Dennis O'Rourke's "CANNIBAL TOURS" is simply stunning. While the cameras snap and the tourists bargain, the New Guineans try to hold onto their world. 'We sit here confused,' one laments, 'while they take pictures of us'.
The film follows European and American tourists as they travel the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. The tourists enjoy bargaining for local handcrafts such as woodcarvings and baskets, snap endless photos of the colourful savages, hand out cigarettes, watch dance performances, and offer naive comments about native people and how they live in harmony with nature. "Heart of Darkness" in air-conditioned comfort with Mozart soundtrack. "The horror! The horror!"
The scenes of the tourists are interspersed with photographs from the era of German colonialism of New Guinea. Now the visitors have cameras rather than guns. The film asks: who are the real cannibals?
Having lived and worked in New Guinea, I feel embarrassed to watch that almost grotesque German haggling over the price of a four-kina carving which probably took someone a whole day to make, and to listen to those Italian tourists talking about those 'backward natives' while they would not last a day in that jungle without air-conditioning.
