Three centuries before Christus. Young Cabiria is kidnapped by some pirates during one eruption of the Etna. She is sold as a slave in Carthage, and as she is just going to be sacrificed to god Moloch, Cabiria is rescued by both Fulvio Axilla, a Roman noble, and his giant slave Maciste.
According to Martin Scorsese, in this work Pastrone invented the epic movie and deserves credit for many of the innovations often attributed to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Among those was the extensive use of a moving camera, thus freeing the feature-length narrative film from "static gaze". Now, I prefer to think of the "moving camera" as a German invention, but I would be more than happy to grant Pastrone the epic.
The film also marked the debut of the Maciste character, who went on to have a long career in Italian sword and sandal films. This is actually one of the most impressive cultural achievements, because the character Maciste became really has very little to do with this film. Whole studies could be done on how Maciste evolved.
According to Martin Scorsese, in this work Pastrone invented the epic movie and deserves credit for many of the innovations often attributed to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Among those was the extensive use of a moving camera, thus freeing the feature-length narrative film from "static gaze". Now, I prefer to think of the "moving camera" as a German invention, but I would be more than happy to grant Pastrone the epic.
The film also marked the debut of the Maciste character, who went on to have a long career in Italian sword and sandal films. This is actually one of the most impressive cultural achievements, because the character Maciste became really has very little to do with this film. Whole studies could be done on how Maciste evolved.