Cabiria

A Sicilian girl is kidnapped to Carthage, the temple of Moloch takes children, Hannibal crosses the Alps, and a slave named Maciste, played by a dockworker, carries the picture and became a franchise. Giovanni Pastrone put the camera on a dolly and moved it through sets built at full scale, and the tracking shot inside the temple is the one Griffith saw before he built Babylon. Itala, Turin, 1914, two and a half hours, with D'Annunzio's name on the poster and his intertitles in the film.