AFI Top 52 Project - #49

Yeah, I just couldn’t get into this at all. I knew going in it was going to be a tough watch (a 3 hour silent film are you kidding me with this shit?!) but the way the separate stories were interwoven made it even harder to keep up with what was going on. I will say that the sets were truly impressive things of exquisite beauty. It just seems like some of that incredible detail should have gone into the editing.

Supposedly Griffith made this as a sort of atonement for the blatantly racist Birth of a Nation, but if you’re replacing racism with a hefty dose of misogyny then you’re really not doing…

Intolerance, burning and slaying. Intolerance is D. W. Griffith's response to the condemnations he had received in regards to The Birth of a Nation, which has over the years been criticized for its racist overtones yet also praised for its technological innovations for film history. As for D. W. Griffith's Intolerance, I feel as if what Griffith is leaving behind made me rethink what I had perceived of him after The Birth of a Nation, because Intolerance goes ahead and speaks out against how closed-minded society's viewpoints may be, within all eras, age groups, and races. It's a film that is already a century old, and it is so ahead of its own time, it cannot be remade today no…

***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages... Oh, what a glorious and tear-inducing cinematographic creation was born almost a century ago. Oh, what a compelling and self-reflexive drama of epic proportions gave cinema an outstanding respect. Oh, what a sophisticated and groundbreaking epitome of the strong emotional connection existent between love and several forms of intolerance Griffith attempted to create. Oh, what a faithful representation of different eras of human history making love until the cataclysmic final explosion ensues an inevitable, yet truthful conclusion about the decaying of the human race due to its imaginary vainglory. Oh, what an audacious depiction of violence contrasted with evil intentions and the lack of…

With the possible exception of True Heart Susie, Griffith's non-formal ideas never progressed past Victorian melodrama. So most of the ideas parlayed within the actual narratives of Intolerance are often precariously simple tales of heroes and villains - with the exception of the "Mother and the Law" sequence. Being that this section of the film was intended originally as a stand-alone feature (and eventually released as so with added footage in 1919) it makes sense that it's the only one which has any serious emotional impact within the individual segments it is chopped up into. However, this is not 'The Mother and the Law,' nor 'The Fall of Babylon,' but a film made of four stories which begin and end…

To think Intolerance is 105 years-old might just be the most mystifying fact of the movies, even when considering its religiously overwrought presentation. Overruling some mildly offensive appropriation, unlike The Birth of a Nation, Griffith’s next feature isn’t besmirched by the same deplorable racism and insidious sympathy for the confederacy, allowing modern audiences to watch it without feeling sick to their stomachs by the time it reaches its conclusion. Alongside Birth, it establishes Griffith as the first true action filmmaker — a title birthed out of a 3-hour spectacle of fire and blood, with some 3,000 extras in tow. It’s the inception of the cinematic language as we now know it; the inconceivable budget, the use of the closeup for…

Not. Even. The Europeans were so far ahead of this in 1916 it isn't even funny -- even their unambitious weekly-program pop-movies, sometimes. The better ones. All it has going for it is the big-ass sets and that assembly-line crosscutting, a mechanical process for creating meaning... but those are pretty American qualities, so it could be that's why it's been preeminent in the history books.

I guess I'll watch the alternate cut of The Mother And The Law one of these days, cuz that's the only part of this that made any impression at all.

PS: There's a thematic thread unifying the four unconnected stories? Really? Only feebly there, I hardly even noticed it ever. Thinking this is ahistorical, and…

After the second watch I’m thinking this is the best movie I’ve ever seen. I’m usually not one to make this sort of judgement so hastily, but this is the kind of movie that makes you reconsider just about any other that you’ve watched. Intolerance is constantly giving you so much information that you fear throughout the runtime that you will have forgotten key elements by the end. But when the picture is finished, you can’t deny the enormity of what you’ve seen. This film is of the caliber of art which, after taking it in, makes you pause and think about how to proceed, something such scant few movies have been able to achieve in the history of the…

The problem with choosing "intolerance" as a theme for your time-sprawling opus is that it is so shapeless and blunt as to lose all meaning. Literally anything can be described as "intolerance" from a certain perspective: Your coworker stole your sandwich from the fridge? He is intolerant of your right to possess pastrami in communal space.

Thus we get DW Griffith's "Intolerance" subtitled "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages," and, philosophically, it's a lot of dreck. We're supposed to believe the Women's Suffrage movement is a moral evil in line with Pontius Pilate and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

This gets even hairier when you dig into the film's origin story. Griffith was in the midst of a huge backlash for…

The film Intolerance was released in 1916, as a response and apology for the film The Birth of a Nation, which was released by the same people a year earlier. D. W. Griffith, the director for both films, denies that it’s an apology for The Birth of A Nation. I haven’t seen The Birth of A Nation, and I don’t think I want to, the only thing I know about that film is that it’s about the Klan and it’s really racist. Many of the characters in this film don’t have names because Griffith wanted them to be representative of different types of people. Intolerance also had mixed reviews and was a financial bomb when it was released but has…

A massive piece of parallel editing that deserves to be as respected (or almost as respected) as it is in film history. Whether you give it those props for being simply foundational or enthralling on its own is up to you, but it's definitely one or both of those things. I say both.

"Intolerance" is used pretty broadly here to describe cyclical cruelty, greed, and meanness in general. Keeping his target that vague actually helps this movie to age well, even if you still get some unnecessary polemics like this one:

"When women cease to attract men they often seek Reform as a second choice."

The morality of Intolerance is enough to make the 200 minute picture coherent, but the…

The first question one should ask in the pursuit of understanding D.W Griffith’s Intolerance begins not at the broad nature of the film, but at the title itself. Why the term “Intolerance”? Sure, the subject matter explored by the film’s sprawling narrative that transcends eras is that of prejudice descending into hate before blossoming again into pure chaos, but why “intolerance” in particular? Why not the few other words I used to describe the thematic flow of Griffith’s epic?

To understand the significance of intolerance, both as an idea and as the film’s title, one has to understand the type of filmmaker D.W. Griffith is - a filmmaker of observation, less so of passion and intimacy. Griffith’s strength and shortcoming…