The first article on barganews concerning the possibility of a documentary film festival here in Barga to feature the work of the Italian film director Gualtiero Jacopetti was back in 2011 -- although many people signed a petition on line nothing much happened for the next couple of years during which the incredibly fast evolution of digital film cameras and dropping prices meant that making high definition films was no longer just for a small group of people with expensive equipment but had broadened out to be within the reach of many, many more people who with the aid of a relatively inexpensive camera, a good idea, a good eye and of course, the internet, can now reach potentially a world audience.
It was time to broaden the idea of a film festival to include short films.
During 2013 the first 6 films produced specially under the banner of Artcambarga – the Gualtiero Jacopetti short film festival were screened on 6 large monitors positioned in strategic places in Barga Vecchia.
This week in Barga finally the controversial filmmaker Gualtiero Iacopetti gets the spotlight and attention on his work as the Lucca Film Festival and European Film 2016 pays tribute with an exhibition and a retrospective of Gualtiero Jacopetti, a native of Barga and founder, with his “Mondo cane” and “Mondo Movies” or shockumentary, who with their strong images and brutal edits invaded the Italian cinemas during the sixties.
Five years after his death, the Municipal Gallery and the Gallery Bel Canto di Barga, from 1st April to the 1st May 2016, are presenting “Lo sguardo Selvaggio – I mondo movies in Italia”, edited by Paul Zelati.
The festival in Lucca and Barga offers a whole section dedicated to Jacopetti, curated by Alessandro Stefani, Simone Gonnelli and Nicola Borrelli.
Stamani la conferenza stampa di presentazione in comune a Barga alla presenza del presidente del Lucca Film Festival Nicola Borrelli, del sindaco di Barga Marco Bonini, dell’assessore alla Cultura Giovanna Stefani, di Federico Gavizzani e Simone Gonnelli, curatori del progetto, e di Andrea Barbuti, managing director del Ciocco.
When the Italian film director Gualtiero Jacopetti made Mondo Cane (A Dog’s Life) in 1962, he tapped into people’s curiosity and provided the strangest commercially successful film in the history of cinema. Audiences not yet accustomed to cheap air travel or the idea of globalisation were unprepared for technicolour National Geographic-style montages of “primitive” rites and “civilised” wrongs. The following year, they flocked to see the film’s sequels, Mondo Pazzo (Mad World, or Mondo Cane No 2) and La Donna nel Mondo (Women of the World).
Mondo Cane was a film made out of a compilation of pithy sequences depicting strange rituals from around the globe. But while Jacopetti documented the peculiarities of what was then regarded as the third world, he also mocked the alleged superiority of western culture. The stupidity of mass consumerism and the absurd delusions of elite culture suddenly seemed as bizarre as cargo cults and cannibalism. The ambiguity of any political message shocked critics but delighted the novelist JG Ballard, who included Jacopetti in his 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition.
I was 15 in 1962, when Barghigiano Gualtiero Iacopetti’s “Mondo Cane” appeared on the screen of the Harper Theater in Detroit, Michigan. It played for a week, and I returned to see it 5 times. Everything about it bowled me over: the wild imagery and stories, the music that seemed at once to have nothing and everything to to with the film’s scenes, the sheer bizarre mentality. It made me want to see the places Iacopetti filmed, and years later I did manage to see quite a few of them. It also made me want to live in Italy, the source of his brilliant madness, and I managed that too — not realizing until recently that I had wound up in his birthplace -- Frank Viviano
The power of Mondo Cane came from a side-stepping of documentary neo-realist principles in favour of a hyper-realism dubbed “shockumentary” because of its brutal edits (“shock cuts” Jacopetti once remarked), rapid zooms, heightened post-production sound effects and sharp contrasts between mis-en-scene and musical score – the much-recorded ballad More (“More than the greatest love the world has known”, in Norman Newell’s English lyrics) comes from the film. Jacopetti’s narrations were resolutely satirical, amusing, sad and at all times contemptuously despairing of humanity’s failings.
Following these box office successes, Jacopetti and the anthropologist Franco Prosperi were able to embark upon Africa Addio (Farewell Africa, 1966), a brutal, sprawling document of the post-colonial continent. The team set out to record the decimation of African wildlife as unregulated poaching took a grip, but switched to capturing violent decolonisations in Angola, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda as revolution and counter-revolution exploded in their faces.
The film was heavily criticised at the time of release for its alleged racist portrayal of black African people as “savages”. Jacopetti was accused of “interfering” in the anti-colonial, nationalist uprisings and orchestrating executions to fit shooting schedules. These charges were later thrown out of an Italian court.
Although it was the European colonisers who were treated most harshly in the film – notably, in a memorably creepy sequence, white South Africans – the bad publicity hit the box office, and the film sank. A reprieve came, much to Jacopetti’s horror, only in the form of a ghastly truncated US video version retitled Africa Blood and Guts.
Jacopetti è sempre rimasto molto legato a Barga, sua città natale, che così definiva: ” Casa mia è dove hanno vissuto i miei genitori, dove sono nato anchì’io. Appartengo alla Toscana, a quegli alberi, a quel mare, ai castagni sui monti e agli armadi pieni di quelle vecchie, carissime cose».
Jacopetti was born in Barga, Tuscany. During the second world war he was involved in counterespionage with the American forces, and as normal political activity resumed ahead of the 1948 election, he worked as a publicist for the Christian Democrats.
However, it was through challenging the conformism of postwar Catholic Italy that he made his name as a journalist in the pages of the liberal weekly news magazine Cronache, which he helped found in 1953. It proved to be the forerunner of L’Espresso, launched two years later. After working on newsreels, which Jacopetti tried to make more colourful than the dry state-sponsored efforts, Jacopetti teamed up with Prosperi, cameraman Antonio Climati and composer Riz Ortolani, a unit which remained constant for all of his feature film output.
In 1971, Jacopetti both satirised American racism in Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom) and took a brief diversion to script Fangio, the story of the great Argentinian racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio, for Hugh Hudson. Mondo Candido (1975) was another satirical piece, but this time a tribute to Jacopetti’s hero Voltaire, whose most famous work, Candide, seemed to echo Jacopetti’s own strange traverse through life. Again, cinematic parallels were drawn between seemingly disparate continents across random time-scales.
Tired of the increasing commercialisation of film industries and the incessant self-publicising necessary to succeed, Jacopetti returned to journalism before retiring to leave his powerful and bizarre creations in the hands of exploitation merchants, gorehounds, censorship bodies – and the term “mondo film” to the lexicon of cinema lore. He was a high-profile figure during Italy’s economic miracle of the postwar period. His charm and good looks led to a number of scandalous incidents that could have been lifted straight out of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Jacopetti was buried in Rome next to the glamorous British actress Belinda Lee, with whom he had a relationship. She was killed in car crash during the making of La Donna nel Mondo.
• Gualtiero Jacopetti, film-maker and journalist, born 4 September 1919; died 17 August 2011 -- source