Cabiria

Cabiria
Customer Review: one of the most influential films of all time
HFS this film is sick. a mix of classic arabesque and fantasy from 1913. nice special effects of mt vesuvious erupting, the gianormous statue of moloch and feeding children into a giant oven. . hella text cards include elaborate invocations to pagan dieties. the piano score sucks.
Customer Review: Cabiria
One of the first sword-and-sandal Italian spectacles, and one of cinema's first epics of any kind, CABIRIA (1914) presents a fairly rare dilemma for the diligent reviewer. Usually the stars I give a product simply gauge my reaction on the `Love It-Hate It' scale. I love some bad movies and don't necessarily care for all the classics. My personal reaction to CABIRIA is a weak three stars. It was okay, but I can't say it had me on the edge of my chair, or that I didn't glance at the time on the dvd-player a time or two to see how much longer it had left. On the other hand, there are some landmark films that deserve extra consideration. This movie was one of the first, my history book tells me, to take the camera out of its fixed seat in the audience and take the actors and action off the proscenium stage. Its sets were some of the most spectacular seen to date, and its special effects were state of the art. It contributed to the development of tracking shots and lighting against shadows to create dramatic effect. If it didn't quite invent the close-up, it certainly brought the camera closer to its restrained - for the day - actors. It helped prove that audiences would tolerate a two-hour film, as opposed to the then standard twelve to twenty-five minute ones. And, we're told, it so affected D.W. Griffith that immediately after viewing it he scrapped the two-reel melodrama he was then working on in favor of his first masterpiece, 1915's The Birth of a Nation, where he invented the close-up. In other words, CABIRIA helped change things profoundly, and innovation deserves respect. Hence the strong four-stars to a movie I ain't all that crazy about. The story is certainly sprawling enough. A young girl, Cabiria, is separated from her parents in the confusion after earthquakes hit and Mount Etna explodes. Her governess takes her to Carthage, where the two are sold into bondage and the young girl is selected as an offering to the fire-god Moloch. Happily, a Roman officer, his slave, and a Carthagenian princess enter the story right about then. While the film more or less stay with Cabiria, it does wrest itself away long enough to join Hannibal crossing the Alps, Archimedes devising a converging mirror weapon, and the Carthagenian Princess striking one of a countless variety of grand dame poses. The Princess's acting, as they say, plays to the bleacher and is evidence that the movie was hedging its bets by keeping at least some things late Victorian traditional. Traditional too, I imagine, is the healthy head of moss growing beneath her arms. You get more than one good look at her grunge sponges every time she lifts a worried wrist to her porcelain brow, and in a movie like this a character like her has a lot of worried lifting to attend to. I'm not sure it matters all that much. You don't accidentally stumble upon movies like CABIRIA. You get them because you're curious about the history of cinema, and primitive tracking shots and special effects are as interesting as any actor or plot point. If you're like me and bring a dilettante's curiosity to films like this, you won't be disappointed.