AFI Top 52 Project - #49

Yeah, I just couldn’t get into this at all. I knew going in it was going to be a tough watch (a 3 hour silent film are you kidding me with this shit?!) but the way the separate stories were interwoven made it even harder to keep up with what was going on. I will say that the sets were truly impressive things of exquisite beauty. It just seems like some of that incredible detail should have gone into the editing.

Supposedly Griffith made this as a sort of atonement for the blatantly racist Birth of a Nation, but if you’re replacing racism with a hefty dose of misogyny then you’re really not doing…

Intolerance, burning and slaying. Intolerance is D. W. Griffith's response to the condemnations he had received in regards to The Birth of a Nation, which has over the years been criticized for its racist overtones yet also praised for its technological innovations for film history (it's a case in which I admire the film more than I like it). As for D. W. Griffith's Intolerance, I feel as if what Griffith is leaving behind made me rethink what I had perceived of him after The Birth of a Nation, because Intolerance goes ahead and speaks out against how closed-minded society's viewpoints may be, within all eras, age groups, and races. It's a film that is already a century old, and…

***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages... Oh, what a glorious and tear-inducing cinematographic creation was born almost a century ago. Oh, what a compelling and self-reflexive drama of epic proportions gave cinema an outstanding respect. Oh, what a sophisticated and groundbreaking epitome of the strong emotional connection existent between love and several forms of intolerance Griffith attempted to create. Oh, what a faithful representation of different eras of human history making love until the cataclysmic final explosion ensues an inevitable, yet truthful conclusion about the decaying of the human race due to its imaginary vainglory. Oh, what an audacious depiction of violence contrasted with evil intentions and the lack of…

With the possible exception of True Heart Susie, Griffith's non-formal ideas never progressed past Victorian melodrama. So most of the ideas parlayed within the actual narratives of Intolerance are often precariously simple tales of heroes and villains - with the exception of the "Mother and the Law" sequence. Being that this section of the film was intended originally as a stand-alone feature (and eventually released as so with added footage in 1919) it makes sense that it's the only one which has any serious emotional impact within the individual segments it is chopped up into. However, this is not 'The Mother and the Law,' nor 'The Fall of Babylon,' but a film made of four stories which begin and end…

Not. Even. The Europeans were so far ahead of this in 1916 it isn't even funny -- even their unambitious weekly-program pop-movies, sometimes. The better ones. All it has going for it is the big-ass sets and that assembly-line crosscutting, a mechanical process for creating meaning... but those are pretty American qualities, so it could be that's why it's been preeminent in the history books.

I guess I'll watch the alternate cut of The Mother And The Law one of these days, cuz that's the only part of this that made any impression at all.

PS: There's a thematic thread unifying the four unconnected stories? Really? Only feebly there, I hardly even noticed it ever. Thinking this is ahistorical, and…

After the second watch I’m thinking this is the best movie I’ve ever seen. I’m usually not one to make this sort of judgement so hastily, but this is the kind of movie that makes you reconsider just about any other that you’ve watched. Intolerance is constantly giving you so much information that you fear throughout the runtime that you will have forgotten key elements by the end. But when the picture is finished, you can’t deny the enormity of what you’ve seen. This film is of the caliber of art which, after taking it in, makes you pause and think about how to proceed, something such scant few movies have been able to achieve in the history of the…

Diantes das "mensagens e "lições" expostas, mesmo diante de suas próprias no final dos filmes, Griffith é, do ponto de vista estético, extremamente agudo e malicioso com as auréolas, os bandos de anjos e os coros de aleluia. Aqueles que desejam, em vez de análise esteticamente cuidadosa, regras de higiene social comunicativa transformada em imagens otimistas, tais meios alienantes iriam cair bem.

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Griffith tenta captar o estereótipo e ao mesmo tempo dissolvê-lo, na medida em que quebra as ações "oficiais". Mesmo que na superfície assim o pareça (pois as cenas, que representam sentimentos em todos os seus detalhes, hoje assim o sugerem), seus filmes não apresentam nenhuma dramaticidade de identificação; decupagens e montagens são utilizadas como meios épicos.

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D.W. Griffith was a white supremacist, let's just put that up front.

As for this movie, it's interesting. It engages for almost 3 hrs, which is impressive, and the movie itself is tremendous in size: 4 interwoven stories, massive constructed sets, a large cast of characters.

The French story is easily the worst and least-developed, just an excuse to show a big massacre. Also, a storyline depicting a bloodthirsty Catholic regime murdering a bunch of Protestants was probably a big "fuck you" to Catholics who were, at the time, a persecuted minority in this country.

The Jesus storyline was pretty whelming for me, an atheist in 2020, but maybe it was more astonishing to a Christian audience one hundred years…