D W Griffith (1916)
This must be one of the earliest films I’ve seen. The experience of watching it jumbles up history, biblical history, cinema history and personal history in an extraordinary way. D W Griffith is regarded as a quasi-religious figure, an Old Testament patriarch, in the annals of cinema; and the making of Intolerance, because of both the size of the undertaking and when the picture was made, seems comparable to a feat of construction in the ancient world: the pyramids or – perhaps more apt, given one of the principal settings of the film – the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Watching the New Testament-inspired part of Intolerance was, for me, a reminder that, in my some part of my mind, I think of Bible stories as somehow taking place in my own childhood. (It was almost a shock to be reminded that they predate me.) Griffith tells four tales, taking place over a timespan of more than two thousand years, to illustrate the persistence of human intolerance. The four stories are known as the ‘Babylonian’, the ‘Judean’, the ‘French’ and the ‘Modern’. The recurring image of a rocking cradle signals that, as new generations are born, intolerance is reborn in different forms. Intolerance is ‘a drama of comparisons’ between the malign forces of intolerance who claim for themselves exclusive moral authority: the treacherous priests who abet Cyrus the Great’s invasion of Babylon; the pharisees in Jesus’ time; Catherine de Medici and the Catholic establishment who victimise the Huguenots; social reformers in present day America. There are many other human vices in evidence – it’s stretching a point to see ‘intolerance’ as ubiquitously dominant in the four stories. But it is the starting point of all that happens in the contemporary American one, which is the crucial story because right wins out eventually.
The logistics, the decorative detail and the movement of the Babylonian sequences – and especially of the battle scenes – are stunning. Some of the incidental details here look startlingly modern (like the shots of a girl’s feet moving). It comes as a surprise that Belshazzar is the relative hero of this story but it is Christ who is presented as intolerance’s greatest enemy – in his wanting the guests at the wedding in Cana to have a drink, in his compassion towards the woman taken in adultery. (You watch this sequence and think of stoning under Sharia law and, with dismay, that there are men now who think themselves without sin and areready to cast the first stone.) Griffith’s use of labels rather than names to denote the characters’ symbolic function in the American drama – the virtuous heroine is ‘The Dear One’, her husband is ‘The Boy’, a Mafioso is ‘the Musketeer of the Slums’ – makes the ‘Modern’ story peculiarly antique. Griffith cross-cuts between the different stories and eras: because he pioneered the technique and it became an essential form of film narrative, this reinforces Intolerance’s historic quality. The cross-cutting results in some oddly juxtaposed climaxes but the rhythms of the editing in the build-up to The Boy’s last-minute rescue from the gallows make this episode very exciting (and the ‘hangman’s test’ sequence is the best description of the frightening techniques of capital punishment that I’ve seen on film).
The huge cast includes Lillian Gish as ‘Eternal Motherhood’ (she rocks the cradle), Mae Marsh as The Dear One, and Robert Harron as The Boy. The uncredited extras included Douglas Fairbanks. Anita Loos and Tod Browning were among those who worked with Griffith on the screenplay and intertitles. The discrepancy between Griffith’s film-making genius and his personal philosophy is no doubt a greater problem in The Birth of a Nation than here but it’s troubling nevertheless that Intolerance seems designed to demonstrate the pernicious influence of contemporary social reformers. Some of the religious notions in the film are also primitive compared with the techniques used to express them. At the very end, a cross of light spreads over the screen – conventional sentimental piety but, when I was jotting down notes afterwards, the predictive text on my iPad thought piety was going to be poetry and that’s apt. Carl Davis’s score, composed for the release of a restored version of Intolerance in 1989, is highly resourceful. This BFI screening was introduced by Kevin Brownlow and very good he was too – highly informative, pleasantly informal. This was a rare occasion when it was worth having the BFI microphone (as usual) not working: Brownlow reminded us that he was a silent film historian – ‘You ain’t heard nothing yet …’
23 April 2012
