Costruire il reale. Primi rilievi per una ricontestualizzazione critica dei mondo movies italiani

Mondo Cane (Jacopetti, Cavara and Prosperi, Italy, 1962) offers a lurid catalogue of archival film from around the world, focusing on violence, destruction, and sexuality, and especially the brutal engagements between human beings and the animal kingdom. The film inspired the ‘mondo’ cycle and the ‘shockumentary’ genre at large. In spite of the international success of such films, at home in Italy critics and scholars saw them as expressions of degradation and obscenity. Since then these films have been neglected by Italian scholars, largely because of the ideological and political use of the camera which is so typical of style. After a brief recognition of the critical reception of the phenomenon, the paper aims to underline some of the more typical elements of the mondo genre. In so doing the films will be considered from a transmedial point of view: the strategies of construction of a “reality effect” will be analysed focusing on the osmotic relationship between images and voice over commentary. The ideological role of the film editing will be analysed as well in order to problematize the link between the image and its reference in the real world.