Perhaps D.W. Griffith felt guilty about The Birth of a Nation (1915), whichpulled filmmaking to new heights while propounding a racist messagerabble-rousing enough to inspire the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Or morelikely, the director wanted another cinematic mountain to climb. His next film,Intolerance (1916), wasthree-and-a-half hours of four interrelated stories. Not unlike the Wachowskisiblings’ Cloud Atlas (2012), it wasa puzzle-box of pieces set in different times and places unified by a commontheme. Contemporary audiences for Intolerancewere often puzzled, yet the enormous scale of the film’s ambition and itstechnical achievements inspired other filmmakers.
Intolerance has been released on Blu-ray, affording a chance towatch a visually clean version of Griffith’s epic. Some segments may appearstodgy a century on, but much of it remains a jaw-dropping achievement from anera when cinematic spectacle was hard earned, built from hardware, notsoftware. Griffith constructed the walled city of Babylon on a Hollywood backlot and shot its fiery siege from balloons. The framing element for thesegmented story pieces is a recurring, blue-tinted image of a forlorn LillianGish rocking a cradle as if to say: life goes on in an endless cycle of birth,tragedy, hope and death.
Alongside Babylon were stories set around the passionof Christ, the massacre of Protestants in 16th century France andstruggles in contemporary America, including scenes of the National Guardgunning down striking workers and killjoy “reformers” trying to ban dancing anddrinking—a warning sign of the Prohibition era about the begin.
Intolerance’s scenes of battle and massacre set high standards thathave been equaled but seldom topped.
