Out of the cradle endlessly rocking ✵ Intolerance - VISIONARIES ✵ 1902–1931 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Historical epic

DIRECTOR

D. W. Griffith

WRITERS

D. W. Griffith, Anita Loos

STARS

Vera Lewis, Ralph Lewis, Constance Talmadge, Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron

BEFORE

1914 Italian director Giovanni Pastrone makes Cabiria, an early feature-length epic.

1915 Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is the first US feature movie, but sparks controversy with its racist content.

AFTER

1931 Griffith’s final movie, The Struggle (his second sound feature), is a box-office failure. It is a semiautobiographical tale of a battle with alcoholism.

One of the most influential movies ever made, Intolerance is truly epic in its scope, with elaborate sets and countless extras. It was not the first movie to use techniques such as camera tracking and close-ups, but director D. W. Griffith used them with such mastery that many regard him as the father of modern moviemaking.

The movie was born in controversy. Griffith’s previous movie in 1915, The Clansman, came to be called The Birth of a Nation and was the first full-length feature movie made in the US. Its innovative techniques foreshadowed those used in Intolerance. It was a hit, but was condemned by many for its overt racism, glorifying slavery and the Ku Klux Klan.

Its commercial success, however, bankrolled the cast of thousands required to make Intolerance, which lost as much at the box office as The Clansman had made. Some critics describe Intolerance as an apology for the earlier movie, but there is nothing apologetic in its ambition and scale.

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The central courtyard in Babylon was recreated with a life-size set. More than 3,000 extras were employed for Belshazzar’s lavish feast.

Four-part drama

Four stories of intolerance, spanning three millennia, interweave through the movie, each with a different film tint. They are linked by the ever-present image of a mother, played by Lillian Gish, rocking a cradle to symbolize the passing generations. Captioned “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” it suggests that nothing changes.

The first of the four stories focuses on the conflict at the fall of ancient Babylon, fueled by the intolerant devotees of two warring religions. The second tells how, after the wedding at Cana, Christ is driven to his death by intolerance. The third tale depicts the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres in France in 1572, when Catholics massacred the Protestant Huguenots. The final story is of two young lovers who are caught up in a conflict between ruthless capitalists and moralistic striking workers. Griffith is clearly on the side of the lovers, who are hounded by the type of social reformers he clearly equates with those who protested against The Clansman.

The four stories are intercut with increasing rapidity as the movie approaches its climax. Racing chariots in one story cut into speeding trains and cars in another; this effect was achieved almost entirely in the edit, since Griffith shot the sections chronologically. To some critics, the effect is almost symphonic, while others find it tiresome. But there is no doubt that this crosscutting and use of the edit was to prove hugely influential.

Other technical innovations we now take for granted include dissolves between scenes and the fade-out. Most significant of all, perhaps, was the close-up. The full-length shots of earlier movies called for an exaggerated, pantomime style of acting to convey the story. But as Griffith said, “The close-up enabled us to reach real acting, restraint, acting that is a duplicate of real life.”

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Jesus drags his cross through jeering crowds in the movie’s biblical story.

D. W. GRIFFITH Director

Born on a farm in Kentucky in 1875, David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was 10 when his father died, leaving the family in poverty. After several years of stage work, he got an acting job for a movie company in 1908, and was soon making his own movies, some of the first ever made in Hollywood. He set up his own company to make The Birth of a Nation, whose racism caused protests and riots. Griffith made about 500 movies in total, but his career entered into a downward spiral after Intolerance. He died in 1948.

Key movies

1909 A Corner of Wheat

1915 The Birth of a Nation

1916 Intolerance

1919 Broken Blossoms

What else to watch: Cleopatra (1917) ✵ Broken Blossoms (1919) ✵ Sunrise (1927) ✵ Metropolis (1927) ✵ Modern Times (1936) ✵ Gone with the Wind (1939) ✵ Ben-Hur (1959)