Cabiria

It is only the second film of the 1910s in the archive (alongside 1916's Intolerance) and one of the earliest titles in the whole collection, first shown in Italy on 18 April 1914. It was chosen to pair with Pan's Labyrinth because the two sit ninety-two years apart yet share one structure: a child seized by the machinery of war and recovered through the intervention of legendary figures. It is also a fixed point in the history of film language - the first popular feature to mount the camera on a dolly and move it through the scene, a device contemporaries simply called the Cabiria shot. In June 1914 it became the first film screened at the White House. Martin Scorsese introduced the restored print shown at Cannes in 2006, arguing that Pastrone invented the epic where credit is usually given to Griffith.

影片开场的西西里，埃特纳火山爆发，小女孩 Cabiria 与乳母在逃难中被腓尼基海盗劫走，母女从此失散，被卖到迦太基。几年后，迦太基祭司把她选定献给魔神 Moloch；罗马贵族 Fulvius Axilla 与他的大力士奴隶 Maciste 潜入城中，把她从大祭坛前救走。故事并没有停在这里：汉尼拔率军翻越阿尔卑斯山南下意大利，Fulvius 与 Cabiria 在战火中被一次次冲散，Maciste 被俘后在采石场戴上镣铐，阿基米德在西拉库扎城下用镜子阵列点燃了罗马舰队。最后一场攻城用了「人类金字塔」式的人群调度， Sophonisba 王后的结局与 Cabiria 的重逢，前后相隔十年。整部影片分五幕，近三个小时的篇幅里，私人命运始终挂在帝国战争的轴上。

Its place in the history of film language is close to unique: it is credited as the first popular feature to mount the camera on a dolly and move it through the scene, pushing in and pulling back, a device contemporaries called the Cabiria shot; Griffith's Intolerance (1916) took the cue directly from it, and much of the epic grammar habitually credited to Griffith or DeMille belongs first to Pastrone, as Scorsese argues in his introduction to the restored print. It is also the debut of Maciste, a character that recurs through decades of Italian popular cinema. The sources are Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Flaubert's 1862 novel Salammbo and Salgari's 1908 Cartagine in fiamme; the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio worked on the screenplay, wrote every intertitle and gave the film its name. In June 1914 it became the first film screened at the White House, on the south lawn. The 2006 restoration, at 190 minutes, played Cannes with a new score, and the history of its music is its own footnote: Pizzetti's Sinfonia del fuoco was performed only once in 1914 and not heard again until 1988.