mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
apparent, teaming up to co-direct with editor Mario Morra, whose credits included Mondo Cane 2 and Te Battle of Algiers. Teir Ultima grida dalla savana (Savage Man, Savage Beast, 1975) is perhaps the most ravishing Mondo film ever made, and Climati and Morra’s three films together are high points of a genre that, by the late ’70s, was in its Indian summer.
As the years wore on and Mondo shaded into
Shockumentary, the films themselves tended to become darker, more violent. From the outset, in Mondo Cane, these movies had played with the sex-and-death Eros/ Tanatos polarity, packaging images of bathing beauties and topless native women alongside religious penitents using ground-glass paddles to beat their thighs into raw hamburger. Now we began to see an increasing emphasis on bloodletting, human and animal, and actual death, caught on camera. Tis can at least partially be accounted for by changes in the mores of the wider culture, resulting from years of the Vietnam War as prime-time viewing. Outside of the context of war reportage, however, the act of depicting death on film retained the tantalizing air of a locked door. In his 1974 testament Film as a Subversive Art, the critic and curator Amos Vogel identified this as the one area that activated “all the superstitious alarms and taboos of pre-history.”
It is human nature that any prohibition doubles as an invitation. Rumors of the existence of “snuff ” movies— films depicting on-camera murder—proliferated, and in 1976 the exploitation team of Michael and Roberta Findlay happily serviced the public imagination by repackaging and marketing a five-year-old splatter film they’d made as Snuff, pitched to grindhouse ghouls. For years the Mondo movie had been offering the additional inducement of seeing that which cannot be unseen. Here, as ever, Jacopetti and Prosperi were in
neither/nor
the vanguard, though they would be followed by death- fixated movies which varied from works of undisguised ghoulishness to the somber and philosophical Des Morts.
Writing in the March/April 1980 Film Comment,
Vogel described Des Morts as an “austere masterpiece [that] compels us to stare into the face of death, our unacknowledged deity and implacable enemy,” and lauded its director, Zéno, as one who, for his fearless transgression of the taboo against representing death on- screen, “must be celebrated as a pioneer and is in danger of being written out of ‘official’ film history.” Vogel was clairvoyant as ever in this prediction. Te box copy on my SP VHS, the 2000 Woodhaven Entertainment release, inauspiciously promises “Graphic depictions of shocking practices, nudity and violence,” while the feature presentation is preceded by a trailer for 1964’s Kwaheri (“Meaning Fire of Puberty”), in which ritually scarified African bosoms are freely ogled.
Des Morts actually came with an unusual highbrow
pedigree—it was a co-production with Margaret Ménégoz’s Éric Rohmer-affiliated Les Films du Losange. In 1980, it played a program of recent Belgian cinema at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, alongside recent work by Chantal Akerman. Writing up the film, which explores the boundary between here and hereafter, presenting and counterpoising a variety of cross-cultural funeral rituals, Te Village Voice’s J. Hoberman called it “better than shock therapy for snapping an acute depression. More than any musical you’d care to name, Des Morts makes you want to live, live, live and keep on living.”
Des Morts credits three directors, Ferbus, Garny,
and Zéno, though it seems reasonable to call Zéno its primary architect, for only he has additional directing credits, including Vase de Noces (Wedding Trough 1974),
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