What to expect
Griffith attempts a form of parallel editing on an unprecedented scale, moving among Babylon, Judea, Renaissance France, and modern America until architecture, crowds, and gestures begin to rhyme across centuries.
How to ease in
Do not try to memorise every name. Identify each period by its visual world, then watch how the intervals shorten as the four crises approach their climaxes.
Heads-up
A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes war, massacre, execution, religious persecution, racism, antisemitic imagery, gender stereotypes, infant danger, and the director’s deeply compromised racial politics.
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The cuts keep asking me to compare events before I have finished absorbing any one of them. I admire the cinematic ambition while keeping the film’s moral blind spots firmly in view.
— Momo
Credits & versions
- Cast
- Lillian Gish · Mae Marsh · Fred Turner
Credits
Version map
Sources for the facts
Where to go next
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