“There is almost nothing in the entire vocabulary of the cinema which you won’t find in this film.”  -- Orson Welles

It is ambitious.  It is self-indulgent.  It is epic.  It is Intolerance.  Written and directed by D. W. Griffith, Intolerance tells four independent stories of brutality and betrayal: the fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Christ, St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and a fictional tale of corporate greed, single motherhood, and innocence on death row.  Linking the stories is the image of a woman rocking a cradle and the words, “Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking.”  Taken from a poem by Walt Whitman, the words reveal the film’s revelation: There will always be a new generation born into ignorance of the bloody history it is doomed to repeat. 

Some consider the film little more than a public apology for glorifying the founding of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation (1915).  Yet it is undeniable that, thirteen years after the landmark The Great Train Robbery revolutionized film as a narrative art form, Intolerance revolutionized the art form again by elevating cross cutting to a level not exceeded in popular film until Pulp Fiction.  Each story progresses independently but in parallel, cutting back and forth across millennia to illustrate the timelessness of human conflict.

The film’s theme of perennial barbarity and conflict was certainly topical when released in 1916, a year of great conflict in its own right.  It was the year of “Pancho” Villa’s raids in New Mexico and “Black Jack” Pershing’s pursuit.  It was the year of the Easter Uprising in Ireland.  And it was the year of the Battle of Verdun, the bloodiest battle in history which left over 700,000 men killed or injured.

The epic scope of the film is reflected in its running time.  However, Griffith never recovered from high costs and disappointing box office.  In the words of Orson Welles, it was an “immensely ambitious project to put all those stories together and make them work, and maybe they don’t work, but that failure remains one of the great successes in the history of the cinema.”

essay by Norris Harrington