Giovanni Pastrone

Giovanni Pastrone, also known by his artistic name Piero Fosco, was an Italian film pioneer, director, screenwriter, actor and technician. He worked during the era of the silent film and influenced many important directors in the international cinema with Cabiria, such as David Wark Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Martin Scorsese believes that Pastrone's work in Cabiria can be considered as the invention of the epic movie and he deserves credit for many of the innovations often attributed to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Among those was the extensive use of a moving camera, thus freeing the feature-length narrative film from "static gaze".