ABSTRACT
Anthropologists began publishing accounts of the Melanesian cargo cult, so-called, in 1948 (Mair 1948: 64; see Christiansen 1969: 19). Within a few years the cargo cult story escaped the narrow confines of ethnographic literature. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Angelo Rizzoli’s 1962 outré film Mondo Cane, the first of a popular series of cinematic ‘shockumentaries’, climaxed with cargo cult. Released in English in 1963, this became ‘the season’s most argued about film’. The camera focused on a Papua New Guinean crowd gathered around a dummy airplane and control tower at a makeshift airfield, searching the skies and waiting. The film’s pontifical narrator orated a Hollywood version of cargo cult:
They believe that planes come from paradise. Their ancestors sent them. But the white man, a crafty pirate, manages to get his hands on them … You build your plane too, and wait with faith. Sooner or later, your ancestors will discover the white man’s trap and will guide the planes on your landing strip. Then you will be rich and happy … They wait motionless. Searching the sky.
(Jacopetti and Rizzoli 1963)