>>349983Intolerance Is the Greatest Movie Ever Made (Abridged)For many critics and scholars - myself among them - D. W. Griffith's Intolerance is the greatest film ever made. A century later we are as close to its subject as we are distant from its art. Political specifics, moral arguments, and movie styles may look different today, yet the only real difference is Griffith's still-daring ingenuity, which calls for a more open-minded reception than in our simplistic habits we are accustomed to: It calls for an optimistic, united popular audience, which Griffith took for granted.
When Intolerance premiered on September 5, 1916, its opening intertitles introduced silent-movie viewers to an extraordinary narrative device: "Our play is made up of four separate stories, laid in different periods of history, each with its own set of characters." Employing a prologue and two acts, Griffith called it "a sun-play," marked by florid melodramatics developed from Emersonian Transcendentalism.
Griffith's idea of cinematic "sun-play" to illuminate a darkened world might sound cornball to cynical Millennials, but his sincere, way-out-there expression of emotion and spirituality gave immediacy to each period story. In place of the saccharine, he interweaves four tales of religious and political persecution: the invasion of Belshazzar's Babylonian kingdom by Cyrus's Persian army; Christ's crucifixion; the Catholics' massacre of the Huguenot Protestants in 16th-century France; and, in the early 20th century, a young couple wronged by urban reformers.
Intolerance derives from that moment when the mass audience was first being created, before niche marketing and solidified genres began to segregate peoples' tastes, as is so egregiously the case with separate categories for film, television, and video games. Yet then, as now, the fact of artistic expression is that artists will ignore or take up social issues, seeking to persuade or else risking inevitable contradiction. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was a perfect example of this. It was based on the primal issues of slavery, U.S. Civil War lore, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, all of which I have discussed at National Review. The Birth of a Nation was not just America's first film epic. It was the country's first political film, and the considerable outcry it raised compelled Griffith to make a follow-up that would clarify his position on both bigotry and censorship. With the almost three-hour Intolerance, Griffith got ahead of the controversy in an elaborate, over-ambitious way that recalled a politician's tactical choices and an artist's idiosyncrasies. Griffith sublimated his political apologia into the emotional and moral defense of love. The four stories present cultural, social, moral, and political arguments for achieving and preserving humane values - the debate over which is still especially pertinent 100 years later.
Griffith used a disarming strategy. Instead of walking back the positions on race and class that many people attributed to him based on the complicated Birth of a Nation, Griffith in Intolerance doubled down, offering a large-scale, sentimental expression of his politics. He projected his combined sense of history, social conditions, literature, and religion open-heartedly, achieving the guilelessness that The Birth of a Nation had seemed to lack. Attempting to create mankind's ultimate Big Picture as a spiritual speculation, Griffith concocted an existentialist point of view before that philosophical concept had gained currency. It is visualized in the central motif of a woman rocking a cradle while behind her sit a trio of white-robed women representing the three Fates. Griffith adds to this the recurring motto "Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking . . ." That line comes from Walt Whitman's "Child's Remembrance" (1859, and incorporated into the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass) - in the early 20th century, a reference almost as common as a Biblical quote. The narrative of Intolerance is rooted in popular literary and storytelling modes. The mix of simple characterization and complex events evokes the cultural lore of Twain as well as the soaring emotional fecundity of grand opera. Griffith introduced innovative cinematic techniques, tinting scenes in varied colors for mood, for example, and giving images extra height and panoramic breadth to accentuate dramatic moments. All this makes Intolerance an unparalleled art experiment. Griffith achieved a persuasive moral argument by matching classical themes to contemporary issues. But the film's social experiment - purposely consolidating moral precepts, social experience, and language - was also a success. History repeats the old conceits but appears fresh and piercing when seen in new contexts. Note how an intertitle describing "The Last Sacrament" leads to The Boy in prison, walking to the gallows and receiving absolution from a priest; through his invention of cross-cutting, Griffith achieves miraculous fluency. Intolerance transcends rhetorical devices used to manipulate political positions. At the film's peak, the intertitles drop out altogether. Emotion and intellect are stirred through pure visual energy, by the leaps and bounds of Griffith's imagination triggering our own - both throughout recorded time and while keeping contrapuntal time with the separate events being depicted. (In his silent-movie genius, Griffith anticipated the jumpily edited phenomenology of French New Wave director Alain Resnais.) The storytelling is both expansive and detailed in ways that give the narrative a contract-and-release, accordion-like expanse. For a century now, filmgoers, taking deep, bated breaths, have watched the four stories of Intolerance move toward a simultaneous climax. The Friendless One in a racing car chases alongside a train to save an innocent's man's life; the dynamic scene is summarized by the intertitle "No. 8 [chases] after the train, leaps with new impulse." Here Griffith features motorized speed, or locomotion, to announce cinema as an art that advances physical and intellectual momentum.
Instead of presenting issues as a banal political filmmaker would, Griffith argues with artistic telepathy - dramas of joy or grief are conveyed through the characters' gestures, demeanor, and facial expressions. The battle of ancient Babylon as it is overtaken by Cyrus involves a betrayal of faith, the destruction of language, and the end of civilization. It is depicted in scenes of heartbreak in the past so that, in the end, the modern tale takes on greater richness and resonance. Griffith ends Intolerance with prophecy: "Perfect love shall bring peace forevermore." As if inspired by the Book of Revelation, the image of angels descending to earth as soldiers and then laying down their arms as children gambol in meadows would seem berserk if it were not so elating and audacious. During the first miracle in the Christ sequence, the image of a crucifix is superimposed on a likeness of the Nazarene; that device is repeated in the coda but now with blinding halation, the shape of a cross engulfing the screen. Imagine an icon of Judeo-Christian inspiration overtaking a 21st-century film. From the psychological precision of the acting to the eye-dazzling imagery of the legendary Babylon-court tableau, Intolerance personalizes political history, conflating it with love. Griffith used cinema to examine both history and love deeply, proposing that, in his view, they are undeniably inextricable. That is still the boldest of all political propositions. Try to find a contemporary politician or filmmaker who would dare.