King Leopold’s Ghost' Recounts Tales of Unimaginable Terror By MANOHLA DARGIS
Europe’s genocidal adventures in Africa receive a passionate reckoning in the ambitious documentary “King Leopold’s Ghost.” Working from Adam Hochschild’s best-selling history of the same title, the producer and first-time director Pippa Scott has enlisted a legion of talking heads to help tell a story of insatiable greed and unimaginable terror. Among those tapped for their expertise are academics, historians, Congolese elders and, for some reason, the memoirist Frank McCourt. Mr. Hochschild proves particularly effective, since he gets right to it: “What made it possible for Congo state officials to deal out all this pain and terror? Race.”
The barbarism of King Leopold of Belgium, the subject of another recent documentary, “Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death,” remains shocking. In the mid-1880’s, with the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and the approval of the world’s leading powers, Leopold seized a swath of Africa (then the Congo Free State, now the Democratic Republic of Congo) more than 76 times the size of Belgium, turning it into a personal capitalist venture. Using a large private army whose numbers included Congolese orphans, the king and his agents squeezed the land of its resources, slaughtering elephants for ivory, tapping trees for rubber. The Congolese were uprooted, separated, enslaved, whipped and mutilated (hands were cut off, sometimes for accounting purposes), leaving as many as 10 million dead.
The Congo Free State, conceived as a "neutral" zone to be run by an international association in the interest of bringing science, civilization, and Christianity to the indigenes, received the Berlin Conference's blessings. Belgium's King Leopold II (above) soon took control, reaping fabulous personal profits through the sale of land and development rights. Scandalously little was reinvested in schools like the one shown here.
Ms. Scott’s outrage is palpable, but she has bitten off enough here for a 10-hour television series. (A former actress who played the oldest daughter in “The Searchers,” Ms. Scott produced a “Frontline” film on Radovan Karadzic.) King Leopold would be enough for one documentary, as would Patrice Lumumba and Mobutu Sese Seko, both of whom are too quickly crammed into the film’s overloaded, visually chaotic two hours. The flurry of archival photographs, maps, paintings, quotations and far too many unidentified film clips, both archival and of recent vintage, fiction and nonfiction, overwhelm rather than elucidate. The voices of Don Cheadle, who provides some of the narration, and Alfre Woodard and James Cromwell, each reading historical documents in accented English, just prove distracting.
Opens today in Manhattan.
Produced and directed by Pippa Scott; adapted by Ms. Scott from the book by Adam Hochschild; narrated by Don Cheadle, with the voices of Alfre Woodard and James Cromwell; edited by Oreet Rees; music by Yoav Goren; released by Linden Productions. At the Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street, East Village. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is not rated.
posted
^^Yes an unfortunate side of European Imperial history we rarely see.
In the past biased documentation of King Leopold and other European explorers were made to romantacize and agrandize them. Making them appear to be the brave courageous explorers who conquered the "savages".
I hope this stuff gets widely released in Belgium, France, and all over Western Europe to show just how "civilized" and "enlightened" their ancestors truly were!
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In the past biased documentation of King Leopold and other European explorers were made to romantacize and agrandize them. Making them appear to be the brave courageous explorers who conquered the "savages".![[Mad]](mad.gif)
I hope this stuff gets widely released in Belgium, France, and all over Western Europe to show just how "civilized" and "enlightened" their ancestors truly were!
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