At 9pm on Saturday, May 27th of 2006, in the Salle Bunuel screening
room of the Cannes Palais des Festivals, I saw Giovanni Pastrone's 1914
historical epic masterpiece "Cabiria" in its full restored glory. It
was an experience I'll never forget. Onstage, a pianist dressed in a
black tuxedo played classical musical accompaniment to the 180-minute
story, set during the Punic Wars of the third century B.C. when a young
girl named Cabiria is kidnapped with her nurse while Mount Etna erupts
in the background. Sold off to be sacrificed at the temple of Moloch,
Cabiria's only hope for rescue lies in the hands of Fulvio Axilla
(Umberto Mozzato), a Roman spy, and his muscle-bound slave Maciste
(Bartolomeo Pagano). To watch Pastrone's seminal film is to understand
how the Italian violinist-turned-filmmaker invented grand spectacle
cinema with the use of enormous scale and a long running time–it was
the first film to be over three-hours long. For "Cabiria," Pastrone
pioneered the use of deep-focus filming and the since-ubiquitous
"tracking-shot"–two years before D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"
would employ similar techniques. There isn't much in a modern director
like James Cameron's bag of hi-tech tricks that can take your breath
away the way "Cabiria" does. The exotic drama, suspense, and daring
stunts on display in Pastrone's film of "12,000 shots" is every bit, if
not more effective, than that of modern filmmakers whose use
green-screen CGI is frequently used more as a crutch than a meaningful
storytelling technique. "Cabiria" sits comfortably alongside such grand
scale silent films as Sergei Eisenstein's "The Battleship Potemkin"
(1925), Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927), and Abel Gance's "Napoleon"
(1925). If you ever have an opportunity to view any of these great
films in their restored state, don't hesitate to witness the creation
of cinema's rich vernacular at its source.
