Mondo Cane: The Shockumentary That Named a Genre

Mondo Cane opened in Italy in 1962, played Cannes the same year, and gave a whole genre its name — every “mondo” film, every shockumentary, every compilation of the world’s cruelties sold as education descends from this one picture. Gualtiero Jacopetti directed it with Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi. It has no plot and no characters. It has a narrator, a globe, and roughly a hundred minutes of things the filmmakers wanted you to find unbearable.

It also produced a love song. Riz Ortolani and Nino Oliviero wrote the score, and its main theme — later famous with English lyrics as “More” — was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. That is the fact that unlocks the whole film. A picture built on animal slaughter, cargo cults and gawped-at grief generated one of the most covered easy-listening standards of the twentieth century, and the reason is that Ortolani’s music is unbearably lovely and Jacopetti knew exactly what he was doing when he laid it over the worst images he had.

The method

The structure is a travelogue. Rome, New Guinea, Malaysia, Taiwan, California, the Bikini Atoll, a dog market, a restaurant, a graveyard, a factory. The narrator connects them with rhetorical bridges that are meant to sound like anthropology and function like carnival barking. A sequence in one country will be cut against a sequence in another to imply an equivalence — Western absurdity set beside non-Western ritual, the point being that all humanity is equally grotesque and the camera is the only adult in the room.

Jacopetti’s technique is the montage of false comparison, and he is genuinely brilliant at it. He will show you something appalling and then show you something trivial and let the edit assert that they are the same kind of thing. The narration insinuates. The music contradicts. The gap between what you are seeing and what you are hearing is where the film lives, and that gap is the invention. Every mondo picture for the next twenty years is a worse copy of this exact device.

The other thing to understand is that a great deal of it is staged. This is not a modern revisionist reading — the filmmakers’ own working methods have been documented at length, and the picture restages, arranges and in places outright fabricates its material while presenting all of it in the grammar of reportage. The film’s authority comes from a claim it never quite makes out loud and never intends to honour. It is presented as captured. Much of it was built.

Why the craft works

Take the sound. Ortolani’s theme is a straightforwardly beautiful romantic melody, and Jacopetti’s decision to attach it to the film’s most distressing material is a formal choice with an argument inside it. Beauty makes you complicit. If the score were dissonant you would know how to feel and you would feel it safely. Instead the film hands you a lush melody while showing you a slaughter, and your ear enjoys itself while your eye recoils. The discomfort is manufactured with real precision. That single trick — gorgeous scoring over atrocity — is one of the most durable devices in exploitation cinema.

Then take the narration. It is written to sound reasonable. The voice is measured, faintly amused, occasionally sorrowful, and it constantly offers you a framework — this is what these people believe, this is what progress has done, this is what we have become. The framework is bogus every time, and the tone is what smuggles it past. A ranting narrator would be resistible. A civilised one is not.

And take the cutting. Jacopetti was a journalist before he was a filmmaker, and the film is edited with a newsreel’s confidence about what constitutes a fact. A cut asserts a relationship. Put an Italian religious procession next to a New Guinean ritual and the cut has made an argument no sentence in the narration is willing to make. Deniability is built into the grammar. That is the mondo film’s real technology.

The ancestor

The received ancestor is the travelogue and the newsreel, and that is true as far as it goes. The sharper lineage runs through Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the founding document of the documentary feature and a film in which the igloo was built oversized and open-topped so the camera could get light into it, and the hunting was arranged for the lens. Flaherty staged reality in the service of a truth he believed in. Jacopetti stages reality in the service of a thesis about human awfulness. The methodology is inherited whole. The ethics diverge at the first frame.

The second ancestor is Häxan (1922), Benjamin Christensen’s witchcraft picture, which invented the trick of using documentary furniture — lecture, illustration, scholarly citation — to license imagery no straight fiction of its era could have shown. I looked at that in Häxan: the 1922 documentary-horror hybrid. Christensen wanted the licence to show devils. Jacopetti wanted the licence to show corpses. The mechanism is identical: claim to be teaching, and the audience will let you show anything.

The descendants matter more. The Italian cannibal cycle takes Jacopetti’s grammar and welds it to fiction, producing films that intercut invented atrocity with genuine animal killing and dare you to tell the difference — the ugly business surveyed in The nasty business of the Italian cannibal cycle and interrogated in Cannibal cinema and the ethics of the fake documentary. Cannibal Holocaust is Mondo Cane with a script, and Ortolani scored that one too, using precisely the same beautiful-music-over-horror device. The line is direct and the composer signed both ends of it.

The other branch runs to horror. When Tobe Hooper opened The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a narrated claim of truth, he was borrowing Jacopetti’s licence for fiction, as I argued in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: the documentary lie that still works. Found footage, the faux-snuff panic, the true-crime documentary with a synth score: all of it is downstream of a 1962 Italian travelogue with an Oscar-nominated song.

The sequences that stuck

Four episodes have outlived the film that contains them, and they are worth naming because they show the range of what Jacopetti was doing.

The pet cemetery in California is the film at its most straightforwardly satirical: headstones, inscriptions, mourners, the full apparatus of grief applied to animals, presented as Western civilisation’s decadence and cut against footage of animals treated very differently elsewhere. It is a cheap shot and it lands, because the material really is absurd and the film simply has to point.

The cargo cult sequence in New Guinea is more complicated. Villagers who have watched aircraft deliver goods during the war build runways and wait for the planes to return. Jacopetti films it as pathos with a smirk on top, and the narration invites you to find it touching and ridiculous at once. It is also one of the few passages where the material is genuinely interesting independent of the framing, which is precisely why the framing grates.

The dog market and the restaurant behind it is the film’s most notorious sequence in Britain, and it is calculated on exactly that basis. Jacopetti knew which culture’s animals produce which country’s outrage, and he assembled the episode for maximum transferable disgust.

And the Bikini Atoll material is where the picture briefly touches something real. Sea turtles, the narration claims, have been disoriented by radiation from the nuclear tests; the film shows them crawling inland to die in the sand rather than returning to the water. Whatever the truth of the biology — and the claim is thin — it is the one passage where Jacopetti aims at his own civilisation with the same coldness he brings to everyone else’s, and it works.

The case against

The film is racist, and no amount of formal admiration gets around it. Its comparative structure consistently positions non-European cultures as the exhibit and the European viewer as the eye, and the sequences shot in Africa, New Guinea and Asia are arranged to produce a specific response in a specific audience. Jacopetti’s later Africa Addio made the politics explicit enough that the argument about the man is settled. The equivalences the montage draws are one-way.

The dishonesty is the second charge, and it is not a technicality. A film that stages its material while claiming to capture it has committed the only sin its chosen form recognises. Everything Mondo Cane asks of you — your shock, your shame, your sense of having been shown the world — depends on a warrant it forged.

The third charge is simpler. Large parts of it are dull. Strip out the notoriety and you have a slideshow, and the shock sequences are separated by long stretches of mild travelogue that survive on Ortolani and momentum.

The verdict

Mondo Cane is essential viewing and thoroughly indefensible, which is an uncomfortable pair of statements to hold and the only honest response to it. It is essential because every subsequent film that claims truth in order to show you something — found footage, the atrocity compilation, the true-crime series with the ominous score — is operating a machine this picture assembled. Watching it is watching a technology being invented, and the invention is genuinely sophisticated. Jacopetti was a real filmmaker with a real formal intelligence, and he pointed it at the worst possible target.

It is indefensible because the intelligence is entirely in the service of a con, and the con has a politics. The film flatters its viewer into believing that gawping is a form of understanding. That flattery is the product. Everything else is delivery.

Watch it with the history in front of you rather than behind you, and watch it in an Italian-language print where the narration’s oily reasonableness comes through properly. It circulates in restored editions and in the archives that keep the mondo shelf alive. Follow it with Nanook to see where the staging started and with Cannibal Holocaust to see where it ended up. Then listen to “More” on its own, sung by somebody in a dinner jacket, and consider what it was written for.

Spoilers below

There is no plot to give away, so what follows is the shape of the thing — useful if you want to know what you are agreeing to before you press play.

The film opens with an assertion. A title card and the narration together insist that every scene is authentic and that nothing has been arranged for the camera. That claim is the film’s opening move and its central falsehood, and everything afterwards is designed to cash a cheque it has just written. Knowing this in advance changes the experience completely: you stop watching the world and start watching the edit.

The structure then alternates by design. A Western absurdity, a non-Western ritual, a Western absurdity, and so on, each pair cut so the equivalence feels discovered rather than imposed. It never varies and it never announces itself. By the halfway mark the rhythm has trained you to expect the comparison before it arrives, which is the moment the film has you doing its work for it.

The closing movement goes to the Bikini Atoll and the irradiated wildlife, and the turtles crawling the wrong way are the last strong image the picture has. Ortolani’s theme comes up over it. The narration turns elegiac. And the film, having spent ninety minutes inviting you to find humanity contemptible, exits on a note of sorrow it has done nothing to earn — the con artist’s final and most reliable trick, which is sincerity at the door.

The sequels came fast: Mondo Cane 2 the following year, then Women of the World, then Africa Addio, then a hundred imitations with the word “mondo” on the poster and none of the craft inside. The genre Jacopetti named spent twenty years proving that his device only worked when a real filmmaker was operating it, and that a real filmmaker was the last thing the device deserved.