by Ramón Alòs Sánchez
Italia, 2015, 52'
Mood Film (Lucca e Roma)
It tells the story of the encounter between the director and producer from Turin Giovanni Pastrone and the Spanish cameraman and expert in special effects Segundo de Chomón. Their professional relation will last 7 years and will soon reveal itself as the source of their revolutionary idea of cinema, a basis for modern techniques. In 1912 Pastrone wrote to Chomon in Spain to join him with Itala Film, his production company. He needed an expert in SFX for a new kind of entertainment. Chomon moves to Turin and the two cooperate in the making of colossal Cabiria, a milestone in modern cinema that will make Italian professionels famopus worldwide. Clips from this movie and others they made together, interviews, stills and shooting of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema will investigate the behind the scenes of turineese cinema in the early 900s.
We wish to pay an homage to Segundo de Chomón and Giovanni Pastrone, two pioneers who chose cinema as their own lifestyle.
Studying their creative development, we are going to take a deep insight into the great innovations they introduced and that made Italian cinema famous all over the world. We will show Chomón’s films where imagination and technical skills reveal the genius of its creator, unknown to the most. We will focus on Pastrone’s innovative idea of the cinema business – the attention to the production work as a whole, the taste for epic stories, the use of new-built sets with grand shenography, the role of cinematography and music, the creation of ‘film stars’. The story of Pastrone and Chomón will tell how they both played an active role in the technique and narrative revolution that lead to the modern idea of cinema. Their experience will witness they intended cinema the way we still do nowadays, as a refinend yet popular show that attracts and moves the souls of wide ranges of audience.