Sandro Pallavicini

Newsreel producer

Archivio Storico - Istituto Luce

1908-1966

Rome, New York

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Sando Pallavicini was born in Ronciglione, near Viterbo, on February 23, 1908. In the early 1930s, he met in Rome Margaret Christine Roosevelt, a distant cousin of the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The two were married in Rome in 1935, arousing wide interest in the American press, which gave wide coverage to the event.

Pallavicini initially worked as a film director. He then founed the Industria Cortometraggi Milano (INCOM) in 1938. This was a private production company specialized in the realization of short films, documentaries and newsreels, modeled on the journalistic information style of the American The March of Time.

In the aftermath of World War II, in February 1946, Pallavicini launched the newsreel that more than any other documented the main stages of Italy's postwar economic reconstruction, La Settimana Incom. Notoriously pro-American, Pallavicini was the only Italian producer of short films and documentaries to entertain, since 1945 and for all the following years, a fruitful series of public relations with overseas American producers and distributors. This network gave him access to a wide variety of film materials and footage from the US. More importantly, his many relations with prominent American producers, officials and dsitributors allowed Pallavicini to make Incom the main exporter of Italian newsreel films to the United States.

Due to a series of disagreements, Pallavicini left the editorship of La Settimana Incom in 1956. He however continued to work in the news business. Bwtween 1956 and 1958, he directed the European newsreel Ciac, owned by Angelo Rizzoli. He was also a director of the Italian Film export (IFE) and, from 1965, vice president of Rizzoli Film Distribution Inc, based in New York.

Pallavicini died at his home in New York on June 14, 1966.

Media gallery

Sources

M.A. Frabotta, L’Italia e il mondo nella dimensione degli anni Cinquanta: i cinegiornali Incom, in L’Italia e la politica di potenza in Europa (1950-1960), edited by E. Di Nolfo - R.H. Rainero - B. Vigezzi, Milano 1992, pp. 371-389.

A. Sainati (eds), La Settimana Incom. Cinegiornali e informazione negli anni Cinquanta. Torino: Lindau, 2001.

Author Giulia Crisanti