The Film Forum will screen a new restoration of Intolerance (1916) from August 2-8. Pauline Kael admired this D.W. Griffith film starring Lillian Gish. Here admiration is reflected in the below commentary.
But let me tell you an American movie that was made by D.W. Griffith and was called “Intolerance.” It wasn’t a successful movie commercially, but it was very successful with me. - Pauline Kael
D.W. Griffith's epic celebration of the potentialities of the film medium-perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history. It is charged with visionary excitement about the power of movies to combine music, dance, narrative, drama, painting, and photography-to do alone what all the other arts together had done. In this extravaganza one can see the source of most of the major traditions of the screen-the methods of Eisenstein and von Stroheim, the Germans and the Scandinavians, and, when it's bad, De Mille. It combines extraordinary lyric passages, realism, and psychological details with nonsense, vulgarity, and painful sentimentality. Four stories set in different historical periods are told by crosscutting, and they reach simultaneous climaxes. The cast includes Lillian Gish in the linking device; Mae Marsh and Robert Harron in the modern story, "The Mother and the Law;" Bessie Love in the Biblical story, "The Nazarene;" Margery Wilson and Eugene Pallette in "The Medieval Story," which includes the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the Huguenots in 1572; Constance Talmadge, Elmo Lincoln, Seena Owen, Alfred Paget, and Tully Marshall in "The Fall of Babylon." Cinematography by Billy Bitzer and Karl Brown; Griffith's assistants included W.S. Van Dyke, Tod Browning, and von Stroheim. Silent. The prints were originally dyed in several hues, and crews of girls added extra color frame by frame; the projectionists were also instructed to throw beams of red and blue light to intensify the effects. - Pauline Kael
Entered July 8, 2013
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