Gualtiero Jacopetti: Italian film-maker whose provocative Mondo documentaries broke new ground for realism in the cinema

When the satirical US rock group The Tubes wanted to shock audiences in the mid-Seventies, they had their lead singer, Fee Waybill, wear a leather mask and thong, and little else, as he shone a torchlight into his face and sang their ode to S&M entitled "Mondo Bondage". They were following in the footsteps of the exploitation director Russ Meyer, who called his 1966 pseudo-documentary about strippers Mondo Topless, and the cult film-maker John Waters, who named his 1969 black comedy Mondo Trasho. However, mondo – the Italian noun for "world" – was first introduced into the English language by another director, Gualtiero Jacopetti, whose "shockumentaries" entitled Mondo Cane ("A Dog's Life", 1962), La Donna Nel Mondo ("Women of the World", 1963) and Mondo Pazzo ("Mad World", also known as Mondo Cane 2, 1963) proved unlikely box-office successes at a time when cinema and television shied away from graphic images.