Silent Films at the California Theatre - Intolerance
Running time: 180 mins
INTOLERANCEFRIDAY, MARCH 6 at 7:00 p.m.
(silent, 1916) USA
With Dennis James at the Wurlizer organ.
Directed, produced and written by D.W. Griffith. Photographed by Billy Bitzer, Karl Brown. With Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish, Constance Talmadge, Robert Harron, Miriam Cooper, Elmo Lincoln, Eugene Pallette, Margery Wilson and a cast of thousands.
Griffith?s grand epic depicting intolerance through the ages is truly stunning and remains one of the great film masterpieces. A first an only of its kind, Intolerance?s four separate-but-parallel story structure has been compared to classical music?s Bach fugues. The sets and sheer spectacle of Intolerance still have the power to take one?s breath away. Griffith?s build to a suspenseful finish to all four stories simultaneously is masterful and has never been matched.
Intolerance was Griffith?s answer to those who had accused him of racism in Birth of a Nation. ?It is charged with the visionary excitement about the power of movies to combine music, dance, narrative, drama, painting, and photographed?to do alone what all the other arts together had done.? ?Pauline Kael.