Razza cagna: mondo movies, the white heterosexual male gaze, and the 1960s–1970s imaginary of the nation

Abstract

This article investigates the role, reception, and socio-cultural, political relevance of mondo movies in the context of late 1950s–early 1980s film and documentary. The mondo genre debuted with reportage films about sexuality in Europe and reached its pinnacle with Gualtiero Jacopetti’s assemblage films. The historical context in which this genre evolved, and white masculinity was rearticulated and positioned at the centre of the national imagined community, is mapped focusing both on gender and race constructions and on the gaze identifying, encoding and decoding the sensationalist presentation of postcolonial/ decolonising Otherness. A brief review of some of the author’s published work on 1962–1971 mondo movies introduces Cannibal Holocaust (1979) and director Ruggero Deodato’s controversial reflection on the white, capitalist, sexist, Western and neo-colonial anthropological gaze.

Italian summary

Il presente articolo vuole indagare, nella cornice della produzione documentaristica e cinematografica tra la fine degli anni cinquanta e l’inizio degli anni ottanta, il ruolo, la ricezione e il significato culturale, sociale e politico del cosiddetto filone dei mondomovie, inauguratosi con i reportage sulla sessualità in Europa e solidificatosi nei collage di Gualtiero Jacopetti. Il contesto storico in cui esso si sviluppa verrà cartografato e ricostruito a partire da un’analisi che pone al centro le costruzioni di genere e razza: un’analisi dello ‘sguardo’ che identifica, codifica e decodifica la cosiddetta diversità sensazionalistica mi permetterà di comprendere come si riarticolò in questa fase storica la mascolinità bianca in Italia e come essa venne riposizionata al centro della comunità immaginata nazionale. In questa cornice, e all’interno di un’analisi che riepiloga alcuni dei miei studi già pubblicati sui mondomovies prodotti tra il 1962 e il 1971 (Giuliani 2017 and 2018), procederò ad analizzare Cannibal Holocaust di Ruggero Deodato (1981) per la riflessione controversa che ha offerto sulla natura neocoloniale e occidentale, bianca, capitalista e sessista dello sguardo antropologico.

Introduction

This article aims to investigate the role, reception, and socio-cultural and political relevance of mondo movies in the context of Italian film and documentary from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. The mondo genre debuted with reportage films about sexuality in Europe and reached its pinnacle with the assemblage films of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi and Dino Cavara. The historical context in which this genre evolved, and in which white masculinity was rearticulated and positioned at the centre of the national imagined community, will be mapped focusing both on gender and race constructions and on the gaze identifying, encoding and decoding the sensationalist presentation of postcolonial/decolonising Otherness. Mondo movies (1962–1980) will be read contrapuntally (Said 1994, 79) in the context of a documentary tradition that – especially within left-wing circles – aimed at mapping/giving voice to people, events and ideas that modernity had placed centre stage or at the margins of Italian society. The focus will be on the crisis of masculinity in cinema and sexual mores in sensationalist documentary (which sought to investigate cultural transformations and/or pre-modern remnants in post-war and post-colonial capitalist society). A brief review of some of my publications on mondo movies will introduce the work offilmmaker Jacopetti and the sexy-mondo genre, ¹ both spanning the 1960s to the 1970s andsharing a similar sensibility and gaze, followed by Cannibal Holocaust (1979) – Ruggero Deodato’s controversial reflection on the white, capitalist, sexist, Western and neo-colonial anthropological gaze.

The importance of linking representations of masculinity in film with the male gaze on colonial and postcolonial worlds and with an analysis of the national imaginary is best explained if we consider how fascist and post-fascist ideas about the hegemonic subject and his characteristics reshaped the nation between the 1920s and the 1950s. Since modernity, first the state and then the nation, as gendered, racialised and classed historical products, have been shaped by and have shaped ideas of mankind, citizenship, and sovereignty. In Italy, as historians Michele Nani, Silvana Patriarca and Alberto Maria Banti have shown, first the Risorgimento and then Unification spread controversy over the characteristics, needs, and aspirations of the nation in gender, class, and race forging or reshaping specific ideas of hegemonic/idealised masculinity and femininity (see Nani 2006; Patriarca 2010; Banti 2011).

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in the midst of rapid social and cultural change brought about by the post-war industrial boom, the hegemonic subject – ideally (and in practice) male – found himself caught between modernist aspirations and anti-modernist fears, a rejection of the fascist ideal of the strong, manly leader/soldier/peasant and the mystique of the virile partisan/industrial worker. ² Nation, masculinity and the male gaze are closely intertwined, connecting the way different hegemonic masculinities are articulated and images of the nation are imposed by law and popularised by both commercial culture and art. In the post-war period, the idea of Italy as a white and Mediterranean nation and Italians as white and yet Mediterranean – a contradictory construction inherent in the fascist conception of Italian imagined community – had to be formally relinquished (Ben Ghiat 2005; Giuliani 2018). Nevertheless, the imaginary surrounding the racial identity of Italians despite poverty, emigration and the North/South divide was still driven by the colonial and fascist credo that ‘we are not black’ (Giuliani 2015, 1–16).

In addition, during the 1950s–1960s economic boom, Italy and Italians underwent a whitening process of resignification that took the defeated, ruined country from a subordinate political and economic position in the post-war geopolitical balance to joining the ranks of the war-winning (and whiter) world’s leading powers. Italy’s ascent to this new status supplanted the international hegemonic view of the country as structurally incapable of self-government, generally – or historically, in the case of Italy – a mark of the ‘uncivilised’ and ‘racially inferior’ (Lumley and Morris 1997; Dickie 1999; Moe 2002). As the fascist assertion of superiority of the white Italic male and female bodies (and, by extension, of the nation) gave way to a whitening process, hegemonic masculinities and the white hegemonic gaze were rearticulated in the name of a post-fascist patriarchal and racist conception of the national imagined community (Ellena 2015; Patriarca 2015; Perilli 2015). The use of the term ‘hegemonic white masculinities’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) implies that there was not just one but many and even conflicting versions, and that they had important effects on the way gender roles and ideas of normative femininity were, and still are, forged.

My exploration of hegemonic masculinities is applied to a specific time in Italian history when profound social transformations caused fierce criticism of fascist patriarchal masculinity. The economic boom, the rise of mononuclear families, as well as mass consumption of industrial goods and cultural products, accompanied women’s sexual independence and political participation despite their decreasing employment rates in the manufacturing and third sectors. ³ Patriarchy in its new guise thus needed to be validated (and its centrality restored) by a discursive and political/legal structure through a rearticulation of men’s and women’s different positionalities and gaze. That same structure needed to accommodate Fordist imperatives and ideas of progress and mass consumption, with a nod to the goodness of the past as opposed to dehumanising, chaotic, bad modernity. This was especially evident in Italian film-making, where a celebration of tradition was accompanied by a white, male anti-modernist gaze behind the camera. ⁴

The attempt to quash the revolt from the margins, whether in Italian society or in the decolonising countries, was visible in both mondo and sexy-mondo movies from the late 1950s. Efforts abounded to socially and discursively curb the aspirations for emancipation of radical female subjectivities and the insurgent ‘wretched of the earth’ (Fanon 2001), both domestically and abroad. A case in point was the political and social resistance to legal reforms (from the 1970 divorce law to the new family law in 1975 and the legalisation of abortion in 1981) or the unwillingness to relinquish the former colonial possessions in Somalia displayed by predominantly male politicians and government members (see Pes 2014, 417–38 on this subject). Legal impediments to the recognition of the black postcolonial minority were introduced (Deplano 2017), while the post-war governments’ cultural policy attempted to preserve even in schoolbooks and children’s publications a male and white viewpoint on human differences, characterised by remnants of inferiorising, colonial attitudes (Gabrielli 2015). Blackness was symbolically kept outside the borders of the imagined community, while non-hegemonic, race- gender- and sexuality-based subjectivities were restricted to the domain of consumption. ⁵

The symbolic re-articulation of a racist, sexist and heterosexist patriarchal imaginary in the public sphere, to which both mondo and sexy-mondo movies contributed in important ways, also attempted to reconfigure normative masculinity and reassert the hegemony of the white heterosexual male gaze over those unsettled margins. Normative masculinity, developed as an offshoot of the traditional patriarchal norm conflating male supremacy with matrimonialism and women’s confinement to domestic quarters, was in considerable tension with the hegemonic masculinities emerging in the post-war period – and was forced to deal with cultural and social reconceptualisations of ideas of virility, marriage, liberty, sexuality and love.

Documentary tradition: the ‘right to look’ at the margins

In the aftermath of the Second World War, documentaries became the main medium for giving space to the poor and to marginalised subaltern cultures, previously neglected by the totalitarian gaze of the Istituto Luce and the more recent focus on colonial battles and world wars. With hundreds of documentaries released between 1945 and the end of the 1950s, this sophisticated yet extremely popular genre soon became one of the most important tools for helping Italians overcome post-war trauma and build a new sense of civitas, a post-Fascist, neo-realist imagined community (Bertozzi 2008, 97–127).

Between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s, several well-known Italian filmmakers ventured into documentary and cine-reportage. Among them were Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, Ermanno Olmi, Alessandro Blasetti, Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio de Seta, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. ⁶ As a wave of social and cultural transformations swept across the country, directors turned their attention to the consequences of the war, the plight of the poorer urbanised classes, and the lives of factory workers. Set against an ever-changing backdrop was the widening gap between the booming industrial North and the poor and rural areas of the South. In that sense, there is a close relation between Italian documentary in the post-war period and neorealism. Among the first to employ a realist/neorealist gaze were Antonioni’s feature on the river Po, shot between 1943 and 1947 (Gente del Po, 1947), and documentaries on and about the war, where, as Bertozzi argues, ‘people’s lives emerge amid precariousness and weakness, and a sense of fatality that is far removed from the pomposity of the regime’ (Bertozzi 2008, 91).

With Fascism gone, so was the claim that a unique self-reflexive reality existed and could be documented. Yet, the purpose in neorealism and documentary was still that of collapsing the distance/difference between the actors’ on-screen roles and the audience – as well as portraying the manifold diversity of real lives in unknown/neglected worlds of Italian society. ⁷ There was a twofold assumption underlying documentary’s lyric and dramatic narrative. First, that it was possible to grasp not just one but the many realities of those miserable subalterns that the fascist gaze had left out of history. Second, that the director’s gaze could maintain a neutral positionality, despite the ubiquitous voice-over signalling authoriality and bias. Looking at ethno-anthropological documentaries through the lens of postcolonial studies, and at those depicting the South in particular, this attitude may be read as slightly patronising. Works by Gian Vittorio Baldi, Luigi Di Gianni, Lino Del Fra, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Cecilia Mangini, Giuseppe Ferrari and Vittorio De Seta reveal a reading/appropriation of the Other’s world that did not give careful thought to the implications of the ‘right to look’ (Mirzoeff 2011) nor to the adoption of a hegemonic gaze. Bertozzi describes these movies as characterised by the ‘savage force of inhabiting images’ (2008) and a spiritual proximity of subject, object and audience. If that is true, then these magnificent pieces of political art, all differences aside, were indeed poised between ‘anthropology and spectacle’ (2008, 112) and driven both by nostalgia for pre-modern forms of life and by condemnation of the living conditions on the margins of society – something that only a specific privileged positionality could/was allowed to indulge in. Within an emancipatory discourse opposing good to bad modernity, the ontologising gaze on the Other was believed to serve an ethical and social purpose.

This is also true for the documentaries addressing the decolonising/post-colonial global South. Among them were Pasolini and Guareschi’s La rabbia, which did poorly at the box office and was pulled from distribution within days of its opening despite being a remarkable feature; Pasolini’s Appunti; and Rossellini’s India, which was a great success, thanks in part to a docuseries hosted by Rossellini on Italian and French television (Giuliani 2017a, 95–113; 2018). ⁸ It was from that same perspective that they interpreted the post-war period, the Cold War, the new geopolitical order, and cultures and fears in the decolonising/post-colonial South. In the opening scene of India Matri Bunhi or India, madre terra (India, Mother Earth), Mumbai is presented as an emblem of bad modernity, to which Rossellini opposes his narration of the country’s more intimate daily life practices through a gaze that, escaping realism’s typical semblance of objectivity, privileges instead an ethnographical take (Caminati 2012, 58). Nonetheless, when the reality of life in India is experienced through its protagonists, it is their viewpoint and feelings that apparently lead the narrative, rather than his own ‘Western knowledge’ (Caminati 2012, 66). Although Pasolini’s emphatic take on the subaltern Other can be ascribed to his pan-southern attitude, he too, like Rossellini, argued that cinema’s essence lies in its ability to penetrate and reside in reality: ‘I love cinema because cinema allows me to be steeped in reality. It’s a kind of personal ideology, of vitalism, of love of living inside things, life, reality’ (Caminati 2012, 31). ⁹

Such semblance of reality was taken to extremes by mockumentaries, fictional versions of documentaries that gained international cult status with Gualtiero Jacopetti’s productions in the early1960s. Jacopetti (1919–2011) was a fascist militant and volunteered for service in the Second World War. In 1944, he joined the anti-Nazi partisan brigades. After the war, he started a career in journalism (with Oggi, Settimana Incom, and Corriere della Sera) and grew close to Indro Montanelli. He founded and directed the weekly magazine Cronache della politica e del costume (1953), a precursor of L’Espresso. His career in film was influenced by Alessandro Blasetti, who involved him in productions that, from the late 1950s onwards, paved the way for his future work. With Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, ¹⁰ he became the standard-bearer for the genre launched in Italy by Blasetti and Vanzi ¹¹ and called mondo after the title of his film.

By mondo movies we mean those shockumentaries […] that scandalised and made a deep impression on Italians (but also Americans and Europeans) from the sixties onwards, depicting realities that were far removed from the Western [sic] through disturbing and shocking images. Mysterious exoticism and violent rituals, ancestral spells and integral nudity, wild nature and tribal [sic] ceremonies constitute the fulcrum of mondo movies, which aim to explore taboos [sic], visualising and bearing testimony to the most disconcerting events in distant continents. (Bruschini and Tentori 2013, 17) ¹²

Among the most influential directors of the genre were Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, Antonio Climati (photography director of Mondo cane), Mario Morra, and Ruggero Deodato, whose Cannibal Holocaust will be discussed in the last section of this article. ¹³ The opening credits and promotional material of Mondo films placed great emphasis on the claim that the whole truth, nothing but the truth would be shown about the shocking world that lay outside the bounds of white, small bourgeois morals. Documentary’s feeble pretension of telling truths unknown to the general public was supplanted here by the directors’ full endorsement of the duty to document, even though many scenes were deliberately fabricated (as in Jacopetti’s films).

Like Blasetti, Vanzi, and the earlier sexy-mondo movies, ¹⁴ Jacopetti assembled footage from national and international film archives. His movies, though, had a far greater circulation and became cult classics (Goodall 2013, 229–231). Following Mondo cane (which competed at the 15^th Cannes Film Festival), they were released both in Italian and in English with German, French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles and distributed in Europe, the United States, and South America (Fogliato and Francione 2016). Differences in style and general aim aside, there were many similarities between mondo directors. Found-footage assemblage, choice of sound-track (mocking and ironic vs. lyric and dramatic), voice-over tone (ironic/poetic/descriptive) and linguistic register were the common structural elements used to deliver their authoriality and political views on post-war societies. While images and commentaries reflect each director’s ideological take, reinforcing the visuality-as-the-dispenser-of-self-evident-truth nature of photography/film (Tagg 1988), ¹⁵ they all shared a focus on cultural massification and criticism of the changing cultural and social (especially sexual) mores.

In particular, Goodall (2013, 230) argues that Jacopetti’s mondos:

[...] enjoyed a unique blend of serious investigative journalism/reportage; exotic and dramatic adventure narrative; tabloid magazine-style sensationalism; National Geographic-style visual beauty; the rapid-fire edit of disparate sections – Jacopetti called these ‘shock cuts’ [...]. The other important mondo elements were aural. These included a [...] expensive musical score, usually composed by Italian musical maestros such as Riz Ortolani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone. The rich musical aspect of the film caused consternation among documentary purists and film critics in particular, yet led to huge sales in soundtrack LPs, many of the ‘songs’ becoming famous outside of the film world.

The white male gaze in mondo movies

The re-centring of the white male heterosexual gaze revealed both a state of crisis of old forms of hegemony and the attempt to establish new ones over those social structures defined by race, gender and class that until recently fascist and colonial patriarchy had governed. This is clearly seen in Jacopetti’s Mondo cane exploitation film series (Mondo cane, 1962; La donna nel mondo, 1963; Africa addio, 1966; Addio zio Tom, 1971, Mondo candido, 1974), ¹⁶ where the positionality expressed through voice-over and choice of images reflects a viewpoint clearly shaped by prejudice towards those who do not seem to fit with a distinct model of masculinity and whiteness. Despite their different style and political background, what Jacopetti and Pasolini had in common was a shared criticism of Italian bourgeois masculinity, contempt for consumerism and conformism, and a profound distrust of the emancipatory struggles of formerly colonised and subaltern populations.

The hegemonic white male gaze in cinema never met with stiff opposition from alternative visual productions. Nevertheless, both Italian and international feminist movements and the intellectual and activist production espousing criticism of white supremacy and colonialism interpellated film and documentary makers – who incorporated both the debates and resistance to the new insurgent gaze in their work. While Fellini offered his reading of feminist criticism of Italian gendered culture in 8 ½ (1963) and City of Women (1980), international criticism of the world of art and culture was more or less directly echoed in Italian and international cinema (think of anti-pornography mobilisation in the US or Carla Lonzi’s condemnation of the widespread male chauvinism in arts production and exhibitions in Italy).

The hegemonic gender culture was in need of an overhaul, as evident both in Mondo cane and in La donna nel mondo. A new post-fascist, capitalist, marketable set of masculinities needed to be forged. And these needed to be in continuity with traditional ideas of virility, family and domestic hierarchy (partially rearticulated by Fascism), and with ideas of sexual liberation, romantic love and urbanised family that since the late 1950s had swept through post-war Western societies. In the Mondo cane series, denigration of consumerism and liberal democracy on one hand, and colonial nostalgia on the other, serve the purposes of a construction by contrast of new foundations for a post-fascist and post-colonial Italy. All that is non-normative (non-white, non-bourgeois, non-heterosexual, not male-centred) is thus highlighted in Mondo cane, Mondo cane 2 and La donna nel mondo through a juxtaposition of imagery from Western and non-Western cultures, and sensationally portrayed as grotesque or horrific. Women’s emancipated consumerist behaviours are repeatedly ridiculed (especially in La donna nel mondo). The successful spectacularisation of normative and non-normative female bodies and actions allows a repositioning of the ideal spectator within the space of the nation along implicit ideals of beauty, social behaviour, and male power to look, appropriate and act. ¹⁷

Many are the hegemonic and non-hegemonic models of masculinity portrayed by Jacopetti & Co. While the white coloniser – the virile icon of the tanned, prolific and sexually voracious man popularised by Fascism – is favoured, the elegant dandy is also cherished. At the opposite pole are the low-class and culturally peripheral southern Italian young men. While filming the celebrations for Rodolfo Valentino’s birth anniversary in Puglia (Mondo cane), the camera indulges in long shots from below of the local male populace. The grotesque effect is all the more striking when contrasted with the elegant demeanour of actor Rossano Brazzi, besieged by a different horde of barbarians (US fans who treat him like an object of sexual consumption), in the scene that follows.

The attempt to forge a new model of hegemonic masculinity is clear if we consider how, in the same years, peripheral and non-hegemonic masculinities had come under scrutiny in the work of the most important post-fascist intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers. Neorealism and Italian-style comedy – most famously by Luchino Visconti, Mario Monicelli, Mario Bolognini, and Federico Fellini (Manzoli 2014, 11–22) – addressed the quandaries and quagmires of urbanised masculinities undergoing shifts and changes. As Jaqueline Reich argues, since the late 1950s the crisis of normative masculinity and the emergence of competing hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities had been highlighted through the contrapuntal image of the inetto:

The inetto articulates the traditional binary opposite of the masculine, as it is constructed in Italian culture and society, and as it relates to sexuality: the cuckold, the impotent and the feminized man. Rather than active, the inetto is passive; rather than brave, he is cowardly; rather than sexually potent, he is either physically or emotionally impotent. His shortcomings and failings are in direct opposition to the prescribed masculine norms deeply rooted in Italian culture. (Reich 2004, 9)

The figure of the inetto embodied men’s growing sense of inadequacy about their ability to comply with the heteropatriarchal diktats emanating from normative and hegemonic masculinities. That sense of inadequacy was stemming from the inability to balance traditional Italian gender culture with the models imposed by consumerist society, Fordism, and the advertising industry, which expected men to be protagonists of consumption, both as objects and as subjects (Goffman 1979; Perilli 2012, 91–126). The period spanning the late 1950s to the mid-1970s was marked by social unrest. As social movements began challenging traditional political party culture, feminist and gay movements reshaped public and domestic spheres; the crisis of industrial labour was accompanied by factory workers’ struggles, and the conservative and neo-fascist backlash complicated the symbolic references underpinning male hegemony.

Different approaches to normative and hegemonic masculinities in neorealism and Italian-style comedy on one hand, and mondo movies on the other, can be ascribed to the director’s gaze (reflexive or rejecting), its positionality (hegemonic, normative, or non-hegemonic) and its aim – be it revelatory or mocking, willing to ponder the flaws in the normative model of masculinity or, on the contrary, imposing a new or old normativity.

In Jacopetti’s work, the contrast between the white, virile model of masculinity and the crisis of white masculinity is inseparable from criticism of the decolonising world – which, in keeping with the colonial orientalist tradition, is expressed through an investigation of sexuality and racialised gender models that is deeply stereotyped. The struggles for equal pay, legal equality and the reform of family law marked a turning point in the way gender relations were structured in Italy and Europe, both in the private and public spheres and in the workplace. The international scene was deeply marked by the wars of national liberation leading to the independence of Algeria (1962) and, before that, of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana (1957), French Guinea (1958), Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. These events and those that after 1965, following violent reprisals, led to the liberation of Zimbabwe and the Portuguese colonies of Angola (1974) and Mozambique (1975) clearly resonate in Jacopetti’s work.

In Africa addio (1966), Jacopetti’s warrior recounts the end of colonialism and the beginning of the ‘end of the Africa we loved, the enchanted Africa of explorers’, providing a counter to the vanishing masculinity of the inetto. The film was as much a success as it was the subject of great controversy. It won a David di Donatello in the year of its release (and a National Board of Review Award in 1967), but the Italian minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities refused to hand Jacopetti the prize, and the film was eventually banned in 14 countries. Five years later, Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Addio zio Tom (1971) also sparked a wave of protests, and the film was censored across the country soon after Italian and African university students interrupted a screening in Bologna. ¹⁸

Africa addio portrays decolonising African countries through a colonial gaze: the revolutionaries enjoying independence are depicted as miserable fanatics ready to disfigure the colonial sense of beauty and order, kill their fellow man, and devastate their own land. In their quest for gruesome sensationalism, and to underscore the blind violence of African peoples left with no (white) guide, Jacopetti, Stanislao Nievo and Antonio Calmati had no scruples about filming the brutal murder of three Muelist kids by mercenaries who were riding in the directors’ truck, waiting for a cue before firing their machine guns. On that count, Jacopetti was prosecuted by Rome district attorney Pasquale Pedote. ¹⁹

Addio zio Tom, a crossover between mockumentary and historical film, was entirely shot in Haiti. Despite Jacopetti defending his work as ‘the epic of African negroes’, and despite a few critics viewing it as a critique of global capitalism and colonialism, ²⁰ the film features brutal scenes whose sole purpose was to dehumanise the slaves and depict slavery as the only system capable of restraining black people’s basic instincts – leaving no room for a critical analysis. Just like in other mondo movies, it is the gaze behind the camera and the close-ups of black faces and bodies that assign those same faces and bodies a negative (ugly/animalised/indecent) meaning. Such is the case with the scenes describing ‘men, women and puppies’ supposedly having fun at the public castration of a slave charged with deflowering a girl who was to be sold ‘as a virgin’ (45:20–47:05); or the ‘natural’ laziness, stupidity, and filthiness of black slaves in the plantation’s main house (56:00–58:30); or, finally, young women’s apparent joy in enduring daily rape by the plantation owners and their sons (1:35:00–1:42:00). ²¹

The less famous Mondo Candido (1975) forgoes footage assemblage in favour of a narrative that spans the centuries. The film follows gullible and naïve Candide as he journeys from Voltaire’s eighteenth-century Westphalia to the contradictions of the present day, searching for his beloved Cunegonde amidst New York’s skyscrapers, IRA landmines on Irish roads and Israeli female troops in Palestine before ending up in an unspecified place where hippies worship their own dervish. As in other mondo movies, Jacopetti combines his taste for the grotesque (scenes set in the eighteenth century are replete with human monsters) with political criticism, disdain for consumer society, scorn for female sexual liberation, and a celebration of male virility and sexual appetite. Candide is the eternal child, whose knowledge of sex does not go far beyond engaging in cunnilingus with his beloved. He is portrayed as an outsider to a corrupt society – as though love and fidelity, and pure women, had no place in the real world.

Normative femininity is construed by contrast in these works of docufiction through denigration of deviant femininities both in the West and in the de- or post-colonising world, in continuity with a ‘scopic regime’ (Tobing Rony 1996) that since colonial times has fixed normativity through the visualisation of the abject, the monstrous, or the good savage. While documentaries focusing on ancient persistences celebrated what was left of the female figures and gender roles of the past, docufiction resorted to stereotyped figures to define by contrast, and in moralistic terms, the Western ideal of woman. In Mondo cane and Mondo cane 2, La donna nel mondo, Addio zio Tom and Africa addio, a fascination with the exoticised black woman (coupled with denigration of her inferiority) intertwined with the white male desire to look at and consume diversity. Whether masked as a critique of slavers’ violence or as a realistic assessment of the need for a colonial guide, both narratives proved to be a great success with audiences. ²²

In sexy-mondo movies, whose fortunes lasted about two decades, the ‘scopic regime’ put the spotlight on changing sexual mores in Italy, Europe and the whole world, feeding a voyeuristic imaginary that indulged in perversion, female naked bodies, and sexual oddness to titillate the audience’s consumerist lust for sex. After the release of Europa di notte, double shooting guaranteed international distribution. A tamer version was usually produced for the Italian market – strictly monitored by state authorities and the Catholic Church – while a more risqué one was released to more liberal markets. The first sexy-mondo movies (Blasetti’s Europa di notte and Vanzi’s Mondo di notte, to which Jacopetti contributed the voice-over scripts) focused mainly on striptease acts and topless dancing (including at the famous Moulin Rouge in Paris), night clubs, brothels, women’s mud fights and other bizarre performances; full-frontal nudity first appeared in the late 1970s (Bruschini and Tentori 2013, 25). The viewpoint adopted was that of the white male heterosexual spectator (the first film investigating other forms of sexuality implying a homoerotic viewpoint was Tomboy, 1977, by Claudio Racca).

Between 1959 and 1980 hundreds of films were produced under the umbrella of the sexy-mondo genre, but signs of decline began to appear in 1964. ²³ Very few films were released after the turn of the decade, and the rise of the porn industry delivered the final coup de grâce. Besides Mario Gervasi’s Africa nuda, Africa violenta (released and censored in 1974), the last successful Italian mondo movies were Bruno Mattei’s Le notti porno nel mondo (1977) and Emanuelle e le porno notti (1978) (Giuliani 2018, 160–162), Sesso perverso mondo violento (1980) and Sexual aberration (1980). The last two featured that blend of sexual oddness and violence often typical of those who followed in Jacopetti’s steps. The commodification of the sexual imaginary was a common trait of mondo movies, in which the hegemonic consumerist masculinity defined how excessive female sexuality should be included in the imagined community of the nation: the oddness of the female Other, together with that of the postcolonial racialised Other, was made into an object of mass consumption that, in turn, redefined gender norms and normative masculinity.

Postcolonial paternalism, anthropological cannibalism and sexism revealed: Cannibal Holocaust

Despite belonging to a different genre, mondo developed as an offshoot of cannibal movies, as evident in Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981) – both shot at the time of the mondo crisis. This allows me to explore how the cannibal genre provided continuity and counterpoint to the mondo world, while exacerbating some of its features. Cannibal Holocaust, in particular, fits into mondo’s voyeuristic mould and yet provides some of the harshest and most innovative criticism of the genre launched by Jacopetti. Deodato’s target is the epistemic violence inherent in the anthropological gaze on the colonial/racialised Other (hence the imagined community behind the gaze, as in Cannibal Ferox). Or, more precisely, his target is the exoticising manipulation of the Other’s postcolonial reality by journalism, academia and cinema.

Cannibal cinema was launched in Italy as a sub-genre of exploitation film by Umberto Lenzi’s Man from the Deep River (1972), among others. Besides Deodato and Lenzi, it included among its ranks Bruno Mattei, Antonio Climati and Joe D’Amato. Deodato (1939–) began his directing career with Italian-style detective fiction (poliziotteschi). In the late 1970s and 1980s he went on to become one of Italy’s best-known horror filmmakers – along with Mario and Lamberto Bava, Lucio Fulci, Pupi Avati and Dario Argento (see Tentori and Cozzi 2007; Lupi 2012). Cannibal Holocaust is the second episode of The cannibals trilogy, which also includes Ultimo mondo cannibale (1977) and Inferno in diretta (1985). The movie was banned in several countries besides Italy for showing animal slaughter, sexual assaults and brutality (6 February 1980, visto censura no. 74702). Deodato himself, together with screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici and the producers Franco Palaggi, Alda Pia and Franco Di Nunzio, was handed a four-month suspended sentence on obscenity charges. ²⁴

The film was shot in two different styles: Part I (titled The Last Road to Hell) was shot in 35mm, while Part II (The Green Inferno) was shot in 16mm with scratched film and a hand-held camera, so as to resemble an amateur movie. (Lupi 2003). Focussing on the construction of the hegemonic subject in Italy and the West through the representation of the Other as a hideous barbarian, Cannibal Holocaust shows how the latter, though depicted as a cannibal, is in fact cannibalised by the scopic regime, which needs him/her in order to reinstate by contrast the centrality of the hegemonic (male, heterosexual and white) viewpoint.

The movie is about a documentary film crew sent to Amazonia by New York University anthropology professor Harold Monroe to film the last cannibals. It begins with the ending, when a rescue team recovers reels the crew left behind before disappearing and eventually their remains. This is not, however, the most disturbing aspect of the film: the film crew’s expedition will turn out to have been marked by unprecedented violence and an unchallenged colonial attitude. The opening scene shows a representative of Pan American Broadcasting System, a US television network interested in airing the footage. In his praise of first-world achievements – the next step after the ‘conquest of the Moon’ will be the conquest of the entire universe – he draws a comparison with ‘stone age tribes still practising cannibalism’. Yet while he is talking about a society (supposedly the Stone Age one) rooted in the survival of the fittest, what plays out on the screen are images of the crowded streets of New York. In the following scenes, the crew members are seen talking about their trip, showing no fear of their impending fate.

Scenes of extreme violence have a twofold aim in Deodato’s film: they are both spectacular in and of themselves and a tool of criticism used to denounce the constant spectacularisation of that same violence by television and the cinema. The film crew – the director Alan, his girlfriend Faye and the two cameramen, Jack and Mark – is only interested in the more shocking aspects of the indigenous lifestyle in the Colombian forest. When nothing remarkable happens, they have no qualms about stirring up events. The narrative is replete with scenes emphasising the barbarian nature of the indigenous population, from the murder of an adulterous wife to the rape and dismembering of a woman by members of a rival tribe, to the killing of a pregnant and ill woman, a banquet of human flesh, and the rape and impalement of a young girl. Other scenes, however, blur the dichotomy between civilised and barbaric, normative and abnormal, hegemonic and subaltern, subject and object of looking that Jacopetti and other mondo movie directors had skilfully created. Such is the case with Jack and Mark’s rape of a girl who is then impaled, or the massacre of natives set alight in their huts by the crew while Alan and Faye make love, seemingly oblivious to the screams of pain in the background. The constant craving for violence that accompanies both the crew’s actions and the filmic narrative is evident in two scenes: the amputation of the guide’s leg and the wounding of a young indigenous man (so as to easily trail him to the village). In his criticism of the unethical representation of violence by the Italian and Western media, Deodato is admittedly targeting the consumption of images, imaginaries and bodies at the centre of mondo movies.

Nonetheless, the whole film gives a grotesque description of the indigenes, who let professor Monroe check their teeth, skin and skulls as though they were dogs: they eat human flesh voraciously, like wild rabid animals, as if they deserved nothing but anthropological surveys and death (at the indiscriminate hand of the army soldiers in the rescue team). Their behaviour is constantly under scrutiny or talked about by Monroe and his team. They, on the other hand, remain silent: they eat, rape, and kill in silence. They have no voice, as though they were zombies just able to roar, eat and murder. They walk fast, as though they were horses trotting, and knuckle-walk, like monkeys.

It remains to be seen whether such characterisation of the indigenes is functional to a filmic narrative that claims to owe its style to mondo movies (Deodato is a great fan of Jacopetti’s work, as the title Ultimo mondo cannibale clearly indicates) or whether it has to do with the director’s critique of their approach. Both sides of the argument are seemingly valid: Deodato is hiding behind two viewpoints and reaping the benefits of both the shocking and the questioning of it. What is interesting here is that Deodato claims to be aware that transforming humans into zombies is colonial in nature – a sort of disclaimer, as Luca Caminati has argued after Mary Louise Pratt with regard to Pasolini’s documentaries: ‘the Western narrator pre-emptively absolves himself of possible colonial sins, volunteering the purity of the first-comer’ (Caminati 2007, 21; Pratt 1992). While Pasolini’s strategy involved the narrator’s self-proclaimed innocence at the beginning of a travel story, Deodato claims to have lost his innocence due to his and his narrative’s encounter with the (alleged) reality of indigenous (physical) and Western (epistemic) cannibalism.

The white male postcolonial gaze is sugar-coated and re-positioned as an unaccountable dispenser-of-truth: likewise, the image of the barbarians vs. the imagined community in Deodato’s mind lets him witness the persistence of colonial violence while identifying with the audience, which, safely seated in a movie theatre, does not personally venture into the jungle (whether it be New York or Amazonia). The twice-mediated gaze (through the film and through its internal critique) is what absolves them from being somehow accomplices in cannibalism. It is, then, a sort of meta-cannibalism, which is also helped by the strangeness of the film’s setting: New York, more than Amazonia, signals that Italians should avoid complicity in the (US) neo-colonial anthropological violence. After all, they have never killed (alleged) cannibals (in colonial times) nor would think of killing them now, would they?

Conclusion

From the late 1950s through to the 1970s, Italian documentaries mirrored the main events along the timeline of modernity, emphasising the contradictions between modern and pre-modern Italy and within modernity itself. The focus on what had been left out of modernity was a cornerstone of neorealist and post-realist features, while new possible scenarios, trends (and abjections) were the hallmark of sensationalist exposés. Nonetheless, the appropriation of the social realities they were supposed to give voice to was a common trait. Whether the political aim was to endorse decolonising/postcolonial cultural diversity and national pride (Rossellini and Pasolini) or prove inferiority on the basis of European (fascist) standards of superiority (Jacopetti), appropriation, domestication, and de-subjectivation of the disembodied Other is always implied.

The mondo genre, in particular, was founded on a core of intertwined themes: visuality-as-the-dispenser-of-self-evident-truth, the exoticisation of Other contexts (only recently emerged from colonial rule and hence a litmus test for the degree of civilisation achieved not so much by the colonised as by the former colonisers) and a re-reading of the colonial archive. Images of savagery were conjured up as inherent traits of Other non-modern and non-capitalist worlds, calling for the return of colonialism lest the atavistic peoples abandoned by their imperial guides fall back into barbarism (Jacopetti). Or as evidence of the (un)speakable perversion and corruption of modern sexual mores (sexy-mondo movies). Or, finally, as the mark of barbarism and violence – equally common in the Self and its uncivilised Other (Deodato). The focus was on the idea of the exoticised Other (the non-normative, monstrous, racialised barbarian) – a useful device for reinstating the male erotic gaze over hypersexualised and exoticised female bodies (sexy-mondo movies); for letting an even more classist, sexist, male chauvinist and nostalgic intellectualism engage in the construction of a superior European Western Self (Jacopetti); or for levelling self-indulgent, strategic criticism at the violence of the modern gaze (Deodato).

Symbolic cannibalism, in the sense of a male colonial mentality that devours and whitens its object of racialised erotic desire and colonial conquest-possession (Giuliani 2017a; Giuliani 2018, 149–168), was a legacy of the slavery-based construction of the black subject – now reduced to a marketable object of pleasure or denigration and rearticulated within the domain of the anthropological gaze of benevolent (post)colonial voyeurism.

Commodification of the Other’s body and its pervasive racialisation enabled the construction of the Italian imagined community’s standards (and spatial co-ordinates) of whiteness. The object of erotic, exotic pleasure and scopophilic desire remained an object with no voice of his/her own, whose sole purpose was that of satisfying the white (usually male) one-directional will to look/know/possess an entire society or culture. The Other’s racialised body was not granted legitimacy and equality, and it was allowed access to the white hegemonic space only on condition that it be configured as a visually (kn)own-able object. ²⁵ As long as it is subordinate, the presence of the black body serves to continuously reaffirm the hegemony of whiteness and the white male’s ‘right to look.’