- Goodbye Uncle Tom
Infobox Film
name = Goodbye Uncle Tom
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director =Gualtiero Jacopetti Franco Prosperi
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music =Riz Ortolani
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released = 1971
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imdb_id = 0180396"Goodbye Uncle Tom" ( _it. Addio Zio Tom) is a 1971 Italian film directed by
Gualtiero Jacopetti andFranco Prosperi and features music byRiz Ortolani ."Addio Zio Tom" is a pseudo documentary where the filmmakers go back in time and visit antebellum America, using period documents to examine, in graphic detail, the racist ideology and degrading conditions faced by
Africans under slavery. Because of the use of published documents and materials from the public record, with actors playing the role of the historical figures, the film labels itself a documentary, and portrays slave life as a non-stop orgy of violence, rape and torture committed by Whites against their Black slaves.The Directors' cut of "Addio Zio Tom" draws parallels between the horrors and slavery and the rise of the
Black Power Movement , represented byEldridge Cleaver ,LeRoi Jones ,Stokely Carmichael , and a few others. The film ends with an unidentified man's fantasy re-enactment ofWilliam Styron 's "The Confessions of Nat Turner ." This man imagines Nat Turner's revolt in the present, including the brutal murder of the whites around him, who replace the figures Turner talks about in Styron's novel as the unidentified reader speculates about Turner's motivations and ultimate efficacy in changing the conditions he rebelled against. American distributors felt that such scenes were too incendiary, and forced Jacopetti and Prosperi to remove more than thirteen minutes of footage explicitly concerned with racial politics for American and other Anglophone audiences.The movie ends with a re-enactment of the Civil War followed directly by a repetition of the opening sequence revealing, among other things, the film equipment. This mocked re-enactment of an historical event, alongside the fantasy re-enactments of Styron's novel, suggests the film's self-critique.
[http://www.blue-underground.com/movie.php?movie_id=41]
External links
* [http://www.blue-underground.com/show_trailer.php?trailer=http://www.blue-underground.com/dev/quicktime/goodbyeuncletomsm.mov&width=240&height=118 Online Trailer (English version)]
* [http://imdb.com/title/tt0180396/ "Adio Zio Tom"] atThe Internet Movie Database
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