Subjects of mondo films include sex (Mondo Sex and Mondo Sexualis USA) celebrities (Mondo Elvis and Mondo Lugosi) youth culture (Mondo Teeno) and the gay subculture (Mondo Rocco).
Much of the action is staged, although the filmmakers may claim their goal is to document "reality". Cruelty to animals, accidents, tribal-initiation rites and surgeries are features of a typical mondo. Later in the decade, this naming convention began to fall out of favor and fewer mondo films identified themselves as such in their titles.įilmmakers wanted to top each other in shock value to attract audiences. Films outside the genre followed suit: Mondo Trasho, Mondo Weirdo: A Trip to Paranoia Paradise, Mondo Keyhole and Mondo Brutale (a German release of Wes Craven's The Last House On The Left) title themselves mondo, although none are mondo documentaries.
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"Mondo Attitude" regards the full exploitation - applied to documentary films or to meaningfully documentary-swamped fiction - of a basic duality: Cinema as the intense portrait of reality and, in the meantime, as a voyeuristic, morbid tool to scope reality without being commited to it.ĭocumentary films imitating Mondo Cane in the 1960s often included the term "mondo" in their titles, even if they were in English examples include Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Daytona, Mondo Mod, Mondo Infame and Mondo Hollywood. Rather than a film genre, "Mondo Cinema" can be regarded as a "super-genre”, thus allowing us to imply a general attitude rather than a set of well-shaped borders. From then on, critics and audiences will talk about “Mondo Movies”, or “Mondo Cinema”. Nonetheless, the worldwide success achieved by Mondo Cane baptized this kind of cinema. Those movies were sleazy sexy-show compilations, lightly disguised as journalistic reports.Įarly signs of "Cannibal Cinema" can be found even during the 30s and 40s. Soon other kinds of educational b-movies came to life, including the infamous "Classroom scare films", inaccurate and creepy "educational" pieces to be shown to school audiences.ĭuring the 50s the "Mondo Sexy" genre spreads: European Nights (1958, Alessandro Blasetti) or World By Night (1959, by Luigi Vanzi) were both written by Mondo Cane mastermind Jacopetti, the first along with Ennio De Concini. Pseudo-documentary or pseudo-scientific films - often mere exploitative efforts - were shown to audiences in sideshows since the beginning of the 20th century. The movie claimed to be as graphic and crude as reality was, despite the depicted reality being re-enacted most of the time - often goofily and excessively - and the movie leaving the audience unaware they were watching something fictitious.īut this was no news to the movie market. No other mainstream movie featured Mondo Cane's harsh and cynical approach to sex, death, illness or weirdness. Mondo Cane is a mixed bag of unusual and shocking visions and act-outs, at least as unusual and shocking as it could be for the average moviegoer from the 60s. What we call "Mondo Cinema" was born in 1962, when the Italian documentary Mondo Cane (by Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi) was released. The term shockumentary is also used to describe the genre. Over time, the films placed increasing emphasis on footage of the dead and dying (both real and fake). Common traits of mondo films include an emphasis on taboo subjects (such as death and sex), portrayals of foreign cultures (which have drawn accusations of ethnocentrism or racism), and staged sequences presented as genuine documentary footage. A Mondo film (from the Italian word for "world") is an exploitation documentary film, sometimes resembling a pseudo-documentary and usually depicting sensational topics, scenes, or situations.
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