Recent viewings

Intolerance. D.W. Griffith's 1916 silent opus is, by any measure, a gigantic undertaking. The phrase "cast of thousands" is literally true; the sets are gargantuan; and both the plot and the structure of the movie are ambitious even by modern standards.

For three and a half hours, Griffith interweaves four separate storylines in four separate settings in a manner that's still regarded as avante-garde and challenging in modern films. Each storyline deals in some fashion with the problems caused by religious and social intolerance. Griffith cuts back and forth between the storylines like a composer interweaving musical themes, and even though the VHS copy of the film I saw is a wretchedly poor transfer, even though a couple of the stories are underdeveloped and all are marred by melodramatic excesses, even though Griffith has a tendency to preach at the audience in the title-cards as well as through the script, and even though his portrayal of Babylon and the conquering Persians is historically bizarre, I still found myself getting caught up in the flow of his titanic epic, especially toward the end as each storyline accelerates toward its conclusion in a crescendo of ever-shorter, ever-more-urgent scenes that bounce back and forth between storylines like a tennis ball in a four-way Wimbledon match.

It's one of the tragedies of cinematic history that when Intolerance proved a flop at the box office, it was recut into two separate, shorter movies and much of the excised footage was lost for good. However, what I saw was impressive enough, even in a dark, murky, blurry transfer with a monotonous and sometimes ludicrously inappropriate soundtrack, that I've ordered a copy of Kino's highly-regarded DVD release. I look forward to seeing the three-hundred foot tall walls of Babylon in something approaching their original glory.

An oddity of the film: it's the only silent movie I've ever seen which actually includes footnotes to the titlecards. Fortunately, the Kino release reportedly leaves the titlecards on the screen long enough that one can actually read them without stopping and rewinding and pausing.