Glossary
Mondo
Shockumentary. Real footage, staged footage, and a narrator who cannot tell you which is which.
Mondo films are documentary-format compilations of supposedly authentic footage of death, ritual and custom, narrated in tones of appalled fascination.
The name comes from Mondo Cane (1962), an Italian production that established the format and was a substantial international hit.
The commercial premise is a dodge. A large and unmeasurable share of mondo footage was staged, and the audience half knew. The possibility that it might be real was the product being sold, and the documentary framing was what allowed it to be shown at all.
It matters here for two reasons. It is the direct ancestor of the cannibal cycle: Umberto Lenzi's Deep River Savages (1972) is a mondo apparatus bolted onto a narrative film. And Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is an attack on it from inside, arguing that the tradition manufactures the savagery it claims to record.
Faces of Death (1978) is the best-known late example and put several staged sequences into general circulation as real.
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