Italian mondo movie maker Gualtiero Jacopetti has died at the age of 91.

Mondo Cane was the movie that started the “mondo” craze back in the Sixties. It was a hugely successful documentary, though some scenes were staged, intended to shock and it did. Although an exploitation film, it was a well-crafted movie that most of its imitators didn’t come close to equaling. While appealing to some of humanities baser instincts, it was also quite critical of the way people treat each other and our planet. It was a shocker with a conscience.

Jacopetti directed several other films, including two that depicted African culture in ways that garnered him some very harsh criticism. Africa Addio (aka Africa Blood And Guts) and Goodbye Uncle Tom depict Africans as either savagely cruel and uncivilized or as victims of white domination and genocide. Billed as exposés about the end of white colonialism and the subsequent civil unrest in Africa, some critics, particularly Roger Ebert who called them “vile crud,” condemned the movies for being racist. But, both films have their champions who see them as denunciations of slavery and white Imperialism. Both sides make compelling arguments for and against the films.  DM is offering you the opportunity to make up your own mind by offering the uncut version of Good bye Uncle Tom for your viewing. I think it’s a rather amazing and extreme piece of film making that draws inspiration from Artaud’s theater of cruelty and Bunuelian surrealism with some of Jodorowsky’s dark vaudeville.

Today’s New York Times’ obituary for Jacopetti describes his best known film with succinct accuracy:

Mr. Jacopetti liked to say he had invented the “antidocumentary” or the “shockumentary” with “Mondo Cane,” which was unveiled, and well received, at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. He showed Italian villagers slicing themselves with glass in observance of Good Friday; the French painter Yves Klein using naked women as paintbrushes; and New Yorkers dining on insects in a fancy restaurant.

The narration was droll and the images were ironic: A bereaved mother in New Guinea nurses a suckling pig, immediately followed by the wholesale slaughter of pigs for an orgy of feasting in the same region. Mr. Jacopetti called such transitions “shock cuts.” Another scene shows people mourning in a pet cemetery in Pasadena, Calif. Cut to shots of customers savoring roast dog at a Taiwanese restaurant.

I remember seeing Mondo Cane as a kid and its images were indelible, they linger still. The film’s theme song, “More” became an international hit and is as memorable as the film itself.

In this clip, we see baby chicks being dyed for Easter gifts, geese being force fed to create foie gras and cows being massaged and fed beer as part of the process of being transformed into Kobe beef.
 

 
A short film made during the UK premier of the restored version of Goodbye Uncle Tom.
 

 
Goodbye Uncle Tom after the jump…