Once again, the Italian Cultural Institute presents a unique cinematic concert, with a screening of Giovanni Pastrone’s Il fuoco (1915), accompanied by Maestro Stefano Maccagno’s live piano improvisation, presented in collaboration with the Department of French Francophonie and Italian Studies, and the School of Music at University of Kansas.
Spark, blaze, and ash: fire and passion are destined to follow the same path of rise and fall. Giovanni Pastrone tells this story in one of his masterpieces, a drama both baroque and essential, which launched the mysterious owl-woman Pina Menichelli into the firmament of movie divas. The actress was yet to be famous when Il fuoco was released, but her charisma immediately won over audiences, giving life to a new model of distant and fatal dark lady.
Giovanni Pastrone (1883–1959), also known under the pseudonym Piero Fosco—used to present Il fuoco—was a director and film producer, one of the pioneers of Italian silent cinema. As director of Itala Film, he is renowned for the epic Cabiria (1914), which introduced technical and narrative innovations that went on to influence world cinema.
Director: Giovanni Pastrone (Piero Fosco) – Cinematography: Segundo de Chomón – Production: Itala Film, Turin – Original length: 1100 m – Copy length: 1038 m – Intertitles: Italian (with English subtitles) – Cast and characters: Pina Menichelli (the poetess), Febo Mari (the painter Mario Alberti).
The restoration of Il fuoco was carried out by the National Cinema Museum in 1991 at the Favro laboratory in Turin, starting from a duplicate negative printed in the 1960s, itself sourced from an unedited nitrate negative now lost. The restoration of the editing sequence, color tinting, and original intertitles was achieved on the basis of original production materials preserved by the Museum.
Free and open to the public.
Stefano Maccagno. Pianist, composer, conductor, professor of improvisation, orchestration, composition and orchestration of music for images. He is the official composer of the National Cinema Museum of Turin, for which he has composed and orchestrated the music for numerous silent cinema masterpieces including Cabiria, Royal Tiger, Maciste, The Whispering Chorus, Blood and Sand. He has collaborated as soundtrack composer with the “Italian National Film Archive” in Milan. He has been pianist accompanist of the biggest masterpieces of silent cinema at Cannes Film Festival, Bologna international film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, Lumiere Festival in Lyon Pordenone Silent Film Days, Cinémathèque Française and Tokyo National Film Center. On commission of the Teatro dell’Opera di Florence he wrote a composition for a large symphony orchestra on music by Led Zeppelin performed by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra, which he directed himself at the Teatro dell’Opera in Florence. He has composed the music score for Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988, recording with actress Trine Dirholm (best actress award at Berlinale 2017). He is the official pianist of the Cabiria restoration project, which has accompanied at Cannes and Berlin film festivals as well as in Belgrade, Budapest, Lyon, Luxembourg, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo, Vancouver.