Dalle notti nel mondo al paese di Dio. I mondo movies e gli Stati Uniti, fra emulazione e innovazione del reportage sensazionalistico

Italian mondo movies are a peculiar and marginalized phenomenon in film history. They are characterized by their sensationalistic depictions of extreme, erotic, and violent aspects of human life under the guise of documentary realism. This article examines an understudied aspect of their production history: how the United States is represented within the genre and how American directors subsequently adopted the mondo formula. American culture appears in Italian mondo movies as both a fragmented visual archive within globally oriented films and a central object of analysis in works portraying the United States as a site of modernity's contradictions. The article highlights how these films portray the U.S. as a paradoxical space shaped by cinema itself, oscillating between nostalgia, spectacle, and a critical examination of consumerism, racial conflict, and technological progress. The commercial success of mondo movies fostered their adoption within the American exploitation film industry in the early 1960s. American filmmakers initially turned their gaze outward before focusing on national subjects such as youth culture, social unrest, and countercultural movements, appropriating and reworking the Italian model. In this process, the genre underwent a significant transformation, aligning with the aesthetics and production logic of U.S. exploitation cinema. It gradually evolved toward more explicitly shocking forms, culminating in the rise of the shockumentary.