Customer Reviews

Intolerance

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Sigh! Once again there is just review after review of the plot and background of a movie, but not one word on the technical aspects and viewability of any given release! I recently decided to purchase Intolerance, but the exisitng reviews did little in helping me chose which version to get. I will admit I was tempted to get the Kino version since I have had good experiences with other releases from that studio, but the extremely reasonable price of the Alpha Video release won me over. It was a big mistake!!! The film is grainy and fuzzy. It's obvious that not a bit of effort was put into getting a good print, let alone restoring it. Out of curiousity, I took the DVD over to a friend's and compared it to a release from Image Entertainment: It was clearer, the contrast was better and was not nearly as grainy.

Please, we need more reviews like this so that studios which put out good quality versions will be applauded and those which don't properly chastized!

Many of the reviewers here rightly praise Griffith's well-deserved credit for his technical achievements. Others criticize him for a poorly constructed film. The fact of the matter is that, for 1916, this film is an incredible feat. The first American big-budget extravaganza, it followed closely in the steps of other big multi-reel films in vogue at the time(Griffith's own Birth of a Nation, and others coming out of Italy). The spectacle alone makes this film worth a look, but viewers should try to contextualize it. There was a great expectation across the nation to what would come from Griffith after the amazing--and incendiary racist-film, Birth of a Nation.

What is Intolerance really a metaphor for anyway? Griffith was fighting off attempts by legislators to regulate or censor the motion picture industry. An anti-censorship booklet released by Griffith in 1916 suggests he continued to respond to "moral reformers" even as he assembled Intolerance. In fact, his film is an attempt to address these reformers while simultaneously opining on nothing less than the historic importance of the film media itself.

Intolerance is really about a nation's cultural memory and Griffith's attempt to offer a totalizing, yet entertaining version of it. His belief that if we were educated on the subject of past "sins of hate, hypocrisy and intolerance" through the magic of film that we could inoculate ourselves against war, capital punishment and other evils. He argued that film was a better education than traditional education. To quote the master: "Six moving pictures would give students more knowledge of the world than they have obtained from their entire study." Such an understanding is, of course, naïve and dangerous.

Griffith was caught in a double-bind. In order to fight the censors he needed to simultaneously argue that his epics (like Birth and Intolerance) were a kind of filmed truth, yet the construction of this "truth" should only be the purview of the director. Griffith's logic is dangerously flawed. Birth of a Nation is hardly true history. In fact its racist vision of blacks fanned the flames of racial hatred in whites and surely accounted for many more lynchings than if the film had not been made. What's missing from his vision is how truth is arrived at: certainly not from a lone man's dictates. We have another word for that...

Intolerance is worth viewing because it is a wonderful illustration of the limitations of film. It's a simple morality tale blown up to epic-and phantasmagoric-proportions. It's greatest weakness is the cross-cutting between the four time-periods, and the attempt to narrate all history, yet this is precisely what makes the film interesting. The failure to arrive at an overarching metaphor that somehow spans history and unites us with our past points to Griffith's own flawed vision. It reminds us-contrary to Griffith's own advice-that understanding history in all its irresolvable complexity is absolutely essential.

Intolerance is historically significant in the grand scheme of film-making. D.W. Griffith tells four separate stories--all linked with the abstract concept of intolerance. Though dated (hey, it was made in 1916) it still has a gripping series of climaxes that make it worthwhile.

Watching older cinema really does demand a little suspension of disbelief. Griffith's Intolerance was an incredibly influential film for its time. Just the cross-cutting would have influence on film techniques like montage, and perhaps even other media like novels, poetry and painting. It is a very long film, but that's what's great about having a DVD version, you can watch it all at once, or in parts. A great piece of filmmaking.

D. W. Griffith's films are badly dated now. Birth of a Nation is historically important, but violently racist. Intolerance isn't overtly racist, but just as simple-minded. On the other hand, no one, in the history of film, has ever been as ambitious. No one else has taken four different stories, from four different historical periods, and combined them in one grand epic - like four tributaries flowing into one great river. For students of film only.

Perhaps highly innovative in its time, this film is hopelessly dated and, at three hours in length, difficult to sit through. The first couple of hours seem to drag as the film jumps between four separate and convoluted story lines; though the last hour with its actions sequences and rapid pacing isn't too bad. Another problem that I have with the film is that it is overly preachy; Griffith practically clubs you over the head with his Victorian ideological message.