A Film Canon

This extraordinary film takes Griffith's mastery of cross-editing to its logical conclusion, as well as clarifying that his preoccupation is not so much with history as with the transhistorical, embodied in a vision of 'intolerance' distilled from four narratives interweaving sixth-century Babylon, first-century Judea, sixteenth-century France and twentieth-century America. As such, all political and economic disparities are robbed of their contingencies, with the result that the empowerment of subordinated groups - especially women - becomes interchangeable with melodramatic violation, beautifully encapsulated in the implication that factory conditions are only tolerable so long as their owners don't deplete wages by contributing to women's reform movements; or, alternatively, in a metonymic chain connecting reform movements, wage depletion, rural- urban migration, crime, prostitution and rape. It makes sense, then, that the only dialectic leap is equated with divine agency, and embodied in the positioning of the Judean strand between the Babylonian and American (the French being little more than a series of brief, enrythmning tableaux, its value largely extrinsic), a duality reiterated in Christ's two crucial gestures - transforming water into wine (the only miracle depicted), and transforming the frenzied, orgiastic crowd that pervades Griffith's oeuvre (and this film in particular) into a congregation - both of which are used to inflect the final, beneficent, and above all personal provision of justice by an American governor. Not only does this gesture preclude the need for any more systemic dissection of American society, but it condenses the entire import of human history and religion into a sublime melodramatic embrace; or, more accurately, beatifies that embrace, allowing it to finally transcend the history that has produced it. In this way, Griffith moves beyond the racist subconscious of The Birth Of A Nation to a even more ambitious hallucinatory spectacle, encapsulated in the astonishing logistics of the Babylonian strand - both in the first act, in which its panoramic festivities produce possibly the most mobile camera to date, and the second, in which the hysterical wall of Judith Of Bethulia is generalised into one of the largest sets in Hollywood history, a cast numbering thousands, and, finally, the impetus for the concluding sequence, whose accelerating juxtaposition of chariot and locomotive is one of the most accomplished uses of cross- editing in all cinema. That said, this expansive scope is simultaneously offset by Griffith's most concerted effort to control and focus the viewer's attention, through irising, blocking, tinting, intertitle fonts, and a recurrent tableau anchoring it in an abstracted vision of time.