Banned and Exposed. The Taboo Work in Mondo Movies Cover Image

Zakazane i odsłonięte. Praca tabu w filmach mondo
Banned and Exposed. The Taboo Work in Mondo Movies

Author(s): Magdalena Kamińska
Subject(s): Anthropology, Communication studies, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Culture and social structure , Sociology of Culture, Film / Cinema / Cinematography, Social Norms / Social Control
Published by: Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej
Keywords: popular culture; taboo; mondo; shockumentary; exploitation documentary; formal primitivism; narrative simplicity; postcolonial; cinematic genre; travelogue;

Summary/Abstract: In historical perspective, mondo is a shockumentary (exploitation documentary) sub‐genre. It is to be derived from travelogue and is also closely associated with an ethnographic film (one can say its pop version). The sub‐genre in classical form ends in the early 1980’s with VHS technology appearing, but its poetics is popular up to this day on TV and internet (YouTube). Mondo concentrates along an identification and translation of taboo, as contextually understood. Thanks to it, in spite of its formal primitivism and narrative simplicity, mondo is uniquely liberal and postcolonial type of film text. As the only one cinematic genre, it is dedicated to bulldoze of so‐called “Big Ditch”. This effect is caused under pretences of sensationalism, that means to without pushy moralisation. The main thesis of mondo concerning all the “Big Ditch ideas” claims that they are socially constructed, in spite of fact that mondo’s directors’ motivation has to be evaluated as not very sophisticated, even though its formal aspects make it similar to the some practices of vanguard.

  • Issue Year: 34/2012
  • Issue No: 04
  • Page Range: 110-121
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: Polish