intolerance

"intolerance: love's struggle in the 21st century" is a netv.com media project "of epic proportions," building on filmmaker D.W. Griffith's 1916 epic "Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages."

FROM HOLLYWOOD TO BABYLON & BEYOND

We will begin our journey from the steps of the re-created set of Babylon in the epicenter of the world's media capital of Hollywood, California where D.W. Griffith brought together the greatest stars of the early film industry, Lilian Gish and Douglas Fairbanks, along with a massive cast of 16,000 extras to portray the fall of the Babylonian kingdom. The poignant portrayal of four key ages in world history is more relevant today than it was nearly 100 years ago when this most costly and ambitious film epic was undertaken, just at the brink of World War I. As two World Wars drift into the past century and the banks of our memories, the world continues to witness a global struggle of love in the midst of age-old human conflicts, this netv.com epic explores D.W. Griffith's four dramatic sequences and integrates a global 21st century vantage point with perspectives from people around the world. As D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" opens, Griffith leads with a prelude that the film shows "how hatred & intolerance, through the ages, have battled against love & charity." The netv.com "intolerance: love's struggle in the 21st century" seeks to show how LOVE & CHARITY win the battle against HATRED & INTOLERANCE.

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"Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages"
VIDEO: WATCH PART 1
VIDEO: WATCH PART 2
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ABOUT D.W. GRIFFITH'S "INTOLERANCE"

The outdoor set for the Babylonian sequences was the largest ever created for a Hollywood film up to its time, and its crowd shots with 16,000 extras were also some of the greatest in cinematic history.

Director D.W. Griffith's expensive, most ambitious silent film masterpiece Intolerance (1916) is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history. Many reviewers and film historians consider it the greatest film of the silent era. The mammoth film was also subtitled: "A Sun-Play of the Ages" and "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages." Griffith was inspired to make this film after watching the revolutionary Italian silent film epic Cabiria (1914) by director Giovanni Pastrone.

After the widespread controversy surrounding his racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith attempted to defensively answer his critics with this work. He took a smaller feature film that he was working on about the contemporary, Progressive Era struggle between capital and labor [titled "The Mother and the Law"] and the theme of social injustice and combined it with three new stories to create a more spectacular, monumental, dramatic epic. All of the stories, spanning several hundreds of years and cultures, are held together by themes of intolerance, man's inhumanity to man, hypocrisy, bigotry, religious hatred, persecution, discrimination and injustice achieved in all eras by entrenched political, social and religious systems.

The four widely separate, yet paralleled stories are set in different ages - and in the original print, each story was tinted with a different color. Three of the four are based on factual history:

THE 'MODERN' STORY (A.D. 1914)

THE JUDAEAN STORY (A.D. 27)

THE FRENCH STORY (A.D. 1572)

THE BABYLONIAN STORY (539 B.C.)

THE 'MODERN' STORY (A.D. 1914)
(Amber Tint)
In early 20th century America during a time of labor unrest, strikes, and social change in California and ruthless employers and reformers - a young Irish Catholic boy, an exploited worker, is wrongly imprisoned for murder and sentenced to be hung on a gallows. The boy is saved from execution in a last-minute rescue by his wife's arrival with the governor's pardon.

THE JUDAEAN STORY (A.D. 27)
(Blue Tint)
The Nazarene's (Christ's) Judaea at the time of his struggles with the Pharisees, his betrayal and crucifixion (told as a Passion Play in his last days) - it is the shortest of the four stories.

THE FRENCH STORY (A.D. 1572)
(Sepia Tint) Renaissance, 16th century medieval France at the time of the persecution and slaughter of the Huguenots during the regime of Catholic Catherine de Medici and her son King Charles IX of France, and the notorious atrocities of St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (including its effects upon the planned wedding of a young innocent Huguenot couple - Brown Eyes and Prosper Latour).

THE BABYLONIAN STORY (539 B.C.)
(Gray-Green Tint)
Peace-loving Prince Belshazzar's Babylon at the time of its Siege and Fall by King Cyrus the Persian, due to the treacherous High Priests - and the Mountain Girl's vain efforts to avert the tragedy. The outdoor set for the Babylonian sequences was the largest ever created for a Hollywood film up to its time, and its crowd shots with 16,000 extras were also some of the greatest in cinematic history.

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In his radically non-linear, hybrid film, Griffith simultaneously cross-cuts back and forth and interweaves the segments over great gaps of space and time - there are over 50 transitions between the segments. The villains of the four stories are mill owner Jenkins and his intolerant social reformers, the hypocritical Pharisees - opponents of Christ, the evil regime of the cunning Queen Catherine, and the treacherous High Priest of Babylon. Their powerful actions set in motion disturbing consequences for a modern-day working-class couple, for an average French Huguenot family and its soon-to-be-betrothed daughter Brown Eyes, for the Nazarene/Christ, and for the enlightened, revolutionary and benevolent Prince Belshazzar.

The symbolic bridging device that interconnects and links together the various stories is the recurring cameo shot of Lillian Gish, his greatest star, as Eternal Motherhood. She endlessly and eternally rocks a cradle, accompanied by the title from Walt Whitman's poem Leaves of Grass: "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. Uniter of Here and Hereafter - Chanter of Sorrows and Joys." Her iconic image, rocking the cradle of humanity, serves as a symbol of continuity for the entire history of the human race, and a representation of the cycle of life and death.

The film was the most expensive film of its time, costing about two million dollars (a third of which was used for the Babylonian segments), but it was commercially unsuccessful in the US, partially due to the financial burden of having full orchestration accompany the film. Its complex, sometimes baffling, unwieldy construction and its pacifist themes may have contributed to its unpopular reception just prior to the US entrance into World War I. Using cinematic methods ahead of their time and influencing a whole generation of future film-makers, he included a crane shot and spectacular crowd scenes and exterior sets (and live elephants!) for the fantastic Babylonian sequence.

The innovative finale is an overwhelming, rhythmic, conglomerate sequence which weaves all four stories into a stirring, fast-moving and exciting climax - as the suspenseful drama begins to conclude, the cross-cutting increases in tempo and rapidity with shorter and shorter segments of each tale flowing together.

The other historical settings were the Judea of Christ and the France of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. The theme of Intolerance -- which Griffith originally subtitled "A Sun Play of the Ages" -- was that social catastrophes always resulted from intolerant bigotry. The fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, the slaughter of the Huguenots [French Protestants], and the dissolution of the modern family could all be traced to the hypocrisy of "Uplifters."
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DEDICATED TO A MAN OF PEACE

"intolerance: love's struggle in the 21st century" is dedicated to a guy who knew when it was time to "get outta dodge" and hit the hills.

It was back around the year 500 in Italy when his parents sent him to Rome and found that Rome wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be. Sounds familiar, right? Enough said.

He showed us that we DON'T have to do like the Romans do. He inspired people to get real, think outside the planet and change the world a little bit for the better before he finally "gave up the ghost," as they said.

The "intolerance" production logo includes a one side of a medallion dedicated to him.

DEDICATED TO LIVING IN PEACE

Atop the medallion reads "PAX," or "peace" in Latin.

Why, you might ask, is the medallion tilted to the left? It represents the frailties of the human experience in an age-old battle against peace and intolerance. While we're forever trying to get it right, we just ultimately don't quite hit the mark.


But we must keep on trying! Let's give it a chance.

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