Intolerance

Getting a primped-up, digitally-restored one-night screening at Film Forum today, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is all at once the Moloch of cineastical good intentions, the first great juggernaut of auteur ambition, and the largest experimental film ever made. It’s also a thunderstorm of cinematic dazzle. This restoration, already released on Blu-ray by Cohen Media, offers the most awesome presentation of the film seen anywhere since its initial run (which lasted, on and off, into the 1920s), and if your experience of it has previously been weathered 16mm prints or public-domain VHS copies, then even skeptics of DCP meta-archivalism (which “saves” the film as digital media, after all, not as anything physical) will have their breath stolen.

Tue., May 13, 7:30 p.m., 2014