CABIRIA (1914) B/W "silent" 127m dir: Giovanni Pastrone (under the name Piero Fosco)

w/Lidia Quaranta, Umberto Mozzato, Bartolomeo Pagano, Italia Almirante-Manzini, Alex Bernard, V. de Stefano, Enrico Gemelli, Luigi Chellini

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films: "During the Second Punic War, a Roman Patrician, Fulvio (Mozzato), and his slave, Maciste (Pagano), save Queen Sophonisbe and a young Sicilian slave-girl, Cabiria (Quaranta) who was about to be sacrificed. ...

"Pastrone, an enterprising Italian producer, wrote the script. Before directing it (under the name Piero Fosco), he asked Gabriele D'Annunzio if he would put his name to it. He accepted without further ado after being paid 50,000 gold lire, but restricted himself to rewriting the pompous titles and to naming the heroes, then announced to all and sundry that he had composed a 'Greco-Roman-Punic drama.' It was the first production to cost over a million dollars. Enormous and sumptuous sets were built in Turin while exteriors were shot in Tunisia, Sicily, and the Alps.

"Main sequences: the sacrifices to Baal, with the bronze statue swallowing up the children in the flames; the siege of Syracuse and Archimedes setting fire to the Roman fleet with burning mirrors; the shipwreck of the heroes; Hannibal's armies and elephants in the snows of the Alps; Maciste's exploits after the fall of Carthage.

"Cabiria brought about many revolutionary innovations in film technique. This is especially true in its systematic use of the traveling shot, which sometimes allowed Pastrone to isolate his characters (who appeared in close-up as the camera tracked forward) and sometimes allowed him to emphasize the perspectives of the enormous sets (constructed of shining, false marble blocks).

"The acting (more restrained than is often said) is dominated by the Herculean Pagano, a docker from Genoa who had been discovered and hired by Pastrone. Cabiria was a world-wide success (including Japan) and its technical innovations and spectacular sets revolutionized the cinema. The film had an especially strong impact in the USA, where it profoundly influenced Cecil B. DeMille and the producers of Ben Hur, among others. It also influenced [D.W.] Griffith, who studied Cabiria closely before making the Babylonian sequence of Intolerance. The character of Maciste became accepted as myth and has since been used in scores of Italian spectaculars."