Mondo: the shockumentary, 1962 to 1978

On 13 April 1964, at the 36th Academy Awards, a love song from an Italian shock documentary was up for Best Original Song. "More," by Riz Ortolani and Nino Oliviero, lost that night but took the Grammy for Best Instrumental Theme the same year, Kai Winding's instrumental version had already reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and would stay the only chart hit of the trombonist's long career, and the song has since piled up hundreds of recorded versions to sit among the most-covered Italian tunes ever written. It is waiting-room music now, the sound of a lift going up. The film it came from, Mondo Cane (1962), settles partway through on a beach of sea turtles, their navigation wrecked by nearby atomic testing, crawling the wrong way up the sand to bake to death in the sun. Ortolani wrote the strings for the turtles and the ballad both.

Mondo means world, and the world was a montage

Mondo Cane had three directors, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara, and it grew out of a late-1950s European fashion for nightclub travelogues, sniffy "documentaries" that toured the planet's floor shows for an audience that wanted to feel scandalised in comfort. Jacopetti, a newspaper and newsreel man who arrived with the documentary's authority and none of its scruples, kept the format and swapped the floor shows for corpses. There is no plot and no argument beyond the narration, a plummy voice that presents "customs" from around the world and cuts each one to look grotesque. A Pasadena pet cemetery, dogs buried under headstones, gets spliced against a Far East market where dogs are butchered for the pot, so a European in the stalls can feel both worldly and superior at once.

It was an enormous hit, and the title turned into a brand. Mondo Cane 2 followed the next year, then a rack of imitations with the word bolted to the front, Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Freudo, Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless, until "mondo" had leaked into American slang as an intensifier, mondo weird, mondo cool. A whole genre and a scrap of surfer vocabulary came out of one 1962 shock reel.

The audience paid for the maybe

A large and unmeasurable share of what Mondo Cane serves up as caught-on-camera reality was arranged, restaged, or simply relabelled by the narration, and the paying audience half knew. That was the deal. You bought the frisson of "this might be real" with a built-in escape hatch, "it is probably a bit fake," so the thrill went home with you and the guilt did not. Most of the lying lives in the cut rather than the shots: splice one piece of genuine footage to another and the narrator draws a line between them that neither supports, so grief filmed in one country and appetite filmed in another become "evidence" about the savagery of everyone who is not in the cinema. Jacopetti spent the rest of his life half-conceding the arrangements while insisting they served a larger truth.

The only footage nobody staged is the dead animals

The joke the format could not survive is that its most authentic material is the part it least wants examined. The executions and the exotic misery are mostly arranged for effect, while the animal killing is not faked at all: a bull speared, dogs and pigs slaughtered in front of the lens, real and casual and constant, with the narration about foreign customs laid over the top so the paying viewer never quite registers that the crew did the killing themselves, for the shot.

One of the three directors quit and made a film accusing the other two

Paolo Cavara did not stay for the sequel. He fell out with Jacopetti over exactly this, the manufacturing of what the films swore they had merely found, and in 1967 he directed a fiction feature about it. L'occhio selvaggio (The Wild Eye) follows a mondo documentarian across Asia as he stages, and finally engineers, the suffering he claims only to record. Everyone at the time read it the obvious way, as a portrait of the men Cavara had just stopped working with. A co-inventor of the format turned around and shot a whole film arguing that the format was a fraud that rots whoever holds the camera. That is Cannibal Holocaust's entire thesis, worked out in 1967, thirteen years before Ruggero Deodato collected the credit for it.

The murder charge landed two years before the film did

Africa Addio (1966) is Jacopetti and Prosperi without Cavara, three years of footage from the collapse of colonial Africa cut into a mondo epic, and it produced the format's most serious legal reckoning before anyone could buy a ticket. Some of what they caught exists nowhere else. The film's aerial shots of mass graves from the January 1964 Zanzibar revolution, taken from a plane a few days after the killing, are cited by Zanzibari historians as the only surviving documentation of a massacre the official record left blank. In 1964, while the film was still being assembled, L'Espresso accused Jacopetti of having delayed and repositioned the execution of captured Simba rebels so his camera could be in place for it. He sued the magazine, and the Italian courts charged him with complicity in homicide committed abroad. He was cleared before Africa Addio opened in February 1966, once he produced documents showing the crew had reached the scene just before the killing was ordered rather than commissioning it.

The trial is the part everyone repeats, and it is the smaller charge. Film a real execution you did not arrange and you have recorded history. What Africa Addio does that cannot be excused sits in the narration, which mourns the passing of white colonial rule and frames African self-government as a descent into savagery, so real atrocities are marshalled into an argument that the continent should have stayed owned. Jerry Gross's Cinemation Industries understood the film precisely, recut it as Africa Blood and Guts in 1970, dropped most of the politics, and sold the corpses on their own.

Goodbye Uncle Tom stopped pretending to find anything

By Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) the pair dropped the last of the documentary alibi and built the American slave trade from scratch, casting themselves as modern television reporters roaming the antebellum South with notebooks, interviewing the enslaved as though for the evening news. They shot it in Haiti under François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and the terms of that arrangement are most of why the film is impossible to defend before you have weighed a single frame. Duvalier handed them diplomatic cars, clearance to film anywhere on the island, as many extras as they asked for, and a standing invitation to dinner at his own table. Hundreds of Haitians were hired to play chained and branded slaves for a European crew, on an island run by the Tontons Macoutes, and Roger Ebert, who gave the film zero stars, called it "the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary" and fixed on precisely that arrangement, the sense of real people being humiliated on camera to stage the humiliation of others.

The 136-minute cut is the one to reckon with, Ortolani scoring this one too, more lush strings over more misery. A competing reading holds the whole thing up as scalding anti-racist satire, an argument that survives only because Jacopetti was constitutionally unable to make anything that did not also leer. It anchors this site's indefensible shelf.

Faces of Death is the format with the world removed

The most notorious scene in Faces of Death is a table of diners eating the brains of a live monkey. The monkey is a puppet, the brains are cauliflower, and the blood is theatrical. That is the whole film in one gag. Released on 10 November 1978 and directed by John Alan Schwartz under the alias Conan Le Cilaire, it keeps the mondo pose, a supposed documentary tour of death narrated by a fictional pathologist called Dr Francis B. Gröss, and quietly throws away everything mondo used to travel for. No argument about the customs of the world, just a chain of death vignettes, and the celebrated ones, the electrocutions, the maulings, the monkey, are effects work. What is real is the purchased stock footage, the autopsy material, and, once again, the animal slaughter. Roughly forty per cent of the running time is staged.

None of the fakery hurt it, because the marketing was the film. Sold under the tagline "Banned in 46 Countries," a figure invented for the poster, Faces of Death stripped video-store shelves through the 1980s on the promise of the real. It is mondo boiled down to a single working part, the gore reel, with the pretence of a documentary about anything at all thrown overboard.

The line runs into the jungle

The mondo apparatus, the real animal death and the ethnographic inserts and the sworn insistence that all of it was found, got bolted onto an actual plot in Umberto Lenzi's Man from Deep River (1972), a jungle-captivity story that then sat almost unnoticed for five years. Deodato picked it back up, and the Italian cannibal cycle, which has its own piece on this site, spent a decade turning the mondo lie into fiction before Cannibal Holocaust (1980) turned it into a film about the mondo lie. The cleanest thread is the quietest one. Riz Ortolani, whose love theme for the turtle picture charmed the Academy in 1964, wrote the score for Cannibal Holocaust, and the same lush strings that lost that Oscar play, eighteen years later, over a real animal being killed on camera.