The Exemplary Practices of David Griffith, Part 2: INTOLERANCE – 'A Drama of Comparisons'

With the release of THE BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915, David Griffith established by common consent and emulation of his peers the prototype of international feature filmmaking – an exemplar of the possibilities of practice within a natural art. A year later he completed INTOLERANCE, the film that was to entice a young Russian, Vsevolod Pudovkin, to explain what was going on and thus complete the paradigm. Within this essay (the second of two devoted to Griffith's achievement), I concentrate upon the unprecedented patterning of the screen times that he allotted to the supposed 'four stories' of INTOLERANCE, a seldom noted but remarkable foreshadowing of the strategies of the documentary tradition.