Speaking of Cinema-As-Puzzle (see: yesterday's post about Don't Look Now), probably the grand-daddy of them all, whether by accident or by design, is a film that is as we speak nuzzling up towards its centenniary: David Wark Griffith's Intolerance.
Made in 1916, this behemoth film was ostensibly constructed as an answer to cries of "Racist sumbitch!
" which were hurled in Griffith's direction upon the release of his previous work from 1915 . . . the dazzlingly constructed but narratively infuriating Birth of a Nation.Designed to reveal Griffith as a man whose heart was not only sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed, but a man who was so perturbed by the injustices that men wreak on their brothers and sisters that he was a downright activist of fully blossomed authenticity, a man who reserved his greatest cinematic effort for a groaning, aching plea for empathy, humanism, and respect for one another. Intolerance is by far his most massive undertaking. It might in fact be the most massive undertaking in the history of cinema.
More likely an act of penitence rather than an indication of the measure of the humanist purity within Griffith's heart--there was essentially no way for Grif to undo the obvious appearance of deep sincerity and tremendous nostalgia with which he rendered his tales of the prewar South and the KKK--Intolerance grew to the size that it did not because of the size of the regret or heartache for Birth, but because of the contemporary trends in epic filmmaking surrounding him.
As for the size of the regret or heartache for being regarded as a Klan sympathizer in Birth, Griffith famously sat down to film an introduction to the re-release version of Birth in the early 1930's with no less a leading light of the day than the legendary Walter Huston (who played Abraham Lincoln for Griffith in this era). In this intro, Grif re-emphasized the spirit of the sympathy he maintained for for the KKK, at least back during the immediate postbellum south. "The Klan was needed, back then," he said, nodding his head in self-affirmation, weaving tales of carpetbaggers and abusive occupiers from the north.
Of course, D. W. himself was a southerner--his father was a Colonel in the Confederacy; he war born roughly ten years after the close of the war, and grew up listening to grownups spin tales of the great conflagration. The war, and his family's side in the war, his very roots as a southerner--all of this was a part of his DNA.
As for the sincerity of his feelings regarding the right of all--regardless of race, creed or color--to pursue the right of liberty and happiness free from persecution, one can only speculate. We can say that after Intolerance, the plight of the oppressed and the misunderstood remained a theme in his work . . . most notably Broken Blossoms (the extremely grim tale of the love affair of a tormented waif under the heel of her abusive father, with an ethnic Chinese merchant) and The Struggle, the dazzlingly brave (and equally grim) early sound era film about a regular, workaday contemporary man's struggle with alcoholism.
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Intolerance began as much smaller, far more intimate tale (versus the end result) about the struggles of a mother (played by the atomically bubbly Mae Marsh) and her husband (played by the tragic Robert Harron) versus the organized forces of moral puritanism. Called The Boy and The Dear One respectively, the couple are forced out of their meager but cheerful small town after a corporate magnate who runs a factory orders a 10% pay cut on his workers in order to finance his resentful, longings-filled sister who, unable to find love and cohabitation, goes all the way in the other direction of total puritanism and starts a crusader organization of "busybodies." Rather than accept the pay cut, the workers strike--a massacre on the strikers by armed breakers sees the Dear One and the Boy fleeing to the city to find their fortunes. There they find love, crime, pregnancy, disaster and total agony, and lucky redemption in the end.
If one were to strip away the three highly ornate, costumed, set-construction-heavy historical stories intercut with the Mother And The Law tale, and leave the latter contemporary narrative unified and standing in sequence on its own . . . one would be left with a rather trite contemporary reflection of its times, full of interesting camera work and locations, without question cut with a rhythm for the ages, particularly in the final thrilling conclusion of the narrative . . . but in the end we would have nothing even closely resembling the awesome acclaim heaped on what this simple modern tale eventually turned into.
Griffith had been keeping a close eye on the goings on in the grandly operatic Italian cinema of the mid-teens. At this time, the Italians were at the forefront of the development of the plastic and subjective arts that comprise the substance of cinema: set construction and costume, camera movement, massive recruitment of extras, inventive camera placement, special effects including pyrotechnics and miniatures, and the introduction of grand spectacle and high operatic, historical and biblical themes into the cinema.
Obvious examples of this are Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914, and a film which should have been reassembled, restored, and rereleased by now), The Last Days of Pompeii (1913, Caserini), Quo Vadis? (Guazzoni, 1912) and others. We can only speculate about the majority of these titles and whether or not Griffith encountered them, but it is known that he did see the dazzling Cabiria--itself a longtime favorite of mine, a film screaming out for restoration and redistribution on home video, a far more pressing cinematic emergency than rereleasing the same old Chaneys, Langs, and Murnaus.
Filled with slow and elegant camera moves, incredible special effects, and outrageously grand sets (Moloch's temple, the exteriors and the interiors, remain among the four or five most incredible full scale plastic, non-superimposition sets in the history of film; this goes for originality, execution, and scale) Cabiria is a film that we know directly affected Griffith tremendously. We know it inspired him to reorganize the entire project from the ground up. The Mother & The Law was re-imagined as simply one element placed against a who series of historical dramas, interwoven like basket bamboo weaves to form a far grander whole.
It requires very little brainpower to spot the elements of Cabiria in Intolerance: in the temple festival ceremony and dance in the Babylonian episode, which incidentally contains a tracking shot for the ages, one that stumped viewers and cinematographers as to its method . . . the rolling elevator, pushed by what we must consider to be early incarnations of the camera "grip", pushing the descending elevator forward until they reach a predetermined marker which sets the camera right in the midst of the exotic dance of religious celebration.
Intolerance is a perfect example of the sum of the parts being far greater than the whole. If one isolated any of the individual threads--the hyper melodramatic French Huguenot episode (classic Griffith overwrought intertitle cards), the Jesus Christ Jerusalem episode, the Babylon episode, and the Mother and the Law sequence--one would be left with a bunch of isolated costume dramas, heavily moralizing and editorialized, with one contemporary drama with extremely exciting cutting, ditto on the moralizing and editorialization.
But in the intertwining of these four stories, and framing them with the mystical element of timeless wondering when man's inhumaity to man will cease, exemplified by the image of Lilian Gish rocking the crade of time, Griffith turned the entire film into something sublime, almost hinting at the religious and the sacred and the eternal.
There are few who can grasp how radical the concept was of splitting up four narratives and fracturing them into each other with very little hand holding was--it throws people even today, not understanding the purpose--to develop a larger thesis, to build up a metaphor, to cultivate a third eye in the viewer, to affect the heart of the viewer by packing the world entire right there in a three hour film. It is as revolutionary as Eisenstein's rapid montage, busting little moments of action into quick splits of vantage point and action; Griffith breaks the entire world down into a sequence of rapid montage: Eisensteins moments evolved out of Griffith's centuries (of course Grif evolved the groundwork for in-the-moment rapid montage especially in Way Down East, as Lilian Gish runs out into the icy wilderness and faints onto an ice floe), where time becomes compressed, and the filmmaker extracts that which is essential for the creation in the viewers mind's eye something extra, something ethereal.
Intolerance is a film that affects me like no other--although it perhaps doesn't mean to, it haunts me. The now aged images, portraying what was already then ancient history (the longshot of the crucifixion strikes me as actual footage!), the then-contemporary images, revealing a long gone world of wrought iron, cobble stones and fired brick, they carry with them a hint of the supernatural, as if there are mysteries to be revealed, secrets to be uncovered if one sifts around within the substance of the film.
It strikes me as if some oracle were successfully wrought by the assembly; it's a feeling I rarely if ever get or have gotten by any other film. There is a feeling of oracle that one gets from the sacred books of the world--the Bible, the Koran, Tao Te Ching, and Hindu scripture: because of it's containing so much of the hard and immutable DNA of the film, because of his superhistorical and almost supernatural aspirations, Intolerance strikes me in almost precisely the same way . . . mysteries to be extracted with each reopening.
I urge anyone and everyone remotely interested in the film to go out and purchase the MoC edition of the Brownlow restoration of the film.
Preston Clive/Schreck
3/10/2015***