Hi everyone. Welcome to the Chauvel Cinematheque for the second part in a two-part program entitled Grindhouse Docos. On Saturday we saw Robert Ardrey's The Animal Within and tonight we will be having a look at Kevin Duffy's 1977 film Shangri-La.
I received a good response to the short series of grindhouse films I screened on the last program to coincide with the Chauvel's release of the Tarantino/ Rodriguez film, so when the time came to work on the current program, I thought it would be good to show some of the different types of films that played on the grindhouse circuit. I had these two films sitting around at home, so I blew the dust off them and gave them a run.
The tradition of the grindhouse documentary stretches back to the exploitation film of the 1920s and early sound period. The development of the Hays Code in the early 1930s saw the emergence of a sort of shadow exhibition industry, one that was not party to the moral imperatives of the code. Films like Damaged Lives, Test Tube Babies, Marihuana and many others used the pretext of documentary to avoid censorship and legitimate their production and exhibition as "educational".
Within the exploitation field, several types of films emerged: the sex hygiene film, the exotic film, the atrocity film, the burlesque film, the nudist film, the drug film, and the vice film. Taken as a whole, they represent a kind of checklist of prohibitions found in the Hays code. The films were produced, distributed and exhibited outside of the Hollywood studio system. As Eric Schaeffer notes in his excellent book "Bold, Daring, Shocking True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, they were, "centered on some form of forbidden spectacle that served as their organizing sensibility."
As the code's influence waned in the 1950s, two new developments in "educational" exploitation films emerged. Beginning with Mondo Cane, a smash hit in 1963, the marriage of the atrocity film (like Mau Mau above) and the exotic film gave birth to the mondo film. Their mixture of real and fake footage was overlaid with an omnipresent and often highly judgemental and misleading narration that provided the educational context. Although Cane was a surprise hit and was even nominated for an Academy Award, the mondo movie soon became a staple of grindhouse programming for the next twenty years.
A parallel development in the exploitation film industry was the emergence of the pornographic sex education film. Sex education films of the mid-late 1960s, or "white-coaters" as they were called in the trade, due to the costumes worn by their ubiquitous "doctor" narrators, were the bridge between the soft-core films of the early 1960s and the hard-core films of the 1970s. Their educational pretense permitted shots of actual sex. It took only a few years before actual sex was permitted in narrative films, but the educational motif has survived as a kind of cinematic equivalent of the human appendix, an evolutionary relic of the past. Which brings me (finally) to Shangri-La.
Produced and directed by the relatively unknown sexploitation producer Kevin Duffy in 1977, although to me it looks earlier than that, Shangri-La is one of the rarest of all the mondo movies. It is not listed on the imdb and if you google it, you get nothing. Under the old classifications of exploitation the film would be labelled an exotic, dealing as it does with the hippie invasion of Goa in India, but like many mondo movies, it also shades into the drug film, the atrocity film, and in a brief shot of the birth of a baby, it even reminds one of the sex hygiene film, of which the birth-of-a-baby film was a small but very successful sub-genre.
It's ironic that this film has probably more educational value today than it did upon its release as it is perhaps the earliest extant documentary footage of the hippie scene in Goa, which was the birthplace of rave culture. It is one of the more thoughtful examples of the mondo genre, but it does periodically come to a halt to foreground such dubious spectacles as nude yoga, acid flashbacks and skinny-dipping. There is something about Shangri-La that I find very appealing. There are some really well-cut montages, an excellent sitar score, and some priceless footage of young people freaking out on drugs. But mostly it is that cosy nostalgic feeling I get from the narration, a nostalgia for a kind of transparency.
If you're expecting to see a lost classic of the cinema, you'll be sorely disappointed with this film, but movie buffdom does not live on the classics alone. One of the most interesting things about movie buffdom is how much it embraces and celebrates the bad as well, if not moreso, than the good. To love movies is to love bad movies, because bad movies are the norm.
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