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The titular linguist joke states the multinational condition of oppression in Africa, along with Glauber Rocha's position as an artist in exile. The Antonio das Mortes revue is transposed to the Congolese savannah, where the type of footage shot for Mondo documentaries becomes groundwork for a scorching political fantasy. The first shot has a bwana couple writhing in half-discarded big hunter regalia, and so it goes, an arresting new idea every new minute. Jean-Pierre Léaud in white robes punctuates his sermon by pounding a mallet into the ground, the local women assembled in the sidelines are mildly intrigued: His litany ("The beast... has the paws of a bear... the throat of a lion...") might be a description of the film being filmed, though the cinematic creature is not so much a chimera as a hydra. A cabal of Euro buccaneers and CIA agents (including Rada Rassimov, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Gabriele Tinti, and Hugo Carvana) spout imperialist claptrap in ventilated terrazzos ("In Latin America it was easier"), the people outside are mobilized for the uprising. A stooge is propped up as a ruler and given colonial peruke to complete the frogged ensemble from The Emperor Jones, resistance rests on the mating of the spear (Baiack) and the machine gun (Giulio Brogi). The Bible is quoted and rejected, "La Marseillaise" and "Lili Marleen" are warbled and garbled, Don Quixote, saxophones, guerrilla bellowing. "In moments of imaginative stultification, there is always somebody assuming power" (Ici et Ailleurs). Rocha understands the paradox of the rebel without a state, and closes on the image (out of Preminger) of revolutionaries out on their own Exodus. With Aldo Bixio, Andre Segolo, and Segolo Dia Manungu.
--- Fernando F. Croce |