When the Kenyan Film Commission enlisted noted producer Sharad Patel to direct and produce Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin (1981) the project was envisioned as a serious and prestigious production. Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin was meant to shock the world all over again with dramatic recreations of Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda and raise awareness of the strife wrought by imperialist interventions in Africa. Generally speaking, the historical record presented in Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin is as frighteningly accurate (Denis Hills plays himself after all) as Joseph Olita’s performance as the notorious dictator. But Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin is neither a prestige production nor a sobering exposé on the corruption of power.
Video Instant Picture Company (VIPCO), a British distributor, acquired Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin and recut the film. VIPCO’s approach to re-editing Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin was to condense the historical epic into a rapidly paced narrative that delivered a cavalcade of spectacles in quick succession including scenes of military attacks, rapes, executions, dismemberments and torture. The atrocities committed by Idi Amin and his regime have been repackaged into “snack sized” morsels of schadenfreude. Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin ends up being a film that has more in common with Mondo Cane (1962) than the contemporaneous Gandhi (1982).
As the film survives today Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin is little more than a montage of exploitation movie tropes draped around a historical context for legitimacy and added dramatic urgency. This relationship between images of fetishized violence and historical atrocities in Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin is identical to that of the Nazisploitation sub-genre. History either disguises or justifies these spectacles of unbridled cruelty for an audience with very specific kinks. While it’s easy to condemn these unique visions of history and their consumers, neither are no more destructive to the record on which they are based than any Indiana Jones picture and its fans.
Divorced from the context of VIPCO’s intervention one might look at Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin as the exploitation remake of Barbet Schroeder’s documentary film General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974). In a way this is true since it was Schroeder’s footage of the dictator that provided the basis of Olita’s performance. The covert character assassination and anti-propagandist messaging of General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait is beyond Patel’s abilities as a filmmaker. But what Patel takes from Schroeder’s film is essential and part of what makes Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin a more compelling depiction of Idi Amin’s Uganda than in the Oscar winning The Last King Of Scotland (2006). What Patel understands from Schroeder’s film is that Idi Amin is this charismatic and cartoonish figure whose manic energy matches the drastic and often violent shifts in his behavior.
Even re-cut to play the grindhouse circuit Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin is as tumultuous and variable as its title character. Patel can cut from a sex scene to a close-up of brutal torture with all the verve that Idi Amin himself possessed. On a structural level (montage, shot composition, music cues, etc) Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin succeeds as a portrait of a despot run amok. Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin is not a film of good taste or political correctness, but it is an example of a film that retains something of its original vision or artistry in the face of being remade as exploitation. Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin is a cruel, unthinking, and verbosely sadistic rendering of history that must be seen to be believed.
