Encyclopedia of Early Cinema（Part J）.pdfVIP

Encyclopedia of early cinema 494 J Jacobini, Maria b. 1892; d. ? actor, Italy Born to an upper-middle-class family in Rome, Jacobini began her acting career with Savoia. Despite her family’s opposition, Maria as well as her sister Diomira, who also became a lesser-known actress, prevailed. In her early films, Jacobini played dangerous and alluring vamps, as in Zingara [Gipsy] (1912). By 1916, however, it was clear that she excelled in somewhat melancholic, delicate roles that demanded a sober, understated acting style. Hence the success of Come Le Foglie (1916) directed by Gennaro Righelli— who later became her husband—and Addio Giovinezza (1918) directed by Augusto Genina, in commemoration of Nino Oxilia. After working in Italy, Germany, and France during the 1920s, Jacobini’s career ended with the advent of sound. From 1937 on, she taught acting at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; among her pupils was Alida Valli. ANGELA DALLE VACCHE Janssen, Pierre-Jules-César b. 1824; d. 1907 astronomer, France Venus passes between the Sun and the Earth only twice in a century. In 1849, Hervé Faye had suggested that photography could be used to record this phenomenon and so determine, scientifically, the parallax of the Sun and its distance to the Earth. Janssen advanced this idea by exploiting the principle of Plateau’s stroboscopic disc as well as the photography of movement advocated before him by Ducos du Hauron, Du Mont, Cook and Bonelli. Thus, in 1873, he devised his “photo graphic gun”: thanks to a rotating obdurator, the machine was able to shoot 48 successive images in about 72 seconds on a mobile daguerreotype disc 7.28