Wild wild world

>> The Parc looks back at Mondo Magic

by MATTHEW HAYS

This film certainly comes with its exploitation/shock cred complete. Mondo Magic, one of the last films in the nastier-than-nasty Mondo cycle of the Italian cheapie doc series (which ran from '63-'74), even grossed out John Waters. Now that's saying something.

The film captures various spiritual and sexual rituals in communities in Africa, South America and Asia, ostensibly in a straightforward manner. I use the word ostensibly because the style of the movie isn't really straightforward at all: the lives of these folks are captured much like an episode of Wild Kingdom.

Directors Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni capture the communities in the film with all the nuance of a circus sideshow; we're witness to the bloodletting of various animals, men tying their penises to their belts, various forms of genital mutilation, torture rituals, self-flagellation and straightforward fornication--all the while being reminded of how "primitive" they are and "civilized" we are (the obvious assumption is that the audience for the Mondo movies will be made up entirely of urban Western types).

Then there are the animal sequences, which many will find even more disturbing than the human ones. Several animals are slaughtered and chopped to bits, there's a scene of a woman breast-feeding two puppies and probably most horrific to watch, an elephant screaming in distress as it is speared to death. Tellingly, the Castiglioni Bros. cut between animal and "primitive" man, apparently quite unable see any difference.

Understandably, these films came under major fire for being far too sensational, colonialist and xenophobic. Though captured under the auspices of documentary filmmaking, the films clearly take on the air of the Leni Riefenstahl School of Filming the Exotic. (Magic, notably, opens with an aerial shot, with the plane descending into various "hellholes.") The bizarre musical score, which surfaces at odd moments throughout the film, seems quite at odds with the visuals it accompanies. (It's clear these films and their scores served as inspiration for the brilliant underground skewering of exploitation travelogue filmmaking, Cannibal Holocaust.) And narrator Marc Mauro Smith's voice sounds strikingly like that of Rod Serling while hosting an episode of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery. These elements often combine to push Mondo Magic from its gritty realism into the realm of the surreal.

The Mondo films certainly stood at odds with the international trend for documentaries of their time. Cinéma vérité films of that period were social issue films, after all, and the folks behind the Mondo films had everything to do with gawking and very little to do with social change. Still, for doc buffs, this opportunity to screen Mondo Magic presents a rare chance to look at an undeniably bizarre, fascinating and often seriously disturbing chapter in the history of pre-Fox reality-based filmmaking.

Mondo Magic screens this Friday and Saturday, March 17-18 at midnight at the Cinéma du Parc