neither/nor


girls, girls. (Reverse-shot perspectives from both the deck of the battleship and the transom of the speedboat betray the filmmakers’ obvious contrivance.) No sooner has this bit of titillation been offered up then it’s back


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


to Papua: A Chimbu tribeswoman who, per the voice- over, has recently lost a child, is seen suckling a piglet. As the camera surveys a crowd of her gaily-painted fellows assembled for a feast day, the narrator observes that “many of these men have eaten human flesh, habitual food for their fathers.” Later, footage of women on the Bismarck Archipelago binging on tapioca root in order to fatten up for marriage and mating with their village’s headman, an astonishingly virile 92-pound bag of bones, is contrasted with that of middle-aged Western widows and divorcees trying to tone up their sagging flesh in a Vic Tanny gym in Los Angeles.


In its final reel, the film returns to New Guinea and “the border between history and prehistory” in the Central Cordillera, home of “the last cavemen, still armed with clubs… as wild and suspicious as a savage beast,” to survey the new faiths that have emerged from the collision with modernity: A mass at the Catholic mission, and the cargo cults that have sprung up in tribes living under the airfield traffic pattern of the Port Moresby airport. In the penultimate sequence, we have already seen the fate that’s in store for the next generation of New Guineans—in the civilized Hawaiian Islands, dusky native girls line up to hulu dance for silver-haired, corn-fed crackers from the mainland. And while the Malay Archipelago would remain a popular destination for filmmakers seeking the end of civilization—see Barbet Schroeder’s La Vallée or, more firmly in the Mondo tradition, Akira Ide’s Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali (1974)—by 1988, Dennis O’Rourke in his Cannibal Tours could essentially remake the Hawaii sequence of Mondo Cane among the same Iatmul who’d been filmed fifty years earlier by Mead and Bateson, now sightseeing attractions for their former colonial overlords.


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