The “disgusting” movie Roger Ebert refused to give a star rating: “This wretched film”
Controversy can be just as much of a blessing as a curse to any movie that makes headlines for all the wrong reasons, whether warranted or not. Roger Ebert was far from the only person to eviscerate a particularly troubling feature, but he was definitely among the most high-profile.
The critic cast his eye over thousands of films across a decades-spanning career, and he wasn’t always in the same boat as the majority. He loved some features that didn’t deserve a single shred of praise, while he also abhorred many pictures that are rightfully lauded as classics.
However, when his focus fell on a documentary that created shockwaves for its graphic and violent content, Ebert didn’t hold back. Shot over the course of three years and released in early 1966, co-directors Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E Prosperi’s Africa Addio became an instant lightning rod.
While the filmmakers purported to tell a story documenting the cycle of violence and chaos that arose on the continent in the post-colonial era, others had different opinions. Beyond its troubling content, racist undertones, and sensationalising of events to present a more Eurocentric perspective, accusations were made that several scenes had been fabricated and staged for dramatic effect.
Not that Ebert cared about whether the lines between fact and fiction had been blurred; he simply hated it with every fibre of his being. Blasting Africa Addio as “a brutal, dishonest, racist, film,” he suggested that “it slanders a continent and, at the same time, diminishes the human spirit, and it does so to entertain us.”
Continuing to rail against the unnecessarily gruesome footage used for shock value and his suspicions that the creative team were fudging the facts and creating their own incidents to enhance the story they always planned to tell, Ebert could barely believe his eyes at how it was supposed to exist as a piece of entertainment.
“There are scenes even more odious, of executions, decomposed bodies, burning flesh, suffering, and death,” he wrote in his review. “If only they were honestly presented, set in context, perhaps they could be justified. But they’re not. Instead, they are staged for our own amusement, cloaked in the respectability of an ‘impartial’ documentary, and in the end, that is the most disgusting thing about this wretched film.”
Africa Addio gained plenty of notoriety as a pivotal moment in the rise of the Mondo movement when bad taste was an accepted part of the medium’s oeuvre, for better or worse. Ebert obviously wasn’t a fan, but the contentious documentary wasn’t universally despised; in fact, even during its initial release, it was being celebrated in certain quarters for pushing the boundaries of the genre, regardless of how many people it upset, offended, and angered along the way.
