Selling Cabiria in transnational markets

When pirates put the infant Cabiria on sale in the Carthaginian market early in the second episode of the Italian epic Cabiria (1914), she is swiftly bought by the High Priest of Moloch. But selling the film to non-Italian audiences in and beyond 1914, given its colonial rescue fantasy and its spectacular celebration of a nationalist war of empire in Africa through the vehicle of Roman history, was more of a challenge. Cabiria was purchased for British consumption in April 1914, why was it not shown in the UK until more than a year later? When it was finally shown, how was it advertised and exhibited for British audiences in the context of the Great War and how was it reviewed? It is now recognised that exclusive focus on national cinemas and the specific history of their film production overlooks the dynamic, transnational character of the silent era. This article aims to put the United Kingdom more firmly on the map of Cabiria’s cultural geography and demonstrate that the film is more than a magnificent product of the Turinese studio Itala. British programmes that survive in the BFI National Archive and contemporary press reports demonstrate that Cabiria was successfully screened across the country for most of the year between 1915 and 1916. The initial delay from April 1914 may have had a number of causes: the scale of the film’s exhibition requirements, the relative absence of an Anglophone hook to draw audiences in and the presence instead of a D’Annunzian rhetoric of Italian nationhood achieved through conquest in Africa that was wholly at odds with the British policy to defend its own empire. When the film was finally released in May 1915, initial publicity placed emphasis on its artistry rather than its D’Annunzian warmongering. But after Italy joined the Allies in May 1915, the film was celebrated as a masterpiece by D’Annunzio, seen as the committed soldier and patriot of a wartime Ally, and its viewing recommended as an act of wartime patriotism. The exhibition of the film fizzled out in local cinemas around summer 1916 when war losses increased radically, and its promotion returned to the language of spectacle and education in history. I argue that in the cultural context of cinema-going in Britian during the first world war, Cabiria becomes almost a different film from the one shown in Italy or in other Anglophone cultures and takes on quite distinct meanings.