Giovanni Pastrone

Giovanni Pastrone
Born(1883-09-13)13 September 1883
Montechiaro d'Asti, Piedmont, Italy
Died27 June 1959(1959-06-27) (aged 75)
Turin, Piedmont, Italy
Other namesPiero Fosco
Occupation(s)Film director, screenwriter, actor, technician
Notable workCabiria

Giovanni Pastrone, also known by his artistic name Piero Fosco (13 September 1883 – 27 June 1959), was an Italian film pioneer, director, screenwriter, actor and technician.[1]

Pastrone was born in Montechiaro d'Asti. He worked during the era of the silent film and influenced many important directors in the international cinema with Cabiria, such as David Wark Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).[2][3]

Martin Scorsese believes that Pastrone's work in Cabiria can be considered as the invention of the epic movie and he deserves credit for many of the innovations often attributed to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.[4] Among those was the extensive use of a moving camera, thus freeing the feature-length narrative film from "static gaze".[5][6]

He died in Turin on 27 June 1959.[7]

  1. ^ Richard Abel (2005). Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Taylor & Francis, 2005, p. 501. ISBN 9780415234405.
  2. ^ Melvyn Stokes (15 January 2008). D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time. Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 122. ISBN 9780198044369.
  3. ^ "D. W. Griffith's Intolerance". Inside/Out, moma.org. 24 November 2009. Archived from the original on 17 May 2020. Retrieved 17 May 2020.
  4. ^ Ebert, Roger (2 July 2006). "Cabiria (1914)". rogerebert.com.
  5. ^ Patrick Keating (18 July 2014). Cinematography. Rutgers University Press, 2014, p. 301. ISBN 9780813563510.
  6. ^ Liz-Anne Bawden (1976). The Oxford Companion to Film. Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 106. ISBN 9780192115416.
  7. ^ "Giovanni Pastrone - Biography". 17 May 2020. Archived from the original on 17 May 2020.