Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916) is D.W. Griffith's landmark silent epic — watch it online on iFILM as one of cinema's foundational works. Running over three hours, the film weaves four separate stories across four different centuries: ancient Babylon, Judean-era Jerusalem, sixteenth-century France during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and early twentieth-century industrial America.

Each storyline follows ordinary lives crushed by the same force in different costumes — moral authority used as a weapon against people without power. Griffith cuts between eras not in sequence but simultaneously, building rhythm through comparison rather than forward momentum. Lillian Gish appears throughout as a recurring symbol of continuity. The Babylonian sequences alone required sets so large that their ruins remained on Hollywood Boulevard for years.

Griffith made this film in direct response to the backlash against Birth of a Nation, and it shows in the ambition: cross-cutting at a scale nobody had attempted, a moving camera used expressively, and close-ups deployed not for identification but for emotion. Film language that later became standard was largely invented or formalized here. Stream Intolerance (1916) online on iFILM.