The Moviegoer Intolerance

at Carpenter Center Saturday and Sunday, 7 p. m.

IN EARLY 1915 David Wark Griffith finished a small film based on contemporary news reports. The Mother and the Law dealt with the oppression of the lowly by the rich and intolerant. Feeling that its theme was bigger than his treatment, Griffith began to expand the film and then became interested in parallel situations set in former societies. Some seventeen months later he had spent two million dollars, hired thousands of extras, and built acres of sets on a film eight hours long. Distributors refused to book a feature that ran for two evenings, and Griffith cut to two-and-a-half hours the film we know as Intolerance .

The scale of Intolerance is only slightly less astounding than the amount of control Griffith had over it. Its Babylonian main hall, over a mile deep, was fashioned to the smallest detail by carpenters whom Griffith instructed day to day. There was no more a script or a scenarist than there were blueprints or a set-designer: Griffith shot from his head.

Why did Griffith undertake such a huge project? What did he expect to do with all the historical and human material he had amassed? How could he think to organize it?

Intolerance was based on a very abstract view of human experience. A triumph of sentimentalist humanism, it made dramatic sense and power out of all history, which it saw as human circumstance. Its basic notion, that a few universal sentiments motivate human actions, were more common in Griffith's Christian times than now. The films of the period, though, don't reflect it. Even Birth of a Nation, which was changing everyone's ideas of what films could be even while Intolerance was in production, dealt with members of two families in a historical context, tracing individuals' emotions through a war. The Expressionist practice of basing films on myths about existence postulates Intolerance by a few years, and Eisenstein's theory that films are the interplay of ideas cannot be found in the period before Intolerance -the period Eisenstein regarded as "prehistory." Finally, the embodiment of abstract themes in specific characters-the narrative feature film as we know it-was developed by Griffith only after this grand experiment.

So Griffith, in using an abstract scheme of moral sentiments to design a drama, had nothing to follow except his instincts. They led him to direct engagement with his material. He buried himself on the one hand in his subjects' history, on the other in the dramatic means he'd developed in eight years and four hundred films. His means did not give him formal dramatic control of his project; Intolerance's moral conclusions were not designed into the film from its beginning. Griffith rather intended his range of historical settings to reveal the struggles of "hate and intolerance against love and charity," with a generality and power the single-story film could not achieve.

THIS METHOD of historical parallels of moral conduct belongs more to sermons than to films, but Intolerance is nowhere narrowly moralistic or illustrative, nowhere organized as a set of examples to prove a point. Indeed, its episodes are so independent that the integrity of its theme is seriously stretched . From the institutional oppression of the poor by the rich in modern times Griffith moves to the political intrigues of Catherine de Medici, to religious conflicts in Christ's Palestine, and to the grand movements of the political civilization of Babylon. He calls the injustices of each social system "intolerance." Consequently, the film's climax-with the four stories intercut-lacks any thematic synthesis. Griffith turns largely to the human interests in his four endings.

What the four stories do have in common on an abstract level is an extraordinary sensitivity to social setting, so that the deaths ending three of them carry a huge sense of social downfall and unite personal with common tragedy. Griffith opens each story with mass scenes revealing the heart of each society-an elite ball and a company dance in modern times, the wedding at Cana for the Biblica lera. His portrayal of each society is entirely different in dramatic action and shooting style; a unique flavor of each way of life reaches the viewer. Each character is completely one with his society. There's an integration of every character's existence and emotion not equalled in his later films, which are based on moral differences. The sets and the action of background figures often seem filled with the sentiments of the principals in the foreground. No other Griffith film attains that degree of unity within such a huge setting.

This strange unity constitutes the formal order of Intolerance . It shows Griffith's desire to tell the truth of his subject directly, without the mediation of a dramatic plan. Though the compositions and cutting of Intolerance show an unbelievably flexible awareness of form, no overall formal control shapes the film. One experiences it rather as a flow of situations and emotions augmented by Griffith's pointed social comments and clear allocation of guilt.

THE FULL instinctiveness, lack of definition simple emotional impact of the film's events is felt in the final image. After a sequence where prisons and wars are overcome by the Kingdom of Peace. Griffith returns to a shot he has used from the beginning, of the Eternal Mother sitting in a shaft of light. Over the frame are the words "Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking ... ever bringing the same joys and sorrows ... "Griffith's return to this image is anti-classical, a return to the central subject, womanhood, which he never cared or managed to define. The image itself-hermetic anti-analytical-shows him at his most sentimental and romantic. The material and the style of Intolerance come together in a peculiar expressive balance.