Cabiria

Cabiria is a 1914 Italian silent epic film directed by Giovanni Pastrone, set in ancient Sicily, Carthage and the Alps during the Second Punic War and following a kidnapped Roman child and the men who try to rescue her across the ancient Mediterranean world. Pastrone shot the film on an unprecedented scale for its time, introducing a mobile camera dolly he called the carrello along with diffused lighting and elaborate sets, and credited the well known writer Gabriele D'Annunzio with the film's intertitles to lend it literary prestige, though D'Annunzio had little to do with its actual production. Cabiria's scale and technique influenced the development of feature-length epic filmmaking internationally, including the work of D. W. Griffith, and it is widely regarded as one of the most important films of the silent era.