Italian filmmaker Francesco Pasinetti (1911-1949) was one of the country’s first film scholars and an accomplished teacher. In Italy, he is best known for his work as a film critic and documentary filmmaker. Pasinetti’s work consistently turned to everyday life, ordinary people, and lived spaces, particularly in the films he shot in Venice. Titles such as Il canale degli angeli (The Canal of the Angels), La gondola (The Gondola), I piccioni di Venezia (The Pigeons of Venice), Venezia minore (Little Venice) and Venezia in festa (Venice in Celebration) approach the city beyond its well-known monuments and classic iconography, instead presenting spaces shaped by human presence and daily activity.
“He was pivotal in establishing a peninsular film culture in the years straddling the Second World War,” says Alberto Zambenedetti, Associate Professor in the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies. “His work in fiction filmmaking is much less known and celebrated,” he adds. This may be explained by Pasinetti’s premature death which cut short the development of his career and limited his chances of gaining international recognition.
In the decades following the centenary of his birth, Pasinetti’s legacy is slowly being rediscovered. Professor Zambenedetti’s critical edition of his scenarios and screenplays is the latest installment in this scholarly effort. Published by Marsilio Editori, a Venice-based publishing house, Francesco Pasinetti: Soggetti e sceneggiature (Francesco Pasinetti: Scenarios and Screenplays) collects writings preserved in the Francesco Pasinetti Fonds at the Carlo Montanaro archive in Venice and addresses a long-standing gap in Pasinetti scholarship. “The scenarios and screenplays reveal that he was trying to transfer his documentary experience into the realm of scripted fiction,” Professor Zambenedetti explains. In this interview, he reflects on Pasinetti’s legacy and how his screenplays stand as “a testament of this cinema that never was.”
What led you to focus on Pasinetti’s unrealized cinematic projects, and why do you think this aspect of his work has been so little studied until now?
This book is part of a larger project on Francesco Pasinetti (1911-1949), which includes a translation of his critical work and a collection of essays. Pasinetti’s accomplishments are understudied in anglophone academia, partly because he didn’t participate in neorealism and he died so young. But he is a fairly well-known figure in Italy, as he was pivotal in establishing a peninsular film culture in the years straddling the Second World War. I was doing some research in the Archivio Carlo Montanaro in Venice, where the Francesco Pasinetti Fonds is housed, and that’s where I had the idea of preparing a critical edition of his many unmade projects, which include three projects he co-wrote with Michelangelo Antonioni. Only two articles exist about these works, and I believe it is important that they are made available for more people to read and study.
How does engaging with Pasinetti’s subjects and screenplays change our understanding of him as a filmmaker and intellectual?
While Pasinetti’s legacy as a pioneering documentarian is undisputed, his work in fiction filmmaking is much less known and celebrated. The scenarios and screenplays reveal that he was trying to transfer his documentary experience into the realm of scripted fiction, building character and story out of the environment, either focusing on local traditions and folklore (as he does in the many projects set in Venice), or by following the tribulations of artists (actors, musicians, painters, sculptors) in a bourgeois world. The projects reveal much about his background (he was born in a well-to-do Venetian family), his upbringing (he descended from a dynasty of famous landscape painters), his interests (he loved to write and stage plays with his younger brother), and his aspirations (not only did he contribute to film institutions from an early age, he also pictured himself leading them).
What role did the Carlo Montanaro Archive in Venice play in shaping this volume, and were there any particularly surprising discoveries in the archive?
Carlo Montanaro is one of the world’s leading early film historians, and he is also the custodian of the Francesco Pasinetti Fonds. Over the past 50 years, Carlo has written and edited several books on Pasinetti, reconstructing his work as a photographer and critic. He also restored Pasinetti's films and celebrated his legacy during the centenary of his birth in 2011. My project is simply an extension of Carlo’s indefatigable work to properly position Pasinetti in the history of Italian cinema. I could not have done it without Carlo’s support and guidance.
In what ways do these unpublished texts allow us to imagine the “cinema that might have been,” and how do they resonate with or diverge from Pasinetti’s completed works?
Throughout his life, Pasinetti bemoaned the fact that he was unable to get a fiction film made (his only feature is Il canale degli angeli). He tried to get backing at home and abroad, with no luck. The screenplays in this volume are a testament of this cinema that never was. They speak of an extremely competent, at times masterful craftsman who never had the opportunity to fully flourish in spite of his extraordinary productivity. That bad luck sometimes extended to documentary cinema as well. One example is the screenplay for his unmade documentary on Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), which in its first draft contains truly revolutionary narrative solutions. Unfortunately, Pasinetti was asked to pull back on the innovations that would have made this film a true masterpiece, and the successive versions of the text highlight this involution. In his completed films, such as the masterful Venezia minore (1942), Pasinetti couples technical innovation with a keen desire to reveal the intricacies of Venetian life to the world. The Goldoni piece clearly displays a similar commitment to do justice to the memory of the great playwright.
What do you hope this book will contribute to future research on Pasinetti and to broader studies of Italian cinema and unrealized film projects?
This book is meant to make the materials available to both Italian cinema researchers and the general public. My contributions, which are the linguistic/philological apparatus in the footnotes and the historical/cultural gloss in the endnotes, as well as the introductory notes, provide context and depth. I hope readers will enjoy discovering this little-known side of Francesco Pasinetti and appreciate his superb understanding of the medium and his innovative (for the time) approach to filmmaking.