Music and Sport in INCOM Production

DOSSIER

One of the lines developed by Sandro Pallavicini for INCOM (Industria Corti Metraggi [Short Films Industry]), in a wide range of documentaries produced from 1938 to 1965, was on sports. In addition to the news reports presented in the Cinegiornale la Settimana INCOM [Weekly INCOM Newsreel] starting from 1946, these documentaries showed sporting events that were otherwise not viewable to the public until mass television. This was the case, for example, of those set to music by Gervasio. They included the Campionato mondiale di calcio [The World Soccer Cup] which in about an hour and a half reported the world cup held in Brazil in 1950; and Fiorenzo il terzo uomo [Fiorenzo the Third Man] or Le 34° tour d’Italie cyclist [The 34th Cyclist Tour of Italy], a complete documentary film of the great race organized by “La Gazzetta dello Sport”, which in little more than an hour reports the stages of the 1951 Giro d'Italia. This documentary was interspersed with sketches and humorous gags, thanks to the presence of actors such as Aldo Fabrizi, Nino Taranto, Renato Rascel, and Raffaele Pisu. A different approach, which pursues objectives of high formal-technical quality, was theConcerto ginnico [Gymnastic Concerto], a sports and musical documentary in one, in which the gymnastic performances of the 1954 European Athletics Championships are not only commented by music, but intertwined with the images of the orchestra and the soloists.