Abstract
The most eagerly awaited film of the 1962 Cannes Film Festival was Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. Film critic Ian Cameron, like many, anticipated that after the disappointing response to L’Avventura the previous year, 1962 ‘would be the year that Cannes capitulated to Antonioni’ (Cameron, 1962: 1). Cameron had to report, however, that the most rapturous welcome went instead to a shock documentary film called Mondo Cane fashioned by a team led by the lesser-known Italian cine-journalist Gualtiero Jacopetti; a film that Cameron describes as a ‘two-hour hymn to mutilation’ (1962: 1). Cameron dismisses the excitement over Mondo Cane as a further example of the ‘perversity’ of the Cannes audience and, writing in 1962, set the tone for subsequent critical reception of the work of Jacopetti, and the sub-genre of documentary cinema (mondo) that his film invented.
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© 2013 Mark Goodall
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Goodall, M. (2013). Dolce e Selvaggio: The Italian Mondo Documentary Film. In: Bayman, L., Rigoletto, S. (eds) Popular Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305657_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305657_14
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