mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


translated as “It’s a dog’s world” or “World of dogs.” It is given literal treatment in an under-the-credits prologue filmed in a kennel, in which a mangy, squirming stray is seen being kicked into a pen full of starving mutts and, if the high-pitched squeal on the soundtrack is any indication, subsequently torn to shreds. Moments before, an on-screen text that is simultaneously read by a narrator (Stefano Sibaldi in both the Italian and English-language versions) delivers the film’s mission statement/self-justification. “All of the scenes you will see in this film are true,” it reads. “If often they are shocking, it is because there are many shocking things in this world. Besides, the duty of the chronicler is not to sweeten the truth but to report it objectively.” (Te authorship of the narration is credited to Jacopetti, also the film’s editor and, therefore, something like the film’s presiding genius.)


Tis disclaimer is given the lie by the very scene that it accompanies. Te position of the camera, tracking the dog as it’s dragged along, tacitly speaks to a level of cooperation between filmmaker and subject, and raises further questions. Would this mutt still be going to its sacrifice if the cameraman wasn’t present? Is it in actual danger once inside the pen? Why would filmmakers who boast of their unflinching objectivity cut away before the fatal moment? Te only indication that we have of its imminent demise is that pained yelp, which was almost certainly added in post-production,


typical Italian


practice on even high-end fiction films. In fact, opening title notwithstanding, by highlighting at every juncture its mediated movie-ness, Mondo Cane establishes itself as the very antithesis of documentaries in the contemporary observational or direct cinema mode— this despite the fact that the Mondo boom was enabled by the same teleological development that birthed direct cinema, the availability of lightweight cameras like the


neither/nor


Arriflex. One aspect of this is the never-long-absent instructional voice-over, often arch, bemused, equal- opportunity condescending, drippingly sarcastic, and— in the case of the English narration for Cavara, Prosperi, and Jacopatti’s La donna nel mondo (Women of the World, 1963), read by Peter Ustinov—gallingly head-patting paternalistic.


Mondo Cane’s narrator having established his dubious


trustworthiness, the film proceeds to whisk viewers off on a leering transcontinental tour, stitching together material shot around the globe: Knee-walking drunks in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn Strasse (where the Beatles had recently been cutting their teeth as a live act), the painter Yves Klein at work with his nude models in Czechoslovakia, a high-end restaurant in New York City where the hoi polloi gather to dine on insects, the tragic effects of atomic radiation on the wildlife of the Bikini Atoll, and the effects of the bikini on sailors on shore leave. Frequently the film takes bounding leaps from one side of the planet to the other, prompted by associative connections between the civilized and the primitive world. After images of a pet cemetery in Pasadena accompanied by the pomp of a funeral march, we’re hit with a shock cut to a sign at a hot pot joint in Taipei advertising “roast dogmeat.” Rather than chastening the savage with the example of superior civilization, the cheek-and-jowl positioning of images from the industrialized and undeveloped world serves to show the continuing importance of rites and rituals in both. Troughout, the narration makes explicit what is already evident through the collision of images: Tat these two spheres are perhaps not so different as they seem. Te purpose of this, it should be said, is not necessarily to elevate the lowly savage, but to place the civilized on the same level—that of a vast kennel, a dog’s world.


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