Dennis James, the preeminent organ accompanist in the United States, performs his own score, based on themes from the original orchestral score, for this newly reconstructed print of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance. The reconstruction represents eight years of painstaking effort by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Film, under the supervision of Peter L. Williamson, in cooperation with the Library of Congress, Music Division and Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, under the supervision of Gillian B. Anderson. Complete with tinted sequences and some thirty minutes of added footage, this can be said to be a definitive version of Griffith's monumental film-namely, the version that Griffith premiered in 1916, a three-and-a-half-hour extravaganza with live orchestral accompaniment. After the premiere, Griffith continually tinkered with the film, at one point making it two separate films and then weaving these together into one film again from memory. It is this last version which he donated to The Museum of Modern Art and which, until now, has been the version which has circulated around the world. Even in its abridged form, Intolerance is considered among the formal masterpieces of cinema and exercised enormous influence, particularly in the Soviet Union. The restored film, which was pieced together from various sources, using the original orchestral score as a guide, not only ties together many loose ends in this multi-faceted narrative but deepens, and makes more explicit, the film's dynamics-sexual, political, and emotional. The centerpiece of the four-part structure of Intolerance is The Mother and the Law, a modern story of industrial and social exploitation that Griffith had begun in 1914, before The Birth of a Nation. After the phenomenal success of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith, in an effort both to outdo himself and to answer the charges of bigotry leveled at him for that film, embellished The Mother and the Law by cross-cutting into it no fewer than three additional stories. Each was from a different historical period and each, in Griffith's mind, illustrated the effects of man's intolerance toward his fellows: by contrasting modern slum life with persecution in Reformation France, ancient Babylon, and Calvary, Griffith mounted a mighty sermon against hypocrisy. The film's pacifist message, on the eve of the U.S. entry into the war, contributed to its relative commercial failure.