Death
of Cinema
Ever since its birth, cinema has
personified two concepts: the Eros and the Thanatos. In the days of the Lumiere
Brothers, viewers went to the theatre to see this balance of life play out. The
viewer revelled in this act, watching a still image of a train come alive and
approach them or a photograph of a factory suddenly come to life and expel out
a group of people. What was less celebrated, or perhaps even unnoticed, was the
thanatotic element of the cinema; the ability to watch that photograph, which
had moments ago come into life, go back into a state of death. Of course, these
elements were not merely paratextual. They also found their ways into the
diegesis of the films themselves, again with portrayals of life taking
precedence over those of death. However, there is a lesser-known history of
death on the screen. In the earliest days of cinema, “realistic” portrayals of
real death, often executions, were produced for popular consumption. In 1901,
for example, the Edison Company released Execution
of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, which depicted the execution of
Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of American president William McKinley. What set
this film apart from its predecessors, however, was that it was released soon
after the real execution, causing people to believe that it was genuine. It
would not take long for people to see a genuine execution. In 1903, the Edison
Company filmed the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant in the aptly-titled Electrocuting an Elephant. The first
genuine footage of human death was less than a decade away. In 1912, Franz
Reichelt’s fatal jump from the Eiffel Tower, an ill-fated attempt at testing
his parachute suit, was captured on film, becoming the first genuine footage of
human death. All of this makes it evident that not only was death an important
part of early cinema, but also that the viewers were, and still are, interested
in seeing death. Despite this, death disappeared from the silver screen for
many years. In 1962, audiences were treated to Mondo Cane, the first introduction to the Mondo genre.
This
unusual genre, a mixture of documentary and exploitation cinema, has
unfortunately been ignored by the academic community. There seems to be a clear
reason why this genre is maligned, however: the Mondo film, or the cycles
thereof, has always reflected the world that the viewer lives in. Mondo cycles
always appear during times of extreme social violence or panic, usually within
the United States and the United Kingdom. As a result, the viewer is reminded
of the failures of the world around him or her, shattering the sheltered view
that people prefer. On top of that, the academic viewer, specifically, tends to
reject the Mondo film as immoral, which further brings up the questions of the
morality of the documentary. Furthermore, each Mondo cycle takes advantage of
the innovation of its time to update the works of the previous cycle and create
a new, seemingly distinct style of Mondo. The three cycles that will be
discussed here, for example, created a new genre, a more artistic
representation and a wider distribution, respectively.
What
is and what isn’t Mondo
Before anything else can be
discussed, one must have a working definition for Mondo. The word mondo is Italian for world. This genre
designation comes from the film that started this genre, Mondo Cane, which translates to “Dog’s World”. This clearly is not
enough, but the bigger problem is that every writer has his or her own
definition for Mondo. David Kerekes defines Mondo as a “documentar[y]…where
fact often runs secondary to exploitation”1, while Mark Goodall,
avoiding giving a proper definition, places Mondo somewhere at a crossroads
between documentary, exploitation and art cinema2. The best way to
define Mondo would be somewhere between these two definitions: Mondo is a
documentary-style film which exploits footage of allegedly authentic death
footage. The word allegedly is important here, as the use of false footage does
not necessarily negate the label of Mondo. Some of the most important Mondo
films, including Faces of Death,
consist heavily or almost entirely of falsified sequences. Usually, when this
deception is discovered, the filmmakers claim that the false sequences were
inspired by true events3. As a side-note, it should be mentioned
that the Mondo genre also consists of films which focus not on death, but
rather on other taboo subjects (sex, other cultures, the hidden nightlife of
one’s own city, etc.). In fact, it is often stated that the first culture shock
of the Mondo genre was an image, in Mondo
Cane, of an African woman breast-feeding a pig. However, the focus here is
specifically on the Mondo films that focus on death.
With the Mondo genre, it is often
more important to comprehend what is not
Mondo than what is Mondo, as the
detractors of Mondo spread plenty of disinformation about the genre. For
example, Mondo is not snuff! Many detractors of Mondo have tried, and continue
to try, to equate the two. However, a snuff film is one in which “a filmed
account of an actual murder, specifically commissioned, recorded and supplied
for the gratification of the paying spectator(s)”4 and is generally
accepted as an urban legend. A Mondo film often comprises entirely of found
footage and in the few instances where the footage was captured by a film crew
filming specifically for such footage, events that are filmed are not committed
specifically for the purposes of the film. Furthermore, the exploitation
element is an important part of Mondo. So, films which document real death
would not be considered Mondo if they are made for reasons other than the
documentation of taboos. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to call Allan
King’s actuality drama Dying at Grace
a Mondo film. Finally, while scenes of genuine death have found their way into
the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Moore and the Maysles Brothers,
that does not make them Mondo films, as a Mondo film must, obviously, consist
entirely of death sequences. So, Mondo is in fact a very restrictive genre and
this may be the best way to describe it.
Proto-Mondo:
Art and Slaughter
In his influential book Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel
names films dealing with death, which he calls the “ultimate [cinematic] secret”,
as one of the types of subversive filmmaking, one which he further states has
been underutilized5. He goes on to claim that the fact that this
universal concept does not exist in contemporary cinema…reveals taboo in its
purest form”6. It is rather telling, though, that even in this work,
the bible of anti-canonical cinema, Vogel refuses to discuss the Mondo genre,
which had taken off a decade before the publishing of this book. However, this
book does discuss works which eventually influenced Mondo cinema. There is one
film and one subgenre of documentary cinema which, taken together, essentially
moulded Mondo cinema.
George Franju’s Blood of the Beasts is the basic framework for the Mondo film.
Released in 1949, Franju’s film shows the slaughter of a series of animals at a
Paris slaughterhouse, in excruciating detail. The images are accompanied by an
unusually calm narrator, alternately explaining the images on the screen and
waxing philosophical about life, death and the very act of existence. This
formula has been used again and again in the Mondo genre, where, in the
majority of cases, the viewer is not allowed to formulate his or her own
opinions. Instead, he or she is forced to listen to a pre-written script, which
tells the viewer how to feel. This calm demeanour is also an important aspect
of the narrative as the Mondo film, just like Franju’s film, attempts to show
the images as just elements of everyday life, ones which should not be shocking
(despite the fact that they are). Furthermore, animal deaths have always been
an important part of Mondo. The simple answer as to why would be that they are
easier to film. As evidenced by Franju, it is as simple as walking into a
slaughterhouse or a kill-shelter or even one of the many bullfights and
cockfights which are still freely available in many parts of the world. It is
also much easier to have an animal killed specifically for the camera, as
animal cruelty laws are much more lenient than similar laws against “human cruelty”.
Mark Goodall offers an alternate explanation for this discrepancy. He believes
that animal cruelty is often used as a metaphor for the social ills in human
society7. This may be true to some degree, but, as will be evidenced
later, animal cruelty is often presented as just another form of cruelty, since
Mondo films, especially ones of the first cycle, portray many of their subjects
as non-human animals.
The other proto-Mondo subgenre which
influenced later Mondo films, particularly the second cycle, is the
concentration camp film. Soon after the liberation of the Nazi concentration
camps in 1945, a young Billy Wilder was commissioned to take the footage of the
death camps and make Death Mills.
This became the first such film, a subgenre which utilizes freely available
found footage, in the form of photographs, short footage shot by news sources
at the time of liberation and German propaganda films, and creates a film which
often contains extra, personally-filmed footage and a philosophical narration.
These films were the first form of widespread death-based filmmaking, being
made everywhere from Germany and Poland to Russia and Canada, consisting not
just of the malnourished, skeletal victims and survivors of the Holocaust, but
also of executions, war crimes and other such atrocities. In a few cases, such
films were even made as propaganda, which also became a later trademark of
Mondo.
First
Cycle: Mondo Colonialism
When Mondo Cane was released in 1962, American society was on its way
towards a sudden onslaught of visible violence. One year after its release,
John F. Kennedy, president of the United States, was assassinated. He became
the first American president to die that way in sixty-two years. This death was
captured on a variety of cameras and the resulting footage became one of the
most seen of all time. In the next ten-year period, American homes became host
to a large variety of violent footage, whether it was the assassinations taking
political and cultural figures, the massacres of the people of Vietnam or the
beatings and killings of their own people at anti-war protests and race riots.
It was not just the United States, either, as, at this time, many African
nations were fighting for their rights to independence. Mondo Cane, a collaboration between Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero
Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, was released to great acclaim to the American
audience and it was a product of its time, one in which, with the advent of
television, people were becoming aware of the world around them. The job of
this first film of this Mondo cycle was to act as what John Cohen describes as
“a new type of journalism”8, which its creators meant as a response
to neorealism9. Mondo cinema was going to show people things that
they have never seen before. The reason that these films were different from
journalism was that they were more sensational than the news of the time. In a
way, this was a return to the cinema of attractions, where viewers were coming
to see what they had not been able to see before10. Mondo Cane was focused on the
differences between the society in which its viewers (middle-class westerners)
lived and the “foreign world”. This gave way to offensive sequences which
juxtaposed the “normal” behaviour of Europeans and Americans with the
“barbaric” behaviour of the inhabitants of Africa and Asia. In order to conceal
their racist bias, the filmmakers would also include sequences of western
individuals who were acting strangely, but this was different in two ways.
First, the western subjects were themselves members of repressed groups (i.e.
members of the queer community) and secondly, the western individuals were
mocked, but not dehumanized. Mondo Cane
was followed by an uneventful sequel and then came Africa Addio, which was also known in English-language markets as Goodbye Africa and Africa Blood and Guts. This was also the film that caused Fernando
Solanas and Octavio Getino to call Jacopetti, the face behind the brand, a
fascist11. While Mondo Cane
contained scenes of death, they were often serene and calm, exemplified by the
footage from the house of death in Singapore, where the old go to die. Africa Addio, conversely, contained some
of the most brutal slaughter ever caught on film. The film was framed as a
humanitarian objection against decolonization, indicating that the Africans
were not ready to govern themselves. This was followed by sequences where
Africans destroyed the natural world around them, slaughtered animals without
purpose and attacked, killed and mutilated each other. All black Africans were
portrayed as violent, animalistic cannibals.
Mondo
Cane and Africa Addio not only
set up the style and premise of this cycle, but they also set up the
conventions that later cycles question and modify. The main aspect of this
first cycle was the gaze, where the ethnographers hold the gaze over the people
that they portray as animals. What furthers this is that the images are not
left to speak for themselves. Instead, the viewer is told what he or she is or
should be seeing, with many scenes set up or inaccurately described. In Mondo Cane 2, for example, a monk
committed suicide in much the same way as Thich Quang Duc in 1963. This shot
was clearly a recreation of the original sequence, but since the viewer is told
that it is authentic, the filmmakers leave the burden of proof on the viewer.
That brings up the question of “how much is real?” The films of this first
cycle, including such titles as Slave
Trade in the World Today and Savage
Man, Savage Beast, often included never-before-seen sequences of supposedly
genuine events, which were usually explained as being captured by hidden
cameras (a trope of Mondo), which could not be proven or disproven due to a
lack of information. There is debate to this day about whether a sequence in Savage Man, Savage Beast, where a
tourist gets mauled and partially eaten by a lion, is authentic. Further
complicating matters, some genuine (or seemingly genuine) sequences become
questionable, because the filmmakers’ responsibility comes under question. In Africa Addio, a gruesome sequence where
tribesmen slaughter a hippopotamus was deemed inaccurate by anthropologists who
studied the tribes of the area12. Near the end of the film, where
the crew “manage” to capture a sudden execution, one must ask if this is in
fact journalism and if these events were not set up beforehand in order to
capture footage13.
The other aspect that was prevalent
in this first cycle was the concept of normalcy. As Goodall explains, these
films worked with perverse politics, which he describes using a tagline from Il Pelo nel Mondo, “visions of primitive
rites and civilized wrongs”14. The very strict definition of normal
shown in these films is heteronormative, white, phallocentric and, above all,
Christian. A sequence in Mondo Cane
showed a group of black Africans taking communion, while the soundtrack
described how only through Christianity could these “savages” hope to become
good people. This is the basic premise of most of the films in the first cycle
of Mondo filmmaking. With religion and civilization becoming synonyms, the
films revelled in the white man’s place in his world, over other races and
species, strangely similar to the Hollywood western.
On July 15, 1974, Florida newscaster
Christine Chubbuck went on the air like any other day. During the coverage of a
shooting, the tape player jammed. When Chubbuck was informed of this, she
shrugged and instead read a statement: “In keeping with Channel 40's policy of
bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living colour, you are going
to see another first—attempted suicide”. She then proceeded to pull a gun out
of her purse and shoot herself in the back of the head, live on air. Death had
found its way into the American home. Footage of that incident no longer
exists. However, due to advances in technology, the next such incident would
live on.
Second
Cycle: Faces of Human Death and the Social Mondo
By the late 1970s, Mondo films had
become repetitive and the audiences were tiring of them. The release of John
Alan Schwartz’s Faces of Death in
1978 was about to change everything. There are a few factors at play in the
beginning of the second cycle. Firstly, Stan Brakhage’s 1971 film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes
caused a new style of filmmaking focused on the fragility of the human body. It
also led to autopsy footage becoming a mainstay of Mondo cinema. Second, the
films shifted away from animal slaughter to human butchery and carnage15.
Finally, the availability of cheap video technology resulted in both the
creation of more Mondo films and the creation of more original footage16.
As the first cycle began with the on-camera death of John F. Kennedy, the
catalyst of the second cycle was a societal change. The 1980s was a time of
social conservatism in the United States and the United Kingdom, with even
Canada electing a conservative Prime Minister in 1984. In Reagan’s America and
Thatcher’s Britain, youths rebelled in any way that they could. This
conservatism is responsible for punk rock, video nasties and the second cycle
of Mondo, which lasted until well into the 1990s. It was also during this
period where moral panics occurred frequently with accusers falsely claiming
the discovery of satanic rituals and snuff films.
Faces
of Death works as a connection between the past and the present. Like its
predecessors, the film begins in Africa and includes a philosophical narrator,
Dr. Francis Gross, a surgeon who wishes to understand death after a recurring
dream of a funeral. However, Africa is nothing but a beginning. Soon, the film
jumps into footage of murders, suicides, accidents and a variety of other ways
to die. While the majority of this film consists of inauthentic footage, it is
the way that everything is put together that is a matter of interest. The
footage is a mixture of authentic and fabricated footage, the authentic taken
from archives, legitimate documentaries or shot by the filmmakers, while the
fabricated footage is made to look like it is from the news and from police
dashboard cameras. One sequence in particular, one showing the suicide of a
young woman is itself a mix of true and false. The footage of the woman jumping
is real, while the aftermath was created and shot by Schwartz, along with a backstory
and identity for the unknown woman. Furthering the idea of Faces of Death as a bridge, Mikita Brottman believes that this film
works as an homage to the “classics of accidentally captured amateur or home
video footage”17. Since many of the sequences were similar to other,
well-known footages, this film works like a library housing copies of canonical
works!
Faces
of Death led to two Mondo traditions. The less interesting of the two
traditions followed a philosophy of showing any footage of authentic death that
could be found, be it video, crime scene photos or any available images. These
films often accompanied still images of carnage with deadpan, comedic
narratives or harsh heavy metal music. This tradition led to the well-known
“franchises” of Mondo, including the rest of the Faces of Death series, as well as the Traces of Death and Death
Scenes series. These films were often sloppily gathered together, with no
underlying theme, other than death. They also often reused the same footage
over and over again. On January 22, 1987, politician R. Budd Dwyer was about to
be convicted and imprisoned for bribery, a crime that he adamantly denied.
After calling a live, televised press conference, Dwyer resigned, still
asserting his innocent, and pulled out a gun, which he placed in his mouth and
fired, killing himself instantly. This footage was from a time of inexpensive,
easy-to-use video technology. Dwyer would become Mondo’s first “star”, his
suicide appearing in practically every Mondo release. Dwyer became so prolific
that he even became the subject of a feature-length documentary.
The other tradition was one which
could be described as Social Mondo. In arguably the most successful attempt at
legitimacy for the genre, these films were characterized by sequences of
authentic death and related subjects, a narrator with a misanthropic tone and
facts and figured utilized in an attempt to create social change. Furthermore,
this new cycle accused the western world of violence and debauchery that had
been relegated to Africa and Asia in the first cycle and the attitude towards
religion had changed, from being seen as a source of salvation towards being
equalized with cult activity and violent behaviour.
The two archetypal examples of this genre are
1981’s The Killing of America and
1995’s Executions. These are two
films that take a contemporary social problem, gun violence and capital
punishment, respectively, and attempt to use the bluntness and graphic imagery
of Mondo to attempt to inform the viewer. Unfortunately, this particular
tradition of Mondo never truly caught on as the average Mondo consumer, at this
point, was usually looking for shock value, while academics refused to give
these films a fair evaluation. The result was that these films were ignored,
with Executions even abandoning its
ethos and releasing a sequel that resembled films from the first tradition.
The
Killing of America was unlike any Mondo film that had come before it for
several reasons. This film was not separated by methods of death, nor was it
focused on showing gory footage. Instead, it was focused on showing what it
considered to be the truth of the world around it, exhibiting archival news and
police footage along with events captured on American streets. The footage was
also reinforced by American crime statistics, which paint a very grim picture.
This footage was, unusually, interspersed with footage and photographs from
other aspects of American culture which do not have active footage, including
interviews with serial killers, aftermaths of political assassinations and
images of young thrill killers. This film, an obvious predecessor of the
successful Michael Moore film, Bowling
for Columbine, was an actual attempt at understanding violence by
attempting to understand and sympathize with individuals on both sides of the
issues, the killers and the police. The two groups were both accused and recognized
as being victims of the violence in which they were themselves involved. This
film almost comes off as a normal documentary, but it does contain the Mondo
elements of exploitation and sensationalism. The grim narrator, conveying a
misanthropic message, delivered a view of an almost post-apocalyptic America,
one where “elections were being decided by killers”. The most problematic
element of this film, though, is identified by Brottman. Killing of America attempts to not fall into the trappings of a
gore film. Unlike almost every other Mondo film, this film does not even save
its “best” for last, ending on the most recent tone instead. However, it still
revels in its footage of death, repeating and slowing down its footage over and
over again. As Brottman puts it, this is a film that is not at ease with itself18.
This is a film that lacks an identity as it is too “unusual” to really be
placed in a proper genre.
A social Mondo film which is more at
ease with itself is Executions, a
film which immediately justifies its content by questioning the concept of the
immorality of showing such footage when the act itself is so prevalent in the
world. This film furthers the idea that there is no such thing as a humane
execution. Furthermore, the film equates all executions from American prisoners
to Holocaust victims creating its base rhetoric. Just like The Killing of America, this film attempts to unnerve the viewer
with facts and statistics mixed with more gruesome footage of a variety of
execution methods captured around the world, forcing the viewer to look into
the eyes of the condemned with the goal of changing his or her mind about
capital punishment. Of course, this film also saves the “best” footage for
last. What differentiates the practice here from elsewhere is that the footage,
a man shot in the face and struggling to breath, is accompanied by text which
informs the viewer, among other things, that this man took sixty seconds to
die, while other execution methods take even longer, effectively disproving the
concept of a humane death. Executions
is the first Mondo film which worked as a didactic piece because of its shocking
violence, rather than in spite of it.
Third
“Cycle”: Decline of Mondo and Birth of the Internet
In 2005, the creators of a series of
videos known as “Bumfights” released a film called Terrorists, Killers and Middle-East Wackos. Utilizing the availability
of such footage on the internet, they created an hour of footage, consisting
mostly of video which had previously appeared on other Mondo films. This film
was artistically void and did not make any attempt at making a statement. It
was simply a series of unrelated videos accompanied by music. It became
well-known, having no competition in a devoid Mondo market, but, despite that,
it did not do well financially. In the age of the internet, the Mondo film is
no longer a viable genre.
As with the previous cycle, this
pseudo-cycle resulted in two different paths, neither true to the nature of the
genre. The first path that resulted from this was the faux-snuff film. In a
time where it has become so easy to create realistic deaths, some saw fit to
create snuff films without having to commit murders. This period saw a lot of
film releases, including the August
Underground and Snuff Perversion
series, claiming to be real footage from actual snuff films. The other path led
to the internet, where websites popped up, dedicated solely to images of death.
Some of these websites, such as “the Young News Channel” and “Ogrish” attempted
to advertise themselves as attempts to show the truth to the world, an argument
that Sue Tait refers to as the “looking-as-civic-duty argument”19.
Basically, these websites disposed of any artistic notion, instead choosing to
host stand-alone footage with minimal commentary, allowing the footage to speak
for itself and then allowing the viewers to discuss it. It makes sense that
this would happen, since this footage is being made and discovered much more
quickly than it could be incorporated into Mondo films. After all, footage has
become much easier to create. On a base level, most cell phones are equipped
with cameras and there are security cameras everywhere. Whenever a disaster or
death occurs, it seems like the security footage and eyewitness videos show up
online almost immediately. On top of that, the internet has made it easier to
gather and share footage that would be otherwise inaccessible to the mass
population. In the last five years, at least two genuine thrill-killing murders
have been posted online, each becoming famous under an offensive moniker,
namely “3guys1hammer” and “1lunatic1icepick”. These videos, along with many
others created by Islamist terrorists, soldiers in war zones and Mexican drug
cartels, also spread much more easily, as their potential viewers are not
hindered by censorship and they cannot be effectively removed, as they will be quickly
re-uploaded20.
Death
of Mondo
Ultimately, it could be said that
Mondo reached its logical conclusion with the advent of the internet. As a
genre, Mondo began as a cinema of attractions and ended as a cinema of
attractions, with the ending being more violent, more abundant and more “real”.
However, with a dead genre, it would be important to take a look at its legacy.
Where has the Mondo genre gone since then? For one thing, Mondo has become much
less shocking! What used to pass for Mondo, before the more gruesome images
were relegated to the internet, started appearing in reality television in the
1990s21. Furthermore, currently, all of the films discussed in this
essay, films which were considered unwatchable and disgusting in their times,
are available for free viewing on YouTube. Nonetheless, despite losing its
shock value, or perhaps even because of it, Mondo continues to be marginalized
as a genre and shut out of academic discussion. In this day and age, where
footage of real death has become easier than ever to access, this genre could
not be timelier.
However, it is possible to look at
all of this another way. The new mutation of Mondo cinema simply continues to
reflect the world around it. After all, this is a time where visible violence
and death are so prevalent, that a televised suicide on Fox News does not
create headlines. Violence and death, from wars to random acts of violence, are
so visible that their “viewers” (simple voyeurs separated from cinematic
viewers) are no longer repulsed by them, even though they continue to claim the
opposite. This is reflected in the absolute abundance and accessibility of
death footage and the self-righteousness that voyeurs continue to use as a
defense mechanism. This tends to push the argument into a metaphysical
territory, as the death of Mondo continues to prove its relevance from beyond
the grave!
Notes
1.
David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing for Culture. (London: Creation
Books, 1995), 72.
2.
Mark Goodall, Sweet & Savage: The World through the Shockumentary Film Lens. (London:
Headpress, 2006), 11-14.
3.
This was also used very often in faux
snuff films, such as the Guinea Pig
series, where filmmakers would claim that their film was based on an authentic
snuff film that they had viewed.
4.
Kerekes and Slater, Killing for Culture, 223.
5.
Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art. 2005 reprint ed. (London: C.T. Editions,
2005), 263.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Goodall, Sweet & Savage, 109.
8.
Mark Goodall. “Shockumentary Evidence:
The Perverse Politics of the Mondo Film,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, eds.
Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim. (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 121.
9. Godfathers of Mondo,
DVD, directed by David Gregory (Blue Underground, 2003).
10.
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions:
Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser. (London:
BFI, 1990), 57.
11.
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,
“Towards a Third Cinema,” in Movies and Methods 1 (1976): 53.
12.
Kerekes, Killing for Culture, 72.
13.
The directors of Africa Addio were brought to trial for one act of killing that
appeared in their film, but were acquitted of all wrongdoings.
14.
Goodall, “Shockumentary Evidence,” 120.
15.
Kerekes, Killing for Culture, 113.
16.
Ibid., 77.
17. Mikita Brottman “Mondo Horror:
Carnivalizing the Taboo,” in The Horror
Film, ed. Stephen Prince. (New Jersey: Rutgers, 2004), 185.
18.
Ibid., 172.
19.
Sue Tait. “Pornographies of Violence?
Internet Spectatorship on Body Horror,” in Critical
Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 1 (2008): 93.
20.
Sue Tait. “Visualizing Technologies and
the Ethics and Aesthetics of Screening Death,” in Science as Culture 18, no. 3 (2009): 346.
21.
Kerekes, Killing for Culture, 111.
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25, no. 1 (2008): 91-111.
Tait,
Sue. “Visualizing Technologies and the Ethics and Aesthetics of Screening
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reprint ed. London: C.T. Editions, 2005.
Filmography
Africa
Addio. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1966.
August
Underground. Fred Vogel, 2001.
Le
sang des bêtes (aka Blood of the Beasts). Georges Franju, 1949.
Bowling
for Columbine. Michael Moore, 2002.
Death
Mills. Billy Wilder, 1945.
Death
Scenes. Nick Bougas and F.B. Vincenzo, 1989.
Dying
at Grace. Allan King, 2003.
Electrocuting
an Elephant. 1903.
Execution
of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison. Edwin S.
Porter, 1901.
Executions.
David Herman, Arun Kumar and David Monaghan, 1995.
Faces
of Death. John Alan Schwartz, 1978.
Il
Pelo nel Mondo. Antonio Margheriti and Marco Vicario,
1964.
Mondo
Cane.
Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1962.
Mondo
Cane 2. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1963.
Savage
Man, Savage Beast. Antonio Climati and Mario Morra, 1975.
Slave
Trade in the World Today. Maleno Malenotti, Roberto Malenotti and Folco Quilici, 1964.
Snuff
Perversions: Bizarre Cases of Death. D. J. Kary and Marcus
Koch, 1999.
Terrorists,
Killers and Middle-East Wackos. 2005.
The
Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes. Stan Brakhage, 1971.
The
Killing of America. Sheldon Renan, 1981.
Traces
of Death. Damon Fox, 1993.
