Intolerance explained...

Ok, since I don't seem to have time to actually write a new blog entry, I'm trolling for content. I wrote this review on Amazon.com and it's actually pretty good. When I last checked, "24 of 29 people found the following review helpful"! I don't know what that means, however.

Ever think about that content you publish on sites like Amazon.com? I'm sure their terms of service state that I've given them all rights to my screed, and thus republishing here is technically illegal. Well, 29 people reading a review on Amazon over a four year period is more volume than I'll be getting here!


Intolerance explained..., May 30, 2002

Reviewer:

Christopher R. DeFay (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Many of the reviewers here rightly praise Griffith's well-deserved credit for his technical achievements. Others criticize him for a poorly constructed film. The fact of the matter is that, for 1916, this film is an incredible feat. The first American big-budget extravaganza, it followed closely in the steps of other big multi-reel films in vogue at the time(Griffith's own Birth of a Nation, and others coming out of Italy). The spectacle alone makes this film worth a look, but viewers should try to contextualize it. There was a great expectation across the nation to what would come from Griffith after the amazing--and incendiary racist-film, Birth of a Nation.

What is Intolerance really a metaphor for anyway? Griffith was fighting off attempts by legislators to regulate or censor the motion picture industry. An anti-censorship booklet released by Griffith in 1916 suggests he continued to respond to "moral reformers" even as he assembled Intolerance. In fact, his film is an attempt to address these reformers while simultaneously opining on nothing less than the historic importance of the film media itself.

Intolerance is really about a nation's cultural memory and Griffith's attempt to offer a totalizing, yet entertaining version of it. His belief that if we were educated on the subject of past "sins of hate, hypocrisy and intolerance" through the magic of film that we could inoculate ourselves against war, capital punishment and other evils. He argued that film was a better education than traditional education. To quote the master: "Six moving pictures would give students more knowledge of the world than they have obtained from their entire study." Such an understanding is, of course, naïve and dangerous.

Griffith was caught in a double-bind. In order to fight the censors he needed to simultaneously argue that his epics (like Birth and Intolerance) were a kind of filmed truth, yet the construction of this "truth" should only be the purview of the director. Griffith's logic is dangerously flawed. Birth of a Nation is hardly true history. In fact its racist vision of blacks fanned the flames of racial hatred in whites and surely accounted for many more lynchings than if the film had not been made. What's missing from his vision is how truth is arrived at: certainly not from a lone man's dictates. We have another word for that...

Intolerance is worth viewing because it is a wonderful illustration of the limitations of film. It's a simple morality tale blown up to epic-and phantasmagoric-proportions. It's greatest weakness is the cross-cutting between the four time-periods, and the attempt to narrate all history, yet this is precisely what makes the film interesting. The failure to arrive at an overarching metaphor that somehow spans history and unites us with our past points to Griffith's own flawed vision. It reminds us-contrary to Griffith's own advice-that understanding history in all its irresolvable complexity is absolutely essential.