Blu-ray Review - Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through The Ages (1916)

Genre:
Drama
Distributor:
Eureka
Release Date:
8th December 2014
Rating: PG
Director:
D. W. Griffith
Cast: Lillian Gish, Constance Talmadge, and Miriam Cooper
Buy: Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through The Ages (Blu-ray)
Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages was D.W. Griffith’s follow up to his still controversial The Birth of a Nation. It has been said that the film was partly a response to the controversy of his previous film’s alleged overt racism and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. The film is considered as one of the true masterpieces of silent cinema and it’s not hard to see why, however D.W. Griffith’s contribution to the art of cinema has been more recently dismissed as a result of the racism in some of his films.

Intolerance takes a novelistic approach to four different stories set over four periods of history. There is a contemporary tale of poverty and prosecution, the story of the conviction and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the fall of Babylon, and The St. Bartholomew Massacre in France. It cuts in-between different stories, not unlike how the much more recent film Cloud Atlas does.  Griffith uses the editing style to build tension over the four different tales he is telling.  At the start, the technique seems quite jarring, but after 30 minutes or so you fall into the rhythm of the film.

It’s quite breath taking viewing, the film is as ambitious and epic as a film can pretty much get. The sets are ridiculously extravagant; the set of Babylon is quite astonishing just to look at. It is also surprisingly fast paced for a film that is nearly 100 years old and the better part of 3 hours in length. This may be down to Griffith’s cutting technique, which just builds from the first few minutes and never lets up.

The idea that Intolerance was his apology for The Birth of a Nation is partly fabricated, as he was already planning Intolerance before his previous film’s release. It is however, quite likely that after the storm of controversy he may have received, Intolerance’s message of togetherness was magnified. The notion of Griffith as a racist is more problematic. His follow-up to Intolerance was a quite tender romance called Broken Blossoms, about the relationship between a white woman and Chinese man, which was full of racial stereotypes. It is worth bearing in mind however, that these films were released in the early 20th Century, when racism was more widely tolerated. Yet, if biographical information on Griffith is to be believed, he was not a political man and never publicly lobbied for segregation.

The film is rightfully included in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema range, because  Griffith was certainly was one of the first masters of cinema. The disc not only includes the stunning new restoration by Cohen Media, but also 3 bonus films by D.W. Griffith (he made over 500 films in 23 years, take that Fassbinder!), along with a short documentary on the film. Intolerance is Griffith’s most accessible film and should never be forgotten, even if some would wish that Griffith’s legacy could be unwritten from the narrative history of cinema.

Ian Schultz

★★★★½