The staggering modernity of "Intolerance"

Mae Marsh loses focus near the end of Intolerance (n.b., this screen cap­ture is not from the newly restored Cohen version).

If you have not seen D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance since film school, or film appre­ci­ation class, or years ago on pub­lic tele­vi­sion, etc., or worse yet (or maybe bet­ter yet, as it hap­pens) have nev­er seen it at all, get your­self down to Manhattan’s Film Forum start­ing tomor­row and catch it, in a stun­ning new res­tor­a­tion released by The Cohen Film Collection. It is nearly one hun­dred years old and I will put money down that it will be the most spec­tac­u­larly vital film run­ning the­at­ric­ally in the five bur­oughs as of its first screening. 

Why? Well, it’s not just the struc­ture: in mak­ing this ostens­ible “answer pic­ture” to the (com­pletely jus­ti­fied) protests per­tain­ing to his 1915 The Birth of a Nation, Griffith con­ceived four tales of this movie’s title theme, each set in a dif­fer­ent age and place, and inter­wove them cine­mat­ic­ally, with one of the key effects being, as Kevin Brownlow has so mem­or­ably described, a sweep­ing up of the view­er into four sep­ar­ate and equally engross­ing cli­maxes in the film’s final third. This was/is admitedly a dar­ing storytelling gam­bit, and not a whole lot of con­ven­tion­al nar­rat­ive film­makers have tried to meet this chal­lenge since (although in a mildly iron­ic coin­cid­ence, noted Griffith dis­ap­prover Quentin Tarantino has per­formed struc­tur­al tricks that Intolerance cer­tainly set a kind of pre­ced­ent for, in both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown). That’s the thing I absorbed pretty well on my first screen­ing of Intolerance long ago, so it did­n’t knock me out this time around. Nor, for that mat­ter, did the con­tent, although it is quite fas­cin­a­tiong. The dis­curs­ive “mod­ern day” story finds Griffith wrest­ling with his inner Victorian to con­coct a con­dem­na­tion of prig­gish reformers. The con­cep­tion of the fall of Babylon has an inter­est­ing proto-feminist com­pon­ent in the per­son of a char­ac­ter named “Mountain Girl.” And so on. All good stuff. Pauline Kael has noted that the film con­tains the seeds of every kind of silent and then sound stu­dio film that came imme­di­ately after it. And more than that: the movie has sur­pris­ing scenes of nud­ity, quasi-nudity, and extreme viol­ence and gore. There’s a behead­ing or two; the effects for these are not par­tic­u­larly con­vin­cing, but hey, they were in there pitch­ing. In this respect, and giv­en the movie’s still stag­ger­ing scale of spec­tacle and set-construction (it’s almost impossible to believe that Griffith con­ceived, pro­duced, shot, edited, and released such an elab­or­ate movie in a mere year after his pri­or one), what Kael says still goes. 

So there’s all that, and it’s all incred­ible and impress­ive and really really beau­ti­ful in the new restored ver­sion, and the Carl Davis orches­tral score accom­pa­ny­ing it all is apt and effect­ive. But what really killed me on see­ing the movie was the elasti­city and innov­a­tion of its cine­mat­ic lan­guage. Both the free­dom and the con­cen­tra­tion with which Griffith com­poses his images and orches­trates their effects is con­stantly dazzling. His mas­ter shots are often in the stand­ard mode of his day. In the scenes in the con­tem­por­ary story, for instance, the action in the apart­ment of the char­ac­ters called The Dear One and The Boy is con­veyed by means of a rel­at­ively tight medi­um shot, and briskly car­ried out by the act­ors, but the things Griffith does to under­score par­tic­u­lar actions are extraordin­ary. When The Dear One (Mae Marsh) learns that her beloved is going to the gal­lows, after a seem­ingly final appeal has been exhausted, the film con­veys her des­pair by hav­ing her walk dir­ectly toward the cam­era, until her face is in a close up that nearly fills the frame, and of course the lens has been los­ing focus the closer and closer the per­former gets to it. Watching it, the view­er is almost moved to rear back a little, so over­whelm­ing is the decept­ively simple effect. Elsewhere, par­tic­u­larly in scenes of ancient Babylon, Griffith breaks up his frame using optic­al vari­ants of the iris-in/iris-out effect. Not set­tling for mere circles, Griffith throws in dia­mond shapes, diag­on­ally blocks off two cor­res­pond­ing corners, and so on. These are old, rel­at­ively “crude” effects but I found them start­ling in their express­ive­ness. Was it, I wondered, a case of the effects being so old that they seemed new? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s more the case that nar­rat­ive cinema has become so much a slave to a cer­tain idea of verisimil­it­ude that cer­tain vari­et­ies of visu­al express­ive­ness have been squelched. (Antonioni, of course, was an act­ive and innov­at­ive pro­ponent of the frag­men­ted frame, but he acheived his effects via archi­tec­ture and interi­or design.)

In Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer With The Danish Filmmaker, Jan Wahl’s splen­did, and just recently pub­lished, account, Wahl recalls that great dir­ect­or’s thoughts on this Griffith film: “Dreyer first viewed […] Intolerance as a young man in 1916. To this day, it remains a stag­ger­ing dis­play of massive archi­tec­ture, tre­mend­ous crowds (all real —no digit­al fakery or Schüftan pro­cess), a huge cre­ation cry­ing out against Tyranny and Injustice—an exper­i­ment employ­ing new devices of cut­ting, fram­ing, angles, invent­ing tech­niques as needed. According to Dreyer’s own words, ‘I went home com­pletely dazed, over­whelmed by a new rhythm and the num­ber of close-ups. In par­tic­u­lar those of Lillian Gish at the con­clu­sion.’ […] On that night, Dreyer became aware of how far one might aim in the medi­um.” I think that Intolerance still retains the power to instill that awareness.