The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
One Week
Sumurun
Haunted Spooks
Anna Boleyn
The Flapper
The Golem: How He Came into the World
Within Our Gates
High and Dizzy
Algol
Convict 13
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Mollycoddle
The Last of the Mohicans
The Penalty
Way Down East
Suds
Neighbors
Huckleberry Finn
Outside the Law
Excuse My Dust
The Round-Up
The Restless Sex
The Mark of Zorro
Why Change Your Wife?
Genuine
Nomads of the North
Something to Think About
Sex
Madame DuBarry
The Tantalizing Fly
The Oyster Princess
From Hand to Mouth
Sunnyside
Yankee Doodle in Berlin
J’accuse
False Faces
The Grim Game
The Hayseed
Different From The Others
A Day’s Pleasure
Male and Female
When the Clouds Roll By
Captain Kidd’s Kids
The Doll
Feline Follies
Back Stage
True Heart Susie
The Delicious Little Devil
Endurance
Sir Arne’s Treasure
Daddy-Long-Legs
The Sentimental Bloke
The Roaring Road
Bumping into Broadway
Broken Blossoms
The Lost Battalion
Victory
The Clown’s Pup
Blind Husbands
The Wicked Darling
Ravished Armenia
Bolshevism on Trial
The Miracle Man
The Cook
Father Sergius
A Dog’s Life
The Heart of Humanity
Out West
The Sinking of the Lusitania
The Bond
Are Crooks Dishonest?
La dixième symphonie [The Tenth Symphony]
Tarzan of the Apes
The Bell Boy
I Don’t Want To Be A Man
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley
The Outlaw and His Wife
The Blue Bird
Shoulder Arms
My Four Years in Germany
Old Wives For New
Fabiola
‘Blue Blazes’ Rawden
Stella Maris
M’Liss
The Whispering Chorus
Moonshine
Mickey
After my very mixed feelings about the DW Griffith’s beautiful, appalling racist epic The Birth of a Nation, I was keen to check out the next film he made, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages. I’d heard that it was made to address the divisions caused by the controversial release of The Birth of a Nation, including the resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan. But it seems that I may have misunderstood DWG’s intentions.
Intolerance is supposedly about the scourge of intolerance throughout the ages – only the focus (if there is one) seems to be on closer analysis of intolerances perpetrated against the ideas and prejudices of one DW Griffith. The right to make a racist film without criticism, the right to follow a more puritanical religion, and so on. You may have a hard time actually picking these out of the immense scope of the thing, but as far as a moral core goes, I’m afraid it may be a rotten one.
Otherwise I’m left with two impressions. Firstly that the whole thing is visually absolutely stunning. The scenes in ancient Babylon in particular are some of the most ambitious I’ve seen in any era – and bearing in mind how everything needed to be constructed in real life, the achievement here is undeniable. Griffith also seems to have developed his editing style a fair amount in the year between productions, and some sections were clearly influential. That is, if you can find them. Because this is a long, long film, and what plot there is is impossible to follow.
A lot of this is due to the convoluted story of the film’s production. DWG started off shooting a film about a strike at a mill, in which the villains are not just the mill owners but also the moral puritans driving the strikers. After showing this to his friends in the industry he decided this was too slight to be the follow-up to the biggest film of all time and started shooting another three segments – one in ancient Babylon, one about Jesus’s crucifixion and one about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestant Huguenots in France.
Intolerance is therefore four films, woven together over three and a half hours of screen time. Most of the characters (and there are a lot of these) are unnamed, and the connection between the stories is highly tenuous. I’m not sure if my attention span has been destroyed by mobile phones and having small children, but it was very difficult to follow one strand, let alone four. This also seems to have been the opinion of contemporary audiences, who did not flock to the cinema as they had previously. The film barely broke even, and DWG’s career never really recovered. In the last century, however, the film has had a critical renaissance – writers who do not want to say anything nice about BOAN have instead flocked to lavish praise on it. Armond White, for example, described it as “The Greatest Movie Ever Made” in the National Review, an opinion which is clearly incorrect. More recently parallels have been drawn between the concept of “intolerance” as demonstrated in the film and the debating tactics of the alt-right, where intolerance of racism is presented as a greater crime than racism itself.
My take is this: it’s another beautiful, awful film, only this time it’s more beautiful, and also really, really confusing.
This episode of the superb podcast You Must Remember This looks at the making of Intolerance.
The Immigrant
Oh Doctor!
The Dying Swan
Satan Triumphant
Thaïs
The Cure
Bucking Broadway
A Little Princess
The Torture of Silence (Mater Dolorosa)
The Woman God Forgot
His Wedding Night
Cleopatra
All Aboard
Fear
The Adventurer
Bestia (aka The Polish Dancer)
A Man There Was (Terje Vigen)
The Butcher Boy
Wild and Woolly
Teddy at the Throttle
The Poor Little Rich Girl
A Reckless Romeo
Straight Shooting
Coney Island
Der Magische Gürtel
Tom Sawyer
The Rough House
The Little American
Intolerance
The Floorwalker
Sherlock Holmes
Fatty and Mabel Adrift
The Rink
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Cenere
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish
Judex: L’ombre mystérieuse (The Mysterious Shadow), Episode 1
Farmer Alfalfa Sees New York
Joan The Woman
Snow White
Hell’s Hinges
East Is East
The Danger Girl
Behind the Screen
Civilization
One A.M.
The Battle of the Somme
Hoodoo Ann
The Count
The Curse of Quon Gwon
The Pawnshop
Where Are My Children?
The Return of Draw Egan
Police
The Tramp
A Fool There Was
The Italian
Carmen
The Champion
Filibus
Fatty’s Spooning Days
Assunta Spina
Regeneration
The Cheat
Der Golem
The Raven
The Martyrs of the Alamo
Madame Butterfly
The Golden Chance
Work
Sage Brush Tom
Not only is there no defending The Birth of A Nation in 2019, it’s wildly offensive even for 1915. A film made to glorify the Klu Klux Klan by claiming that they saved the USA from (appalling racist caricatures of) unruly black people, it was picketed by the NAACP on release, but was enough of a hit to inspire the real KKK to return from semi-retirement to murder thousands of black people. It would be hard to imagine another film doing as much to harm humanity as a whole, and beyond any other considerations, this should clearly mark it as a bad film.
Inconveniently it’s also a landmark in filmmaking history – not the first feature film, but the one which was big enough to get everyone else making them, and a spectacle so vast and varied that it wouldn’t be matched in scale for decades. Director D.W. Griffith was a leader in the field already, but the release of the film shot him into superstardom, and he took the sleepy Californian community of Hollywood with him.
So I watched Birth of A Nation, all three hours and thirteen minutes of it, to find out if there is anything to salvage.
In terms of writing, no. The script is a hackneyed bunch of racist cliches muddled with sentimental war stories and bad political fantasy. In terms of acting, also no. Lilian Gish puts in some fairly decent work as ever, but the horrible blackface performers undo everything – the public in crowd scenes are no worse than most of the other actors. But in terms of cinematography, in the first half of the film at least, there are some moments of sublime beauty which this piece of trash does not deserve in any way. These don’t really come across in still images, but I’ll try.
Part of it is awe at the scale of everything, but I can’t deny there was some real talent wasted in making this film.
If you want to judge this for yourself, the whole thing is available on Youtube.
His Musical Career
Gertie the Dinosaur
Fantômas Contre Fantômas
Salomy Jane
His Prehistoric Past
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
The Magic Cloak of Oz
His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz
Cabiria
Judith of Bethulia
Absinthe
Mabel’s Strange Predicament
Bathing Costumes
In the Land of the Head Hunters
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
Engelein
Mabel at the Wheel
The Avenging Conscience
Cinderella
The Virginian
Suspense
The Last Days of Pompeii
Mabel’s Dramatic Career
Folkestone Beauty Contest
The Speed Kings
L’Enfant de Paris
The Grasshopper and the Ant
The Student of Prague
The Night Before Christmas
The Bangville Police
Ivanhoe
Ingeborg Holm
Atlantis
Mabel’s New Hero
The Battle at Elderbush Gulch
Fantômas
Hamlet
The Mothering Heart
The Adventures of Kathlyn
Die Insel der Seligen
Death’s Marathon
The Pursuit of the Smugglers
The Gusher
Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life
Twilight of a Woman’s Soul
Eighty Million Women Want -?
Scrooge
Raja Harishchandra
The House of Darkness
Evidence of the Film
Centuries of Sound 