Word: amins
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...POINT OF documentary cinema at its best is to convey things as they really are, events as they really occurred, in all their beauty, in all their terror, in all their pathos. In this sense, Idi Amin Dada is documentary at its worst, a combination of cheap shots, superficial political commentary, and cultural racism, which results in a meaningless comic portrait of a genocidal dictator. A Swiss director, Barbet Schroeder, took a crew to Uganda in 1974, after having received express permission to do a film portrait of the Ugandan President, who had assumed power in a coup d'etat...
During the intervening three years, Amin had become something of an international villain/buffoon, due to his massacre or explusion of the nearly 100,000 Asians who had formed the managerial elite in Uganda during the colonial period, his admiration for Hitler's efforts to exterminate European Jewry, expressed in a telegram to Kurt Waldheim the day after the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, and his seemingly psychotic messages to other heads of state such as Tanzania's Julius Nyerere. Amin saw the film, which consists almost entirely of interviews with him and scenes of him in action...
...cheap shots, the most striking is that the film is conducted entirely in English. That is to say, not only are the interviews in English, but Amin's public displays are also in English, and for the most part, whenever his subordinates are called upon to address him, they also speak in English. Now the fact is that Amin's ability to articulate himself in English is limited at best, and at times, as in a speech he attempts to deliver to the assembled physicians of Kampala, he is almost completely incoherent. Although he is undoubtedly something less than...
...CABINET meeting, staged for the cameras, and conducted of course in English, Amin launches into a convoluted and barely coherent explication of what he says at the outset are seven major points. After exhorting his ministers not to be hesitant and indecisive like women, not to be late to their meetings or out of their offices when he calls, and not to dilly-dally about executing spies, he has gotten so lost that he forgets the last four points. And as he rambles from non-sequitur to non-sequitur, appearing completely ludicrous, Schroeder's camera pans the room--the ministers...
Beyond the occasional slip into the D.W. Griffith syndrome, and far more serious, is the pervasive cultural racism in Idi Amin Dada. Among the moments that are apparently meant to be particularly hilarious are shots of Amin in native dress, participating in what seem to be Ugandan dances and ceremonies. These scenes have no purpose in the film whatsoever, unless Schroeder assumes that his audience will find practices and rites belonging to an alien culture inherently amusing. One is forced to wonder how a Ugandan audience would receive a film showing President Ford donning a football helmet and marching with...