When the Italian film director Gualtiero Jacopetti, who has died at the age of 91, 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.
Jacopetti side-stepped documentary neorealist principles in favour of hyper-realism. Photograph: David Lees/Corbis
The power of Mondo Cane came from a side-stepping of documentary neorealist 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 mise-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 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, the cameraman Antonio Climati and the 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 timescales.
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 will be buried in Rome next to the glamorous British actor Belinda Lee, with whom he had a relationship. She was killed in a car crash during the making of La Donna nel Mondo. He is survived by his daughter, Christine.
• Gualtiero Jacopetti, film-maker and journalist, born 4 September 1919; died 17 August 2011
