Continente perduto (1955)
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Directors
Leonardo Bonzi, Enrico Gras, Giorgio Moser
A lavish visual poem captures a series of scenes across Southeast Asia.
The story
This documentary unfolds as a series of scenes filmed in Southeast Asia, presented on a lavish scale and accompanied by a rich soundtrack. Rather than functioning primarily as an ethnographic inquiry, it shapes its images into what has been called a “visual poem,” drawing grandeur from the picturesque, the unexpected, and the strange. The article also notes a tension in the film’s approach: it appears to foreground postcard-style exoticism, while criticism argues that its colorful presentation ultimately makes that exoticism banal. Its imagery is discussed in relation to the Bandung Conference, held in the same year and region.
Full plot (contains spoilers)
This is a documentary consisting of a series of scenes filmed in Southeast Asia. Made on a lavish scale and accompanied by a rich soundtrack, it is less an ethnographic inquiry than a “visual poem” in which “the picturesque, the unexpected, and the strange attain a kind of epic grandeur,” according to Jean de Baroncelli. In his celebrated collection of essays, Mythologies, Roland Barthes offers a critical analysis of the intentions underlying the film. In his view, while purporting to foreground postcard-style exoticism, Lost Continent ends up banalizing it: “to color the world is always a way of denying it.” Barthes also draws a connection with the Bandung Conference, held in the same year the film was released, in the same region of the world, and marking the emergence of the Third World non-aligned countries movement: “It cannot be innocent to lose the continent that came together at Bandung.”
Genres
Film metadata comes from the open sources listed in Credits & Contact. Catalogue details may be incomplete.
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