mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
neither/nor
mondo today
whi le the poetics of Jacopetti and Prosperi, Climati and Morra, Renan and Schrader, or Zéno were sorely missing from the latter-day descendants of the Mondo tradition, it would nevertheless continue in the degraded form of direct-to-video mixtapes like the Traces movies or Joe Francis’s Banned from Television, the snuff equivalents of America’s Funniest Home Videos (in which Bob Saget played, during its original run, the role of a benevolent sort of Mondo narrator), and its various spinoffs.
It is difficult to point to purebred offspring of the Mondo/Shockumentary film in a new century that has seen the rise and fall of
Rotten.com and the proliferation of copycat “shock” sites catering to the ghoulish scopophiliac, but the genre’s influence can be found in the oddest of places. Te studiously composed films of sometimes-collaborators Michael Glawogger and Ulrich Seidl, both cross-breeders of documentary and fiction filmmaking, would be unimaginable without the precedent of Mondo, and no documentary in the thanatological vein—Executions (1995), Orozco the Embalmer (2001), El Sicario, Room 164 (2010), even Te Act of Killing (2012)—can wholly ignore the tradition (or taint) of Mondo. In 1996 Derrick Beckles, a fixture in the Toronto punk scene, made his first mash-up assemblage of sitcoms, infomercials, workout tapes, TV movies, PSAs, and daytime chat shows, inaugurating a
series of TV Carnage mixes, panoramic views of a media hellscape, which would spawn imitators of their own. (Chicago-based Everything Is Terrible being the most prominent.) Beckles was also an early contributor to Te Voice of Montreal ’zine, which in due course would birth VICE magazine, the multimillion-dollar vice empire, and vice tv, who deal in a reportage style very much in the Mondo vein.
Te legacy of Mondo is problematic. It is also one that
we ignore at our own risk: newly vital in a day when our comfort zones are steel-reinforced by algorithms and self-selected social media feeds filter out anything that might rub us the wrong way. Criticizing the patriarchal order of colonialism even as they sometimes epitomized it, the original Mondo movies are commentaries on the times from which they emerged that are also representative of them, forward-thinking in some ways, blinkered in others. Tough often knocked on release as pessimistic or apocalyptic, today some of them look positively clairvoyant. Tey were resented as crass and exploitative and mistrusted for their popular appeal, though could often be models of cinematic verve, and blew breaches in decorum that will never be repaired, through which much fine work has since passed without facing anything like the same censure. In watching these films you may be offended, awed, rankled, amused, or appalled... but you will not be apathetic.
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