum stunts. Interestingly, this
is quite a precise parable for what makes this movie collapse: there
is nothing keeping it together. This makes the movie, at its heart,
into the very opposite of what it is set out to be. The exterior of an
over-blown praise of an interpretation of Spartan life, accompanied by
mediocre acting, blue screen animations, Hollywood sound effects, Nu
Metal riffs, billions of slow-motions, and the constant use of the
increasingly obscure concept of "freedom," will most probably
entertain some people. But beneath all this, there is nothing. Those
who seek art that beautifully portrays heroism, will not find it here.
Not even the debate on whether the movie draws its motivations from
current politics or not is very interesting. Instead, what makes this
work sort of fascinating as a phenomenon, and meaningful to review at
all, is that it's an excellent example of the extreme contrast between
modern and traditional thinking, and of surface versus content. These
filmmakers take some ingredients from the past, but don't know how to
deal with them other than by throwing them into a stew of modern
decorations and purposes. While awful as a movie, and hardly worthy of
ancient Sparta, at least "300" stands as an unintentionally comical
monument of contemporary misunderstandings. - Ensittare
exponentiation ezine: issue [5.0:culture]
[ music | books | film | food ]
Dir: Ruggero Deodato
Release: 1980
Director: Zack Snyder,
Release: 2007 (117 minutes)