Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

Four stories in four different eras: the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion, the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre in France, and what happens to a poor young couple in twentieth-century America. The film does not tell them in sequence but cuts between them. It is not interested in history. It is interested in the recurrence of intolerance: the same thing happens in all four periods, power dressed as morality crushing ordinary people. Griffith ties them together with the image of a woman rocking a cradle and accelerates all four towards the finale at the same rhythm. The form changed the editing language of cinema for good. Parallel cutting, the choreography of crowds and moving shots taken from cranes are early examples of much that is now standard. The numbers describe the scale. The budget was $385,907 and the cost approached $400,000; the Babylon sequence alone came to $200,000, nearly twice the budget of his previous film. The Babylon set used ten thousand extras and live elephants. The film collapsed commercially, Triangle was put up for sale, and Griffith pulled it from distribution after twenty-two weeks; in 1918, to recover something, he split two of the sections into separate films. The Babylon set stayed standing for four years despite a fire department order to demolish it, because Griffith had no money left to pull it down. Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh and Robert Harron appear. Who it is for: anyone interested in film history and in how the language of editing was assembled. Who it is not for: impatient viewers. It runs over three hours, it is silent, and it jumps constantly between four stories; following it still takes effort.