mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


Jacopetti and Prosperi’s thrilling film sense places them in a class by themselves in the soon-to-be- crowded Mondo field. Teir movies exhibit a pummeling virtuosity that employs throbbing zooms, wide-angle lenses that give every portrait shot a touch of caricatured distortion, and a luxuriously appointed soundtrack that sometimes synchronizes with and comments on the material, an element that would be de rigueur for future Mondo imitators. Te score for Mondo Cane was co-written by Nino Oliviero and Ríz Ortolani, who also orchestrated and conducted, and their theme, “More,” would become a standalone hit, eventually nominated for Best Original Song at the 36th Academy Awards. Along with their talented cameramen Antonio Climati and Benito Frattari, these composers were the most irreplaceable parts of the production unit that formed around Mondo Cane. Oliviero wrote the score for odds- and-ends cash-in sequel Mondo pazzo (Mondo Cane 2, 1963), Oliviero and Ortolani collaborated again on Women of the World, and Ortolani is credited alone on Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Africa Addio (Goodbye Africa, 1966) and Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom, 1971)


Gualtiero Jacopetti was born in Tuscany in 1919, and for the first thirty-some years of his life, this filmmaker, who would later be pilloried for every imaginable lapse in taste and ethics by right-thinking movie reviewers, had—at least according to his obituaries—impeccable liberal bona fides. After serving in the anti-fascist Italian Resistance during World War II, Jacopetti co-founded a left-wing newsweekly, Cronache, a forerunner of L’Espresso, in 1953. After working as a war correspondent and writing newsreel commentary, he transitioned into screenwriting, providing the narration for two compilation films highlighting contemporary nightclub acts, Alessandro Blasetti’s Europa di notte (Europe at Night) and Luigi Vanzi’s Il mondo di notte (World at Night;


neither/nor


both 1959). Presaging future cabaret-heavy travelogues like Norman Cohen and Arnold L. Miller’s London in the Raw, Claude Lelouch’s La femme spectacle (aka Night Women; both 1964), and the prolific output of Mino Loy, these proto-Mondo projects provided Jacopetti the inspiration for the film that would make him famous— and for a time he was famous as few documentarians have been since. Upon his death in August 2011, the most frequently reproduced image of Jacopetti was a candid shot from 1968 that shows him hobnobbing in a Rome nightclub next to a palpably bored Monica Vitti. Jacopetti’s career-defining work in the years after Mondo Cane, however, was made far from the world of La Dolce Vita. While both Mondo Cane 2 and Women of the World hewed closely to the compare-and-contrast style of Mondo Cane, the next project from Jacopetti and Prosperi—now without Cavara—was something more focused, ambitious and, ultimately, controversial than anything they’d mounted before.


Africa Addio begins with the ceremonious exit of the


British government from Nairobi, Kenya, on December 12, 1963, and proceeds to offer a collage of scenes from around the African continent at the moment when all but the most stubborn of European powers had begun to pull up stakes on their colonial holdings. Te comedy of counterpoint seen in the earlier films, as well as the blithe cruelty towards physical anomaly, is still very much in evidence here: Accompanying a cut between two buck- toothed women, one a member of the outgoing white ruling class, the other of the ascendant blacks, the narrator cracks, “Somehow in the little human ways there’s really little difference.” Tese occasional bits of comic relief—a public slide show teaching a new black supremacist curriculum, tribal warriors receiving government-issue boxer shorts from the Sudanese Legion of Decency, a couple of lions being interrupted in flagrante delicto by


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