Gualtiero Jacopetti, an Italian moviemaker who made an art form of documenting the bizarre, the ironic and the unclothed with the provocative film “Mondo Cane” and the “shockumentaries” it spawned, died of undisclosed causes Aug. 17 at his home in Rome, according to Italian media reports. He was 91.

“Mondo Cane,” which Jacopetti directed with Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, was a worldwide sensation when it was released in 1962, and it has maintained a devoted following.

Decades before YouTube became a repository for videos of toilet-trained cats and backyard stunts, Jacopetti traveled around the globe filming all that was weird. He compiled the material into a film that was called, in English, “a dog’s world.”

“Those with frail stomachs,” wrote a Washington Post reviewer, “are well advised to stay away.”

Few people could resist.

Critics resorted to bulleted laundry lists to convey the expanse of Jacopetti’s 105-minute montage of raw human absurdity: Americans engaging in histrionics at a pet cemetery as a poodle urinates on a gravestone; French women force-feeding geese to make foie gras, quickly contrasted with scenes of island women bingeing on tapioca to make themselves more heftily attractive; a woman in New Guinea nursing a piglet, followed by images of the wanton slaughter preceding a feast of pork.