INGAGI 1930

INGAGI was presented to audiences of its day as an authentic ethnographic film, being the documentary account of a safari led by one Sir Hubert Winstead into "darkest Africa" - the name of the mysterious continent literally zooms glowing out of the opening scrolled text like a ghostly "Boo!" In addition to chronicling the dark continent's "low bred" people and unusual wildlife (wildebeests, giraffes, zebras, and crocodiles spawned by the dozens), there is on-the-spot footage of the debonair Sir Hubert's hunting and painstaking capture of a leopard and a reputedly 65-foot python (disturbed in its attempt to devour a lemur), replete with often tasteless tongue-in-cheek narration, while a ceaselessly noodling electric organ grinds out the most turgid Bible Tent music imaginable. At one point, they document the discovery of a tortoise with a strange armor-like shell with wings, which they christen a "tortorillo" - shortly before its bite allegedly poisoned and killed one of the dogs taken along on the hunt. But the real point of the film, promised to us in that opening scroll, is its exclusive documentation of an African tribe that worships gorillas - to the point of sacrificing its barren women to them, in the belief that mating with gorillas will help them to bear children at least of some hybrid sort.
INGAGI premiered in various North American theaters on March 15 and did the proverbial "boffo box office," raking in at least $4,000,000 - an enormous return on a meager investment that time would prove even more meager; however, by the first week in June, newspapers across the country began to run exposé reports about its sensational content. As Bret Wood points out in one of the two excellent commentaries included on this disc, today's audiences tend to regard the audiences of the 1930s as being preposterously gullible as compared to today's more sophisticated viewers, but the published documentation of the day generally supports the idea that INGAGI was quickly recognized by critics and popular audiences as an insult - not to people of Africa or African descent (which it most certainly is) but rather to paying audiences. It seems that whoever played Sir Hubert Winstead never left California to head his own safari, whose highlights were a fabulation of footage freely cobbled together from other ethnographic films, such as Lady Grace Mackenzie's 1915 film HEART OF AFRICA. In an ironic discovery that only began to gain popular meaning in recent times, every act of intrepid heroism attributed to Sir Hubert in the movie had actually been accomplished some fifteen years earlier...