Mondo

Mondo is the pseudo-documentary genre that tours the world's supposedly shocking customs, rituals and deaths, with a narrator presenting the footage as fact. The name comes from Mondo Cane (1962), Italian for "a dog's world", which was an international hit and produced an Oscar-nominated song, More. Producers then stuck the word on anything similar: Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Freudo, Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless. Shockumentary and shock documentary are the usual synonyms.

What defines a mondo film

• No plot. A chain of vignettes joined by narration, usually a smooth, faintly appalled voice.
• Travelogue structure. The camera goes abroad, or to a fringe of home, and films people behaving strangely.
• Real and staged footage cut together. Genuine material is spliced to arranged or relabelled material, and the narrator draws connections the pictures do not support.
• Death and animal slaughter as the draw. The promise that some of it was real was the product.

Where it came from

Mondo Cane had three directors, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara, and grew out of a late-1950s European run of nightclub travelogues. It was an enormous hit, and "More", by Riz Ortolani and Nino Oliviero, was nominated for Best Original Song at the 36th Academy Awards in April 1964. The sequel arrived the next year, and the imitations followed. The longer history of the format has its own piece on this site: Mondo: the shockumentary, 1962 to 1978.

The pitch and the reality

The pitch is a globe-trotting tour of real customs, rituals and deaths. The reality is that a large and unmeasurable share of the footage was staged, and the framing is colonial throughout. The camera goes abroad looking for people behaving strangely and finds exactly that. The audience half knew, which was the deal.

The endpoints

Faces of Death (1978 onwards) is mostly fabricated. Africa Addio (1966) is not fabricated, and is much harder to sit through for that reason. Paolo Cavara split from Jacopetti, made Malamondo (1964), then directed The Wild Eye (1967), a fiction feature about a documentarian who stages the suffering he claims to record.

Why it matters here

Mondo is the link between the newsreel and the cannibal boom. Umberto Lenzi's Man from Deep River (1972) bolted the mondo apparatus onto a fiction plot, and Cannibal Holocaust is a mondo film that says out loud what mondo films are. Mondo also sits close to video nasty history, since Faces of Death was a rental-shelf staple of the same years.

Start here

1. Mondo Cane (1962): the original, and the source of the name.
2. Africa Addio (1966): Jacopetti and Prosperi with less staging, which makes it worse.
3. Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971): the slavery reconstruction, the cycle at its most indefensible.
4. Faces of Death (1978): the rental-shop death tape, partly faked.
5. Man from Deep River (1972): Lenzi bolting the mondo apparatus onto a fiction plot, and the start of the cannibal cycle.

The full history of the cycle: The mondo film, 1962 to 1978.