Vignettes
A statue by Luigi Gheno is dedicated to Rudolph Valentino in his hometown of Castellaneta, Italy. At the event the narrator points out similarities in some local men's faces to Valentino's.
In the United States, Rossano Brazzi has his shirt torn off by a crowd of adoring female fans hunting for his autograph.
At the beach in polyandrous Kiriwina, one of the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea, a large crowd of topless native women run after a handful of men, trying to capture them "not only for autographs".
On the French Riviera, a small group of blonde bikini-clad young women on a boat drive by a ship with U.S. sailors, "wooing" them teasingly from the distance by sending them kisses, showing their tongues and flaunting their breasts.
In a New Guinean Chimbu community, a woman whose child was killed breastfeeds a piglet whose mother died. Also in New Guinea, at a celebration that recurs every five years, in a matter of hours, dozens of pigs are slaughtered by beating on their heads with wooden poles, and eaten, after which the partly cannibalistic community returns to its perpetual state of hunger. Dogs, however, are fed some of the pork and treated with affection and respect.
At the Pet Haven Cemetery in Pasadena, California, dog owners mourn their departed pets.
In Rome, hundreds of chicks are tinged in many colors and then dried at 50 degrees Celsius to be included in Easter eggs; according to the narrator, of each 100 that undergo it, approximately 70 do not survive the procedure.
For foie gras, geese in Strasbourg are force-fed using funnels.
In a farm 200 miles from Tokyo, Wagyu cattle are treated with care by being massaged and fed beer, so that their meat can eventually be served at luxury restaurants in Tokyo and New York.
On New Guinean Tabar, the most beautiful women are locked up in small wooden cages and fed tapioca until they reach 120 kilos to be offered as wives to the village dictator.
In a Vic Tanny health club in Los Angeles, overweight women work on losing weight to recover from a previous marriage.
At a Hong Kong market, exotic animals are sold for food.
At the New York restaurant The Colony, canned exotic animals are served for rich Americans.
At a Singapore snake store, a snake is chosen and butchered for consumption.
In the Italian village of Cocullo, on Saint Dominic's day, the statue and its followers in the procession carry live snakes.
In Nocera Terinese, on Good Friday, each “vattienti" beats their legs with glass shards and spill their blood on the streets where the procession will take place.
A parade of the "Life Savers Girls Association", all from 16 to 20 years old, march toward Sydney's Manly Beach, where they put on a surf carnival, including CPR on young men.
Due to the nuclear contamination on Bikini Atoll, swarms of dead butterflies drift at sea, birds hide in holes in the ground, a species of periophthalmus fish migrated to the trees, sea gulls brood over sterile eggs, and disoriented turtles move inland and die on the atoll's dry sand dunes. Birds nest in turtles' skeletons, which move in the wind as if they were still alive.
In Malaysian underwater cemeteries, sharks get accustomed to human flesh. Their fins are dried on the beach and collected by disabled fishermen, who sell them to the Chinese as aphrodisiacs. A 12-year-old Malaysian boy has been killed by sharks, and the fisherman exact revenge by shoving toxic sea urchins into the mouths of sharks, releasing them again to slowly die.
Rome: In the Capuchin Crypt, bones were arranged as ornaments, and on Tiber Island, the Sacconi Rossi ("Red Sacks") guard the bones of nameless victims of the past since around 1600, which on Fridays are cleaned by local families including children.
On the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, people indulge life by drinking beer and suffer from the symptoms of hangovers in the morning. They sleep standing up, dance, drunkenly fight, and fool around.
Tokyo has a massage parlor for men who are drunk.
In Macao, the dead are covered in make-up for the funeral. People burn money for the departed to take with them.
In Singapore, where 60% of citizens are of Chinese descent, there is a hotel for the dying members of Chinese families. Relatives await their demise by making merry at restaurants in the plaza nearby.
Cars are crushed at a junkyard in Los Angeles and reduced to cubes for recycling. One such cube is sold as art in a Paris art gallery.
The French artist Yves Klein, erroneously introduced as Czechoslovakian, comes forward from one of his monochromatic blue paintings to start of a line of musicians to play his Monotone Symphony. Adjacent are some scantlilly if at all clad young ladies immersing themselves in blue colour, which they later, under the instruction of the artist will, impress from their bodies to a canvass and create a work of art for sale for 4 million French Francs, then worth about 800,000 US-Dollars. (The artist had a heart attack after viewing the film at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and died less than a month later.)
In Honolulu, tourists are showered with leis and witness the Hula Dance.
In Nepal, Gurkha soldiers perform a rite of passage by dressing up in women's clothing on anniversary of the execution of 300 Gurkha POWs by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII.
Gurkha soldiers behead buffalo bulls in a ritualistic contest of strength.
In Portugal, there is a morning running of the bulls for working-class citizens and an afternoon bull-taunting inside a stadium for noble-born men in formal costumes.
At Goroka, Papua New Guinea, there are indigenous tribes who attend Catholic church services.
The film concludes with footage of a group of indigenous people who live as part of a cargo cult in the mountains near the airport of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Having encountered and interacted with foreign airmen during World War II, the people have erected icons of worship that resemble an airport runway, airplane, and control tower using bamboo.
