The Wild Eye (1967)

Paolo Cavara had been in at the birth of the Mondo movie genre.  Indeed, as one of the directors of Mondo Cane (1962), he was, arguably one of the genre's creators.  But it was a creation he clearly fell out of love with, judging by his subsequent film The Wild Eye (1967).  A savage critique of the Mondo genre, The Wild Eye casts Philippe LeRoy as Paolo, an obsessive director of 'documentaries', whose quest to present 'truth' on screen involves him in contriving situations he can exploit for footage, directing the participants in order to ensure that ostensibly 'real' events play out in the most cinematic way possible.  It opens with a desert hunting trip he has arranged becoming a struggle for survival when the vehicle he and his group are using breaks down and it transpires that nobody has ensured that extra fuel, water or provisions have been stowed aboard.  As the group desperately awaits rescue, Paolo films them, trying to create conflict between its members with his 'interview questions'.  When rescued, while Paolo maintains that the incident was an accident, pure chance, others accuse him of having deliberately contrived the accident in order to create footage for the film he is shooting.  The theme continues as Paolo and his crew proceed to South East Asia in order to shoot more footage, with the director continually attempting to get tip offs from local contacts as to when terrorist attacks, executions or suicides are likely to occur, so that he can be present to film them.  Most of these incidents clearly reference the subsequent work of his Mondo Cane collaborators, Gaultiero Jacopetti and Franco E Prosperi: his repeated attempts to find a Buddhist monk who will publicly immolate themselves, for instance, references such a scene (probably faked) filmed by Jacopetti and Prosperi for Mondo Cane 2 (1963), while Paolo's rearrangement of the execution by firing squad of a Viet Cong suspect to make it more cinematographic echoes the )probably real) execution scene in Jacopetti and Prosperi's Africa Addio (1966).

Indeed, a lot of Wild Eye's Vietnam sequences seem designed to echo Africa Addio, with Paolo's constant declarations to combatants in the war zone that he and his crew are 'Italian Journalists' making a documentary reminiscent of Jacopetti and Prosperi's similar justifications for their close up filming of the carnage in the Congo.  The question of whether the sort of war zone footage shot by the makers of Mondo movies represents merely unflinching journalism or is sensationalised voyeurism, lies at the core of The Wild Eye.  Paolo, like his real world equivalents, seeks to co-opt the approach adopted by genuine journalists and legitimate documentary makers that they are merely presenting reality, over which they can express no moral judgement, leaving that to the viewer.  To intervene, they argue, would be to interfere in the natural flow of events, to falsify reality - they can only bear witness to reality, not create it.  The difference, of course, lies in the fact that Paolo and his equivalents do intervene, if not in terms of altering the outcome of what they film, but in the way in which it happens or, more significantly, how it appears to happen.  Of course one of the key criticisms of the Mondo genre is that it doesn't just interfere in real events, but that it actually fakes events in order to create sensational footage.  Throughout most of The Wild Eye, Paolo never actually creates a false situation. (or at least, can't be proved to have done so), apart from the sequence where he gets an impoverished Sultan he meets in the ruins of his palace, which is being rapidly reclaimed by the jungle, to humiliate himself onscreen, eating butterflies (which Paolo and his crew have collected and brought to the palace) and generally acting as if he is deluded.  Paolo's defence is that he is enhancing the reality of the situation, in order to put over to audiences the tragedy of his subject's situation.  Which is an idea which underpins his approach to film making - that what he is attempting to achieve is to present something that goes beyond ordinary, mundane, reality, that he improves it and makes it 'more real'.  Although, simultaneously, he professes to hate contrivance - which is why he makes his interventions as subtle and natural-looking as possible.

The final part of the film addresses the other main criticism of Mondo movies - their lack of a moral compass.  When Paolo is tipped off that a nightclub is to be attacked with a rocket fired from a bazooka, rather than warn the authorities or even the customers, he instead sets himself and his camera up inside the club, already crowded with revellers, in order to film the attack firsthand, with his crew outside to film it all from the external perspective.  Inevitably, the situation results in tragedy - not for Paolo himself, who survives unscathed - but for his female companion, who, although outside, is fatally injured in the blast.  While, initially, his horrified reaction seems to be genuine, we are left in doubt, as he urges his crew to film his grieving over her body.  While clearly intended as a critique of the genre he had helped to birth, Cavara's film still has resonance today, as, with the rise of reality TV, social media and AI, the veracity of what we are seeing on our screens is increasingly held up to question.  Even news footage on mainstream TV channels is now constantly questioned, with journalists constantly being accused of imposing their own, partisan, narratives upon it.  The whole concept of objectivity is being called into question.  But, of course, we all of us impose our own narratives upon what we see.  Everything we experience is filtered through our own experiences.  The key to objectivity, though, is to apply one's critical faculties to our experiences, in order to try and cut through our own pre-existing prejudices.  Sadly, critical thinking just doesn't seem to be a priority these days, either in reporting or education, leaving us with a situation where our entire media is in danger of becoming one big Mondo movie, with nobody having any clear idea of what is real and what is not.  Which is precisely what Cavara was pointing to in The Wild Eye, way back in 1967.