Gualtiero Jacopetti


Gualtiero Jacopetti was an Italian documentary film director. With Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, he is considered the originator of mondo films, also called "shockumentaries".

Early life

Gualtiero Jacopetti was born in Barga, in Northern Tuscany, in 1919. During World War II, he served in the Italian Resistance to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After the war, on the advice of his friend and mentor Indro Montanelli, he began to work as a journalist. He co-founded the influential liberal newsweekly Cronache in 1953, only to be forced to shut down production after publishing risque photographs of actress Sophia Loren which caused the paper to be charged with manufacturing and trading pornographic material. He subsequently worked as a journalist, editor, newsreel writer, actor and short-subject film maker. He also worked on screenplays for René Clément and Alessandro Blasetti before undertaking his own career as a director.

Film career

In 1960, he approached his colleagues Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara with the unusual idea of making an "anti-documentary". The result, which premiered in 1962, was Mondo Cane, a non-narrative compilation of shocking and unusual footage from around the world. It premiered at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, where it was well-received and even nominated for the Palme d'Or. The theme song "More" by Italian composer Riz Ortolani was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1963, the year of its premier in the United States.
The success of Mondo Cane inspired an entire genre of documentaries featuring lurid or shocking subjects, which came to be known as mondo film. Jacopetti and Prosperi went on to make several more entries into this genre, including Women of the World, Mondo Cane 2, Africa Addio and the faux-documentary Goodbye Uncle Tom. In the 2003 documentary The Godfathers of Mondo, Jacopetti describes the style they used to make these films: "Slip in, ask, never pay, never reenact."
During the filming of Africa Addio—which includes footage of intense fighting and mass death in the Mau Mau Uprising, the Zanzibar Revolution, the Simba rebellion, and other post-colonial African conflicts—the crew was interrogated in Zaire, and arrested and nearly executed in Tanzania, before an army official intervened on their behalf, shouting "Stop — they're not whites, they're Italians." A scene depicting the execution of a Simba rebel during the Simba rebellion in the Republic of the Congo resulted in Jacopetti being charged with murder in Italy; he was acquitted after producing documents demonstrating the footage had not been staged for the cameras.
Following the critical and commercial failure of the faux-documentary Goodbye Uncle Tom, Jacopetti and Prosperi attempted a fictional film, 1975's Mondo candido. Jacopetti went on to write one further documentary, 1981's before returning to print media for the remainder of his career.

Death

Jacopetti died on August 17, 2011 at the age of 91. His ashes were interred in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. Italian press articles had reported that he wished to be buried next to his girlfriend, the British actress Belinda Lee, who died in 1961 in a car accident in which Jacopetti was also hurt.

Criticism

Despite their early success with Mondo Cane, controversy followed Jacopetti and Prosperi's careers. New York Times reviewer Pauline Kael dismissed Mondo Cane, claiming that its advocates were, "too restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause and effect." Criticism became even more pronounced with Africa Addio, which Roger Ebert called "brutal, dishonest, and racist" and claims that it "slanders a continent". Ebert's review was not based on the original film but on an edited version for US audiences. This version was edited and translated without the approval of Jacopetti. Indeed, the differences are such that Jacopetti has called this film a "betrayal" of the original idea. Notable differences are thus present between the Italian and English-language versions in terms of the text of the film. Many advocates of the film feel that it has unfairly maligned the original intentions of the filmmakers. Charges of racism and claims that elements of their film were staged or manufactured by the directors plagued them over the years, though they strongly denied both charges.
Jacopetti claimed his intent was to create films that "...would play on the big screen whose subject was reality." In the 2003 documentary The Godfathers of Mondo, Prosperi went on to claim criticism of their work was due to the fact that, "The public was not ready for this kind of truth." Both directors denied staging anything for their films, with the exception of Mondo Cane 2 which they acknowledge does contain some staged or recreated footage.

Filmography

;As director
;As screenwriter