Intolerance and Greed
As I'm going to be writing about silent-era Hollywood, I figured it was about time I did the deed, sat down, and watched these. Intolerance was made over 100 years ago. There were almost no special effects (except probably the guy getting his head chopped off in battle) - that was really a bazillion extras storming the walls of Babylon on Sunset Boulevard. I was interested to see how sophisticated the filming techniques were, including a lot of stuff that's still being used (that little shot of speeded-up double-exposed ghost-figures scurrying around the villainess's office to indicate passage of time - that's still a pretty common short-hand for, "some time went by...."). The "barbarian soldiers" were pretty hilarious. Griffith had a beautiful sense of images, and the version I'm watching (in several installments - I don't have more than an hour or so of down-time 4 nights a week) isn't horrendously long. It's not like trying to s