thinbeach In terms costume, design, and size of action, this Griffith epic is rightly considered one of the towering films in cinema's history, for it is a marvel to look at for an audience of any era - with the re-construction of Babylonian sets including towering walls, carved sculptures, and chariots, as the backdrop to religious worship and army sieges. It conjures up all number of memorable images and features a range of impressive technical feats - such as dolly's and what look like crane shots, as well as many close ups - which were very rare for the time.Unfortunately however not nearly as much talent went into the script as the production. It attempts to tell four stories from four different eras and places in history, united by a single theme - that intolerance is bad. The problem is however, the film tells us this in opening title cards before the thing has even started, so that watching this film is not a journey of wonder and discovery and mystery and surprise, but the journey of watching a wealthy group of people make their point in a scripted way with re-creations of history that contain inaccuracies. On top of this, two of the four stories seem to just fall by the wayside and be largely forgotten about. It feels less like a fiction film than a documentary re-enactment, the purpose of which is to provide a moral which everybody understands to be true before they enter the theatre to watch this film anyway. The problem with corruption in politics and religion and wealth in our world, and through the ages, is not that people don't understand morals, it's that they don't act upon them for selfish reasons. This film just uses morals to try and leverage some gravitas. Well, it could have been told in half the time at least! It could have been told in ten minutes! They told it in the first few title cards! The acting is fairly poor throughout, without any suspense the plot really drags, and relies heavily on title cards to progress the pretty pictures, but ironically it is the most modern story, the one with the least impressive set and costume visuals, that is the most affecting, as they choose not to provide a history re-enactment, but set a story of twists and turns in motion, melodramatic as they are.Wikipedia will try to tell us "it has been called the first art film" - but that's rubbish, because all film is art, and Melies, to list just one, was there before Griffith, and Griffith himself made better art before this anyway. In my opinion this is the kind of film that will inspire more blockbusters than unique stories.

disinterested_spectator It is often said that this movie was not well-received at the time, because it was over three hours long, and because it jumped back and forth among four different stories from four different time periods. Well, what was true then is still true today. The only way this movie deserves praise is if we handicap it for when it was made.In watching this movie, it soon becomes clear that the intolerance referred to in the title is religious in nature, for in each of the four stories, it is religion that causes all the suffering (actually, in the fourth story, it is more a matter of women becoming morally righteous as they age and lose their looks). Oddly enough, after showing how much misery is caused by religion (or moral righteousness) for over two thousand years, at the end of the movie, the heavens open up and God's grace is shed on earth, right in the middle of a war, causing everyone to stop fighting and love one another. So, I guess religion is bad, but God is good. Except, you have to wonder, what was God waiting for? If he was going to intervene and stop all the religious killing, he could have done that a long time ago.In three of the stories, good people die, but in the fourth story, set in modern times, the innocent man about to be hanged is saved by a melodramatic, last-minute confession from the real murderer. The reason for the difference is inexplicable. There is no indication that progress has been made over the centuries, for religious or moral intolerance is depicted as being just as prevalent today as in the past. If the innocent man had been hanged, that would at least have provided artistic unity for the four stories. As it is, the man's reprieve is capricious. D. W. Griffith probably figured the audience deserved at least one happy ending, especially since no one was going to believe that business about God's belated intervention.

a-cinema-history Intolerance has been sometimes referred to as the Greatest film of all times. This is in my view an exaggeration, but Intolerance is definitely a milestone in cinema history.It is quite unique in its combination of five different stories only linked by their common reference to the theme of intolerance. 1) a contemporary melodrama showing how charities can be led by selfish motives and can have disastrous consequences; 2) the passion of Jesus Christ in Judea; 3) the events surrounding the 1573 St Bartholomew's Day massacre in France (substantial parts of this segment are lost), 4) the fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia, 5) a pacifist epilogue showing the war raging at the time in Europe grinding to a halt with soldiers fraternizing, flowery fields blooming and children playing among abandoned canons. This pacifist message must be put back in the context of the discussions going on in America at the time about joining the war.Maybe because of this pacifist message just before the decision to go to war, Intolerance was released in September 1916 and the United States declared war to Germany in April 1917, maybe because the form of the film was too much ahead of its time with its distinct stories running in parallel, the film was a commercial failure; it could not recover the enormous production costs, particularly for the Babylonian segment.a-cinema-history.blogspot.com/2013/11

gorankostanski David Wark Griffith was a pioneer of cinema because he dared to explore in a time when people were playing it safe, when a film was a conservative medium (in the US, at least), try out something new, he was curious and adventurous, which in the end resulted in a few failures, but when he did it right, he paved the way that even modern day epics still walk today. Ben-Hur, The Gladiator, Gone With the Wind...Numerous Hollywood epics owe a lot to Intolerance, a classic that already in 1916 showed that a film can be long, all-encompassing and "larger than life", even when the silent era was not quite the best level for such an opulent scale.With almost three and a half hours of running time, Intolerance is no easy piece of entertainment, but I view it still as a fascinating document of its time, almost as an archaeological discovery of a film. The four stories form a simple, humble and wise message of man's hate towards man, offering love as the only way we can survive. Some may call it naive, but the message still stands, and people of today even thought of different titles - like patriotism or law and order - to make love more appealing to the masses, all just to make the society go on and not allow people to destroy themselves. The first story, set in Babylon, is easily my favorite, and you can feel the colors and opulent set-designs of the crew behind the black and white cinematography. The second story, revolving around Jesus Christ, is also fine, as is the third one, revolving around Huguenots who were persecuted by Catholics in France in 1572. Still, I must deduct one star from my review because the fourth and final story, set in modern times, simply did not do it for me. After so many expenses and great pains, the "modern" story seems almost nonchalant and too simplistic. Ignoring this and moving on, there is still so much to enjoy in this. Intolerance established the spectacle - which is sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing, depending on each film - and that should be respected.