{"id":1599,"date":"2012-02-24T12:17:03","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T18:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1599"},"modified":"2012-02-24T12:17:03","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T18:17:03","slug":"everyone-mondo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1599","title":{"rendered":"Everyone Mondo"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cMondo,\u201d being the Italian word for world, should be a neutral noun. Yet go to any modern dictionary and find a variety of definitions far from the original. \u201cAdjective: enormous; huge; extremely unconventional or bizarre.\u201d \u201cAdverb: Used in reference to something very striking or remarkable of its kind.\u201d The Urban Dictionary provocatively calls Mondo \u201cthe quintessential word of the English language.\u201d What all contemporary linguists agree on is that it derives from the 1962 \u201cdocumentary\u201d Mondo Cane. So it\u2019s worth recognizing the film\u2019s writer and supervising director, Gualtiero Jacopetti, who died Aug. 17 at 91.<\/p>\n

Born in Barga, Tuscany, in 1919, Jacopetti served in the Italian Resistance during World War II and co-founded the liberal newsweekly Cronache in 1953. He worked on newsreels, and a couple of docs about the seamier night clubs on five continents, before having his eureka-Mondo inspiration. \u201cLet\u2019s make an anti-documentary,\u201d he told his colleague Franco Prosperi, who would be Jacopetti\u2019s codirector for the next decade. The result was Mondo Cane, which means Dog World in Italian \u2014 \u201can ironic, mocking, even cynical title,\u201d Jacopetti recalls in David Gregory\u2019s exemplary 2003 doc The Godfathers of Mondo \u2014 but which was released in English-speaking countries under its original title. Hence, Mondo. (See the 100 best movies of all time.)<\/p>\n

Jacopetti wasn\u2019t the first filmmaker to marry sensation to documentary. The early shorts produced by Thomas Edison\u2019s company opened viewers\u2019 eyes to cockfights, cootch dancers and, in 1903, the electrocution and death of Topsy, a Coney Island elephant. Audiences loved that the movie camera could take them places they\u2019d never been and show them things they\u2019d never seen, and in 1922 they got their first feature-length true-life adventure. In his ethno-smash Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty filmed the working and community life of an Inuit fisherman in faithful detail \u2014 except that the Eskimo wasn\u2019t named Nanook, and many scenes were restaged for the camera. Flaherty believed a filmmaker had to bend certain facts to tell a larger truth, and the documentary ethos would henceforth pirouette between reportage and reenactment.<\/p>\n

Cellar-dwelling filmmakers soon added the erotic to the exotic. J.C. Cook\u2019s 1934 Inyaah (Jungle Goddess), which intercut stock footage with a location shoot in Indonesia, purported to record the strange folkways of tribal races, where the men are fierce and the woman pretty and topless. The peculiar American mores of the time forbade nude images of whites but saw ethnographic value in shots of unclothed African or Asians; it\u2019s one reason many boys became connoisseurs of photo spreads in the National Geographic. Exploitation movies just upped the ante: to National Pornographic \u2014 a tendency Jacopetti and his team would bring to cinematic fruition.<\/p>\n

Jacopetti expanded that adolescent voyeurism to the whole world. \u201cCinema,\u201d he said, \u201cwas the perfect medium to tell the facts of life,\u201d and he\u2019d tell them all. Jacopetti and his team \u2014 Prosperi, second codirector Paolo Cavara and cameramen Antonio Climati and Benito Frattari \u2014 circled the globe for lurid scenes, acting like the nerviest tabloid photographers whose only goal was to get the story. \u201cBack then the whole world was unprepared for our shooting strategy,\u201d Prosperi says in The Godfathers of Mondo. \u201cSlip in, ask, never pay, never reenact.\u201d (Well, maybe sometimes they did stage reenactments, but, hey, so did Flaherty.) Mondo Cane upended the Italian film tradition of neorealism \u2014 movies on working-class themes shot in a naturalistic style \u2014 for a kind of sociological hyperrealism. (See the best movies of the decade.)<\/p>\n

In the process it defibrillated the staid documentary tradition: here were startling images, abrupt juxtapositions, the violent voyeurism of the new zoom lens and Jacopetti\u2019s scathing narration. TIME\u2019s review of the film gave a hint of the filmmakers\u2019 dialectical scheme: \u201cAfter ogling a beachful of bikinied bosoms, the camera cuts abruptly to a woman in New Guinea nonchalantly nursing a small, bristly pig, cuts again to a nearby village, where screaming hogs are being clubbed to death by natives in preparation for a barbecue.\u201d Wrote the magazine\u2019s unnamed critic: \u201cIf there\u2019s a message, it\u2019s that people are no damn good.\u201d And yet, as Michael Weldon noted decades later in The Psychotronic Video Guide, \u201cThere\u2019s sense and irony in everything, The film made audiences think while shocking them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s opening narration read: \u201cAll the scenes you will see in this film are true and are taken only from life. 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.\u201d The objectively reported truths included such antic behaviors as snake-eating, bull-goring, pet necrophilia, a woman suckling a pig, livestock beheaded with a sword, a restaurant that serves canned ants, an artist who paints nudes. Paints their nude bodies blue, that is.<\/p>\n

Jacopetti also hired the composer Riz Ortolani to write a full, Hollywoodish score, whose inappropriate but irresistible love theme \u201cMore\u201d (\u201cMore than the greatest love the world has known\u201d) was nominated for an Oscar and went on to be played at nearly every wedding for the next 20 years. This weird mix of horror and humor \u2014 that you could hum to \u2014 made Mondo Cane a worldwide hit. The Guardian\u2019s Mark Goodall fairly pegs it as \u201cthe strangest commercially successful film in the history of cinema.\u201d