neither/nor


on the wider world that the Mondo movie provided came through European (specifically Italian) eyes.


From the moment when Mondo movies first


appeared in the early 1960s, the genre was a magnet for controversy. In the years ahead, thanks to a widespread relaxation of censorship laws, the films would make use of images of real suffering, real death—sometimes for aesthetically


and philosophically defensible


ends, sometimes for what can only be read as queasy vicarious titillation.


Comparing and contrasting 6


different cultures, their narrated text often fell back on stereotypes, and in these cases the best that might be said is that the films usually held all of the world’s peoples at roughly the same level of bemused contempt. Even when filmmakers were dealing with the catastrophic legacy of colonialism, as in Africa Addio, they would often do so in a manner that echoed colonialism’s paternalistic language. At worst, the Mondo/Shockumentary movie could be a parade of scurrility and offenses, and one could be forgiven for wondering why these sometimes ugly, denigrating movies deserve to be revived or remembered at all.


Tere are several answers to this question. First, the Mondo film represents an attempt, however flawed, to offer an encompassing view of the new world order—the word “Mondo” is Italian for “world”—that had emerged in the years following the physical recovery from World War II. Tey depict a planet stricken with nuclear paranoia, religious fervor, ecological catastrophe, and pandemic violence, where newly ubiquitous American- style consumer capitalism exploited hardwired human instinct while ancient tribal bonds remained an essential element of political organization. Tis is to say, they were an attempt to represent the world that we live in today, and how it got that way. Inasmuch as there


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


is a philosophical throughline to Mondo film, it is the consistent questioning of the relative designations of “civilization” and “savagery”—a question that was foremost in many minds in the years after the so-called civilized nations had turned Central Europe and China into charnel houses. Secondly, immediately relevant to the mandate of Neither/Nor, there is the fact that the Mondo film, appearing after the first wave of cinéma vérité, established a parallel tradition, a heady combination of field reportage, bald-faced counterfeit reenactments,


and straightforwardly


effusions (montage, orchestral cues, heavily designed and transparently strategized camerawork, plummy narration) which, without the benefit of a theoretical position, challenged the assumptions of the existing fiction/nonfiction rubric. Mondo movies were disdained in both official, ethically


responsible documentary


filmmaking channels and by the critical establishment, and it is true that these films were often exercises in bad faith and bad taste—but bad taste is very often instructive, and sometimes sublimely transgressive. Finally,


in


parsing the ranks of Mondo/Shockumentary movies, we discover a class of works that, though lumped in with the Faces of Deaths because of superficial similarities, in fact are rigorous in methodology and serious in artistic intent. In this category I would include Jean-Pol Ferbus, Dominique Garny, and Tierry Zeno’s Des Morts (1979) and Sheldon Renan and Leonard Schrader’s Te Killing of America (1981).


Te Mondo genre took its name from what was, if not the first film that belongs among its annals, then certainly the one that was most widely seen, and the one that set the template for much of what was to come: 1962’s Mondo Cane, the work of Italian filmmakers Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco Prosperi. Te title comes from a Tuscan expression variously


“cinematic”


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