These days, all pretty standard fare for an average evening's TV viewing. In 1962, however, the only way to witness global scenes of everyday madness - other than creating them yourself - was at a cinema showing Mondo Cane (which roughly translates as A Dog's Life). Juxtaposing footage of a Californian pet cemetery with a Taiwanese dog restaurant and blood-drenched Christian penitents with paint-covered Action Art models, it's a wryly humorous, kaleidoscopic paean to human folly, madness and cruelty. Its creators, journalist Gualtiero Jacopetti and wildlife filmmaker Franco Prosperi, scoured the world capturing scenes they hoped would shock cinemagoers out of their bourgeois complacency, while making them a pot of money.
Along with Mondo Cane and its 1964 sequel, this brilliantly executed boxset covers all of the depraved duo's documentary collaborations. One of the most notoriously violent films of all time, Africa Addio remains a brutal indictment of man's inhumanity to his own kind, not to mention other animals. The directors themselves came very close to losing their lives to a firing squad during filming, then narrowly avoided being tried for war crimes, accused of setting up some of the executions they caught on camera.
Goodbye Uncle Tom was intended to counter the allegations of racism that followed Africa Addio. A misguided attempt at a realistic pseudo-documentary portrayal of the horrors of American 19th-century slavery, it comes across today as totally bizarre and irredeemably offensive. Shot in Haiti with the personal approval of brutal dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, it's packed full of gleefully shot scenes of human degradation and torture that make Pasolini's Salo look like playschool. These are interspersed with footage of civil-rights marches, riots and murders carried out by afro'd-up black dudes. There's a message in there somewhere, possibly that the guys should have stuck to what they knew best.
The Mondo films inspired a swarm of imitators, established an entirely new documentary genre, and without Jacopetti and Prosperi there would be no Bizarre, so do your duty and get hold of this.
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