Intolerance
So your
last movie trashed for being extremely racist and falsifying history and you
feel hurt. What do you do?
Say: “arh,
maybe you are right I was a bit out of line”?
Maybe make
a movie to show that you are definitely not a racist bastard?
You could also
switch to a whole different theme and hope that people will forget over time.
D.W.
Griffith did none of the above.
Apparently
he felt so hurt and unfairly treated that he wanted to make a film to show how intolerant
people are and how the saints or the different people are always crucified.
Talk about
being blind to your own faults!
It seems
like he could not really decide on a story: Something with Jesus, no, big and
ancient like Babylon or modern maybe, something we can relate to and those
bleeding catholics, they are gonna have it to. Well in the end he decided to
make them all. And big big big!
In my
opinion this story is a mess. There is a Babylonian part, a part about Christ,
some French Huguenots being prosecuted and a modern story. The whole thing is
something like 160 minutes long. And long is the right word. Normally I like
multi track stories, especially if they somehow interconnect, but here I just
lost interest long before it was through. I watched it to the end, but that was
just me not wanting to give up. Mentally I was bored to stupidity and the point
and finer details of the individual stories just eluded me.
At least
the Babylonian part had some really nice sets and a fine battle; I just did not
really see the connection with the story. I had to read up on the background to
find out who was intolerant to whom. I mean the story of Christ and the story
of the Huguenots are pretty straight forward, but not the two others. Except of
course that people are getting sooo unfairly treated and this is the fate of
those who think differently at any time in history.
There was
one part I liked. Lillian Gish rocking the cradle, symbolizing the mother of
humanity or something like that. This was a very loaded image and worked well
for me the first two to three times she appeared. Eventually however even that
became uninteresting.
Maybe this
was actually an interesting film
Maybe it
was important
My mind
just went into stupid mode long before the resolution of the stories.
All I could
think of was: What a hypocrite ass!
Ha ha ha! Nice review. This is a film that I need to rewatch in order to comment intelligently on it, but I certainly remember it being long. THAT much stuck about it for me.
ReplyDeleteI liked it more than Birth of a Nation, but that's not hard to do.
The reason to see this film is to look at the massive sets and cast of thousands and say "Wow!". You're right that he made this, not as an apology, but as a defense for his Birth of a Nation film.
ReplyDeleteExcept that Birth of a Nation didn't trash at the box office. It held the record for highest grossing film from 1915 through 1939, when it was upstaged by Gone with the Wind.
ReplyDeleteTrue. At the box office it did magnificiently. Maybe the public were so amazed by this new concept, the feature movie, that they ignored the message. Or maybe they actually approved of the message. Those were different times. I do not know. But it has remained to thisday one of the most controversial films in history and in its day caused riots and protests and what not. It may not have been trashed at the box office, but it has by many if not most critics for its content and rightly so.
DeleteI agree that it is overly long, but I liked it much more than you. Pure spectacle alone makes it worth the watch--plus, knowing the background as to why he made it adds another interesting element to it for me.
ReplyDeleteI can see your point and would probably even agree if I had seen a 10 minute extract from the movie, but somewhere between the first and the second hour I lost interest in this monstrosity.
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