>>349983Intolerance Is the Greatest Movie Ever Made (Abridged)For many critics and scholars - myself among them - D. W. Griffith's Intolerance is the greatest film ever made. A century later we are as close to its subject as we are distant from its art. Political specifics, moral arguments, and movie styles may look different today, yet the only real difference is Griffith's still-daring ingenuity, which calls for a more open-minded reception than in our simplistic habits we are accustomed to: It calls for an optimistic, united popular audience, which Griffith took for granted.
When Intolerance premiered on September 5, 1916, its opening intertitles introduced silent-movie viewers to an extraordinary narrative device: "Our play is made up of four separate stories, laid in different periods of history, each with its own set of characters." Employing a prologue and two acts, Griffith called it "a sun-play," marked by florid melodramatics developed from Emersonian Transcendentalism.
Griffith's idea of cinematic "sun-play" to illuminate a darkened world might sound cornball to cynical Millennials, but his sincere, way-out-there expression of emotion and spirituality gave immediacy to each period story. In place of the saccharine, he interweaves four tales of religious and political persecution: the invasion of Belshazzar's Babylonian kingdom by Cyrus's Persian army; Christ's crucifixion; the Catholics' massacre of the Huguenot Protestants in 16th-century France; and, in the early 20th century, a young couple wronged by urban reformers.
Intolerance derives from that moment when the mass audience was first being created, before niche marketing and solidified genres began to segregate peoples' tastes, as is so egregiously the case with separate categories for film, television, and video games. Yet then, as now, the fact of artistic expression is that artists will ignore or take up social issues, seeking to persuade or else risking inevitable contradiction. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was a perfect example of this. It was based on the primal issues of slavery, U.S. Civil War lore, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, all of which I have discussed at National Review. The Birth of a Nation was not just America's first film epic. It was the country's first political film, and the considerable outcry it raised compelled Griffith to
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