Word: filming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...moral sentiments to design a drama, had nothing to follow except his instincts. They led him to direct engagement with his material. He buried himself on the one hand in his subjects' history, on the other in the dramatic means he'd developed in eight years and four hundred films. His means did not give him formal dramatic control of his project; Intolerance's moral conclusions were not designed into the film from its beginning. Griffith rather intended his range of historical settings to reveal the struggles of "hate and intolerance against love and charity," with a generality and power...
THIS METHOD of historical parallels of moral conduct belongs more to sermons than to films, but Intolerance is nowhere narrowly moralistic or illustrative, nowhere organized as a set of examples to prove a point. Indeed, its episodes are so independent that the integrity of its theme is seriously stretched . From the institutional oppression of the poor by the rich in modern times Griffith moves to the political intrigues of Catherine de Medici, to religious conflicts in Christ's Palestine, and to the grand movements of the political civilization of Babylon. He calls the injustices of each social system "intolerance." Consequently...
...portrayal of each society is entirely different in dramatic action and shooting style; a unique flavor of each way of life reaches the viewer. Each character is completely one with his society. There's an integration of every character's existence and emotion not equalled in his later films, which are based on moral differences. The sets and the action of background figures often seem filled with the sentiments of the principals in the foreground. No other Griffith film attains that degree of unity within such a huge setting...
This strange unity constitutes the formal order of Intolerance . It shows Griffith's desire to tell the truth of his subject directly, without the mediation of a dramatic plan. Though the compositions and cutting of Intolerance show an unbelievably flexible awareness of form, no overall formal control shapes the film. One experiences it rather as a flow of situations and emotions augmented by Griffith's pointed social comments and clear allocation of guilt...
...FULL instinctiveness, lack of definition simple emotional impact of the film's events is felt in the final image. After a sequence where prisons and wars are overcome by the Kingdom of Peace. Griffith returns to a shot he has used from the beginning, of the Eternal Mother sitting in a shaft of light. Over the frame are the words "Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking ... ever bringing the same joys and sorrows ... "Griffith's return to this image is anti-classical, a return to the central subject, womanhood, which he never cared or managed to define. The image itself...