Intolerance

In the autumn of 1914, while The Birth of a Nation was being edited, D.W. Griffith began work on his next film, The Mother and the Law, a contemporary saga of social deprivation that he had already completed by the time his epochal Civil War story opened to widespread adulation. Spurred on by the favourable response to Birth of a Nation�s epic scope and keen to respond to censorious charges of racism, he now proposed to expand his recently shot material into a new film, which would be his most ambitious project to date. With an emphasis on editing as a ruling aesthetic principle (that was to prove a central influence on the Soviet school of the 1920s), Intolerance pictured a mother rocking a cradle, providing the link between four separate moments in time, each of which in some way manifested a struggle against opression. A modern couple fighting for justice; the Passion Play and Christ�s crucifixion; 539 BC, when King Belshazzar is betrayed and Babylon falls to the invading Persian forces; and France in 1572, when Catholicism is responsible for the St. Bartholomew�s Day massacre of the Huguenots. Despite notable set-piecesm, Intolerance was not a financial success on its initial release.

D. W. GRIFFITH

American director D.W. Griffith, one of the pioneers of the cinema, was born in 1875 in LaGrange, Kentucky. He was the first to employ such cinematic devices as crosscutting. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948.

1915  The Birth of a Nation

1916  Intolerance

1920  Way Down East

1921  Orphans of the Storm

1924  America, Isn't Life Wonderful?

1930  Abraham Lincoln

Has anyone of you seen that movie ? I saw it on wednesday ,was very impressed.