An Italian Film (Africa Addio) takes the title of Jacopetti and Prosperi's famous 1960 film as the first step of a major revision project of the past and present notions of colonialism and imperialist nostalgia, analysing how they were transposed and pervade in the present globalised contexts.

Barbara Casavecchia: Your work is titled An Italian Film (Africa Addio), like the infamous 1966 ‘documentary’ on the end of colonialism in Africa by italian filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi together with Paolo Cavara. Why this reference?

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc: My first contact with Africa Addio came after a reading of the famous article of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,Towards a Third cinema, published in 1968. This is precisely what they say about it: “The more man is exploited, the more he is considered insignificant. The more he resists, the more he reaches the level of beasts. You can see in Africa Farewell! (Africa Addio) of the fascist Jacopetti wild African, bloody thirsty exterminating beasts, consumed in an abject anarchy once they have defeated the protection of the White. Tarzan is dead and instead were born the Lumumba’s, the Lobemgula’s, the Nkomo and Madzimbamuto’s, and this is something that neo-colonialism does not forgive. The fantasy was replaced by ghosts, and then man became a star of a deathshow for Jacopetti to shoot comfortably its execution.” So, in a way, Africa Addio was for them the enemy, and I was intrigued that they had localized this enemy so precisely. Then I became aware of the real scandal around Africa Addio, that happened two years after Jacopetti and Prosperi started to shoot it, in the month of December 1964, through the Italian journalist Carlo Gregoretti. A mutual friend of the two filmmakers, he accompanied them for several weeks on the movie set. When he returned to Italy, he quickly published on L’Espresso an article headlined “A private war in Cinemascope”. In it, Gregoretti recounts the assault on the city of Boende by the Congolese national army accompanied by South African, German, English and French mercenaries. Gregoretti describes how, while the mercenaries are returning to the city, they come face to face with a band of rebels, just a few adolescents. The mercenaries are about to execute them, but one of them notices the operator adjusting his camera, asks if he is ready, the answer is no, so the mercenary awaits for him to finish his settings, the operator makes a hand signal and finally films the scene while the gun is unloaded. As the scandal grew in Italy and soon in Europe, justice got involved, and Gualtiero Jacopetti was indicted for war crimes in April 1965 by the Italian Minister of Justice. The director was acquitted in December 1965, after an investigation lasting several months by grace of a set of testimony declaring him innocent (including one of Moise Tshombe). I am trying now to get a hands on the recording of this interviews between Jacopetti and the judge, in order to start the second part of the project.

BC: Mondo Cane (1962), the film that predated Africa Addio - the first of a long series of shockumentary mondo movies – was also terribly controversial, but at the same time, quite radical in its attempt of overturning the rules of filmic narration and the 'documentary' epic, or the golden rules of cine-verité. It had a crude humour too, that the voice over and surreal juxtaposition of images brought forth. What is still interesting, I think, in Jacopetti and Prosperi’s cinema, is the impossibility to frame truth as a solid ground, as well as all the speculations around the filming (or non-filming, or faking, or remaking) of certain scenes.

MKA: Yes, you are right, and Mondo Cane was readily defined by its authors as an “anti-documentary”. Prosperi and Jacopetti wanted to release themselves from classic documentary writing, which they considered too smooth and too polished, and therefore moved towards a documentary style they defined as openly subjective and whose purpose would no longer stand in the production of knowledge through scientific “objectivity”, but rather to produce a maximum of thrills for the audience. Franco Prosperi when about to describe the shooting of a pig slaughter ritual in New Guinea - animals slaughter being a recurring motifs of the film - specifies: “Where others would have made a two-hour movie (with the rushes), we have kept only six minutes to show the most shocking moments”. For Africa Addio, Jacopetti and Prosperi were taken by the decolonisation uprising that were spreading in several African countries (Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe...), and travelled for three years all over the African continent, from north to south, to film the liberation movements and their effects. To do this, they didn't change the methods that have earned them their scandalous reputation. What they wanted, above all, was to create a show that would shock the Western viewer. And Africa Addio will not be outdone. The wild animals slaughter, pogroms, murders, mutilations, African countries they show us are just a vast field of ruins bathed in blood. Countries that summarize an entire continent returned to its wildness and its obscure solitude because the colonial empires abandoned them too early. For Jacopetti and Prosperi, Africa was indeed “a large black baby who grew up too quickly to become a very bad company” and to which “Europe had brought more than it had taken.”

BC: It all sounds dreadfully familiar, when one thinks of what's happening in Syria right now. The construction of the news.

MKA: I definitely agree because I think Africa Addio condenses in its monstrosity a whole section of the colonial imagery, a scientific tradition, an ideology that we could track in its discontinuity from the eighteenth century to today. And that's what I wanted to explore with An Italian film (Africa Addio), (which is planned to be a four part film, Copper being the first part), deconstruct Jacopetti & Prosperi’s movie by localizing and defining where it belongs, a margin of the film industry considered unrecoverable, what it is, a perverse film lying in an ideological murk, in order to bring it back to us. Or rather to find a point by a thread of association that would connects it to the nineteenth century’s explorers narratives, the ethnographic films of the thirties, surrealism, and to temporarily ends with the terrible photographs of Abu Ghraib. A point where we might think how images were the agents of historical terror, a terror determined as much by race than by class or gender, a history of terror whose settlement was a time central, but could more generally be define as an history of domination. So I wanted to discuss all that, without reproducing this type on imagery. That's how I got to film this quiet destruction of the crosses.

BC: Why did you chose to use English, instead of French with subtitles, for instance. Langue dominante, to put it with Derrida?

MKA: I must say that the voices over in English are really part of the projects. It was a way to connect with the area where the film is shot, the Yorkshire. The two children are local children, and you can feel there accent, which is already a step aside of this idea of langue dominante. It's a language which is already distorted by a a feeling of belonging. As it was important to shoot in a brass foundries in Sheffield and to link this old colonial narratives of the Belgian smelting the crosses in the early 20th century, to the present of the English steel industry in an area where it collapsed several years ago. It's a way to speculate on the relationship still existing between the capitalist and colonial project, between past and present, here and elsewhere.

Credits

Written & Directed by: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Voices: Persia Babayan-Taylor; Tyler Wilson

Director of photography: Phil Wood

Sound Engineer: Martin Salomonsen

Editing: Bledar Bujupi

Grading: Simon Blackledge

Translation: Matthew Cunningham

Acknowledgements: Brass Founders, Sheffield; Ecole supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Nantes-Métropole; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Arts Council, England; Creative Space Management; Houses and Communities Agency; Leeds City Council

Special thanks to: Isabelle Alfonsi, Cécilia Bécanovic, Anne Bonin, Emmanuelle Chérel, Marie Cozette, Gill Park

Produced by: Ecole supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Nantes-Métropole; Pavilion, Leeds; Les Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d'art contemporain