Jacopetti uses juxtapositions for shock effect, such as cutting from a close-up of a model's cleavage to a tribeswoman suckling a pig, and a shot of pet dogs in America followed by footage of an Asian dog-meat restaurant. The film is exploitative, with its National Geographic-style nudity and animal-slaughter, and it's also misleading. For example, a beached turtle is seen flapping its flippers in obvious distress, though apparently, according to the narrator, the 'delusional' creature believes it is swimming in the ocean.
Clearly unable to source sufficient shocking material, Jacopetti pads the film out with long, dull sequences showing mildly intoxicated Germans and retired American tourists. The film was, however, an inexplicable success, and it instigated the long-lasting mondo documentary sub-genre (as discussed in the books Sweet & Savage and Killing For Culture).
Later mondo documentaries released on video, such as Faces of Death, focused on news footage of human fatalities. The controversial documentary Executions was the first such video to be classified by the BBFC in the UK. George Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des b&ecaret;tes), a documentary filmed in a Paris slaughterhouse, is a less exploitative mondo precursor, and the autopsy art films The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and Le poeme were influenced by Franju’s poetic documentary. Hollis Frampton’s experimental films Apparatus Sum and Magellan also contain images of bodies in morgues.
Mondo-style autopsy footage has occasionally been included in narrative cinema: Superbeast, Black Mamba, and Providence all feature footage of real autopsies. T.F. Mou claimed that the autopsy of a boy in his film 黑 太阳731 [Men Behind the Sun] includes genuine medical footage. Thriller by Bo Arne Vibenius apparently utilised a real corpse for its eye-gouging sequence. Juan Logar concocted the plot of Autopsia as an excuse to insert footage of a real post-mortem. Three underground music videos—Hijokaidan’s Live and Confused (1988), and SPK’s notoriously offensive Despair (1982) and Two Autopsy Films (1983)—also feature autopsy footage, and Suicide’s music video Frankie Teardop (directed by Michael Robinson, 1978) was partly shot in a mortuary, as was the horror film Unrest (Jason Todd Ipson, 2006).
Arguably the most famous death on film, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, was captured by Abraham Zapruder on his home movie camera. Life magazine immediately purchased all rights to his 8mm film, and published selected frames from it a week after Kennedy was killed, showing “for the first time and in tragic detail, the fate which befell our President.” Life did not print the headshot, seen in frame 313, and the film itself was not shown to the public until an unauthorised copy was aired on ABC’s Good Night, America on 6th March 1975.
Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook has produced a series of contemplative video works—collectively titled สนทนากบความตายบนถนนสายแรกของชวต [Conversation with Death on Life's First Street]—in which she reads aloud to corpses in a morgue. These include Reading for One Female Corpse (1997), Reading for Two Female Corpses (1997), Reading for Three Female Corpses (1997), Reading for Male and Female Corpses (1998), Reading for Female Corpse (2001), Chant for Female Corpse (2001), Conversation I-III (2002), Death Seminar I-II (2005), The Class I-III (2005), Pond (1998), Lament (2000), Three Female-scape (2002), Thai Medley I-III (2002), Wind Princess White Birds (2002), Sudsiri and Araya (2002), and I’m Living (2002).