The Italian version gets to the time travel (and the opening title) at the sixteenth minute, but before that it takes a delightfully prescient detour. An old white woman stands on the grounds of her family plantation, burned a hundred years before in a slave uprising. Then she gets in her car with her black driver and Jacopetti and Prosperi are doing a riff on Driving Miss Daisy two decades before its release... except that in this version the black driver is listening to inciting activists on the car radio while the lady is shopping, and we see that he has murder in his heart.

Up until now Addio Zio Tom has been sort of strange, but it's at the opening title where it takes off into orbit. The camera crew, there to investigate slavery, meets a group of landed whites having dinner while black children play under their table and eat their scraps like dogs. The whites make fun of the ever-unseen Italians for being papists, and they discuss their rationalizations for the slave trade. Then we visit a slave ship as it makes its trip across the ocean and the movie's dark heart is finally and truly revealed.

There are people who refer to the slave trade as the African Holocaust, and in many ways the graphic scenes in Addio Zio Tom illustrate just how apt that name is. The depravities visited upon the people who were taken from their homes and crammed onto boats, sent across the ocean to live their remaining days as chattel, remain the most hideous mark upon American history. Putting that horror in the face of modern Americans, making us feel it, is a valid cinematic way of keeping that history alive and fresh. But as you watch a cast of poor Haitians, pitifully paid by the Italian exploitationers, being humiliated and mistreated in torture devices all too realistic, you begin to wonder when the line between invoking reality and creating a new horror gets crossed. One slave ship scene explains the process of corking slaves, filling their assholes with tar and cork so that they wouldn't leak so much when they inevitably got dysentary; the scene includes a re-enactment of a corking so real and graphic that I'm hard pressed to explain how this was accomplished without having one man shoving an object up the ass of another man.

Just as you're reeling from the shock of the slave ship scenes, Jacopetti and Prosperi do one of their delirious personality shifts; all of a sudden we're back in the modern day and well dressed black people are going dancing at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City while the narrator accuses them of being Uncle Toms and sellouts. Pretty harsh criticism from a bunch of well-off Italians, I'd say.

That trip to the present day is quick, and the film is soon back in time, visiting a slave sorting center in Louisiana. It's actually Haiti, though, where the film was shot with the cooperation of dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. The frame is filled with naked black children; naked black men sit in suspended cages, being deloused by fumes. And then the film's next real life atrocity - naked black men are hung upside down from their ankles. The narrator tells us that this was the treatment for epileptics - truly a horrible historical note (if true) - but the sight of poor Haitians being actually hung from their ankles has to make your gut twist in horror. These scumbags are exploiting black people to make a point about how bad it is to exploit black people. Mind bending.

The slave sorting scene is one that exemplifies another of the schizophrenic aspects of Addio Zio Tom - this is one of the most beautiful ugly movies ever made. The composition of wide screen vistas are often impeccable, and the colors and camerawork are first rate. As the camera pans above the men hanging upside down, looking at the soles of their feet and the bottom of their balls, you have to admire the craftsmanship on display. Scenes of runaway slaves being shot down in a swamp happen in an evocative, poetic slow motion. Most exploitation films look as nasty as their subject matter, but this film - which took three years to make! - is lovingly crafted in every scene. That paradox is one of the things that keeps drawing me back to this film, which I've now seen maybe eight or nine times (which is really an awful lot, considering how utterly evil it is).

The horrors continue unabated as the movie traces the path of a slave from ship to master and beyond. A scene of slaves being fed consists of hundreds of nude extras rushing slop troughs, among them the deformed and retarded. A baby is placed in the trough, gruel shoved in its mouth. Another scene has a first person view of a white visitor to a plantation manor being offered a 13 year old slave for his sexual pleasure; she begs him (and us, since the camera is his point of view) to deflower her or the Mammy will beat her. The scene fades out as they begin to fuck... all still from the camera's point of view. There's almost not even an excuse needed to have the black extras naked; the movie is one long parade of dicks and tits. A group of low class whites - the original crackers, the film tells us - rapes their way through a barn filled with black women, the camera lingering as the non-actresses weep. Over it all the soundtrack finally plays a song that isn't the main theme - it's a romantic number, sounding like it could be called Love Theme From Addio Zio Tom. Insert shots of children watching the rapes almost feels redundant. How much more sickened can they possibly make me?

Speaking of children, one of the movie's most arresting images comes as a bunch of white kids frolic in green fields, followed by an angelic little blonde girl... holding a little black boy on a chain. In another context this is a heartbreaking moment that defines the depravities of an era; in this film it's just another horrible low blow.

Addio Zio Tom is obsessed with the sexuality of blacks. We visit a breeding farm, where a huge retarded 'stud' named Casanova impregnates unwilling women. A grossly fat white man feels up actually pregnant extras. A slave is deballed for fucking too many virgins on the farm (the ripping off of his testicles happens surprisingly offscreen, but his screams are on the soundtrack as a rotten toothed German woman laughs). It's Mandingo all over again (and again and again) - the black man as sexual threat, seen in awe and disgust at the same time. The black woman is nothing more than a sexual device; in the scene where the 13 year old begs the camera to deflower her she complains that black men's dicks are too big for her and she prefers whitey. Misogyny doesn't even touch on it - the film is filled with a dismissal of woman as actual beings that doesn't even leave room to see them as individual enough to hate.

Jacopetti and Prosperi don't just keep their hatred to blacks. They take lots of shots at the Church, depicting the clergy as grotesque hypocrites. One of the most over the top scenes in the movie is an interview with a Jewish doctor who experiments on slaves and keeps them in almost Auschwitz-like conditions. He doesn't see them as human, doesn't think they have any feelings. Watching this Jew caricature, straight out of a John Birch Society comic strip, walking among extras in medieval restraint devices is weird enough, but in the next scene he's laughing and throwing food at a twitching, crawling mass of cripples and amputees. Even the most jaded viewer is going to feel his skin crawling here.

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