The city where the biggest Italian production houses of the silent film era
were situated, and the place where people that developed some of the biggest
successes of Italian film history lived and worked.

Unlike other art disciplines, we know the precise date and place of cinematic
art’s occurrence. Rightfully or not, the majority of people regard Paris on
December 18, 1895 to be the place and time of the emergence of film. Even the
parents are well known: the French brothers Lumière. However, history could have
been different had an engineer, Filoteo Alberini, born in Torino on March 14,
1865, successfully finished his invention called Cinetografo Alberini, which he
had registered on November 11, 1895. Nevertheless, Alberini, inhabitant of
Torino, was the author of the first Italian feature film La presa di Roma
or La breccia di porta Pia from 1905, whose theme was the entrance of
king Vittorio Emanuelle’s army into Rome on September 20, 1870.

Despite the fact that due to the technical difficulties with Alberini’s
invention, Torino did not become the official place of film’s emergence, it
became famous as a city in which Italian cinematography started to bloom. It is
the city where the biggest Italian production houses of the silent film era were
situated, and the place where people that developed some of the biggest
successes of Italian film history lived and worked.

It is in Torino that Arturo Ambrosio and Roberto Omegna in 1904 recorded the
first film news and in that way started the filming of documentaries. Only three
years later in May of 1907, Giovanni Papini published one of the first
theoretical articles about film and philosophy in the Torino newspaper La
stampa. Six months later, in December, the famous Italian writer Edmondo de
Amicis published his article “Cinematografo cerebrale” in the L'illustrazione
italiana.

Nevertheless, film production and real successes are what counts. The first
international success of Italian cinematography is connected to a man who was
born and died in Torino. In 1908, Luigi Maggi (1896-1946) made his historical
spectacle Gli ultimi giorni dei Pompei and achieved the first
international success of Italian film. This was the first film in the series
with the same theme, but even more importantly it marked the beginning of the
so-called golden era of Italian cinematography that lasted until 1916 and in
which Italy would be the leading film world power.

This era ended with the, probably, most influential film of the early
cinematography. The film is Cabiria and its director and author, Giovanni
Pastrone or also known as Piero Fosco, died in Torino in 1959. A huge number of
extras, incredible set design and an exciting story full of emotions and
historical events, became the trademark of what the film critics and historians
called gigantism. Nevertheless, one of the motives that characterize the film
and by which it became famous, Pastrone owns to the Polish Henryk Sienkiewicz
and the Italian Enrico Gauzzoni, who adapted this novel into a film two years
earlier. The motif is the one of Urso and Lighya that in Cabiria became
the motif of Maciste and the main female character. Perhaps even Federico
Fellini used this motif – the motif of an unprotected, innocent girl and a
strong man who breaks the chains – in an ironic manner in the relationship of
Gelsomina and Zampano. Nevertheless, Maciste soon became one of the first
great film characters, while the actor who played him, a Genovese harbor worker
Bartolomeo Pagano proved that dreams may come true.

Pastrone was in debt to someone else too –the incredible Spaniard Segundo de
Chomón who arrived to Italy in 1912 and helped Pastrone to construct the camera
trolley that enabled the unbelievable depth of the space and the continuity of
its representation on film. Only two years later, his animated sequence was a
part of another Pastrone’s film.

Even though Torino did not become the official birthplace of film, if you were
in Torino until the 1916, you were in the very heart of film action. Some people
believe that even the famous David Wark Griffith had his own copy of the film
Cabiria. The two brothers from Pisa - Vittorio and Paolo Taviani in their
film Good Morning, Babylonia, hold that opinion, too. (Dario Marković)