The film that was included on the AFI's Top 100 list that I was most dreading was this one and I knew that I would have to just grit my teeth and make it through. To me, this initial perception was justified and to some degree, it makes me feel good knowing that I could not get myself to enjoy this. D.W. Griffith's Intolerance is a 3-hour and 17-minute silent film that turned out to be just as exciting as it sounds. Thankfully, the cut available on Prime Video is just over two hours and while this was a massive life-saver, it did not help how horribly paced and dull this entire story is. I absolutely love learning about film history and the techniques that the innovators of this art form used to tell their stories, especially this early on in the days of film. However, I also believe that there is plenty of room to both appreciate the way that a vast film like this was made and recognize that it is boring as shit.
Told throughout the course of many generations and time periods, this film revolves around a young woman (Lillian Gish) who has her baby taken away from her in a series of intolerable events. As she is separated from her family, other stories of injustice and cruelty towards people throughout history are interwoven in order to highlight how sometimes love and affection is not the cure for the disease of humanity. Hot on the heels of his film The Birth of a Nation, perhaps one of the most controversial and racist movies of all time, Griffith follows up with this film, which many argue was almost an apology for his previous work. While he has directly stated in interviews that it isn't, it is hard not to see this movie as him trying to make up for the reasonable backlash behind his other, infamous film. It actually surprises me that The Birth of a Nation was not on this Top 100 list, because even though it is incredibly difficult to watch, it is important to see how much farther we have come in terms of what is appropriate in film. It is a landmark in film history, as much as we could ever hope it shouldn't be, but makes Intolerance pale in comparison to its cultural significance. I had never even heard of this film until I began watching this entire list and there is good reason for that. Of course, this film provides a lot more context about its story than my synopsis above ever could, but my main issue with this movie is how little I cared about any of it. It is told in such a spastic manner that I could never really attach myself to any of the stories. Griffith's direction is completely all over the place and the use of unintelligible language to describe the most basic of events only made this movie all the more muddled. The script and title cards, written by seven different people, do not make these stories any clearer and I had such a hard time following what these individual stories were even supposed to be about.
I always try my absolute hardest to give filmmakers from this early period the benefit of the doubt when it comes to experimenting with what they can do with their newfound art form. However, being silent is not what deterred me from enjoying this film, but rather how inconsistent and unnecessary a lot of its storytelling choices were. Perhaps it's my twenty-first-century attention span that my entire generation holds, but I could not get myself to be interested in this story for the life of me. It is actually exactly what I expected, though, so I feel like I really did not lose much from watching this, other than two hours of my time. What I was not expecting, however, was the fantastic production design and costuming that every shot prominently displayed. Knowing nothing about this movie going might have been the smartest choice because even though I despise its attempted story and Griffith's storytelling abilities, the seemingly infinite world that he builds in some simple shots is extraordinary. Not since I had watched William Wyler's Ben-Hur have I been so entranced by the atmosphere of the sets that are designed for a film. All of this exciting technical prowess was still overshadowed, however, by the fact that this film is the opposite of entertaining. I really do not want to whine about the way that audiences from 104 years ago enjoyed themselves, but I can not wrap my head around what they could have found interesting about this movie. I suppose the technological advancements of film at the time were enough to get people to go see this newfangled experience but I feel so desperately sad for them that Griffith was one of the leading names they had to rely on. But that's just history, I guess.
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance is a very confusing film to rate. On one hand, I really love the style of this film and the production behind how it was made. It is so impressive that an expansive, audacious film like this one could be shot and edited more than a hundred years ago. On the other hand, I refuse to abandon my principle that films should have at least some kind of lasting entertainment value and this movie was the furthest from that.
My Rating: ★½
No comments:
Post a Comment