Intolerance

Intolerance – A gargantuan failure looming over the dawn of cinema, Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is the source and pattern for just about every development in film during the last 96 years. People write books about Intolerance and a note like this had best aspire to nothing more than a few humble observations. Griffith sets himself a problem that is insoluble: how to reconcile his elephantine theme and aspirations with human dimensions. The conflict between vastness and intimacy that the film poses is best embodied in the Babylonian sequences, particularly those on the enormous set showing niagaras of steps (the precursors to Eisenstein’s Odessa steps), four-story tall rearing ornamental elephants, huge idols, and walls that seem to be 200 feet high – the Bablyonian set is less a film location than a geological phenomen, a vast escarpment with chariots, it seems, the size of ants coursing along its upper ramparts. The set is simply too huge to be effective – you are either too close to the thing to grasp its inordinate, grotesque size or too far way to visualize the mobs of extras, the proverbial “cast of thousands” as anything other than tiny dots moving back and forth in ridiculously coordinated choreography. Griffith’s solution to the tension between the film’s Olympian dimensions and it’s human aspects is to ramp up the emotional heat of the performances in the film, to drive his actors and actresses into paroxysms of frenzy, anguish, and love. Even by silent film standards, the acting in Intolerance is mostly “over-the-top”, as if Griffith had formed the calculus that his players would be dwarfed by the spectacle around them if they didn’t emote on a superhuman, cosmically melodramatic level. Every element in the film clashes violently with opposite impulses. The argument against intolerance proceeds against a background of broad stereotyping and caricature, if not bigotry and prejudice, at least, it’s close cousin. Griffith’s pale Tennysonian heroines are contrasted with harlots filmed in the most prurient and salacious manner – acres of fleshy odalisques scarcely covered by translucent veils in the Babylonian orgies – and, at times he indulges in imagery that is frankly obscene; for instance, the Mountain Girl orgiastically milking a goat while thinking of her beloved. Griffith’s huge close-ups don’t match always with the surrounding mise-en-scene, his interest in pre-Raphaelite faces conflicts with the sordid milieu in which his characters often are visualized. The extreme deep-focus that characterizes Billy Bitzer’s photography frequently poses dramatic tableaux against remote, teeming backdrops of figures completely uninvolved in the main action – an effect that seems almost neo-realist. In one scene, Griffith allows one of his women to approach the camera so closely that she goes out of focus, blocks out the light, and her face becomes a kind of dark, lunar landscape with enormous eyes glinting with sinister emotion. The most banal sequences are continuously enlivened with puzzling and inexplicable details – things glimpsed as it were out of the corner of the eye. The irreconcilable antinomies governing the film achieve palpable presence toward the end of the picture – the chiaroscuro used to illuminate the three tiny crosses set above hordes of extras writhing like the damned in a whorl of darkness like something out of a late Turner, literally a battle between light and dark, men fighting on a WWI battlefield are suddenly bathed by a heavenly light and the upper half of the screen teems with angels – the image is pure kitsch and, except for its scale, unimpressive, but, then, Griffith cuts to an expressionistic shot of hundreds of prisoners, clad in bar-striped penitentiary garb, and all throwing their arms up in a gesture of defiance at a cyclopean wall. This is not kitsch and a startlingly memorable image. Then, we see the battlefield again with vines and flowers growing on the howitzers and tiny, angelic children, putti in fact, playing among the weapons. The paradoxes in Griffith’s film suffuse the viewer: you are intensely bored with much of the banal, tableaux-style documentation of past epochs, but, then, suddenly, some detail will nudge you into the most intense attention, into the most complex and exhausting seeing. The film is immensely irritating and immensely inspiring, sometimes within the same shot.