DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI)

 DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI): 1920, 74mins. Director: Robert Wiene, Cast: Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), Cesare (Conrad Veidt), Jane (Lil Dagover), Franzis (Friedrich Feher)

Hyperbolic or not, bestowing the title of “the first horror movie” on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari somehow sells it short. To what degree it is even a horror film or, more accurately, what sort of horror it is, largely depends on how much faith we put in Franzis (Friedrich Feher) as a narrator. We first see him a forlorn man telling a companion the tale of murders that took place in his hometown of Holstenwall some years earlier when a mysterious showman by the name of Caligari (Werner Krauss) wandered into the village with his travelling sideshow, a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt). At face value, Franzis was witness to the terror brought on by the sinister Caligari and his accomplice. But in the end, none of this may have happened outside of the narrator’s mind.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari succeeds where so many other films have failed attempting the same mental flip largely because the chilling atmosphere is sustained regardless of which truth we accept, even if it’s only a man’s dissent into madness.

Indeed, the much-celebrated look of the film, depicting the abstraction of a Bavarian village using sharp jagged edges, crooked alleyways and spiraling rooftops, has earned it a place in the retrospectives of German Expressionism. Set designer Hermann Warm would recall, “We spent a whole day and part of the night reading through this very curious script. We realized that a subject like this needed something out of the ordinary in the way of sets. Reimann, whose painting in those days had Expressionist tendencies, suggested doing the sets Expressionistically. We immediately set to work roughing up designs in that style.”

But, as some film historians have pointed out, apart from the superficial backdrops, the film bears little resemblance to the nature of Expressionism. In The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, Lotte H. Eisner argued, “A lack of continuity is apparent between the Expressionistic sets and the utterly bourgeois furniture-the chintzy armchairs in Lil Dagover’s sitting-room or the leather armchair in the madhouse yard. The break in style is fatal. Similarly, the façade of the asylum is not distorted, yet the end of the film is seen in the same weird décor. It is hard to say which is the more responsible for this: the Expressionist tendencies of the designers, or the parsimony of the producer.

The stylization of the acting is dictated by the sets. Yet Werner Krauss in the part of the satanic Dr. Caligari and Conrad Veidt in that of the sinister somnambulist are the only actors who really adapt themselves  to it, and-in Kurtz’s words-achieve a ‘dynamic synthesis of their being’, by concentrating their movements and facial expressions. Through a reduction of gesture they attain movements which are almost linear and which-despite a few curves that slip in-remain brusque, like the broken angles of the sets; and their movements from point to point never go beyond the limits of a given geometrical plane. The other actors, on the other hand, remain locked in a naturalistic style, though, owing to the old-fashioned way in which they are dressed (cloaks, top hats, morning-coats), their outlines do achieve an element of the fantastic.

The characters of Caligari and Cesare conform to Expressionist conception: the somnambulist, detached from his everyday ambience, deprived of all individuality, an abstract creature, kills without motive or logic. And his master, the mysterious Dr. Caligari, who lacks the merest shadow of human scruple, acts with the criminal insensibility and defiance of morality which the Expressionists exalted.”

Ah, but this misses the larger point. This bizarre view of the houses, streets and even offices reflects a literally distorted view of the world as seen by Franzis. This is his homeland, rendered unrecognizable by the literal and psychological ruin brought on by the war.

As Anton Kaels wrote in his essay on the film for Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, “The film’s historical unconsciousness-what the film does not or cannot say-is the war, or more precisely, the traumatic memory of the war. The film itself serves as a flashback to the period that had hardly passed; it invites the audience to recover the memory, as discomfiting and contradictory as it may appear. The film’s disregard for temporal linearity blurs the boundaries between past and present, fantasy and experience, dream and delusion. A detective story on its surface-who is the monster in our midst?-the film conceals as it reveals, it deceives as it uncovers, it represses as it remembers.”

But Franzis also speaks on behalf of the writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, pacifists whose view of life and home was shattered by the war, to them a diversion for the powerful at the expense of the sleepy citizens they send off to battle.

For the rest of his life Janowitz stood by his account that the frame narrative, ultimately revealing Franzis to be a patient in an asylum, was added at the insistence of the producers in an attempt to restore faith in authorities, accomplished by revealing the director of the asylum to be the real-life counterpart of Caligari, still played by Krauss, now seen as simply a man of medicine running an institution.

In his 1947 From Caligari to Hitler, once considered a seminal essay on the film but now marred by discoveries made since, Siegfried Kracauer, accepting this version of events, commented, “Janowitz and Mayer knew why they raged against the framing story, it perverted, if not reversed their intrinsic intentions.  While the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Wiene’s Caligari glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness.  A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one—following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum”

Eisner, in The Haunted Screen, repeated the same version of events in, “We know from the comments of one of the authors of the scenario-quoted by Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler-that the prologue and epilogue were added as an afterthought in the face of objections from both authors. The result of these modifications was to falsify the action and ultimately to reduce it to the ravings of a madman. The film’s authors, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, had had the very different intention of unmasking the absurdity of asocial authority, represented by Dr. Caligari, the superintendent of a lunatic asylum and proprietor of a fairground side-show.”

Janowitz’s account was substantially discredited in 1995, however, when the original screenplay surfaced with the frame narrative already intact (though in a significantly different form). It remains unclear, then, if Janowitz was speaking out of displeasure in how the frame narrative was ultimately rewritten rather than in the idea of a frame narrative being written at all. A more probing question is whether Janowitz was blaming the producers due to faulty memory or, more likely, a misplaced anger with himself and his cowriter for their failure to write a direct attack on authoritarianism.

It’s intriguing how similar the questions we ask about Franzis are. Is there a grain of truth in his story or is he, like his writer, subconsciously blocking memories he would rather not reckon with? Was he, for instance, the real murderer of his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) with whom he held a gentleman’s competition for the heart of Jane? Did he then opportunistically blame Cesare (or did he fabricate the monster himself), until remorse drove him to madness? Franzis himself remains a blank but the film offers a clue. Almost every player of his story (from Jane to Cesare to Dr. Caligari himself), is based on inmates and staff of the asylum.

In the end, no matter what the truth, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari depicts a world in which nothing looks or feels right. If the core of the film is a window into Franzi’s mental state, however, the film itself says much about the moods of Janowitz and Mayer even in unexpected places. Jane, for instance, was based on Gilda Langer, an actress who inspired the two writers and encouraged their work. Mayer fell for her, but Langer became engaged to rising Hungarian director Paul Czinner and then, tragically, died of a lung infection at the age of 23 about a month before the release of the film she helped inspire.

As David Kalat explained, “She didn't miss out on Caligari because she was dead. She was actually alive during the entire production. Torn between Mayer and Janowitz, Gilda Langer took the chance to trade up from a pair of starving writers in favor of an up-and-coming director and producer named Paul Czinner. By marrying Czinner, Gilda effectively left their orbit.”

Tellingly, Jane (played by Lil Dagover) is the only intended victim Cesare cannot bring himself to kill. Instead, he runs off with her but doesn’t get far before she is rescued by her father and a pose. Perhaps this was Mayer’s wish fulfillment, rescuing Langer both from the man who took her away and her untimely death. But Jane was only Langer’s avatar and her escape a mere fantasy of the screen. But the stark reality also creeps in for Franzis in the end when we discover Jane was based on a woman living in the mental hospital.

Further evidence of a dream in which the world, including the officials in charge, works as it should is in how easily Franzis recruits help. For all of the film’s alleged anti-authoritarianism, both the police and the orderlies in the asylum are easily convinced and eager to help when Franzis warns them of the somnambulist’s deeds.

But this only makes the bleakness of the ending hit harder. The real Jane (if that’s even her name) is as far from Franzis’s grasp as Gilda Langer was from Mayer’s and Germany itself was headed for darker times despite the initial hope of a compassionate and ethical state.

As Kaes wrote, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari marks a bold beginning in Weimar’s engagement with the trauma of the war. Implicitly participating in the debates at the time about war psychiatry and shell shock, the film is concerned with saving a memory of the war experience that runs counter to the official, harmonizing commemoration practices that began in 1920. Instead, in the spirit of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and the Berlin Dadaists who portrayed a scathing picture of the German professional classes in 1919-1920, Caligari offers an equally aggressive and grotesque image of bureaucracy and the medical establishment. It also critiques traditional filmic realism by adopting a highly abstract and provocatively primitive form that mimics the physical and mental desert the first technological war had left behind. By extending the concept of shell shock into the very form of the film, we realize to what extent trauma has fractured and shattered both narration and mise en scene. Caligari is a film in which the liminal experience of the front-its hallucinatory, ineffable, and disorienting effect-is preserved more authentically than in most naturalistic war movies.”

If a single philosophy, then, were to be settled on for a film as complex as Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, nihilism and existentialism are the likeliest candidates. If neither a story of a murderous fiend or the ravings of a lunatic, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is more clearly the story of Germany rising from the ashes of war only to step into a darker future. Cesare predicts the death of Alan early in the film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was also prophetic in a way Janowitz, Mayer and director Robert Wiene could not have guessed.

WITHIN OUR GATES

 WITHIN OUR GATES: 1920, 79 mins.  Director: Oscar Micheaux Cast: Evelyn Preer (Sylvia Landry), Flo Clements (Alma Prichard), William Smith (Philip Gentry), Charles D. Lucas (Dr. V. Vivian), William Stark (Jasper Landry)

Within Our Gates was an unquestionable candidate for inclusion into the National Film Registry if for no other reason than it bears the distinction of being the oldest surviving film by a Black director. Its predecessor, The Homesteader, predates it by a year but that, alas, has been lost to time. But Within Our Gates is a precious artifact for far more influential reasons. It is one of the few surviving pieces of the prolific career of director Oscar Micheaux, a trailblazer in every sense.

One name out of a flurry of Black filmmakers to emerge upon the end of the Great War, Micheaux had been telling the story of his struggles before film was even thought of as an option, writing and selling stories in South Dakota where he experimented as a homesteader. Film gave him a new medium and his body of work has remained the standout of what would come to be termed “race films” of the early 20^th century.

This despite the fact that a large portion of his oeuvre has been lost in the same manner a lot of early cinema was lost. In the case of Micheaux, an entire career has nearly vanished through nitrate degradation. Within Our Gates, an invaluable survivor, offers clues to the style and direction of one of cinema’s first auteurs.

The film is a complex, almost Dickensian, narrative with many layers, innovative narrative devices, and a sizeable roster of characters. Sylvia, a sweet young woman played by Evelyn Preer, drives the story. After her life falls apart while staying with a cousin up north, she leaves for the rural south to help a failing school intended to prop up the Black residents of the area. When she realizes how dire the financial situation of the school looks she returns to north to solicit an endowment. Here the film appears to become disjointed from where it began. The jealousy of Sylvia’s cousin who sabotaged her engagement, her cousin’s slimy step-brother who lusts after her and the compromising position Sylvia finds herself in through her cousin’s treachery all seem to fizzle out inconclusively, but Micheaux weaves it all back in seamless fluidity by the end.

In the meantime, the film shifts to address the questions many Black Americans were asking themselves in the early 20^th century. Micheaux draws a distinction between the Blacks who remained in the south and the ones who sought a better life in the industrial cities of the northern states. This disparity is also explored among the White characters, Micheaux reminding us that the dichotomy is not as clear as the north would like to pride itself.

For instance, Sylvia is eventually able to secure funds to save the school from the generosity of a Boston socialite, but not before the benefactor’s mind is almost changed by her snooty girlfriend, a southerner now living in Boston, her resentment so steep she is fighting against the 19^th Amendment, willingly sacrificing her own right to vote in order to prevent the same right to Black women. The socialite eventually honors her promise to Sylvia, but Micheaux’s reminder that even well-meaning Whites can be misled by persuasive sounding bigotry stands.

As Anna Siomopoulos observes in The Birth of Black Cinema, “But the racial reversals in the plot of the film are not the only challenges that Within Our Gates poses to Griffith’s film. Within Our Gates also counters Birth of a Nation in the politics of its aesthetics, specifically in its very different use of parallel editing. Griffith’s film uses cross-cutting to present a very simple opposition between white virtue and black villainy; in contrast, Micheaux’s film uses a complex editing pattern to present a larger social vision of many different, competing positions within both white and African American society.”

Micheaux’s harshest condemnation, however, is for traitors like the treacherous Efrem (E.G. Tatum) who endangers the lives of his own people to ingratiate himself to White mobs, and Old Ned, the unscrupulous Black reverend who preaches complacency to his Black assembly while secretly collecting bribes from Whites determined to keep them down.

 Dr. Vivian (Charles D. Lucas), a medical student in Boston who ultimately wins Sylvia’s heart, and Rev. Jacobs, who runs the crumbling school for Black children make for a revealing comparison. Both men embody the divergent philosophies offered by two Black leaders at the time. In the former Micheaux seems to have placed the ideas of Booker T. Washington while in the latter the teachings of Marcus Garvey. Both men, as did their historic counterparts, see education as the key to the path forward but Dr. Vivian’s emphasis is on patriotism. Micheaux’s decision to end the film with the triumph of this philosophy puts the film ideologically implicitly in Washington's camp.

Although the brutal lynching of Sylvia’s parents depicted through a flashback invert the horror of the murder of Gus in Birth of a Nation, the influence of Griffith on Within Our Gates is overstated. More than a rebuttal, Micheaux wanted to tell the story of his people in film for his people by his people, this explaining the title more than any other aspect of the film.

This entailed the establishment of Micheaux’s own production company and while he would come to sport many hats, this precluded Micheaux the budget offered by the larger film production companies. Getting the film made was only part of the struggle. Releasing and distributing the picture proved equally as challenging as many cities (notably Chicago, which was still reeling from the race riots of the previous summer) were reluctant to allow the film a run, at least before some cuts were made.

Despite these obstacles and financial restraints, Micheaux persevered and Within Our Gates was seen widely enough to have an impact. What it lacks in cinematic polish it more than compensates for with a pointed vision. Its multiple angles, both of the narrative and topical kind, tell a story that only a mind like Oscar Micheaux’s could tackle. While one would give much for more of his filmography to turn up, and it may as Within Our Gates itself was thought lost until a print was discovered in Spain in 1979, Within Our Gates is something of an overall testament to his contribution to cinema.

SOUTH

 

SOUTH:1919, 80mins.     Director: Frank Hurley

South, assembled from the footage shot by Frank Hurley on his fateful voyage to Antarctica with Ernest Shackleton on the Endurance, began life merely as a documentation of the voyage, the ice and wildlife of the South Pole. History turned it into an account of survival.

In July of 1914, with the backing of the government, Shackleton, accompanied by a crew of twenty-seven men including renowned Australian photographer Frank Hurley and some seventy dogs, left England to finish what his fellow countryman Robert Falcon Scott had tragically failed to do two years earlier; reach the Antarctic and return home with footage and specimens of the expedition. Scott and his men perished, Shackleton who, unlike Scott, was not burdened by a race to the Pole against the Norwegians, lost not a single man and his tale of heroism became a national motivator in the age of Antarctic Exploration.

Indeed, the outlook must have looked bleak when the Endurance, already trapped in pack ice, began to succumb to pressure winds, eventually crumbling to the bottom of the Weddell Sea. After surviving on provisions, Shackleton left 22 of his men on Elephant Island and made his way to a whaling station in South Georgia Island where he was able to solicit help for his crew.

If South is not as harrowing an experience as such a tale would suggest it is because much of it is the film Hurley initially set out to make; a documentation of the ice caps and marine life. It wasn’t until the crew became stranded that his focus shifted to the daily ordeals.

On film the crew appears determined and optimistic, but what were they really thinking as they are stoically digging through the ice or playing with the dogs? Was this where they were going to die once the supplies ran out? For that matter, what was Hurley’s real motivation behind the camera? Was his footage to be the only way to know their story once their frozen carcasses were discovered?

South was not assembled until three years after the rescue and it recounts the experience through the eyes of survivors. The whimsical footage of penguins and elephant seals, along with drawings standing in for footage Hurley couldn’t film, was spliced together years later, when the dread had subsided and it became easier to smile at animal antics. If the film does not quite grip us and lacks a sense of urgency as we see the situation becoming more hopeless by the day it does provide some striking images of the Antarctic at a time when many nations were racing to stake out the mysteries of the Pole. It works best as a capsule, being an impressive early documentary.

After its initial run in 1919, however, South was rarely seen in its entirety. In 1996 a restoration began which was met with praise when the finished product was screened in 2000. In 2022 it went under another polishing up, which added tinted colors and a beautiful score, and South was brought to life in a way that Frank Hurley would have been proud of. 

BROKEN BLOSSOMS

 

BROKEN BLOSSOMS: 1919, 87mins. Director: D.W. Griffith Cast: Lillian Gish (Lucy), Richard Barthelmess (Cheng Huan), Donald Crisp (Battling Burrows), Ed Peil Sr. (Evil Eye)

D.W. Griffith was somewhat past relevancy when he released Broken Blossoms in 1919. By the time he would make his Abraham Lincoln talkie in 1930 his name above the title was practically an anachronism. Even more so than Chaplin and, to a lesser extent only because he began later, Keaton, two contemporaries who would surpass him in popularity, Griffith spent much of the final war years catching his breath.

Intolerance had put him over budget in 1916 and so he laid low in 1917 and reemerged as a filmmaker in 1918 only to make some shorter features and shorts for the war. By February of the following year, however, he was one of the founders of the newly established United Artists Corporation and turned to features once more.

Nonetheless, Broken Blossoms would be a much more modest endeavor both in scale and length, running just under an hour and a half. A $115,000 the production would cost slightly more than Birth of a Nation, the inflation predictable almost five years later, but remained well under the whopping $1,600,000 of Intolerance. Apart from the opening shots set in an unnamed Chinese port-city capturing some of the grandeur of the Babylonian set pieces in Intolerance with Griffith’s striking close-ups of the locals, Broken Blossoms is a stagier and, comparatively, minimalist work though by no means devoid of atmosphere.

Intentionally or not, however, this scaling back provides a serene return to basics for Griffith, harking back to the slight but effective use of sets and location in his early Biograph shorts. The foggy London docks, for instance, where Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), the brutish prizefighter keeps his battered adoptive daughter Lucy (Lillian Gish) more or less captive, recall the how expertly Griffith created desolation and despair in the slums in such shorts such as The Musketeers of Pig Alley with the least bit of old wood and a few establishing shots of decaying buildings.

As Martin Williams recounted in Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, “Griffith decided that such a tale needed a special telling. To gain absolute atmospheric control over every frame of his film, he built his sets entirely indoors and used with care only artificial light. Much of the photography is in a soft focus, and it is the work not only of Bitzer, but also-for close-ups and “special effects”-of Hendrick Sartov. A former portrait photographer whose work Lillian Gish had admired greatly, he had been used for some of her added close-ups in Hearts of the World. Griffith also used carefully tinted film, differently colored from scene to scene, even from shot to shot. Further, he hand-tinted some scenes with additional colors. Broken Blossoms, in its studio-controlled atmosphere, in its scaling down of emotion, and in its theme, marked a distinct stage in American movies. In his use of atmospheric studio sets, where design, proportion, and lighting could be strictly controlled form shot to shot, Griffith may have been influenced from certain Danish productions of the time. In any case, his film had a sizeable influence on production methods in Germany as well as at home. Ironically, he had originally hoped to shoot Broken Blossoms in London in its actual locales.”

Griffith’s early work, after all, struck chords because his focus was always on the tight narrative, carried by a handful of actors. As much as one can be awestruck by the spectacle of, say, Intolerance, the closer-knit cast of characters allowed for a deeper connection. In Broken Blossoms this resulted in a more moving film, gentler and more humaine than anything Griffith had attempted since his Biograph days.

How much Lillian Gish can be credited for this impact cannot be overstated. She had been making films with Griffith for seven years but, here, as the abused young woman, a unique talent emerges. Crisp is in fine form mugging his way as the animalistic father, but Gish foregoes theatrics and for all its slightness, her performance gives her much more complexity than her previous work. Lucy is both the soul of the film and an enigma.

Being forced to smile through the daily drudgery, Gish’s Lucy has learned by forced to hide her truest emotions for fear of retribution. Take for instance, the scene in which she pleads with her father to stop the beating, warning him that if he kills her, he will be hanged. Is she simply protecting herself with this warning or is she also trying to save a man she inexplicably cares about? So effective is Gish’s portrayal of this girl who has learned to hide what she is feeling that the very ambiguity, because we recognize it is a defense mechanism, elicits both pity and horror at the realization.

“The terror in her final scenes provides one of the great examples of pure pantomime in American silent films. If a soundtrack of her screams had been included, the effect would have become bathetic and ludicrous; when the inner ear of the viewer provides her screams for what he sees, the effect is harrowing,” wrote Williams.

She lets her guard down but once. After a particularly brutal beating, she escapes her entrapment and, exhausted, falls on the doorstop of Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), the compassionate shopkeeper who fled China for London to preach the teachings of Buddhism. As she is nursed back to help in the tiny flat above Cheng Huan’s shop, her smile feels genuine for the first time.

Cheng Huan is something of a mystery himself. Keeping to himself after his arrival in London, his stoic expression inspires speculation. What are his thoughts on the world he sees before him? Is the Anglo world ready for the teachings of Buddha, as he had thought? In the short story by Thomas Burke on which the movie is based, Cheng Huan himself is swayed by the allure of the opium dens in London’s Limehouse District. In the film he doesn’t quite dodge their pull but remains aware enough to note the irony of local missionaries telling him they are travelling to his homeland to “convert the heathen”.

Why does he care for Lucy as much as he does? Is it lust or sheer pity for the broken girl? Perhaps it’s because beneath her bruised and closed exterior he sees another beautiful soul dimmed by an unforgiving world. A moment early in the film, before the fateful day he takes her in, is particularly revealing. While shopping in town, Lucy is harassed by a local vendor known around the slums as Evil Eye (Edward Peil). Cheng Huan comes to her defense but then refuses to approach her himself, happy only to see her continue safely on her way.

He will, eventually, provide her with the only kindness she ever sees, an act that will ultimately cost him more than his life. For Cheng Huan the tragedy is not in his own death but in being forced to betray his principles. When the jealously enraged and, by then, murderous, Burrows turns his aggression on him Cheng Huan resorts to the very violence he hoped to eradicate. His final act expresses not only his grievance for Lucy, the only blossoming heart he saw, but that his own soul was consumed by the darkness of the world.

“Miss Gish’s performance is all curves, it has been said, and Richard Barthelmess’s, as Cheng, is its compliment, all angles,” wrote Williams. “Miss Gish perceived this for herself, and Barthelmess shows us the fear under Cheng’s self-effacing calm. Donald Crisp’s is all effective cruelty and brutality, but it may strike us as overdone, because he did not grasp, or did not let us glimpse, the hidden fear that a brute such as Burrows masks with arrogance and violence.”

It is no secret that Barthelmess was not Chinese. Yellow-facing, however, was an abomination too widespread to fairly condemn Griffith’s use of it here as an isolated incident. Still, after Birth of a Nation it became impossible not to consider racial dynamics in his works. Perhaps without the tarnish to his name, it would have been easier to not associate the otherwise tender scenes with Cheng Huan and Lucy with the troubling racial hierarchy of His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled where the worthiness of a Black man is measured by his care of his wife enslavers. Griffith never felt the need to retract his past but, with consideration of this, it must be said that Broken Blossoms is the closest he ever came to addressing the storm. If nothing else, it is a more direct condemnation of racism and xenophobia than anything he did since or would subsequently do.

Bigotry is given the invariably ugly and scarred face of Battling Burrows. When his xenophobia is revealed, though, there was already so much stacked against the character up to that point that it comes as one more tiny nail in the coffin. More interesting is the contrast between Cheng Huan and the world that has him in dismay. Memories of why making Broken Blossoms was such a courageous undertaking are becoming lost to history, but the Chinese Exclusion Act would not be repealed for more than twenty years after its release and large swaths of the world believed in the virtues of missionaries travelling to foreign lands to bring salvation. Some, like Mark Twain in the brilliant essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, saw inherent egotism at play.

Griffith took the bold step of reversing the mirror. What if our ways seemed just as barbarous from the outside looking in, he asks. Contrast, for instance, the serenity of the scenes in the Chinese village with the grimy docks of East London. Peace is disrupted in China only when rowdy American sailors begin brawling and light enters in Limehouse upon the arrival of Cheng Huan. Accordingly, the only time we see optimism in Cheng Huan’s face is early in the film before he leaves his homeland and never again once the world disappoints him.

Finally, it is Cheng Huan who is converted in a way the missionaries who travel to his country could not have foreseen. The reality of their world changes him irrevocably.

“But for Griffith himself,” observed Williams, “the range between Intolerance and Broken Blossoms is the range of a major artist.”

Indeed, Griffith now had the confidence of a new studio to back his picture when Adolph Zukor, head of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, the studio that originally funded the film expressed disgust at the film’s somber tone. Griffith repaid Zukor the $250,000 for the rights to his film and launched the newly founded United Artists (which he founded along with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford) with this as its opening film when it premiered at the George M. Cohan Theater in May.

Broken Blossoms proved to be both a commercial and critical success.  The New York Times commented: "Mr. Griffith chose a tragic story of impossible love, love impossible in this world of passions and prejudices and brutal forces, he absorbed it in its full meaning, recast it in his mind pictorally, translated it from the written words of the author into the scenes and actions of a photoplay, added what was needed to make it live in pictures, left out what pictures could not have adequately expressed and Broken Blossoms came to the screen a masterpiece in moving pictures. Bare narration of the story cannot hope even to suggest the power and truth of the tragedy that Mr. Griffith has pictured. All of his mastery of picture-making, the technique that is preeminently his by invention and control, the skill and subtlety with which he can unfold a story...all of the Griffith ability has gone into the making of Broken Blossoms. Many of the pictures surpass anything hitherto seen on the screen in beauty and dramatic force. The whole is a photoplay that cannot fail to impress anyone who looks at it in any mood short of the most resolute hostility."   

A review in Current Opinion was equally enthusiastic stating, “Once again has David Wark Griffith delved into his seemingly inexhaustible bag of trick and brought out another novelty in the way of a film to intrigue the public and amaze his rivals. This time it is a film version of one of Thomas Burke’s sophomorically grewsome [sic] tales of London’s Limehouse district. It is called Broken Blossoms and is that might be termed a bit of intensive cultivation of film possibilities.

The picture itself inaugurates what one might term the fully elaborated short story of the screen. It consumes about eighty minutes. It abounds in pictorial and so-called “artistic” effects of photography-artistic in the sense of that dimming and blurring and unfocussing of the negative so that a photograph may look like anything but a photograph. Perhaps Mr. Griffith will soon catch up with the real photographers who are not ashamed of being photographic. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Mr. Griffith possesses the power of making critics and public take his work seriously.”

CABIRIA

CABIRIA: 1914 126mins Director: Giovanni Pastrone Cast: Lidia Quaranta (Cabiria), Umberto Mozzato (Fulvius Axilla), Bartolomeo Pagano (Maciste), Gina Marangoni (Croessa) 

 

Looking back through the innovations of cinema, determining “firsts” becomes a tricky business, the term itself being open to interpretation. The Jazz Singer, for instance, often cited as the first talking picture, contains so little sound it hardly justifies the term talkie. Furthermore, sound had been experimented with on film since Thomas Edison was in the business. Likewise, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is not the first animated feature…if by ‘animated’ one is including stop-motion. In that case the crown goes to 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

And so it is in this line that D.W. Griffith has his position challenged as the pioneer of the feature-film. Of course, here semantics matter too matter. Boxing matches had been filmed in their entirety since the turn of the century, but these cannot be called movies in the strictest sense of the term. Still, The Birth of a Nation has some heavy competition, especially starting in the early 1910s when the possibilities of film were expanding. L. Frank Baum made a number of movies based on his Oz books out of his short-lived film studio and Keystone (Biograph’s zany sister studio) threw its lead stars into Tillie’s Punctured Romance. Griffith himself was gradually stretching the length of his shorts, reaching almost feature length in 1914 with Judith of Bethulia.

But why Birth of a Nation is credited as the first full-length film and not Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria is something of a mystery. To be sure, Birth of a Nation perfected cinematic language and techniques more so than Cabiria and had a greater overall impact on the medium. Still, Cabiria is the first film which by any standard can be called a feature. “In length alone the film surpasses all previous efforts to produce a picture to be shown in a single evening,” South Australia’s The Critic observed.

In its own way it was an innovator, introducing cinema to the colossal possibilities of ancient world epics. With its splendid sets depicting marble palaces, hundreds of extras as Roman soldiers and villagers and a menagerie of exotic animals (camels, a leopard and Indian elephants as Hannibal’s steeds for his journey across the Alps) the vibrations of the film could be felt throughout the career of Cecil B. DeMille. Griffith himself, no stranger to the fascination with the days of pharaohs and kings, would emulate the spirit of Pastrone’s epic in Intolerance.

Cabiria, however, is also a cumulative film, the pieces that came together to make it a whole can be traced in earlier work. Griffith’s influence can be felt primarily in a thematic sense. As is the case with his American counterpart, Pastrone’s depiction of women coasts from fragility and vulnerability to veneration for courage and virtue. In discussing The Birth of a Nation critic Dave Kehr observed that while the film’s overt racism is easily acknowledged, its confused attitude toward women often goes unnoticed. Cabiria, the titular girl (played in her childhood years by Carolina Catena and as an adult by Lidia Quaranta), does little more than survive the eruption of Mount Etna (through no pluck of her own) only to be captured by Phoenician pirates and sent to Carthage as a prisoner of the High Priest Karthalo (Dante Testa). She is rescued just before being sacrificed to the god Moloch by Roman spy Fulvius Axilla (Umberto Mozzato) and his slave Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano). While Cabiria herself is not afforded as much as a reaction to any of these perils it is important to note, however, that she is rescued from the burning city by her nurse Croessa (Gina Marangoni) who is later also responsible for sending Fulvius and Maciste to her rescue from the temple of Moloch, an act for which she pays with her life when Karthalo discovers her treason. Her other benefactor is also a woman. Sophonisba (Italia Almirante-Manzini), niece to Hannibal and enemy to Rome, shields the fugitive in her palace where she shelters her for a decade as the Second Punic War continues. Like Croessa, Sophonisba sacrifices herself for the greater good. In light of all this and the empty canvas that Cabiria remains, the finale in which she sails off with Fulvius as his bride feels all the more arbitrary, having arrived with no build-up for what seems like an unlikely romance anyway. Even the melodrama (of the sort Griffith was fond of) involving the star-crossed love of Sophonisba and Masinissa (Vitale DiStefano) feels natural by comparison.

Stylistically, Cabiria owes more than a little to Georges Méliès. In particular, the matte shot depicting the images of a nightmare while the sleeping Sophonisba squirms in discomfort bring to life the French filmmaker’s 1898 The Astronomer’s Dream. The mechanisms of the gigantic face of Moloch at the entrance of the temple as well as the statue of the god itself into which children are thrown as sacrifices are similar to 1912’s Conquest of the Pole, one of Méliès’s last works and the superimposed sea sprites frolicking around Fulvius’s ship in the last shot hark back to Méliès early fantasies.

Not surprisingly, contemporary reviews were enthusiastic. Typical of the responses was the write-up in Australia’s The Mail: “This wonderful picture play, representing the highest point ever attained in the sphere of kinematographic art, has created enormous enthusiasm in Italy and America. It deals with the struggle which occurred three centuries before the birth of Christ between the might of republican Rome and the powerful armies of Carthage. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the famous Italian poet, dramatist, and author is the writer of the scenario of Cabiria. He also supervised the rehearsals and production of the film, designed the costumes, chose the settings for the various scenes, and saw that everything was correct historically. The film is the longest ever made. It takes a whole evening to screen it, and it is crammed full with the stupendous incidents of the great Punic wars, presented in a most realistic style. It shows the army of Hannibal crossing the Alps, it vividly pictures an eruption of Mount Etna, it brings before the spectator the burning of the Roman fleet, the siege of Cirta and the sacrifices to Moloch, the hideous infant-consuming idol of Carthage. Through all this tremendous concourse of events runs a sweet love story. Its heroine is Cabiria, an innocent Sicilian maiden, who is captured and enslaved at Carthage. Her lover is Fulvius Axilla, a Roman Patrician, who with his slave Maciste, one of the most extraordinary figures ever introduced into a photo play, experiences the most thrilling adventures. In the production of Cabiria 700 actors, 50 horses, and 20 elephants were busily engaged for 14 months. The total cost of production borne by the Italian Film Company was £50,000.” Cabiria owes a lot to the earliest film innovators but its own influence peaked more than fifty years later when the world of ancient spectacle once again became a grand arena for filmmakers.

INTOLERANCE: LOVE'S STRUGGLE THROUGHOUT THE AGES

INTOLERANCE: 1916 177mins. Director: D.W. Griffith Cast: Lillian Gish (Eternal Mother), Robert Harron (The Boy), Bessie Love (The Bride of Cana), Mae Marsh (The Dear One), Howard Gaye (Jesus Christ)

Seeing D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance more than a century after its release packs as hard a punch, a very beautiful punch, that is, as it did for audiences who had not seen a work by Griffith since the previous year’s Birth of a Nation. Intolerance outshines Birth of a Nation in so many ways (technically, conceptually, and even innovatively) it is astounding to conceive them as of the same creator. This may have contributed to an enduring misconception. Intolerance was taken then and continues to be taken as Griffith’s apology for the incendiary racial sentiment of his previous film. Indeed, Griffith may have felt the timing was right, having personally responded to the blowback after the film’s release. However, Intolerance was in initial stages of planning before production began on Birth of a Nation. His working title, “The Mother and the Law”, was pushed aside when Griffith undertook his first breakthrough and only returned to and subsequently built upon once Birth of a Nation proved a success. Undoubtedly, Griffith knew he was going to rattle some cages with Birth of a Nation, so sharp an attack was it on the sacrifices made to save the union, but he was likely taken aback by the scale of the response which extended beyond the “radical” publications and cities he thought it would be relegated to. To calm the storm he used to advantage the nature of his next film, but this was an afterthought and Intolerance was an independent creation from a man who to his death believed he had done no wrong.

“He didn’t feel he had anything to apologize for,” biographer Kevin Brownlow told the New York Times. A case could be made that Griffith felt he was owed an apology and this movie was his plea. In his own limited way, Griffith fashioned himself a humanitarian. Injustice was a reoccurring theme in his work. It was only natural that once secure in his independence as a filmmaker he would make a plea for humanity, as he saw it. Intolerance, more so than Birth of a Nation, is his cumulative work. Everything Griffith developed and aspired to throughout his years at Biograph leads up to what can be called his crowning achievement.

Griffith and, in fact, the movies as an institution, outdid themselves with Intolerance. It may have been out of sensitivity that the American Film Institute replaced Birth of a Nation with Intolerance when it updated its list of the 100 greatest American films in 2007. Goodwill aside, though, Intolerance is the greater achievement. The idea, used several times throughout the ensuing decades in The Hours, Cloud Atlas and The Tree of Life was an innovation in 1916. Over the course of three hours, the film intercuts between four stories, each from distant eras in history starting with the fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 to a contemporary tale set in the slums of big city, all connected by the theme of bigotry throughout the ages.

Amidst this sweeping epic is a clue as to why Griffith would follow it up with a return to the modest  melodramas of his early years with Broken Blossoms in 1919. The most heartfelt of the four intertwining stories in Intolerance is also the simplest. Set in the early 20th century and foregoing lavish sets for the stark walls of tenement housing, it tells the story of a young girl, referred to simply as the Dear One (Mae Marsh), who moves to the city after her father is laid off at the factory for his part in a strike. After the hardships of life bring the old man to his death, the girl is swooned over by a smooth-operating boy (Robert Harron) who also made his way to the city after the strike. Both the Uplift Society (a biting spoof of the Temperence movement) and the local gangsters pose a dark cloud for their happiness. 

The set-up here was a throwback for Griffith, his early innovations now enhanced. Early-on Griffith pioneered the close-up and he never used it to better effect than the look of anguish on Mae Marsh’s face and the haunting look of prisoners peering out of their prison cell doors. Griffith may not have invented cross-cutting but he was the first filmmaker to realize its potential in Birth of a Nation. Here he uses it to even better effect in a race against time climax involving a train to stop and an eminent execution. Throughout most of the movie, the cross-cutting is a jump through the centuries that becomes increasingly erratic as tension builds toward the climaxes. 

Writing about the film in 1959 in Classics of the Silent Screen, Joe Franklin observed, “Griffith didn't tell his stories episodically, one by one, but told them simultaneously, in parallel action. He began by devoting long stretches of film to each story, to establish the period and the characters. Then as the film progressed, he cut more rapidly from story to story to emphasize the injustices common to all eras. And as all four stories reached their climaxes, he cut with fantastic fluidity from one story to another— from Cyrus' chariots racing to destroy Babylon to Catherine's troops about to massacre the Huguenots, and back to the modern story with the condemned boy starting his walk to the gallows. Not only was the idea vast in conception, but it was magnificent in execution, each cut almost mathematically planned long shot of one story to long shot of another, closeup to close-up, and so on. The rhythm and tempo increased until, in the words of Iris Barrv, it was "like watching history pour across the screen like a cataract."

Intolerance was, and is, the most advanced example of film technique. Almost every device you see on the screen today came from, or was perfected in, this picture. But as entertainment it baffled and exhausted its audiences, which were not only unused to social indictments, but just couldn't grasp the meaning of it all. Today's audiences are better able to understand it, but they are no less exhausted by it.”

There are many powerful shots here, among them the struggling workers looking on for their chance as the strike goes terribly wrong, impoverished slum-dwellers watching police raid their neighborhood with dismay and the brutality that ensues when the factory guards turn on the strikers. These fleeting moments represent the full blooming of Griffith’s vision and idea for his early short A Corner in Wheat.

Conversely, the visually impressive but straightforward retelling of the last days of Jesus Christ (Howard Gaye) is devoted the least time, perhaps because life in ancient Jerusalem was a story so popular with early filmmakers (Griffith himself gave Jesus Christ a majestic appearance in the last shot of Birth of a Nation) there was little else Griffith could bring to it but draw parallels between the morality then and now. In both stories the villains are not only the aggressors (e.g. the soldiers that nail Christ to the cross or the factory magnets that fire on the strikers) but, rather, the moral authorities that initiate the violence. In the modern segment the Uplift society sets the destruction in motion by convincing the Jenkins family, owners of the mill, to donate to their righteous cause. To do this, Jenkins cuts wages, setting off a strike, the violent response and the subsequent misfortune of the sacked works now forced into the city. Likewise, in Jerusalem, Christ was condemned not by the soldiers who performed the execution but by the Pharisees who consider Christ a threat. In the Renaissance tale, Catherine de’ Medici (Josephine Crowell) does not personally partake in the massacre, but her smile as it unfolds indicates she takes credit for it.

“The purpose of the production is to take a universal theme through various periods of the race’s history: Ancient, Sacred, Medieval, and Modern times are considered. Events are not set forth in their historical sequence or according to the accepted forms of dramatic construction, but as they might flash across a mind seeking to parallel the life of the different ages,” Griffith wrote.

Critic Vachel Lindsay observed the pattern as well. “The days of St. Bartholomew and the Crucifixion signal back to Babylon sharp or vague or subtle messages. The little factory couple in the modern street scene called The Dear One and The Boy seem to wave their hands back to Babylon amid the orchestration of ancient memories,” he wrote in The New Republic.

Even in the scenes of ancient Judea, which are few,, Griffith's attention to human expression is evident in stunning close-ups of the impoverished citizens bearing a visual power that would not be seen until Soviet cinema found its voice. 

As Frank Beaver noted in Michigan Today, “The film’s influence on post-Revolutionary Russian filmmakers was well-noted by Vsevolod Pudovkin, who was inspired by Griffith’s cross-cutting editing constructions and his development of historical screen epics. Pudovkin, initially a chemist, says he turned to filmmaking after seeing Intolerance. His Mother (1926), a historical drama about the abortive Russian uprising at Tver in 1905 — owes much to Griffith in both narrative familiarities and editing technique. The great French director Abel Gance — J’Accuse (1919), Napoleon (1927) — was an avowed admirer of Intolerance and Griffith’s innovative editing and camera techniques. Numerous other directorial greats from Erich von Stroheim to Stanley Kubrick have spoken of the impact that Griffith’s historical epic had on their own screen efforts.”

It is a pity that Griffith didn’t dig deeper into the violence against the Huguenots. Of the four stories, it is the most overt plea for tolerance. The conniving Queen-Mother manipulates her son, Charles IX (Frank Bennett) to authorize an extermination against the Huguenot of Paris to prevent an uprising, reminding him of previous acts of violence as a scare tactic. Little insight is given into the religious strife inflicting the Paris of Charles IX nor the motivations behind them. The film skirts historic complexities to crystallize its message. In line with Griffith’s love for sentimentality, a subplot involving the attempted assassination of of Admiral Coligny (Joseph Henabery), which would prove the catalyst for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, was cut and the focus shifted to a love triangle between Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson), a shy Protestant girl and her Catholic lover Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette) and the mercenary soldier (Allan Sears) who falls for her. The plot suffers little, however.  When the slaughter begins, the horror and carnage in the streets, with its brutal realism, makes for the film’s most powerful moment. 

Without a doubt, the most amazing segment of Intolerance is the fall of Babylon following the war between Prince Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) and Cyrus the Great (George Siegmann), circa 539 B.C., which was allotted roughly half the footage and for good reason. The set for this segment alone cost $250,000, a sum unthinkable in 1916. It is Griffith’s answer to his rival Giovanni Pastrone, whose Cabiria predated Birth of a Nation by a year.  In itself, the set, built by Frank Wortman, became part of Hollywood folklore with the city walls towering a hundred feet high, three-eights-of-a-mile long, marble elephants lining the archways and wide enough to fit the film’s over three thousand extras. On its own, this piece was a production tour de force.

Franklin concurred, “In terms of purely popular entertainment, its Babylonian sequence came off best. The sheer massiveness of the sets have never been equaled. Griffith almost built a full-scale replica of old Babylon!

The big battle scenes remain the most enormous, and the most expertly directed, in all movie history. Despite a screen full of huge scaling towers and thousands of battling extras, Griffith so unerringly composed his shots that the eye of the spectator was automatically concentrated on the detail he wanted noticed. The excitement and realism of these scenes have never been surpassed— from overall grandeur to individual vignettes, such as those horribly convincing medium shots of heads being lopped off in the course of battle!”

Craft, however, was not where Griffith had his soul. Spiritually, he returns to the themes of his featurette Judith of Bethulia with a tale of impossible love at a time of war. The bacchanals of Babylon, the opulent sets and the thrilling attack by the Persian army as they make their way up the wall protecting the city are what impressed then and impress today, but this isn’t where Griffith wants to stay. He zeroes in on the story of Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge), a tomboy who becomes infatuated with the sympathetic Prine Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) after he rescues her from a cruel fate at a bride auction and ultimately dies in battle, sacrificing herself for the noble man she secretly loved.

A human face to epic cinematic carnage is never a waste but it is unlikely that this tale of unrequited love will be what audiences remember of the Babylonian scenes. The sheer spectacle that could rival the work of DeMille, the cross-cutting between the approaching chariots of Cyrus and his army and the blissful feast at the palace of the unsuspecting Belshazzar and the attention to detail made film history. 

Almost a decade after the release of Intolerance, Photoplay offered this retrospective, “While the major movements in the main current of screen evolution in this period were in the drama of business and commercial aspects of the machinery of picture selling, D.W. Griffith made the year of 1916 memorable in film art with Intolerance. 

Intolerance is worthy of a monograph, but it can only be discussed as an incident of the time here. Only eight years have passed since it came to the screen. Most screen efforts can be reasonably evaluated within the month of their presentation, but it is probable we shall not know the complete meaning of Intolerance for many more years to come. It may take half a century to decide whether Intolerance was merely one of the curious experimental divergences from type to be found among the fossils of every evolution, or if it is to be classified as a contribution to the direct line of progress toward forms of screen expression now not to be anticipated. 

In any event Intolerance was extraordinary, and remains yet the most entirely remarkable expression of the screen art. The history of this production is most intimately integrated with the motion picture.

When Griffith returned to California from his terrific round of censorship struggles in connection with the presentation of The Birth of a Nation his mind was occupied with reflections and calculations. Doubtless he was seeking, half-consciously, a solution of the problems presented. In these reveries of conflict he reviewed similar struggles down the course of history, the endless wars against intolerance, social, religious, economic. Nothing had ever availed, it seemed, but exposition and understanding. That much, he decided, the screen might do for itself.

Still with the idea half formed in mind, he cast about for a notion by which he might portray on the screen, visually to the millions, the thing as he saw it. There must be some way to fuse together into one argument all these diverse and distant evidences of history.

Then came to hand Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and on a familiar page:

". . . endlessly rocks the cradle,”

The metaphor of the poet supplied the literal pictorial suggestion that Griffith was seeking, a thread to join his tales of intolerance.

All through that night Griffith, abandoning sleep in the fervor of his conception, pondered and fitfully wrote piles of notes. By dawn he had outlined the skeleton of his screen preachment to be.

Griffith had in hand a modern melodrama suitable to his purpose. It was "The Mother and the Law" with Mae Marsh and Robert Harron in the leading roles. The story was laid on a capital and labor background with tinges of the plot influence from the Steilow case. This picture had been scheduled for release through the Mutual Film Corporation, only to be withdrawn at the time of the New York Motion Picture Corporation's secession and the formation of Triangle.

His bigger idea, on the theme that he called "Love's struggle through the Ages," and which more actually was the villainy of hate through the ages, was now to use "The Mother and the Law" as the modern example in a composite review of historic intolerances.

As the notes fell together the Griffith story moved like a Bach fugue, written in Wagnerian thunder, through Babylon of 539 B.C., through Judea in 27 A.D., and France of 1572. The transitions and interludes were to be filled with a picturization of the idea from Whitman, described by Griffith as “A golden thread, binds the four stories — a fairy girl with sun-lit hair — her hand on the cradle of humanity — eternally rocking — .” This came to the screen with Lillian Gish photographed in mysterioso half-lights.

So with zealous abandon the Griffith lot in Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, became a maelstrom of costly construction. There he built Babylon with its walls three hundred feet high, the architectural pretentions of mediaeval France, and the streets of ancient Judea. The most stupendous expenditures were incurred. There were weeks on end when the daily payroll of the literal armies of actors totaled $12,000 a day. The banquet hall scene for the feast of Belshazzar cost just a quarter of a million dollars.

The cast included many famous screen names, among them, Sam de Grasse, Joseph Hennabery, Tully Marshall, Elmer Clifton, Signe Auen, Bessie Love, and Ralph Lewis. Count Eric von Stroheim played a Pharisee, and becoming a director since has developed a habit of shooting everything to the vast Intolerance scale, regardless. Constance Talmadge played "the Mountain Girl," a role which brought her first attention and opened the way to a star career, beginning under Selznick auspices soon after.

When the totals were cast up at the end Intolerance had cost $1,900,000. It was some thirteen thousand feet in length, cut from three hundred thousand feet of negative. Let us recall in contrast now that Edison spent $24,000 inventing the motion picture, and that at the end of 1895, the first year of production, the total cost of all the motion pictures in the world to that date was $110,000.  Intolerance in thirteen thousand feet was just twenty years after Annabelle the Dancer in thirty-five feet, the sensation of 1895.

Intolerance opened at the Liberty theater in New York, the scene of The Birth of a Nation triumph, on September 6, 1916. It played in legitimate theaters in all the major cities here and abroad. It was inevitably a sensation and the topic of considerable debate. Despite a considerable patronage it was unprofitable. The American audience of the motion picture then numbered probably some twenty millions. It would be a reasonably accurate estimate that less than half a million could know what Intolerance was about. Whole audiences came away from the theaters, awed and overwhelmed with the immensity of the spectacle and bewildered by the picture fugue treatment of the theme. Mostly the theme was lost. Griffith, who, above all others, had evolved a screen technique of close-up and cut-back to clarify plot movement and to make attention unconscious and automatic, had betrayed them. Here was a picture which required conscious attention, some thought and a reasonably capable memory. The public, measured in terms as represented by the average of the motion audience, does not go to the theater to intellectualize. That is no indictment of the motion picture and its following. The public never goes anywhere to intellectualize. Audiences are to be counted in thousands, students are solitaries, each in his niche, to be counted one at a time. There is no box office revenue in units of one. Intolerance told its real story to a few thousands, but it needed the patronage of millions to make it commercially rival The Birth of a Nation which it considerably surpassed as an expression of ideas. One may fancy that the Babylonian spectacles of Intolerance shown alone as a complete production would have done about as well at the box office as the whole potpourri composite.”

Half a century later the evaluation referred to did come from an uncharacteristically ecstatic Pauline Kael. “No simple framework could contain the richness of what Griffith tried to do in this movie,” she wrote in 1968. “He tried to force his stories together, and pushed them into ridiculous patterns to illustrate his theme. But his excitement — his madness — binds together what his arbitrarily imposed theme does not. Intolerance is like an enormous, extravagantly printed collection of fairy tales. The book is too thick to handle, too richly imaginative to take in, yet a child who loves stories will know that this is the treasure of treasures. The movie is the greatest extravaganza and the greatest folly in movie history, an epic celebration of the potentialities of the new medium — lyrical, passionate, and grandiose. No one will ever again be able to make last-minute rescues so suspenseful, so beautiful, or so absurd. In movies, a masterpiece is of course a folly. Intolerance is charged with visionary excitement about the power of movies to combine music, dance, narrative, drama, painting, and photography — to do alone what all the other arts together had done. And to do what they had failed to. Griffith’s dream was not only to reach the vast audience but to express it, to make of the young movie art a true democratic art.”

As a true testament, the legacy of Intolerance in the new century was noted by Armond White in National Review. 

“For many critics and scholars — myself among them — D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance is the greatest film ever made. A century later we are as close to its subject as we are distant from its art. Political specifics, moral arguments, and movie styles may look different today, yet the only real difference is Griffith’s still-daring ingenuity, which calls for a more open-minded reception than in our simplistic habits we are accustomed to: It calls for an optimistic, united popular audience, which Griffith took for granted,” White wrote. “From the psychological precision of the acting to the eye-dazzling imagery of the legendary Babylon-court tableau, Intolerance personalizes political history, conflating it with love. Griffith used cinema to examine both history and love deeply, proposing that, in his view, they are undeniably inextricable. That is still the boldest of all political propositions. Try to find a contemporary politician or filmmaker who would dare.”