Word: griffith
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...Intolerance was based on a very abstract view of human experience. A triumph of sentimentalist humanism, it made dramatic sense and power out of all history, which it saw as human circumstance. Its basic notion, that a few universal sentiments motivate human actions, were more common in Griffith's Christian times than now. The films of the period, though, don't reflect it. Even Birth of a Nation, which was changing everyone's ideas of what films could be even while Intolerance was in production, dealt with members of two families in a historical context, tracing individuals' emotions through...
...Griffith, in using an abstract scheme of 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...
...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, the film's climax-with the four stories intercut-lacks any thematic synthesis. Griffith...
What the four stories do have in common on an abstract level is an extraordinary sensitivity to social setting, so that the deaths ending three of them carry a huge sense of social downfall and unite personal with common tragedy. Griffith opens each story with mass scenes revealing the heart of each society-an elite ball and a company dance in modern times, the wedding at Cana for the Biblica lera. His 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...
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...