The Oxford History of World Cinema (51 page)

shows -- from the 'Mondo Niovo' of the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth century

'Megaletoscopio' -- and scientific curiosities (documented by A. Riccò in his 1876 study

Esperienze cromostroboscopiche, 'Chromostroboscopic experiments'). It is in this context

that the first appearance of the 'Cinématographe Lumière' in the Roman photographic

atelier Le Lieure, on 13 March 1896, provoked an excited reaction and this new French

invention spread to Naples, Turin, and gradually to several other cities. Markedly less

success awaited the Chronophotographe Demen´', Robert W. Paul's 'Theatrograph', and

the Edison apparatus.

As local distribution initiatives multiplied, the Société Lumière made its presence felt

thanks to four cameramen: Vittorio Calcina, Francesco Felicetti, Giuseppe Filippi, and

Albert Promio. As well as actualities and scenes from real life, there were also the brief

narrative films of Italo Pacchioni, who built his own camera in 1896 along with his

brother Enrico, and of the variety artist Leopoldo Fregoli, who used the Cinématographe

(renamed the 'Fregoligraph') to reproduce the quick-change impressions that had made

him famous throughout Europe. But these were isolated efforts, which did very little to

contribute towards the setting up of stable, commercially viable projects. For almost ten

years, therefore, the diffusion of cinema in Italy was dependent on sporadic initiatives

taken by travelling performers, by photographers who became amateur managers, and by

owners of variety or café-concert clubs.

It was not until nearly a decade after 1896 that such fragmented elements came together

to create a number of production companies constructed on a more solid base. Some of

these very quickly acquired a pioneering role in their field. In Rome, there was the

Alberini & Santoni studio ( 1905), which changed its name to Cines in April 1906; in

Milan, companies owned by Adolfo Croce and Luca Comerio (the latter became SAFFI-

Comerio in 1908 and then Milano Films in late 1909); in Turin, which was the real capital

of Italian cinema in the period of its creation, Ambrosio ( 1905), Aquila Film founded by

Camillo Ottolenghi ( 1907), Pasquali and Tempo ( 1909), and Carlo Rossi & Co., formed

in 1907 and renamed Itala Film in May 1908 at the behest of Giovanni Pastrone and Carlo

Sciamengo.

NON-FICTION, COMEDY, AND ANCIENT ROME

The French domination of the Italian film market led to a serious crisis in the nascent

home industry as early as 1907. The recently formed companies struggled to find

adequate distribution outlets for their work, and responded by adopting a strategy which

aimed to exploit the popularity enjoyed by three particular genres: historical films,

documentaries, and, above all, comedies, for which demand from exhibitors was growing

at a remarkable pace. Comerio, Ambrosio, Itala, and Cines all developed an aggressive

policy of documentary and reallife film-making, sending specialized film-makers to areas

of natural beauty which had not yet been covered by Pathé, Éclair, and Gaumont, as well

as to areas struck by natural disasters (such as Calabria and Sicily after the 1909

earthquake). Of particular note were Giovanni Vitrotti, who worked for Ambrosio in Italy

and abroad, and Roberto Omegna, who began with Milano Films a career in scientific

documentaries which lasted for several decades. It is not unusual to find in these non-

fiction films interesting elements of technical innovation. In The Island of Rhodes (Tra le

pinete di Rodi, Savoia, 1912) the final view of a shooting cannon transforms this

travelogue into a pretext for colonial propaganda when the film is suddenly flooded with

red, white, and green, the colours of the Italian flag. An unidentified film made by

Ambrosio probably around 1912, and known by the apocryphal title Santa Lucia, has

shots with a split screen divided into several differentsized sectors.

In the field of comedy, the Italian response to the overwhelming influence of the French

was initiated by Giovanni Pastrone, who travelled to Paris in 1908 in order to entice a

well-known actor back to Turin. The two principal candidates, both employed by Pathé,

were Max Linder, who was already on the way up, even if not yet arrived at stardom, and

André Deed (pseudonym of André Chapuis), who had served a brief apprenticeship under

Georges Méliès before moving on to Pathé and immense success in the role of Boireau.

Pastrone chose Deed, changed his nickname to Cretinetti (or Foolshead in Britain and

America), and, from January 1909 onwards, produced a series of around 100 short

comedies, interrupted only by the actor's temporary return to France ( 1912-15), and

closed with the 1921 feature L'uomo meccanico ('The mechanical man', Milano Films).

The main ingredients of the phenomenal world-wide success enjoyed by Deed from 1909

to 1911 were the surreal use of visual tricks and the acceleration of the hectic rhythm

typical of chase comedies. With its madcap, almost hysterical pace, its systematic

destruction of whatever surrounded the action, and its upturned logic, André Deed's work

constitutes an anarchic paradigm of transformation, in the nihilistic sense, of everyday,

urban comedy. His example was followed by every one of the major companies of the

time, creating a gallery of around forty characters of varying talent and fortune. The most

interesting personalities amongst them were the circus artists Ferdinand Guillaume (as

Tontolini for Cines, 191012, and as Polidor for Pasquali, 1912-18), Marcel Fabre (as

Robinet for Ambrosio, 1910-15) and Raymond Fran (Ovaro) (as Kri-Kri for Cines, 1912-

16). They drew heavily on their repertoire of clownery in making film comedies. Some,

such as Kri-Kri, created visual novelties and original situations which were occasionally

upgraded to more complex forms of mise-en-scène.

The development of the third strand in Italian production of this period was based on the

reconstruction of historical settings and characters, from Ancient Greece and Rome to the

Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and, to a lesser extent, the eighteenth century and the

Napoleonic era. The trend towards this sort of production, partly derived from French

models (the company Film d'Arte Italiana was founded by Pathé in 1909), was

immediately successful with Italian audiences, and also encountered favourable reactions

abroad. The success of the new genre became an important cultural phenomenon with the

release of The Fall of Troy ( La caduta di Troia, 1911), directed by Giovanni Pastrone and

Romano L. Borgnetto for Itala Film. Despite its hostile reception by Italian critics, the

film was greeted with unprecedented public approval in Europe and America, inspired by

its spectacular monumental reconstructions of classical architecture, filmed using depth of

field rather than two-dimensional backdrops, and by its unashamed aspiration to artistic

grandeur.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

Such aspiration to the status of art formed the basis of the most successful period in the

history of Italian silent cinema, which, despite the relatively modest resources available to

its creators, managed to secure a deserved place amongst the great powers of international

production nations between 1911 and 1914. Progress was aided by the support

forthcoming from a new generation of entrepreneurs, with its roots in the aristocracy or in

the world of high finance and big business, who in part took over the role of the pioneers

who had laid the foundations for a stable production system only a few years earlier.

These members of the privileged classes could call upon immense resources in order to

pursue such a prestigious hobby as film-making. But their contribution was not solely

economic in nature. They also brought a certain instinct for patronage and philanthropy,

insisting on the potential of the moving image as an instrument for the moral and cultural

education of a nation which was still in large part illiterate. For good or ill, they provided

the Italian film industry with the entrepreneurial backing which had been strikingly absent

thus far from the spontaneous, dilettante approaches of the first practitioners.

Encouraged by the didactic mission of its backers, the full-length feature film emerged

earlier in Italy than in most other countries. La Gerusalemme liberata (The Crusaders,

Cines, 1911) by Enrico Guazzoni was 1,000 metres long; L'Inferno ( Dante's Inferno,

Milano Films, 1911), directed by Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan, in

collaboration with Giuseppe De Liguoro, was two years in the making and was

announced as measuring 1,300 metres.

In a short period of time, the trend towards grand spectacle produced two costly films,

both set in Ancient Rome, which were destined to have an enormous impact on the

development of film production: The Last Days of Pompeii ( Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei,

Ambrosio, 1913), directed by Eleuterio Rodolfi, 1,958 metres, with, literally, a cast of

hundreds; and Quo vadis? (Cines, 1913), by Enrico Guazzoni, whose length (2,250 m.)

had only ever been surpassed by the Danish film Atlantis (Nordisk, 1913) by August

Blom (2,280 m. excluding intertitles). The Last Days of Pompeii repeated and by far

exceeded the sensational success in America of The Fall of Troy, so that one American

distributor, George Kleine, was even tempted to start up a production company of his own

-- Photodrama of Italy -along with a large studio at Grugliasco, near Turin. His

courageous venture failed on the outbreak of war, but it illustrates eloquently the power of

attraction exercised by Italian cinema outside Italy in the years leading up to 1914.

The apotheosis of the historical genre was reached with Cabiria (Itala Film, 1914), by

Giovanni Pastrone, a film which symbolizes the zenith of achievement of silent cinema in

Italy. The majestic drama set against the background of the Punic wars between Rome

and Carthage was by a wide margin the most lavish film made in that era. Pastrone, a

gifted but reclusive figure, was the first producer to grasp the need for a sound managerial

attitude to film production. Unlike other producers of the time, his background was

modest: he had started out on a career in bookkeeping, but he came to combine his

businesslike style with genuine artistic vision. He tried out new technical possibilities,

such as a camera for amateurs designed to shoot four separate films using a single length

of 35 mm. film divided into four segments; and 'stereoscopic' and 'natural colour' shooting

which were tried, without success, for Cabiria. He acquired a fund of technical knowledge

for his company by hiring an expert from Pathé whose forte was special effects, Segundo

de Chomón. He reorganized his company in 1910 with the adoption of a rigorous and

efficient set of internal regulations, written out in detail and distributed to all employees.

And finally, he secured a sound financial base thanks to the success of André Deed's

comedies and to a number of 'sensational' films such as Tigris, by Vincenzo C. Dénizot,

produced in 1913 and inspired by the success of the French Fantômas series by Louis

Feuillade. All these elements created for Pastrone the opportunity to develop and extend

formal and expressive fields of research.

one of the first results of this ambition was Padre ('Father', Gino Zaccaria and/or Dante

Testa, 1912), in which Ermete Zacconi, a great theatre actor, appeared in front of the

camera for the first time. The even grander aim of Cabiria was to obtain the collaboration

and support of the most famous intellectual figure of the era, Gabriele D'Annunzio.

DAnnunzio agreed to write the intertitles for the film, and was even credited as its author.

However, beyond its literary echoes and its weighty architectural apparatus, Cabiria offers

stylistic and technological solutions which make it a pioneering, avant-garde work. Above

all, it repeatedly uses long tracking shots which move across the scene. Although these

had already been seen in earlier films, such as, among others, Le Pickpocket mystifié

('The pickpocket bewildered', Pathé, 1911), Sumerki racking shots of Cabiria perform a

crucial narrative and descriptive function, and were filmed on a sophisticated system of

tracks which allowed for remarkably complex camera movements.

With the emergence of the full-length feature, the Italian film industry underwent a

further transformation. In order to make a profit on a smaller number of film shows, the

exhibitors enlarged their halls, ticket prices went up, and so, in turn, did the directors'

pretensions. From a popular spectacle, designed in large part for working-class audiences,

cinema became a middle-class form of entertainment. This new situation accentuated the

competition between companies, whose number grew to excess after 1915, shifting the

centre of production from the north ( Turin and Milan) to Rome and Naples, challenging

the monopoly of the bigger companies, and hampering any further consolidation of the

newly formed production base. The embryonic 'studio system' of the years after 1910 was

thus replaced by a growing fragmentation of the industry.

One effect of this new situation, as in all the other major film-making countries, was the