#54: Intolerance

Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)

Intolerance is the oldest movie I've ever seen by about nine years. It's also arguably the first art film. Coming one year after Griffith's most famous film Birth Of A Nation which was accused of racism (And that was by 1915 standards), Intolerance portrays a struggle between human love and social repression that's been waged all throughout history. The film jumps back and forth between four parallel stories: One about the downfall of Babylon, one about the crucifixion of Christ, one about the Protestant Reformation, and one in modern day. The most important of the time periods is the modern day, because it's the one being compared to the other three.

In Babylon, the priests of Marduk are angry that people are worshipping this new Ishtar cult, so they betray Babylon to the enemy. This ends up in a bloody massacre.

In Christ's time, the Pharisees are mad that Jesus is going against the system which places them in a position of moral superiority, so they have him crucified.

In the 1500's, the Queen is mad that people are turning away from Catholicism, so she goads the King into repressing them. This ends in in a bloody massacre.

In modern day, a woman who is angry she's no longer seen as part of the youth culture organizes a society called 'The Uplifters', a group of political activists to 'Protect the moral purity' of youth. (A theme which has obvious relevance to today's culture.) They gain the help of this business who, to pay for the political movement, has to cut employee wages by 10%. This causes a strike which is met with violent retribution. Later in the film, the main character gets caught using drops of whiskey to help put her child to sleep (Which, reprehensible by today's standards, is explained in the film to to be 'Frowned upon, but practiced by doctors'.) The Uplifters then sue her to take her child away from her. She then tries to go to a criminal to take her baby back for her. Her fiance shows up to stop her, and then there's a violent struggle in which this member of the Uplifters spying on them shoots the criminal with the husband's gun. The husband is convicted of murder and sent to be hanged. During this storyline, it repeatedly cuts back and forth to the other three to expose parallels in terms of persecution and the toll it takes on the innocent. But out of the four storylines, the boy in the modern timeline is the only one who gets saved. The message seeming to be 'Let's learn from the past and work to fight intolerance in the present'.

Somebody should edit the film with clips from Fox News. The Pharisees of modern day.

The film is successful in it's artistic expression, but it's hard to ignore the problems with film technology in 1916. The light level's always fluctuating, the score doesn't always fit the action like it does in later silent films. The captions are over-explanatory. They put words on the screen, you read them, then it shows the things you just read happening. It's like a picture book. You should be able to tell what's happening mostly based on the action, and the captions should be bare bones, like in the later Chaplin silent films.

Rating: *** / 5

25/101

Others:

Ghost Writer: **** / 5

A Polanski movie that starts out looking like a political satire then turns into Chinatown about the Iraq War. It's clearly fiction, but it's also obvious which character is supposed to represent which real life political figure. Good movie on the whole, but would have worked better if they ended it about two scenes earlier. They traded realism for the more obvious 'I am Roman Polanski' ending.