A Dog's World
1962
Directed by Paolo Cavara
Well that was weird as hell. And that pretty much is the only point of this film, to gross you out and to possibly disturb you. Um, okay. I could achieve the same thing simply by looking up how starfish eat their prey (look it up; it is pretty disgusting) and it wouldn't take an hour and fifty minutes.
There is really no plot to speak of, just a series of odd sequences. For instance, fishermen get revenge on man-eating sharks by shoving sea urchins in their mouths. In another part of the film, a woman breast feeds a pig. Ewwwwwwwwwwww….
At the beginning of the film, the narrator claims that none of these sequences are faked, which is actually complete bull and the whole is very staged.
This is one of the first "shockumentaries"which I suppose is why the title is even including in the 1--1 list (either that or somebody slept with an editor). Just not my cup of tea and I definitely could have died without seeing this.
RATING: **---
Interesting Facts:
Nominated for an Oscar.
Available on YouTube:
Maybe had we been around in the early sixties this would have felt like a fun fair ride in the horror house. Now it was just stupid.
ReplyDeleteEw I had blocked this out.
DeleteI downloaded and watched over an hour of a documentary about the end of colonial rule in Africa before I realised I was watching entirely the wrong movie.
ReplyDeleteA few days later...
At first I thought that any claims to be a credible documentary or journal were undermined by the way it was clearly playing it for kicks and laughs. But after a while I realised that this was the point, to play on our susceptibility to see crazy foreigners as shocking, unrefined or somehow lesser than ourselves. And then each time it cuts back to our "civilised" world to show us doing pretty much the same thing.
The semi-staged nature of many of the scenes was also jarring at first but also part of the point. And by the end most of the focus is on our willingness as tourists and spectators to gawp at the madness without really caring to understand what lies behind it.
All that said, while the principle of all that will never grow old, the examples inevitably have done. If nothing else, the western world of sixty years ago is also like a foreign land to us now, so the comparison of us-and-them becomes void.