mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


neither/nor


prosperi, jacopetti, and the dawn of mondo


it was practically requisite that Cavara, Prosperi, and Jacopetti would provide reportage from the Papua Islands in their film: As the last redoubt of perfect primitivism, it made a perfect stick against which to measure observations of civilized life. For example: A scene of the Italian-born film star Rossano Brazzi having his shirt torn off by a mob of female fans in a New York department store is followed by a dissertation on mating habits on the Trobriand archipelago off the east coast of New Guinea, as a pack of females in heat pursue two frantic bachelors through azure water and across sandy beaches—I suspect that the scene was inspired more by the onrushing avalanche of prospective brides in Buster


Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925) than by anything in actual Trobriand tradition. “As you have probably noticed,” says the narrator, “hunting men is a sport which is practiced the world over. Perhaps the women here practice it—how can we say?—more sportingly, in the open air and bare-breasted.” With this cue, we cut from a phalanx of New Guinean women walking towards the camera to a swimsuit-clad blonde in the same position, tracked by four wolfish sailors, in what is described as “our Western hunting grounds on the French Riviera.” Next, a sequence in which the crew of an American Navy vessel run to and fro, port to starboard, in order to keep in view a circling speedboat loaded with girls,


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