Forget about plastic dolls come to life, puffy-faced 60-year-old men jumping around in front of greenscreens and American 20^th century witchhunts! If you click the image next to the post title, you can watch the original summer blockbuster, the first epic movie (sez Scorsese), one of the first colossal films, 1914’s Cabiria by Giovanni Pastrone in 720HD! All this and an accompanying soundtrack, yet!

If we wanna push definitions, it’s one of the first superhero movies or, with less definition pushing, the first “action hero” movie, introducing the perennial Italian-cinema superman, nascent cinema’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maciste!

Besides inspiring the later American epics of D.W. Griffith, Cabiria also gave birth to the (by today’s standards) simple idea of putting the camera on wheels (dollying), henceforth naming said camera technique “the Cabiria shot.”

Even more impressive, generations raised on weak scientists turning into giant, green musclemen or wisecracking, belligerent raccoons would do well to note, the sets in Cabiria were not 3D nor miniatures^[1]. Those babies were either constructed, old school, life-size! or shot on location, taking advantage of the Roman Empire’s slave labor hundreds of years earlier, thus getting around various unions and guilds—that’s a IATSE joke. Among the most impressive are the scenes of Mount Etna’s eruption and ensuing destruction, and most famously, the temple of Moloch and the human sacrifice!

• Yes, it’s in (gasp!) black and white, although this copy is hand tinted. Pretty!

• No, the intertitles are in Italian but never fear: the King Mongoose has a link for you all to an English-language version from our friends at The Internet Archive. Unfortunately, it’s at a lower resolution and no accompanying soundtrack.

• Yes, this version comes in at 02:34:22 and isn’t exactly paced like a Fast and Furious movie. Set the video to 1.5x speed if you get fidgety; oddly enough, the film doesn’t suffer but the soundtrack may seem a little frenetic. YMMV.