Intolerance

A real coincidence sits between today's two films.

The 35th Cannes Film Festival ran from 14 to 26 May 1982. Its opening film was this 1916 American silent, Intolerance. It closed with Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. And its Palme d'Or went jointly to Missing and to the Turkish film Yol. The jury was chaired by the Italian opera and theatre director Giorgio Strehler, with Gabriel García Márquez, Geraldine Chaplin, Sidney Lumet and Mrinal Sen among its members.

So a 1916 silent and a 1982 Turkish film ended up in the same programme — 66 years, two languages and two continents apart.

They are genuinely a pair.

First, neither film will tell only one story. Intolerance cuts together four storylines roughly 2,500 years apart; Yol sets five prisoners' one-week leave side by side. In both, the protagonist is not a person but the structure itself — several things happening at once.

Second, both were cut or banned. A major segment of Intolerance's French story, involving the attempted assassination of Admiral Coligny, was removed before release; Yol was banned in Turkey and only released there on 12 February 1999.

Third, both were misread on release and canonised decades later. Intolerance has long been written off as a box-office disaster, though the film's own accounts show it recouped; Yol won the Palme d'Or and was banned at home for seventeen years.

Start with this one — it is the earliest and most expensive attempt at the structure.

四条故事线同时开始。

公元前 539 年的巴比伦，城墙有 300 英尺高，城里正在准备一场盛宴，而波斯的军队已经在城外。公元 27 年的犹地亚，一场婚礼刚刚结束，一个年轻人走进人群，开始讲话。1572 年的巴黎，王室正在筹备一场联姻，街上的人却在磨刀。二十世纪初的美国，一家工厂的老板宣布：所有工人的工资下调 10%。

四段故事里的人互不相识，隔着两千五百年，也永远不会相遇。它们在同一卷胶片上，同时走向各自的结局。

（这里不再往下说。）

One film, four eras, roughly 2,500 years

Intolerance opened in the United States on 5 September 1916. Silent, with English intertitles. Directed by D. W. Griffith; cinematography by G. W. Bitzer; editing by Griffith, James Smith and Rose Smith; distributed by the Triangle Distributing Corporation. It carries two subtitles: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages and A Sun-Play of the Ages.

Four storylines:

1. Babylon (539 BC) — Prince Belshazzar against Cyrus the Great of Persia. The city falls because of intolerance between the devotees of two Babylonian gods.
2. Judea (c. AD 27) — from the Wedding at Cana to the Crucifixion. The shortest of the four.
3. France (1572) — the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the Huguenots, fomented by the Catholic House of Valois.
4. The modern story (c. 1914) — a strike, moral uplift societies and the collision of capital and labour, ruining the lives of people at the margins.

Why it was made

This has to be said plainly. Griffith's previous film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), was fiercely attacked by the NAACP and others for perpetuating racial stereotypes and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. Intolerance was partly a response to that criticism — but not an apology. In numerous interviews Griffith made clear he felt he had nothing to apologise for: the film was a rebuttal to his critics, whom he considered intolerant themselves.

So the film occupies an awkward position: it answers a criticism of its own maker's work with a film about intolerance. That situation is more complicated than any of its four stories.

The cradle: the single shot that stitches four eras together

Between the stories the film keeps returning to one image: a woman representing Eternal Motherhood, rocking a cradle, played by Lillian Gish. It marks not a date but the passing of generations.

The film contains more than 50 transitions between its segments. As it builds to the climax the cutting accelerates, and the four lines alternate faster and faster — the earliest large-scale experiment in accelerating montage in cinema.

In the original print each storyline carried its own colour tint, distinguishing the eras by hue.

Sets, cost and a genuine gamble

The sets stood on the lot on Sunset Boulevard: the Babylon walls rose 300 feet (91 m), alongside streets of Judea and medieval France. The production used more than 3,000 extras, with the extras' payroll reported to reach $12,000 a day; 300,000 feet of film were shot.

The film's own accounts give the exact cost as $385,907 (a widely repeated figure of "close to $2 million" includes a reported $250,000 for the Belshazzar feast scene alone). A third of the budget went into the Babylonian segments. The sets were demolished two years after they were built.

Why the characters mostly have no names

The heroine of the modern story is "The Dear One", the hero "The Boy", the gang leader "The Musketeer of the Slums". Griffith wanted them to be emblematic of human types rather than individuals. Critics and theorists read the naming as a symptom of his sentimentality.

From "box-office disaster" to "the greatest film ever made"

Contemporary critics received it enthusiastically. It has long been reported as a box-office bomb, but according to the film's own accounts that reputation comes from a misreported budget: it returned roughly $1.75 million in theatrical rental to its backers, enough to recoup.

Its standing has only grown:

• seventh in the 1958 Brussels World's Fair film poll;
• among the first films selected for the United States National Film Registry in 1989 — the first year of voting — for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant";
• 49th in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition), 2007;
• 98% on Rotten Tomatoes across 42 reviews, average 8.30/10; 99/100 on Metacritic from 15 critics;
• Pauline Kael called it "one of the two or three most influential movies ever made, and I think it is also the greatest";
• included by the Vatican in its 1995 list of important films, under the category "Values".

The dissent

Not everyone accepts it. David Thomson argues the film is weakened by its own "self-destructive frenzy": "The cross-cutting, self-interrupting format is wearisome... The sheer pretension is a roadblock, and one longs for the 'Modern Story' to hold the screen." That objection still stands — it is a real face of this film.