Gualtiero Jacopetti, a filmmaker who titillated and disgusted moviegoers by roaming the globe to document bizarre, not to say creepy, phenomena — a chicken that smokes cigarettes, for instance — in the movie “Mondo Cane” and its sequels, died Wednesday at his home in Rome. He was 91.

His death was widely reported in the Italian press.

Jacopetti liked to say he had invented the “anti-documentary” or the “shockumentary” with “Mondo Cane,” which was unveiled, and well-received, at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. He showed Italian villagers slicing themselves with glass in observance of Good Friday; the French painter Yves Klein using naked women as paintbrushes; and New Yorkers dining on insects in a posh restaurant.

The narration was droll and the images were ironic: A bereaved mother in New Guinea nurses a suckling pig, immediately followed by the wholesale slaughter of pigs for an orgy of feasting in the same region. Jacopetti called such transitions “shock cuts.” Another scene shows people mourning in a pet cemetery in Pasadena, Calif. Cut to shots of customers savoring roast dog at a Taiwanese restaurant.

Jacopetti made “Mondo Cane,” which translates as “a dog’s world,” with Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara, who also collaborated with him on other films. It was distinguished by a jazzy score by Nino Oliviero and Riz Ortolani, whose theme song, “More,” was nominated for an Academy Award.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a “gigantic motion picture.” Judith Crist of The New York Herald Tribune called it pretty much everything: “Bizarre and barbaric, macabre and gruesome, ironic, hilarious, bloodstained, unconventional, provocative and controversial.”