Intolerance is an incredible, mammoth production. It's filled with spectacle and wonder and is truly the idea I had in my mind of Old Hollywood Film Production. There are huge sets, a sweeping shot of the city of Babylon, which was one of the most expensive sets ever built. And it's incredible to look at from a logistical perspective knowing that everything had to be hand built and made to give a realistic impression of the world. It's remarkabl to see how scale was achieved and how the director, cameraman and builders created a vantage point that would give you a very tangible sense of the three dimensional world so that your imagination could fill in the rest.
Apart from the production, Intolerance is incredible for the boldness of the storytelling. You really feel the ability to translate the naked truth of life across the screen with this film. It does not lie to you in its depiction of people and their lives. In a way this highly truthful storytelling and scripts felt greatly at odds from Classic Hollywood. It seems that stories went to greater and greater lengths to round the edges which incited reactionary movements such as the French New Wave and American New Wave that was all about returning to raw truth. The goal here was to create stark emotion. And we really see that the clearest with Lillian Gish's character. Her suffering in Intolerance is ridiculous. She undergoes extreme hardship in a very blunt way that many lone female characters are not so directly put through.
I remember watching that and thinking, wow those are some harsh problems to have in a movie. And it’s just apparent how naked this society was to the general ills of life. Murder, rape, death from disease, war, famine, poverty was very real. Far more than today in Western societies. Life was rough for a lot of people and these films openly reflected that to the audience. They made grandeur out of the sets and the locations, but the storyline scenarios were always raw. And the acting style that went with that was very raw and uncontrolled as well. Gestures, facial expressions and actions were very extreme and that's fully on display in this film with large arms outstretched and very little subtlety in the performance.
On a structural note, in a way this was the first Inception. The film is devised as having four storylines that all play out from beginning to end intercutting with each other, and having the actions build up in ways that resembled storylines within storylines.
This film is a big bang in many ways in opening the possibilities of cinema transporting you to another time and place and being emotionally rocked to your core by the story that is being translated through this highly impressive medium. The set pieces are spectacular, and the stories are very extreme with the depiction of the story of Jesus, the religious slaughter of the St. Bartholomew's massacre, the fall of the Babylonian empire, and the modern story of a woman being imprisoned by lone motherhood and poverty.
One interesting thing about Intolerance is the use of a strong female character in the form of the Babylonian warrior. In contrast to Lilian gish’s modern tragedy, you really see a promotion of women in film during this era. In some movies they play the snivveling tramp so to speak but in Griffith’s films, many of his female characters are portrayed as very strong and independent. They fight for their husbands even though they are slightly wretched and lost causes, they even fight the great persian empire. These women really kick ass, it’s interesting to see that here because it suggests that as film developed its voice and power only then did women start to be portrayed as flimsy and subservient, in the 30’s specifically.