CABIRIA: 1914 126mins Director: Giovanni pastrone Cast: Lidia Quaranta (Cabiria), Umberto Mozzato (Fulvius Axilla), Bartolomeo pagano (Maciste), Gina Marangoni (Croessa)
Looking back through the innovations of cinema, determining “firsts” becomes a tricky business, the term itself being open to interpretation. The Jazz Singer, for instance, often cited as the first talking picture, contains so little sound it hardly justifies the term talkie. Furthermore, sound had been experimented with on film since Thomas Edison was in the business. Likewise, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is not the first animated feature…if by ‘animated’ one is including stop-motion. In that case the crown goes to 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed.
And so it is in this line that D.W. Griffith has his position challenged as the pioneer of the feature-film. Of course, here semantics matter too matter. Boxing matches had been filmed in their entirety since the turn of the century, but these cannot be called movies in the strictest sense of the term. Still, The Birth of a Nation has some heavy competition, especially starting in the early 1910s when the possibilities of film were expanding. L. Frank Baum made a number of movies based on his Oz books out of his short-lived film studio and Keystone (Biograph’s zany sister studio) threw its lead stars into Tillie’s Punctured Romance. Griffith himself was gradually stretching the length of his shorts, reaching almost feature length in 1914 with Judith of Bethulia.
But why Birth of a Nation is credited as the first full-length film and not Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria is something of a mystery. To be sure, Birth of a Nation perfected cinematic language and techniques more so than Cabiria and had a greater overall impact on the medium. Still, Cabiria is the first film which by any standard can be called a feature. “In length alone the film surpasses all previous efforts to produce a picture to be shown in a single evening,” South Australia’s The Critic observed.
In its own way it was an innovator, introducing cinema to the colossal possibilities of ancient world epics. With its splendid sets depicting marble palaces, hundreds of extras as Roman soldiers and villagers and a menagerie of exotic animals (camels, a leopard and Indian elephants as Hannibal’s steeds for his journey across the Alps) the vibrations of the film could be felt throughout the career of Cecil B. DeMille. Griffith himself, no stranger to the fascination with the days of pharaohs and kings, would emulate the spirit of Pastrone’s epic in Intolerance.
Cabiria, however, is also a cumulative film, the pieces that came together to make it a whole can be traced in earlier work. Griffith’s influence can be felt primarily in a thematic sense. As is the case with his American counterpart, Pastrone’s depiction of women coasts from fragility and vulnerability to veneration for courage and virtue. In discussing The Birth of a Nation critic Dave Kehr observed that while the film’s overt racism is easily acknowledged, its confused attitude toward women often goes unnoticed. Cabiria, the titular girl (played in her childhood years by Carolina Catena and as an adult by Lidia Quaranta), does little more than survive the eruption of Mount Etna (through no pluck of her own) only to be captured by Phoenician pirates and sent to Carthage as a prisoner of the High Priest Karthalo (Dante Testa). She is rescued just before being sacrificed to the god Moloch by Roman spy Fulvius Axilla (Umberto Mozzato) and his slave Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano). While Cabiria herself is not afforded as much as a reaction to any of these perils it is important to note, however, that she is rescued from the burning city by her nurse Croessa (Gina Marangoni) who is later also responsible for sending Fulvius and Maciste to her rescue from the temple of Moloch, an act for which she pays with her life when Karthalo discovers her treason. Her other benefactor is also a woman. Sophonisba (Italia Almirante-Manzini), niece to Hannibal and enemy to Rome, shields the fugitive in her palace where she shelters her for a decade as the Second Punic War continues. Like Croessa, Sophonisba sacrifices herself for the greater good. In light of all this and the empty canvas that Cabiria remains, the finale in which she sails off with Fulvius as his bride feels all the more arbitrary, having arrived with no build-up for what seems like an unlikely romance anyway. Even the melodrama (of the sort Griffith was fond of) involving the star-crossed love of Sophonisba and Masinissa (Vitale DiStefano) feels natural by comparison.
Stylistically, Cabiria owes more than a little to Georges Méliès. In particular, the matte shot depicting the images of a nightmare while the sleeping Sophonisba squirms in discomfort bring to life the French filmmaker’s 1898 The Astronomer’s Dream. The mechanisms of the gigantic face of Moloch at the entrance of the temple as well as the statue of the god itself into which children are thrown as sacrifices are similar to 1912’s Conquest of the Pole, one of Méliès’s last works and the superimposed sea sprites frolicking around Fulvius’s ship in the last shot hark back to Méliès early fantasies.
Not surprisingly, contemporary reviews were enthusiastic. Typical of the responses was the write-up in Australia’s The Mail: “This wonderful picture play, representing the highest point ever attained in the sphere of kinematographic art, has created enormous enthusiasm in Italy and America. It deals with the struggle which occurred three centuries before the birth of Christ between the might of republican Rome and the powerful armies of Carthage. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the famous Italian poet, dramatist, and author is the writer of the scenario of Cabiria. He also supervised the rehearsals and production of the film, designed the costumes, chose the settings for the various scenes, and saw that everything was correct historically. The film is the longest ever made. It takes a whole evening to screen it, and it is crammed full with the stupendous incidents of the great Punic wars, presented in a most realistic style. It shows the army of Hannibal crossing the Alps, it vividly pictures an eruption of Mount Etna, it brings before the spectator the burning of the Roman fleet, the siege of Cirta and the sacrifices to Moloch, the hideous infant-consuming idol of Carthage. Through all this tremendous concourse of events runs a sweet love story. Its heroine is Cabiria, an innocent Sicilian maiden, who is captured and enslaved at Carthage. Her lover is Fulvius Axilla, a Roman Patrician, who with his slave Maciste, one of the most extraordinary figures ever introduced into a photo play, experiences the most thrilling adventures. In the production of Cabiria 700 actors, 50 horses, and 20 elephants were busily engaged for 14 months. The total cost of production borne by the Italian Film Company was £50,000.” Cabiria owes a lot to the earliest film innovators but its own influence peaked more than fifty years later when the world of ancient spectacle once again became a grand arena for filmmakers.
