Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Intolerance
Four stories from four ages, Babylon, Judea, Renaissance Paris and a modern American city, cut together until they run as one.
Griffith made it after the outcry over his previous film and called it a reply. It is nominally about intolerance; really it is about cutting. Four stories, each in its own century and its own style of title, hand over to one another, and in the last reels the cuts come faster until a chariot, a car racing a train, a massacre and a crucifixion seem to be one chase. Between them Lillian Gish rocks a cradle, after Whitman. The Babylon set, with white elephants on its columns, stood at Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard for years. Watch the camera sink into Belshazzar's feast: it rode an elevator tower built for that one shot.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- D. W. Griffith
- Photographed by
- Billy Bitzer
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Griffith's two histories with a lesson printed at the front: tolerance in 1916, a warning against Bolshevism in 1921. Both end on rescues cut to the second, and both put Lillian Gish at the centre of an age she cannot change.