Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages · reception & legacy
1916 · D.W. Griffith
How Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A commercial disappointment in 1916 that nearly ruined Griffith — audiences found its four intercut storylines bewildering — it's now enshrined as one of silent cinema's supreme achievements, the film that taught the Soviet montage school (Eisenstein and company studied it obsessively) how editing could think.
What's debated
The eternal fight: is it Griffith's 'apology' for The Birth of a Nation or a defiant answer to his critics — and can you champion this film without excusing the man who made it the year before?
Its footprint
The Babylon set — those colossal elephant-topped pillars on Sunset Boulevard — is one of cinema's most iconic images, famously recreated at the Hollywood & Highland complex, parodied by Buster Keaton in Three Ages, and mythologized in the Tavianis' Good Morning, Babylon; Lillian Gish endlessly rocking the cradle is silent film's most quoted linking image.
Where it stands
A pillar of the 'you must have seen this' silent canon — more admired than adored on Letterboxd, where reviewers arrive as homework and leave stunned by the Babylon sequence.