Ballardian

AN EXHIBITION OF ATROCITIES: J.G. BALLARD ON MONDO FILMS

interview by Mark Goodall

The following is a short interview with JGB conducted by Mark Goodall in 2006 for his book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens. The book is published by Headpress, and the interview is posted here with the kind permission of Mark Goodall and the publisher.

News reporter turned film director, Gualtiero Jacopetti, kickstarted the trend for outrageous documentaries — ’shockumentaries’ if you will — back in 1962 when he made Mondo Cane. MARK GOODALL talks to J.G. BALLARD, a fan, about Mondo Cane, its successors and its influence on his own work as a writer.

LEFT: Gualtiero Jacopetti.

MARK GOODALL: What were your initial impressions of the films of Gualtiero Jacopetti (Mondo Cane, Mondo Cane 2, Women of the World, Africa Addio etc.); where did you see them; what was the audience like?

J.G. BALLARD: I was very impressed by Jacopetti’s films — I saw all of them from 1964 or so onwards — they were shown in small cinemas in the West End, and to full or more or less full houses, and my impression is that the audiences completely got the ‘point’. As far as I remember, the response of the people sitting around me was strong and positive. I think there was comparatively little sex in the first Mondo Cane, and I can’t recall even one dirty raincoat. The audience was the usual crew of rootless inner Londoners (the best audience in the world) drawn to an intriguing new phenomenon. At the time, some twenty years had gone by since the war’s end, and everyone had seen the World War 2 newsreels — Belsen, corpses being bulldozed, dead Japanese on Pacific Islands and so on. All grimly real, but safely distanced from the audiences by a sign that said ‘horrors of war’. What the Mondo Cane audiences wanted was the horrors of peace, yes, but they also wanted to be reminded of their own complicity in the slightly dubious process of documenting these wayward examples of human misbehaviour. I may be wrong, but I think that the early Mondo Cane films concentrated on bizarre customs rather than horrors, though the gruesome content grew fairly rapidly, certainly in the imitator’s films.

I was a great admirer of Mondo Cane and the two sequels, though if I remember they became more and more faked, though that was part of their charm. We, the 1960s audiences, needed the real and authentic (executions, flagellant processions, autopsies etc) and it didn’t matter if they were faked — a more or less convincing simulation of the real was enough and even preferred. Also, the more tacky and obviously exploitative style appealed to an audience just waiting to be corrupted — the Vietnam newsreels on TV were authentically real, but that wasn’t ‘real’ enough. Jacopetti filled an important gap in all sorts of ways — game playing was coming in. Also they were quite stylistically made and featured good photography, unlike some of the ghastly compilation atrocity footage I’ve been sent. It is lovely to think that he had his retrospective in a British university (as in The Atrocity Exhibition, which is not set in the US, as some think).

J.G. Ballard.

But the audiences were fully aware that they were collaborating with the films, and this explains why they weren’t upset when what seemed to be faked sequences (they might have been real in fact) started to appear in the later films — there was almost the sense that they needed to appear ‘faked’ to underline the audience’s awareness of what was going on — both on screen and inside their own heads. We needed violence and violent imagery to drive the social (and political) revolution that was taking place in the mid 1960s — violence and sensation, more or less openly embraced, were pulling down the old temples. We needed our ‘tastes’ to be corrupted — Jacopetti’s films were part of an elective psychopathy that would change the world (so we hoped, naively). Incidentally, all this was missing from the way audiences (in the Curzon cinema I think) saw another 1960s shockumentary — The Savage Eye (directed by Joseph Strick) — when I saw it I, like the audience, shuddered but felt no complicity at all. A fine film.

ABOVE: Still from Mondo Cane.

MG: Can you recall any critical or other ‘professional’ reactions to Jacopetti’s films when they were released?

JGB: I remember the critical/respectable reaction to the Jacopetti films was uniformly hostile and dismissive. As always, this confirmed their originality and importance.

MG: Jacopetti has distanced himself from the films that later copied Mondo Cane labelling them ‘counterfeit’. What were/are your impressions of the copies of his films?

JGB: I can’t remember any specific imitations, though I must have seen one or two. They were too obvious, ignoring the delicate balance between ‘documentary’ footage on the one hand, and on the other the need to remind the audience of its role in watching the films, and that without its intrigued response the films wouldn’t function at all. The balance between the ‘real’ and the ironic simulation of the real had to be walked like a tightrope.

MG: How did mondo films influence your own work/ideas/thought processes (in particular The Atrocity Exhibition)?

JGB: For me, the Mondo Cane films were an important key to what was going on in the media landscape of the 1960s, especially post the JFK assassination. Nothing was true, and nothing was untrue (The Atrocity Exhibition tried to find a new sense in what had become a kind of morally virtual world) — ‘which lies are true?’

I think that Jacopetti was genuinely important, and opened a door into what some call postmodernism and I call boredom. Screen the JFK assassination enough times and the audience will laugh.

J.G. Ballard.

MG: What in your view was important about Jacopetti’s films? Do you think the films have any relevance to the present day, or to the future?

JGB: I suspect they’re very much of their time, but that isn’t a fault, necessarily. But there are many resonance’s today as in the Bush/Blair war in Iraq — complete confusion of the simulated, the real and the unreal, and the acceptance of this by the electorate. Reality is constantly redefining itself, and the electorate/audience seems to like this — a Prime Minister, religiously sincere, lies to himself and we accept his self–delusions. There’s a strong sense today that we prefer a partly fictionalised reality onto which we can map our own dreams and obsessions. The Mondo Cane films were among the first attempts to provide the collusive fictions that constitute reality today. Wartime propaganda, and the Believe it or Not (Ripley) comic strip of bizarre facts in the 1930s, were assumed to be largely true, but no one today thinks the same of the official information flowing out of Iraq — or out of 10 Downing Street and the Pentagon and significantly this doesn’t unsettle us.

A Gualtiero Jacopetti retrospective occurred as part of the 2003 National Museum of Photography Film and Television’s Bradford International Film Festival. The retrospective was a collaboration between the festival and the department of postgraduate studies at the School of Art and Design, Bradford College.

‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J G Ballard on Mondo Films’ is taken from the book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens by Mark Goodall. Published by Headpress.

UK £9.99 / US $19.95
ISBN 1900486490

..:: MORE INFO
+ Headpress

..:: POSSIBLY RELATED
+ Escaping the gaze: A review of John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies