Italy

 Italy

Italian cinema flourished in the first half of the 1910s.
1)The success of exported films and the establishment of the feature film attracted talented people
   to the industry and
2)led producing companies to compete energetically.

Historical epics & Quo Vadis

1)continued to have the most significant triumphs abroad.
2) In 1913, Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis?
    was an enormous hit and confirmed the epic as the main Italian genre.

Quo Vadis? was followed in 1914 by one of the most internationally popular films of the era,
 Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria.

Cabiria:
1)Set in the Roman Empire of the third century b.c.,
2)Cabiria involved kidnapping and human sacrifice,
3) as the hero Fulvio and his strongman slave Maciste try to rescue the heroine.
4)Mammoth scenes showed a palace destroyed by an erupting volcano     
    and a huge temple within which children are thrown into a fiery figure of the pagan god Moloch.
5)Cabiria also used innovative slow tracking shots toward or away from static action.
6)Camera movement had appeared in the early years of the cinema, particularly in scenics.

Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914)

Beginning Title card: 

Tracking shot?

Baby placed in fire as offering

I don't know what this is, people entering temple or sacrifice mouth

Baby Kicking that he doesn't want to enter and Hero rescuing baby. 

end of class clip

 Filmmakers had also occasionally used mobile framing for expressive purposes in narrative films,
1)  as when D. W. Griffith began and ended The Country Doctor (1909)
     with pans across a rural landscape.
2) Cabiria’s tracking shots were more influential, however, and the “Cabiria movement”
   became a common technique in films of the mid-1910s.

A second distinctively Italian genre resulted from the rise of the star system. Several beautiful female stars became wildly popular. These were the divas (“goddesses”). They typically starred in what are sometimes known as frock-coat films—stories of passion and intrigue in upper-middle-class and aristocratic settings. The situations were unrealistic and often tragic, usually featuring eroticism and death, and were initially influenced by the importation of Asta Nielsen’s German films.

The diva films played up luxurious settings, fashionable costumes, and the heightened acting of the performers. Ma l’amor mio non muore! (“But My Love Does Not Die!” 1913, Mario Caserini) established the genre. It made Lyda Borelli an instant star, and she remained one of the most celebrated divas. Borelli’s main rival was Francesca Bertini, whose 1915 Assunta Spina (Gustavo Serena) was a rare diva film set in a working-class milieu. Bertini went on to make a series of more luxurious films based on her star persona. These included a spy melodrama, Diana l’affascinatrice (“Diana the Seductress,” 1915, Gustavo Serena), that displayed Bertini’s histrionic talents and elegant costumes. Diva films remained popular during the second half of the 1910s and then quickly declined in the 1920s. In the following scene, Lyda Borelli, as an actress alone in her dressing room, strikes a dramatic pose reflected by her mirror in Ma l’amor mio non muore! (“But My Love Does Not Die!” But My Love Does Not Die! (Mario Caserini, 1913) Beautiful Opera Singer with a lot of men who want her in her backstage dressing room

The male equivalent of the diva was the strongman. The characters of Ursus in Quo Vadis? and Maciste in Cabiria started this trend. A muscular dockworker, Bartolomeo Pagano, played Maciste, who so fascinated audiences that Pagano went on to star in a series of Maciste films lasting into the 1920s. Unlike Cabiria, these and other strongman films were set in the present. This genre declined temporarily after 1923, as Italian filmmaking sank into crisis. The peplum film, or the heroic historical epic, often involving brawny heroes, resurfaced decades later with such films as Hercules (1957).