Photograph of Francesco Pasinetti, The City of Venice. www.comune.venezia.it

Francesco Pasinetti, an Italian author and director from Venice wrote the first history of Italian film making.  He is still honored each year at the Venice Film Festival with an award in his name given to spotlight Italian filmmakers and a viewing room in the Palazzo del Cinema has been named after him.  Pasinetti published many books including The Smile on the Face of the Lion in 1965, but he is best remembered as a Venetian filmmaker.  Pasinetti produced a number of films during his lifetime that involved Venice as the backdrop to his stories.  These films include The Canal of the Angels from 1934, a love story of a sailor who falls in love with a married woman in Venice whose child becomes seriously ill.[1]  The film presented a more melancholy vision of daily Italian life than what was normally depicted which critics described as. “a true documentary style.”[2]
Documentary filmmaking was the most popular genre of film during the war-era as it typically used stock footage or footage of factually based events but could be presented in a dramatic or stylized form.  In the case of Pasinetti, the story behind his film The Canal of the Angels was fictional but the way in which he presented the city of Venice was the most accurate of his time.  Pasinetti is remembered in part because he offered the first written insight into the Italian film industry before World War II broke-out and just two years after The Canal of the Angelswas released.