Composition en profondeur, mobilité et montage dans Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)

Through the comparative study of Cabiria and the footage excluded from its final cut, this essay demonstrates that this Italian film, released it 1914, follows a project of “in-depth spatial composition” in an attempt both to avoid the fragmentation of the represented space caused by editing and to respect its integrity through an emphasis on its tridimensional aspect. Like the majority of European films of the first half of the 1910th, Cabiria thus realizes an ideal of tridimensional representation “with limited circularity” (which, while it enables the spectators to get closer to the scene, it never situates them at the center of the action). The dominant feature of this type of spatial representation is the mobility of the scenic space, which is different from the one created by the succession of shots and viewpoints.