Thursday,
May 17 at 7pm
Secret
Cinema presents
Karamoja!
dir.
William B. Treutle, USA, 1954, 35mm, 63 mins, color
+
Surprise Short Subjects
“This
is the story of a man with six months to live… and of the strangest
honeymoon a bride ever had.” California dentist William B. Treutle
had never made a film when doctors gave him his fatal prognosis.
It gave him the courage to fulfill his lifelong ambition to
travel to Africa, and while doing so, he filmed this unforgettable
documentary in a closed territory of Uganda.
An
early entry into the “Shockumnetary” genre (an international
phenomenon ten years later, in the wake of Mondo Cane, Ecco
and countless others), this often-unsettling look at the rites
and lives of the primitive people of Karamoja does have a fascination
with the bizarre and the visceral. There are graphic scenes
of blood drinking, ritual scarification, tattooing, and knocking
out of teeth, and the eating of raw bull intestines, not to
mention copious full frontal nudity, both male and female.
Notorious
exploitation distributor Kroger Babb played this up to the fullest
(“See it all! Uncut! Uncensored! Unclothed! Unashamed!”), but
behind the sensation was a revealing, sincere and even sensitive
look into a way of life 6000 years out of step with the Western
world. Treutle, who met and married his wife early on his African
voyage (she worked as sound recordist while he ran the camera),
surely felt a kinship with the excited, shy young nuptials in
a filmed Karamojan wedding ceremony… as he documented their
many differences (in one tradition, the bride and groom smear
cattle dung on each other).
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