Cabiria
Italy, 1914
Director: Giovanni Pastrone
Script: Giovanni Pastrone
Cast: Lidia Quaranta, Umberto Mozzato, Bartolomeo Pagano
Genre: Silent movies
Plot
The aristocrat Batto has his residence in the surroundings of Etna. The Sicilian volcano erupts. The prayers that Batto, his family and employees make to appease the wrath of the gods are of little use.
However, several servants find a secret subway passage and manage to escape. Among them is the nanny Croesa, who takes with her little Cabiria, Batto’s daughter. The servants discover in the underground the treasures that the aristocrat had accumulated, and take the opportunity to plunder it.
The next day, Batto and his wife weep disconsolately, believing that their daughter has perished under the rubble. But Cabiria is safe, thanks to Croesa. Both, along with the other servants, reach the coast and are about to embark on a ship that is there when Phoenician pirates appear and capture them.
Pirates take them to Carthage, where they are sold in the slave market. Croesa and Cabiria are bought by an evil priest of Moloch, who wants to sacrifice the little girl.
In Carthage, the patrician Fulvius Axilla and his assistant, the strongman Maciste, are on a secret mission. Both of them are spying for Rome in the North African state.
Croesa tries to prevent Cabiria from being sacrificed, but her strategy is unsuccessful, and she is whipped by her captors. She is then released. The nanny meets by chance Fulvius and Maciste, to whom she implores for help to prevent Cabiria from being thrown into the jaws of the demon-god…
However, Croesa and the two Romans manage to intervene in time. They save Cabiria and flee from the temple of Moloch (“the voracious creator”, as his followers call him) pursued by the furious Carthaginians. Fulvio, Maciste and the girl hide in an inn, giving the fanatics the slip.
Meanwhile, the Carthaginian general Hannibal crosses the Alps with his soldiers, mounted on elephants. Danger looms over Rome. An emissary comes to the inn to warn Fulvius about it. The patrician decides to return.
At the same time, Sophonisma, Asdrubal’s daughter, has been betrothed by her father to the Numidian king. But the princess has a suitor among the Carthaginian knights…
An informer reveals to the priests of the temple of Moloch that the Romans are hiding in an inn. Fulvius throws himself off a cliff into the sea and sets sail for Rome. Maciste, who takes Cabiria with him, arrives at the gardens of Asdrubal. There he encounters Sophonisma and her betrothed. The colossus is caught and chained to a millstone.
His patron, meanwhile, arrives in Rome to confront Hannibal. Fulvius departs in a fleet bound for Syracuse, a city allied with the Carthaginians. There is the old wise man Archimedes, who devises an effective weapon of war against ships: the famous giant magnifying glass. Thus the Roman ships are burned.
The shipwright Fulvio arrives on another Sicilian coast. He wears the ring given to him by Croessa, and for this he is recognized by other servants of Batto. Fulvio receives the hospitality of Batto and his wife, who have already rebuilt their domain. Cabiria’s parents learn that the girl survived. Fulvius offers to return to Carthage to find her and return her to her parents.
At the same time, the Roman general Scipio Africanus also sets out to repel the Carthaginian advance.
Once in Carthage, Fulvius locates and frees Maciste, who was still a slave turning the wheel of a mill. Ten years have passed since they last saw each other. The Herculean Roman knows nothing of what happened to the girl Cabiria, who must now be a woman.
And at the Carthaginian court, Asdrubal has betrothed his daughter Sophonisba to a Numidian warlord. The high priest Karthalo is infatuated with the princess’s favorite slave, supposedly named Elissa…
Sophonisba has a dream in which she sees a girl escaping from the jaws of Moloch. The demon-god is furious about it, which represents bad omens for Carthage. Sophonisba summons the high priest to interpret her nightmare.
After a battle, Fulvius and Maciste are captured. Thanks to the prodigious strength of the latter, who bends the bars, they manage to escape from the dungeon. Maciste sets out to settle the score with the demonic priest of Moloch, and when he enters his quarters he discovers that Karthalo is mistreating a young woman who looks quite familiar…
Comment
Although this colossal feature film is not from the ’20s but even earlier, we thought it appropriate to include it in our special space dedicated to the cinema of a century ago, because it is a blockbuster that has nothing to envy to the great silent classics that would be filmed in the following decade, and that would also lay the foundations for a film genre that we will also discuss in this blog: The peplum.
“Cabiria,” filmed in the same year that World War I began, is a story written by none other than the great playwright and novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio. The central theme is the conflict between Rome and Carthage – two diametrically opposed worldviews. We are presented here with an essential conflict between two worlds; the Roman telurocracy of the imperial type (although it was still the time of the Republic), and the Phoenician thalassocratic mercantilism (the Carthaginians were directly related to the Phoenicians).
Maciste, played by Bartolomeo Pagano, was the subject of a whole series of films. And decades later, in the fifties, the figure of this hero reminiscent of Hercules would become popular with the peplum genre.
This was the first film in which Bartolomeo Pagano, who was not a professional actor but a dockworker in Genoa, took part. His muscular physique and good poise in front of the cameras opened the door to a film career as the protagonist of the Maciste franchise throughout the 1920s.
In “Cabiria” worked the Spanish Segundo de Chomón, one of the pioneers of the seventh art in our country.
This epic film combines drama, adventure and historical genre. The Punic Wars, which took place around two centuries B.C., serve as the setting for the plot. Before reaching Italy, crossing the Alps with their elephants, Hannibal and the Carthaginians were in Hispania, subduing most of the Iberian peoples and founding cities like Cartagena in Murcia. Hannibal, Asdrubal and the Carthaginian elite were part of the Barca clan. This word, in Semitic languages, is related to light or brightness. In Arabic, the word “baraka” refers to a kind of magical luck or fortune. And it is believed that etymologically the name of the city of Barcelona derives from the aristocratic Carthaginian surname of the Barca family. The film also features the general Scipio Africanus, the great strategist of pre-imperial Rome, who took Hispania from the Carthaginians.
Queen Sophonisba conspires to turn allied military leaders against Rome in an attempt to make Carthage prevail. The Punic Wars serve as the setting for the story of Cabiria, who cannot really be considered the protagonist.
In addition to the terrible Moloch, in the palace of Carthage appear other gods of the Phoenician-Carthaginian pantheon, including huge cats, reminiscent of the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet. In fact, in the sets there is a very similar style between the Carthaginian divinities and the Egyptian ones (which we are more accustomed to see).
We also see in the film the legendary trick of Archimedes, who in Syracuse used the gigantic magnifying glasses to attract the sun’s rays and thus burn the enemy’s ships.
The film was entirely shot in the surroundings of Turin. Martin Scorsese considers Giovanni Pastrone to be the inventor of epic cinema with his “Cabiria” (1914), and he has not been given the consideration he deserves.
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