PASTRONE, GIOVANNI

(1883-1959)

Producer and director. Long known as merely the producer and director ofCabiria(1914), Pastrone has continued to grow in stature as more recent research has revealed his major role in, and contribution to, the Italian film industry during its golden silent period.

A gifted child with a talent for both music and languages, Pastrone was soon forced to abandon music in favor of accounting. It was as a bright junior accountant and factotum that he joined the Turin film company of Carlo Rossi & C. in 1907. Within six months he had risen through the ranks and become a full partner. When Rossi left to work for theCinesin Rome, Pastrone and fellow partner, Carlo Sciamengo, formedItala Film. Pastrone soon reorganized the company on a firm business basis, introducing stricter management, planning, and accounting practices as well as technical innovations. Recognizing the popularity of comic sketches at the time, he lured Pathe's most successful resident comic,Andre Deed, to come to Turin to work for Itala. Deed'sCretinettifilms, turned out for a time at the rate of one a week, were a gold mine for the company and kept it solvent. At the same time Pastrone produced and directed the epic spectacleLa caduta di Troia(The Fall of Troy, 1910). Poorly received at home, the film broke box office records in the United States, allowing Pastrone to open up an American subsidiary. It also prompted him to plan the greatest film made to date,Cabiria, a film that would require almost a year and an astronomical budget to make.Taking out a patent on what would become known as the dolly—Hitchcock would later attest that in his early days it was known in the trade as thecabiria—Pastrone also shrewdly recruited the best special effects cinematographer of the day, Segundo De Chomon, to work for Itala. With the film meticulously planned and partly completed, Pastrone conceived the masterstroke of approaching the current greatest literary name in Italy, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and paying him a huge fee to accept paternity of the film, an offer that D'Annunzio gleefully accepted.

D'Annunzio's name helped to make what was an extraordinary cinematic achievement even more spectacularly successful at the box office and thus allowed Pastrone to proceed to other projects. In the following years, as well as initiating the long line of films featuringMaciste, the musclebound strongman fromCabiria, he also directed (under the pseudonym Piero Fosco) the divaPina MenichelliinII Fuoco(The Fire, 1915) andTigre reale(Royal Tigress, 1916) and his own discovery, Itala Almirante Manzini, in a fine adaptation of Ibsen'sHedda Gabbler(1919). Nevertheless, by the end of World War I, with the onset of the crisis that would soon decimate the Italian film industry, Pastrone had lost financial control of Itala. He briefly joined theUnione Cinematografia Italiana(UCI) under duress, but following the trust's refusal to fund a major project he had proposed, he left the industry to carry on scientific and other studies in private for many years. His only real connection with the cinema was the reissue of a version ofCabiriawith a coordinated musical track in the early 1930s and his strong support for the setting up of the National Film Museum in Turin. He died in 1959 just as the new golden age of Italian cinema was beginning.