Mondo movie madness

What is a mondofilm? What are the components?

by Christer Persson

Well, the exception confirms the rule, but there are some components that are in, if not all, but most of the films. In this article about the mondogenre, I have chosen to include the following components that a mondofilm can be created from:
Compilation
Education
Exploitation
Narrator
Re-enactments
Snuff
Reality TV

The genre called »mondo« wasn't created out of nothing in the sixties, so this article will start with a short description of the earliest films of sensation, the movies that influenced the mondogenre one way or another. Then we will get into the mondofilms, which will be examined through the different components they can consist of. Towards the end of the text I'll discuss the phenomenon of snuffmovies, the mondofilms way into our television via the reality shows and finally some personal reflections from me. This is by no means a definite article on the subject, but since the section mondo has appeared it can be helpful to you, the reader, to get a short description of the genre and some of the terms since there will, in time, appear reviews of several mondofilms.

Cinema Mondo
Ever since the birth of the motion pictures the issues of accidents and death have been present. Even though mondo pictures are a quite new phenomenon as a genre, the films have baffled audiences for a little more than a century.

The early sensationfilms
What we call mondopictues has their roots in the earliest of the documentary films the Lumiere brothers made in 1895. The first films contained trivial happenings like Baby eats breakfast, A train arrives at the Station and A boat leaving the harbor, and was nothing more than a minute of pure reality. But if the media was going to live into the twentieth century, photographers were sent all over the world to film sequences that would charm, enlighten and thrill the demanding audience. So, captured on film was royalties, celebrities and more obscure stuff like beheadings, hangings and one or two hardcore film was also produced, and the audience was, at least for a while, happy.

One of the earliest examples of mondofilm, in my opinion, is J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith's film about the battle of Santiago Bay. These gentlemen where among the first to carry a camera into battle and did successfully capture Theodore Roosevelt's attack on San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American war on Cuba in 1898. But safe at home in New York they read in the newspapers that a big battle had been fought in Santiago Bay. Annoyed that they had missed this historical battle, they came up with a brilliant idea. They bought some books about ships, some cigars, and gunpowder and turned an upside-down table filled with water into Santiago Bay! They had cut out ships from the book, and pulled them into the scene with strings. A local boy helped blowing cigarsmoke into the set and gunpowder was fired. This innovative film, together with the not-so-great quality of the film stock, fooled a whole world and this was probably the first re-enactment in cinema history. As time went by, the audience found a new genre to love, the travelogue. The travelogue was documents from, let's say, Africa and Papua New Guinea. Exotic beasts side by side with the wild bushman, and if you where real lucky, the bushman could also practice the noble art of cannibalism. Several of the daring and in some cases foolish, photographers made this into an art. Some of the finest films where made by Osa and Martin Johnsson with films with exiting titles like Head hunters of the South Sea and Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific. The crux of the biscuit for many was that traveling across the world cost an awful lot of money, but that they REALLY wanted to cash in on these kinds of films. And why not? Many big cities have a zoo where you can film some animals and later cut into some exotic tale. Even big events like the Boer war in Africa and riots in China were produced and filmed in Europe and America. And no one seemed to care. The producers certainly got their money back and the audience got the action they craved. And this went on, it really never stopped, but it wasn't really until 1962 it all took a new turn

Mondo Cane
Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi«s unequalled Mondo Cane was released 1962 and new standards for the genre now to be known as mondo were set. Mondo Cane was, and still is, a hip, cool quilt over the bizarre, weird and beautiful things going on on this grave earth. With an Oscarwinning themesong, the beautiful photography and a new thinking in editing, Mondo Cane became a well-deserved success over the world. And with such a success it was only a matter of time before cash-ins was going to be produced. What makes Mondo Cane such a joy to see lies in it's editing. The filmmakers have made a textual flow throughout the film and the audience is guided from one corner of the world to the next in matter of seconds. Like the scene from Pasadena Dog Cemetery, where pathetic celebrities' dead animals lies, and after some heartbreaking material the film swiftly moves to Taiwan and is introduced to the famous dish, roast dog! The whole film works in this fashion and almost unnoticed changes the subjects from the cute to the bizarre. A classic in every sense. It's interesting to see what an impact the name »mondo« instantly made. Mondo is Italian for »world« and Mondo Cane translates something like »a dog's world«. Its cameras sniff in the alleys and gutters of the world, filmed from an animals point-of-view, the media for the underdog so to say. So not only a movietitle, but also the name for a whole genre. The name Mondo quickly became an institution, and still is after the 37 seven years that has passed. This was the swinging sixties and sex was the major subject for many of the films. Even though they all had their share of bizarre shock material. With the commercial success of a certain Deep Throat everything changed again. No longer could the mondofilm lure the audience with topless native women, now it was time to turn up the volume to eleven, if you know what I mean. The last taboo, which had been involved since the birth of cinema, got uglier, grislier and in full color: death. If sex was out of reach at the moment, death always sell tickets. So at the end of the seventies the infamous Faces of Death came and even outgrossed Star Wars at the box-office in Japan according to some sources. And with the VCR becoming a household item in the eighties, the video compilation films like Death Scenes and Traces of Death where produced.

Compilation
A mondofilm is in almost every case, a compilationfilm. It's made of little fragments from here and there. Sometimes it spans over a continent and sometimes over a specific subject. Sometimes the producers / directors has made all the material themselves, and sometimes the films are made out of old news coverage and stuff like that. Nick Bougas eerie Death Scenes are a bit different in the genre. Filled with some of the most violent pictures ever, it never seems to exploit its subject. And containing almost only black and white stills, it's the reminiscent of Kenneth Angers book Hollywood Babylon. One of the more watchable unwatchable movies ever made. The title is in this genre very useful to understand the movie's content, and you don't need much imagination to understand titles like Shocking Africa, The Killing of America, Death Scenes and so forth.

Education
Another aspect of the mondo genre is that it really wants the audience to learn something. With its almost ethnographical documentation about cultural differences, sexual habits and different ways of dying these movies seem to say something. The only real difference between mondo films and the old travelogue is merely that the mondofilms are more explicit and does not chicken out when the going gets tough. Tough in an other way is the Swedish Lucky People Center International, which is something so unusual as a happy, dance provoking mondofilm. Much like Mondo Cane, Lucky People Center International travels around the world, talking to different people about, life, death and the global rhythm that seems to exist. With its pumping soundtrack, beautiful images, slick editing and original individuals interviewed, it's the most original mondo film made since Mondo Cane. Usually though the genre has nothing to do with dance, except maybe, with the dance of death.

When it comes to education films, it's difficult not to mention the old Drivers Ed films that where produced in America from the fifties and forward. Photographer Dick Wyman followed ambulances and shot some real haunting scenes with corpses burned to crisps, humans crushed into a pile of flesh and blood and things difficult to explain in text. He edited the scenes into films with titles like Wheels of Tragedy, Option to Live, The Third Killer and the most famous one, Signal 30. This films where to be used to educate the American youth into being better drivers and understand that speed kills! And when seeing these hard-hitting films, some lives might have been spared, because the images are grim, and unfortunately, real. Several scenes from these films has been seen in mondofilms, sometimes for pure speculation and for its blood and guts quality, and Nick Bougas has included Signal 30 into his Death Scenes 2.

Exploitation
Many of the sequences that are incorporated into these films, especially those produced from the seventies, are of such remorseless character that they never, except in some isolated cases, have been shown on TV. This is an interesting aspect of the genre as a whole, because even though some of the material offend the audience, it's one of the few channels these kinds of atrocities have to be shown. Much of the material are from the third world and these films has more than once been called racist, because of the colonial look of the films. The happy exotic look that was in the early films has changed into a troublesome look, and the best example of this is Jacopetti and Prosperi's Africa Addio. Africa Addio was from the start going to be Mondo Cane 3, but they found themselves trapped in a civil war and were the only western journalists left. They documented executions, riots and horrifying other scenes. They became accused by a fellow Italian journalist for having postponed an execution when the light wasn't right, but the allegation was never confirmed. For the western audiences its also safe to witness actions that take place in an other culture, and of course from the safe sofa at home or in the collective room of the cinema. Certainly is many scenes pure exploitation and outdrawn to extreme, but are nevertheless a reminder that the world is not a happy one.

Narrator
When the films now are made of fragments and bits and pieces, a narrator is needed to guide the audience throughout the different setpieces. I guess we've all watched the macabre appearance of Dr. Francis B. Gröss from the first three Faces of Death films and wondered what the hell the filmmakers thought when hiring weird actor Michael Carr as the good old doctor. Would you like to be examined by this man? Yep, thought so. Anyway, besides that freak, prominent actors like Orson Wells, Glenda Jackson and Cameron Mitchell (?) has made their share with voice-overs. The best choice of narrator must go to Nick Bougas and the first installment of Death Scenes, where the late Dr. Anton Szandor LaVey (or rather voice-of-Satan in this case?) is speaking in a soft voice over the hundred + black and white photographs.

Re-enactments
What seems to be the most bizarre with this genre though, is that how grim and bloody the authentic scenes in the films are, a lot of re-enactments are still being utilized. Why this is the case with numerous scenes in the mondo films is difficult to answer, but I think it lies partly in that many of the authentic material is so swift and fast that the viewer never has the time to really understand what happens. Sometimes the narrator can give the background to what's happening, and sometimes the scene is repeated over and over again so the viewer have time to put himself into the action. So, when making a re-enactment the filmmakers can give you the whole picture so to say. It not only becomes a horrifying part in the film, but the audience also get a beginning, a middle and an end. In the classical Hollywood formula, the film has a clear-cut problem that has to be solved, and it ends with victory or defeat. Of course in the mondo fims it usually never ends with victory. By using this the audience has the time to put themselves into the scene, and gets a chance to themselves figure out how it's going to end. With authentic material, people leaping from burning buildings, being crushed under cars often happens too fast for the human eye to comprehend what's going to happen. When speaking with people, who have seen mondofilms, they often talk about the re-enactment's, because it was those scenes that made sense to them. Like the alligator scene in Faces of Death. If you know just a little bit how a fiction film is made, no way you're fooled by this pathetic re-enactment, but the viewer that's not used to this kind of films, gets carried away, and maybe, just maybe closes their eyes when the horror begins. As Lars Von Trier says in one of his final words in The Kingdom, »Its behind the closed eyelid the horror begins«. The faked material in the mondogenre is a too long list to mention, and remain one of the most fascinating aspects of the genre.

Snuff
Are mondo film snuffmovies? The simple answer to that question is, no! A snuffmovie is a commercial production with actors that are killed for the movie. How grim the material in the films are and that real deaths are in them doesn't automatically make them snuffmovies. According to some sources there are a lot of snuff films produced, especially in Asia, and according to some there has never been one made, that they're only a myth. Feature films like Ruggero Deodatos masterpiece Cannibal Holocaust has always been surrounded with rumors of human killing. The real killing in the film are the ones conducted on animals, but no human was killed. The latest films to have sort of snuff tattooed onto them the Japanese Guinea Pig films, and foremost Flower of Flesh and Blood. An hour of disemboweling and torture it's not for the fainthearted, but is in fact a fiction film were no one got hurt or injured. Not even the chicken! When so-called actor Charlie Sheen saw it some years ago he got scared and gave the film to the F.B.I who instantly started an investigation. With the help of a certain Chas Balun and some f/x guys the film was exposed as fake, and on its release on Laserdisc a »making of« was included for good measure. In 1999 in Sweden the very same film was turned over to the police and a lawyer claimed that he really thought it was for real, and that he »Iâve seen part of it. I couldnât see the whole film. It was too horrible«. It's clear that he was not among the ones the filmmakers made this film for - or?

Reality TV
Thanks to commercial TV, we now get mondo films delivered right into our homes. Not under the title mondo, but disguised as The worlds scariest police shoot-outs, Eyewitness video, Cops and the list goes on. These shows incorporate and utilize the very same material and cinematic psychology as the mondo films, only not as graphic as their cousins at the cinema. But it's all there and for once, it's all real. The very same people that rant about the dangers of violent movies and who fear the potentially snuff film, goes home at night and would most certainly watch these shows because it's real and it's happening out there! It's a bit confusing that a whole genre of films a generally dismissed as being exploative and dangerous, while these shows visit us in our homes on a daily basis and there's almost never any public discussion about them.

Do you see something you like?
Why are these films being produced? There is only one answer to the question and that is that people want to see them. People like to watch dangerous things at a safe place. To stretch their boundaries and a curiosity about the grim nature of human beings. Sometimes it doesn't really matter if the scene is a re-enactment or not, it's more a question how justified it is to see them. The films' priority is to show sensational documents and to shock to audience. This cynical and misanthropically way of filmmmaking has made that many viewers turned their back to these films. And when that happens, some people are drawn to it for that very reason. Since I myself has seen one or two horrormovies, when swapping films I've noticed that almost every list I got, had one, two or more films from the mondogenre, It seems like the horrorfans, who already are at the cultural bottom has adopted these films. And in a society where stupid clowns like Marlilyn Manson can get famous, it shouldn't surprise me if these films will have a new peak in popularity. But what does you feel when watching, let's say, an autopsy? Are you getting aroused? Feeling sick? Do you feel fascination? Is it really justified to film a human body when it is stripped off its last intregity (the skin)? Stan Brakhage's The act of seeing with ones own eyes are a good example of this. He has filmed an pathology at work and with no way to look away the audience must see every detail in his work, and Franju's Blood of the Beasts which show the daily work at a French slaughterhouse, where the butchers sing about the sea, while standing in huge pools of blood, is bizarre to watch. What these two films have in common though, is that even though the filmmaker would have been there or not, the work would had gone on. They merely register what's happening, opposed to the allegations of Jacopetti and Prosperi in the above mentioned Africa Addio.

One thing is sure, these films and its content will always continue to fascinate people. With the spreading of the world wide web (the very place where you're reading this), films and images will be available to anyone who wants to, and you have to ask you self one thing, punk, do you feel interested?

Some Related Films

Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, The Stan Brakhage, USA 1971
Africa Addio, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, Italy 1966
... aka Farewell Africa
... aka Africa: Blood and guts
America Exposed: The Motion Picture, Romano Vanderbes, USA 1991
Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific, Martin and Osa Johnson, USA 1918
Baby eats breakfast, Louis Lumiére, France 1895
... aka Le Repas
Battle of Santiago Bay, Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, USA 1897
Cannibal Holocaust, Ruggero Deodato, Italy 1979
Death Scenes, Nick Bougas, USA 1989
Death Scenes 2, Nick Bougas, USA 1992
Death Scenes 3, Nick Bougas, USA 1992
Deep Throat, Gerard Damiano, USA 1972
... aka Långt ner i halsen
Faces of Death, Conan Le Cilaire, USA 1979
Faces of Death 2, Conan Le Cilaire, USA 1981
Faces of Death 3, Conan Le Cilaire, USA 1985
Faces of Death 4, Conan Le Cilaire, USA 1990
Killing of America, The, Sheldon Renan 1981
Late Great Planet Earth, The, Robert Amrem, USA 1976
Lucky People Center International, Erik Pauser and Johan Söderberg, Sweden 1998
Mondo Cane, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, Italy 1962
... aka A Dog's Life
... aka Mondo Cane No 1
... aka Det grymma livet
Mondo Cane 2, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, Italy 1963
... aka Mondo Pazzo
... akka Mondo Cane No 2
Mondo Cane 3, Stevio Massi, Italy 1988
... aka Mondo Cane Oggi: L'Orrore Continua
Mondo Cane 4, Gabrielle Crisanti, Italy 1988
... aka Mondo Cane 2000: L'Incredibile
Mondo Freudo, R.L. Frost, USA 1966
... aka Mondo Sexuality
Mondo Magic, Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni and Guido Guerrasio, Italy 1975
... aka Magica Nuda
Options to Live, Dick Wyman, USA 1979
Savage Man Savage Beast, Antonio Climati and Mario Morra, Italy 1975
... aka Ultime Grida Dalla Savana: La Grande Caccia
... aka Savage Temtation
... aka The Great Hunting
... aka Zumbalah
Shocking Africa, Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni, Italy 1982
... aka Africa Dolce E Selvaggia
... aka The Last Savage part 2
... aka Faces of Pain
Signal 30, Dick Wyman, USA 1960
Simba, the King of Beasts, Martin and Osa Johnson, USA 1928
Sweet and savage, Antonio Climati and Mario Morra, Italy 1983
... aka Dolce E Salvaggio
... aka Mundo Dulce Y Cruel
... aka Caramba!
Taboos of the World, Romolo Marcellini, Italy 1963
... aka I Tabœ
... aka Taboos Around the World
... aka Tabu
Third Killer, The, Dick Wyman, USA 1960
This is America, Romano Vanderbees, USA 1976
... aka Jabberwalk
... aka Crazy Ridiculos American People
This Violent World, Antonio Climati and Mario Morra, Italy 1978
... aka Savage World
... aka Monod Diavolo
... aka Savanna Violenta
... aka Savage man, Savage Beast 2
... aka Mondo Violence
Traces of Death, Damon Fox, USA 1993
Traces of Death 2, Damon Fox, USA 1994
Train arrives at the station, Louis Lumiére, France 1895
Wheels of Tragedy, Dick Wyman, USA 1960