D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation was a milestone in narrative filmmaking and a popular sensation, but a film condemned for its sympathetic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan. In answer, Griffith conceived this study of intolerance throughout human history, interspersing a Babylonian story, the Christ story, the events of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 16th-century France, and a modern American story in which moral puritanism leads to a disenfranchised man being mistakenly condemned to death.
The film cuts between these stories with increasing rapidity as it builds to its exciting quadruple climax, though the complexity of this structure proved too enervating for contemporary audiences and the film was a commercial disaster. The Babylon set was at the time the most extravagant produced in Hollywood.
