Mondo Cane

Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara's 1962 "schockumentary" Mondo Cane is mildly offensive, humorous, and overall rather easy to watch. My roommates both wandered in and remained till the end, at turns gasping over the graphic depiction of the slaughter of animals, laughing at the strange choreography (whether clearly influenced by the filmmakers or apparently "natural") and commenting on the voice-over's bland, Euro-centric narration. Overall, I found the aura of the "shocking" surrounding the film entirely false; animals are killed en masse everyday, and people in other parts of the world are, in some ways, different from the Jones. 

The film's real high point is in the depiction of a destitute, confused wildlife in the Bikini atoll still suffering from the persistent effects of the atomic bomb. The camera moves along a trail of little white bits floating on the surface of a very, very blue water as the narrator tells us that these are the corpses of white butterflies killed by the toxic water. The first response may be to ask why the filmmakers didn't interfere as the large, sad-eyed turtles wandered not towards the water after laying their eggs, but instead to their land-bound deaths in the hot sun of the desert, having lost their sense of direction in the cloud of radiation hovering over the beach - and the second to realize the true meaning and importance of a different kind of intervention. The birds burrow into the earth to lay their eggs, and end up staying - it is better, they have realized, to bury your face in the sand than to face the horrors of "civilized" human behavior.