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The poles are Cocteau's epigram for cinema ("Death at work") and the joke about saving the story in the editing room (cp. Brooks' Modern Romance). Out of the New York school of documentary, would-be auteur (Gabriel Yorke) and script girl (Francesca Ciardi) and cameramen (Perry Pirkanen, Luca Giorgio Barbareschi) looking for fame in the Amazon, the conquistador as film-school dipshit. Into "el infierno verde" they disappear, the anthropologist (Robert Kerman) locates them in the indigenous village as dangling strips of celluloid inside ribcage and skull. The gory truth runs through a projector in grainy 16mm. "If hell holes like these didn't exist, I'm sure you would invent them." Ruggero Deodato has McBride's David Holzman's Diary in one hand and in the other Schroeder's La Vallée, the result is the monstrous apex of a monstrous subgenre. Bestial ecosystems and Third World suffering, the devouring lenses can't get enough of it, the gringo can't quite hide his smile at the impaled native with the tip of a spike protruding from her mouth. The characters are not above shooting, torching and raping to spice their project, the filmmakers follow suit with their own atrocities on turtles and monkeys and assorted jungle critters. "Put-ons" and vérités, shaky cameras and spilled entrails. Pirandello calls for "a great sense of the theatrical," it comes with furious vengeance in the snuff self-reflexivity of the explorers' comeuppance—slashing and disemboweling and roasting contemplated by a gaggle of squirming TV executives. (Surely the pillars of Salò are recognizable.) "Just sit back and enjoy the show." Tavernier that same year takes the high road in Death Watch, Deodato here goes lower and further by rigorously embodying the barbarous cinéaste steeped in viscera and shame. With Salvatore Basile, Ricardo Fuentes, Paolo Paoloni, and Claudia Rocchi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |