(television)
The Age
Saturday December 9, 1995
ASTROLOGY, palmistry, iridology, tarot, feng shui, The X Files our world goes steadily backwards to embrace old superstitions.
The New Age is a looped tape of older ages.
SBS is starting a series of 10 programs under the title Divine Magic: world of the supernatural (Sundays 7.30).
The first episode is on the world of voodoo. Trained by the movies, most of us will approach voodoo with memories of really lousy horror movies with titles like Voodoo Island (comic predecessor of Gilligan's Island), Voodoo Woman, Voodoo Tiger and Voodoo Man starring Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist whose wife has been turned into a zombie.
Hollywood loves making voodoo movies because they have so many bad actors who just have to be themselves to play zombies.
But voodoo is as plausible as any other religion. Though only four centuries old it offered faith, tradition and solace to millions. We are apt to underestimate the size of sub-Saharan African religion.
Voodoo arose when slaves kept their African traditions alive through the horrors of slavery. In Haiti, many died on the plantations but some escaped and maintained their old religion in the jungle.
Hollywood historiography has immortalised Spartacus as the leader of a slave revolt, but in Haiti Toussaint L'Ouverture was an even more remarkable leader. He helped to found the first black republic and it was based on voodoo.
In some ways this is an unsatisfactory film. The information content is given almost entirely in voice-over. The visuals seldom tell their own story.
They also fail to keep the viewer informed. What am I looking at when staring people are doing strange things? Is this a clip from an old movie, as the monochrome image suggests? Is it old newsreel or anthropological film or is it a reconstruction?
There are wonderful graphics from the walls of churches, though we are not told the origins of this evocative mixture of pagan and Christian images.
If you want to see something stranger than voodoo be sure to watch Hell Bento (Tuesday 8.30 SBS). This AFI, Film Victoria and SBS product is an extraordinary ride through the Hieronymus Bosch country of the contemporary Japanese underground.
Japanese proverbs and aphorisms catch the eye and mind. ``The mouth is the entrance to hell." ``Like the carp on the chopping block." ``We walk through hell gazing at flowers.
" ``Money controls even the order of hell." ``There are holes in the sun."
A man talks to us, laughing after each apocalyptic utterance.
He explains that the underground is like cicadas that stay underground for seven years, then come up. ``Like the cicadas, " he says, ``We must hide ourselves."
We begin with lesbians and a strong sense of deja vu from memories of Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. This kind of feeling recurs: the Japanese underground is often what we were 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
Girl bands play old rock and roll. There is a sort of cross- over. The underground we see on the screen is dominantly American in origin. ``We lost the war," they keep saying, and they fell for the power of America. But one commentator remarks that it is traditional Japanese culture that is now underground.
The family is revealed through a mother with daughters who play in a '60s cover band, a '70s revival band and a hotrod punk band. One says she would be prepared to marry ET. A male band plays naked, they are the Samurai Punks.
Technology has married art and religion. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost have been upgraded in the multi-media age into Hardware, Software and Network. An old man says that if you give a double clap in front of a spiritual window, it opens up. You wonder if he is talking of Windows and a double click on your mouse.
Derelicts sleep in cardboard boxes, a great international symbol of affluence. The speakers keep coming back to war, bombs and peace. ``This is the age of gluttony. Peace has made us stupid." A geisha, sadistic art, elegance and brutality it is a wonderfully stimulating, chilling, hilarious and thoughtful film. See it twice.
© 1995 The Age
