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3.6 Ethno-Faciality

I turn here for a moment to televideo, and pre-empt a fuller discussion of mondo and snuff for an analysis of race in faces - those that do not ‘pass’ in dominant white, western representation. The extreme of horror films, the mondo film, deals with alterity in the use (and abuse) of ethnicity to refer to the ‘anything goes’ other, the other without civility. The mondo movie is an exploitation feature masquerading as a documentary and is currently being masqueraded itself on prime time television in such programs as Caught on Camera and When Animals Attack! Mondo movies document bizarre cultural rites, operations, animal slaughter and human death, though these deaths are ‘caught’ on film and not deliberate. Mondo claims to ‘film reality’, a claim that remains, for the purposes of this section of the book, suspect. [97] Until Faces of Death (Conan LeCilaire, US, 1978) and The Killing of America (Sheldon Renan, US, 1981) most mondo films relied heavily on the ethnic alien-ness of their images in order to validate their authenticity. In this system the absolute other of biunivocalization, he or she who does not pass through a minoritarian alignment, represents pure alterity and truth in such alterity. We cannot know this irreducible other so we gullibly believe what we see to be true. Or that is what the white, European and American filmmakers would have us believe. In reference to racial and cultural alterity the face is passed over for the whole body. The repetitive forced imagery of nakedness or near nakedness in the spectacle of the racial other at once makes the entire flesh a machinic signification of alterity, reducing the naked face to the level of the naked body. Uniqueness or individuality is eradicated through the focus on the lack of a marker where clothes end and face begins, occurring within the representation of tribality as teeming or always plural. Simultaneously the racial other becomes at once facialised over the full dermis, with tribal markings and practices such as hunting becoming signifiers for new binary univocalization - those who hunt, we who do not, those who scarify and stretch the skin, we who (on the whole) do not. A whole new set of biunivocal corporeal systems come into play in these pseudo anthropological exhibitions in order to enhance the authentication and fascination of pure otherness. Mondo films are also responsible for the executions on screen of much wildlife. The conflation of ‘native’ and the sacrificial carcass, signified by ‘primitive’ nakedness with the exposed nakedness of animals, is repeated over and over again. Even in titles such as Ultime Grida Dalla Savana: La Grande Caccia (‘Savage Man… Savage Beast’, Antonio Climati & Mario Morra, Italy, 1975) an immediate correlation to the full-bodied faciality of the native and the animal to the slaughter is forced. There is a disturbing suggestion that the natives, although value-less as individuals in the eyes of the filmmakers and presumably the audience, cannot simply be slaughtered to capture ‘real’ death onscreen. Instead the slaughter of animals is interspersed to assure the fascination of otherness is always reduced to the fascination of the unknowability of death. Kerekes and Slater point out however, that such killing of natives does occur in such films as Africa Addio (‘Africa Blood and Guts’, Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi, 1966). They mention the shooting of a black citizen at the hands of a group of white mercenaries: “Allegations arose that the filmmakers actually encouraged the unlawful killing of the man for the sake of powerful documentary footage”. [98] The emphasis on race distribution in this event cannot be forced enough, but there are instances in mondo films where the ‘barbarity’ of the ‘natives’ vindicates the phantasmatic passive voyeurism of the supposed documentary camera.

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