Itala Film was an Italian film production company.
Itala Film was an Italian film production company.
It was founded during the silent era. In 1905, industrialists Carlo Rossi and William Remmert established a company in Turin, recruiting filmmakers from Pathé. Two years later, they were joined by Giovanni Pastrone who reorganised the company as Itala. [1] Over the next decade, the company enjoyed enormous growth, aided by signing up Pathé's most popular comedian André Deed. Further development came with the company's production of historical epic films beginning with The Fall of Troy , allowing the company to open a New York office to sell the films in the American market. This policy was crowned with the success of Pastrone's 1914 epic Cabiria set in Ancient Rome. [2]
The company continued to make epics along with literary adaptations, while Maciste, the most popular character in Cabiria, appeared in further films. However, by 1918, Pastrone had lost control of Itala, and the following year the company was absorbed into the conglomerate Unione Cinematografica Italiana which itself collapsed after only a few years. In 1926, the former Turin studios of Itala, now derelict, were acquired as part of the growing film empire of Stefano Pittaluga who already owned the Fert Studios in the city. [3]
In the early 1930s, the Itala Film name was recycled for a Berlin-based company established by the producer Alberto Giacalone. The company specialised in co-productions, or Italian versions of German films. In 1937, Giacalone relocated to Rome, with the firm continuing to operate until 1955.[ citation needed ]
The cinema of Italy comprises the films made within Italy or by Italian directors. Italy is one of the birthplaces of art cinema and the stylistic aspect of film has been one of the most important factors in the history of Italian film. As of 2018, Italian films have won 14 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film as well as 12 Palmes d'Or, one Academy Award for Best Picture and many Golden Lions and Golden Bears.
Cabiria is a 1914 Italian epic silent film, directed by Giovanni Pastrone and shot in Turin. The film is set in ancient Sicily, Carthage, and Cirta during the period of the Second Punic War. It follows a melodramatic main plot about an abducted little girl, Cabiria, and features an eruption of Mount Etna, heinous religious rituals in Carthage, the alpine trek of Hannibal, Archimedes' defeat of the Roman fleet at the Siege of Syracuse and Scipio maneuvering in North Africa. Apart from being a classic on its own terms, the film is also notable for being the first film in which the long-running film character Maciste makes his debut. According to Martin Scorsese, in this work Pastrone invented the epic movie and deserves credit for many of the innovations often attributed to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Among those was the extensive use of a moving camera, thus freeing the feature-length narrative film from "static gaze".
Epic films are a style of filmmaking with large scale, sweeping scope, and spectacle. The usage of the term has shifted over time, sometimes designating a film genre and at other times simply synonymous with big-budget filmmaking. Like epics in the classical literary sense, it is often focused on a heroic character. An epic's ambitious nature helps to set it apart from other types of film such as the period piece or adventure film.
Giovanni Pastrone, also known by his artistic name Piero Fosco, was an Italian film pioneer, director, screenwriter, actor and technician.
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Pathé Exchange, commonly known as Pathé, was an American film production and distribution company, largely of Hollywood's silent era. Known for its groundbreaking newsreel and wide array of shorts, it grew out of the American division of the major French studio Pathé Frères, which began distributing films in the United States in 1904. Ten years later, it produced the enormously successful The Perils of Pauline, a twenty-episode serial that came to define the genre. The American operation was incorporated as Pathé Exchange toward the end of 1914 and spun off as an independent entity in 1921; the Merrill Lynch investment firm acquired a controlling stake. The following year, it released Robert J. Flaherty's groundbreaking documentary Nanook of the North. Other notable feature releases included the controversial drama Sex (1920) and director/producer Cecil B. DeMille's smash-hit biblical epic The King of Kings (1927/28). During much of the 1920s, Pathé distributed the shorts of comedy pioneers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett and innovative animator Paul Terry. For Roach and then his own production company, acclaimed comedian Harold Lloyd starred in many feature and short releases from Pathé and the closely linked Associated Exhibitors.
Henri André Chapais, known as André Deed, was a French actor and director, best known for his Foolshead comedies, produced in the 1900s and 1910s. André Deed was one of the first named actors in cinema, and his film series based around Foolshead were a global success.
Giuseppa Iolanda Menichelli, known professionally as Pina Menichelli, was an Italian actress. After a career in theatre and a series of small film roles, Menichelli was launched as a film star when Giovanni Pastrone gave her the lead role in The Fire (1916). Over the next nine years, Menichelli made a series of films, often trading on her image as a diva and on her passionate, decadent eroticism. Menichelli became a global star, and one of the most appreciated actresses in Italian cinema, before her retirement in 1924, aged 34.
Arturo Ambrosio (1870–1960) was an Italian film producer who was a pioneering and influential figure in the early years of Italian cinema.
Ambrosio Film was an Italian film production and distribution company which played a leading role in Italian cinema during the silent era. Established in Turin in 1906 by the pioneering filmmaker Arturo Ambrosio, assisted by cinematographers Giovanni Vitrotti and Roberto Omegna, the company initially produced large numbers of documentary and fictional short films, but its output quickly grew more ambitious.
Hollywood on the Tiber is a phrase used to describe the period in the 1950s and 1960s when the Italian capital of Rome emerged as a major location for international filmmaking attracting many foreign productions to the Cinecittà studios. By contrast to the native Italian film industry, these movies were made in English for global release. Although the primary markets for such films were American and British audiences, they enjoyed widespread popularity in other countries, including Italy.
Stefano Pittaluga was an Italian film producer, one of several figures who helped revive Italian film production in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Il mostro di Frankenstein is a 1921 Italian silent film directed by Eugenio Testa. The film features actor Luciano Albertini as Baron von Frankenstein and Umberto Guarracino as The Monster. Albertini was known for his strong-man films at the time, particularly the Sansone film series. The film is a lost film, with only a photo, some promotional materials, and a single published review left to give insight to what the film was.
Lidia Quaranta, also known with the stage name of Lydia Quaranta, was an Italian stage and film actress of the early 20th century.
The Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI) was an Italian film production and distribution consortium of the silent era. Following the end of the First World War, a group of eleven leading Italian companies joined forces in a single conglomerate which would be better able to compete with rival films from America, Britain, France and Germany. The driving force behind UCI was Baron Alberto Fassini, who had previously headed the Cines studio.
Letizia Quaranta, also known with the stage name of Laetitia Quaranta, was an Italian film actress. She was mainly active in the silent era of cinema.
Dante Testa was an Italian stage and film actor and theatre and film director whose career began in the 1880s.
The Fall of Troy is a 1911 Italian silent short film directed by Giovanni Pastrone and Luigi Romano Borgnetto. It is the first known adaptation of Homer's epic poem, the Iliad.
The Cines Studios were film production studios located in the Italian capital Rome. They were established on Via Veio in 1930 by Stefano Pittaluga, head of the Cines film company, at the beginning of the sound era. It produced Italy's first sound film The Song of Love the same year. For several years it was the leading studio complex in Italy, until September 1935 when it suffered a major fire and was largely destroyed. This became a spur for the Italian government of Benito Mussolini to invest in the construction of a new development Cinecittà, the largest studio in Europe which opened in 1937.
Leopoldo Metlicovitz was an Italian painter, illustrator and poster designer.
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