Freely combining tropes from Homer and Virgil, Giovanni Pastrone and Luigi Romano Borgnetto's epic is as remarkable for its creative ingenuity as its scale. Pastrone and Borgnetto use recurring camera movements, background figures, phantasmagorical superimpositions, and adventurous editing to develop a complex but coherent narrative form. Unusually intended for presentation as a single work (without intermission), it was an enormous international success, establishing a model of ambitious filmmaking that endures to the present. Restored by the Fondazione Cineteca Italiano. With English subtitles.