Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. “A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |