The Vanishing Man

Flame and the Fire. "The beginning of the Space Age is the end of the Stone Age," says Explorer Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau. From treks to Africa, Brazil, Australia and New Guinea, Gaisseau has assembled a film less dramatic than his memorable The Sky Above--The Mud Below, but steadily fascinating as a record of a dozen or more primitive cultures not yet shouldered into the future by civilization.

The tone of his research is best expressed in the image of a befeathered savage dancer wearing sneakers. Without straining for irony, Gaisseau notes inching progress in New Guinea, where one happy warrior of the cannibalistic Kuku-Kuku tribe is flown away to face murder charges; his kinsmen on the ground wear human hands as talismans, smoke the bodies of their honored dead and lug them around like dolls.

As evidence that the mystery of such anthropological anomalies may never be solved, Flame picks Africa's Auen nomads, caught in the fierce Kalahari desert between the Boers of South Africa and the northerly Bantus. When game is scarce, Gaisseau relates, they often spare their young the agony of starvation by smothering them in shallow, sandy graves. They are among the most stubbornly primitive people on earth, and their harsh mercy has already marked them for extinction: at the time of filming, only 28 members of the tribe were living.

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