Intolerance (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | intolerance |
| Original title | Intolerance |
.jpg) | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1916 |
| length | 197 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | David Wark Griffith |
| script | David Wark Griffith |
| production | David Wark Griffith |
| camera | GW Bitzer |
| cut |
David Wark Griffith , James Smith , Rose Smith |
| occupation | |
Babylon episode
Jesus episode
Bartholomew Night episode
Modern episode
| |
Intolerance (original title: Intolerance ) is a feature film by David Wark Griffith from 1916 with a pacifist tendency. It is considered a milestone in film history and a masterpiece of silent film , on the one hand because of the enormous production effort and on the other because of pioneering innovations in terms of form, technology and content. At the same time, the most expensive film to date was the first flop in film history in the million dollar range.
The film deals with four episodes that take place in different epochs and are not shown one after the other, but alternately. The most recent and current story was brought into the cinemas again in 1919 under the title "Intolerance Part 2, Triumph of Love" (original title: The Mother and the Law ), the Babylonian episode in the same year under the title "The Fall of Babylon" .
action
The film consists of four interwoven storylines, each linked by the theme of human intolerance . It shows the terrible consequences of intolerance in all forms in human history. The individual times are symbolically linked by the figure of an "eternal mother", based on a model by Walt Whitman , who constantly rocks a cradle. In the course of the film, the individual episodes of the film are switched ever faster.
Babylon episode
The longer ancient episode has the fall of Babylon in 539 BC. Christ on the subject. The young ruler Belshazzar , son of King Nabonidus , and his lover, The Princess Beloved , worship the goddess Ishtar , breaking with old traditions. When Ishtar's statues are brought into town, it annoys the religiously intolerant priests of the previously exclusively venerated god Bel . The priests fear for their influence and intrigue against the king. As a result, the priests support the conquest of Babylon by the dangerous Persian king Cyrus (Cyrus) . A first attack by Cyrus fails, but when the Babylonians celebrate victory in arrogance after the battle, they are betrayed by the priests. Thanks to their information, Kyros sees his chance and attacks again. This time the celebrating Babylon is completely surprised by Cyrus' army and has to give up after an unequal battle. Belshazzar and The Princess Beloved commit suicide.
The episode is determined by the fate of the so-called Mountain Girl , a young inhabitant of Babylon. She rejects the advances of all men, including that of The Rhapsode , a poet in the service of the High Priest of Bel. The Mountain Girl's brother is intolerant of his sister's behavior and drags her to the marriage market against her will. When Belshazzar happened to pass by, he took the Mountain Girls' side. Belshazzar announced that she was free to choose whether or not to marry. The Mountain Girl now worships Belshazzar with deep love and gratitude and also fights the Persians with his army. She also watches the meeting of the treacherous priests of Bel with Cyrus and rides back to tell Belshazzar of the betrayal. This doubts its history, but has to be taught better than the city walls fall. The Mountain Girl dies in battle alongside her king. The Rhapsode , who is still in love with the Mountain Girl , meanwhile had to accompany his master, the high priest of Bel, to Cyrus without him knowing about the treason of the priests. But ultimately, The Rhapsode also swears the oath on the new ruler Cyrus.
Jesus episode
The short biblical episode takes place around the year 30 AD in Judea and first shows the miracles that Jesus performed, for example at the wedding in Cana . Jesus defends the adulteress who is about to be stoned against the intolerance of his fellow human beings. Ultimately, the intolerance of some of the Pharisees towards Jesus leads to his crucifixion .
Bartholomew Night episode
The religious conflict in France during the Renaissance period between Catholic rulers and the Protestant Huguenots is the subject of the third, comparatively small intolerance episode. The feeble King Charles IX. is under the influence of his mother, Caterina de 'Medici . At the same time, the young king built good relationships with the Huguenots. Caterina de 'Medici, politically and religiously intolerant, was responsible for the murder of the Protestants on St. Bartholomew's Night in Paris in 1572 . Finally, with the help of other nobles, she can persuade her son to sign the order to persecute the Huguenots. It comes to a bloody night, and the Huguenot Brown Eyes and her family are also affected. She has a brutal soldier as an admirer who could save her, but she refuses to accept this so that the soldier finally kills her. Her other admirer Prosper Latour, a non-Huguenot, is so desperate about the death of Brown Eyes that he attacks the soldiers and is shot himself.
Modern episode
The extensive contemporary episode takes place in the western United States in the early 20th century. The wealthy Mary T. Jenkins is a bitter old maid who is recruited as a donor by a so-called charity. Its members, the Uplifters , stand for moral puritanism , which wants to redefine the lifestyle of the average American through prohibitions in the form of “welfare organizations”. The uplifters are really intolerant of youth, laughter and dance. Miss Jenkins donates so much money to charities that her brother, Mr. Jenkins - who owns a large mill - cuts workers' wages by 10% in order not to lose profits. Ruthless capitalism brings the mill workers to the barricades, the strikers are fired by Jenkins and replaced by new ones or - even worse - shot by police at demonstrations. Many mill workers have to move to a slum area after losing their job, including the heroine Little Dear One and her father, who cannot cope with the move from a once humble but happy life and dies soon afterwards.
The Boy , too, was formerly a mill worker and, like many others, is now lured into crime by unemployment. He meets Little Dear One and falls in love with her, but she does not want to let him into her bedroom without marriage. The boy marries Little Dear One and tries to escape his criminal environment because of her. But his former gang boss, Musketeer of the Slums , takes revenge on the boy by accusing him of an act and thus bringing him innocently behind bars. Meanwhile, Little Dear One has to feed their baby as a single mother. The charity becomes aware of this and takes her child away from the young woman: she is accused of being a bad mother. The musketeer of the slums helps Little Dear One in her poverty, but not without ulterior motives: She should sleep with him. Even the boy gets back into the dependency of his old boss after his release. When the musketeer of the slums intrudes into the girl's apartment and apparently wants to rape her, he is shot by his spurned lover, The Friendless One , on the one hand out of jealousy and on the other out of the murderer's old debt of thanks to the boy.
But the boy is now arrested as an apparent perpetrator, found guilty and sentenced to death by the court. Little Dear One and The Kindly Officer , a friendly policeman, try to solve the case and discover evidence that the boy is not the perpetrator. But the governor does not want to overturn the death sentence. The killer The Friendless One is plagued by a guilty conscience and finally confesses to Little Dear One and the friendly police officer. With great difficulty they can catch up with the governor sitting on the train, who now overturns the death sentence. At the last minute, the boy is saved from his execution and is finally reunited with his wife.
epilogue
The end of the film shows acts of war that do not belong to any of the episodes. They depict the ongoing First World War . An interlude with elegiac images ends the war. It expresses the hope for a reconciliation in peace and the end of intolerance.
backgrounds
prehistory
David Wark Griffith conceived the film around an already started project - the modern episode - after he was exposed to accusations of racism because of his film The Birth of a Nation (1915) . The birth of a nation was the most commercially successful movie of all time and is still considered a milestone in film history, but it received a lot of criticism even then: Because the birth of a nation also puts the Ku Klux Klan in a very positive light and propagates open racism. The stated goal of Griffith in the production of Intolerance was the criticism of The Birth of a Nation to expose as a form of intolerance and to present these human as the basic attitude of man and historically recurring motive action. Wrongly, however, the film is still often seen as Griffith's excuse for The Birth of a Nation .
Griffith's longtime confidante and leading actress, Lillian Gish , writes in her 1969 book The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me : “It has been said time and again in literature that Mr. Griffith realized the great damage he had done in producing The Birth of a Nation . Intolerance must be understood as a justification. Such assumptions are completely wrong. Mr. Griffith in no way felt that his film had done any harm. He had shared what he believed to be the truth of the civil war, as he had been told by those who had witnessed the conflict. He saw no reason to justify himself for this film. On the contrary, and in his own way , he replied with intolerance to those whom he considered bigoted. "
In the modern episode set in the then present, Griffith - a representative of realism in film - brought up the current issue of labor unrest and strikes. The Ludlow massacre of 1914 served as a real model for the workers' strike, shown in intolerance , with a fatal outcome . The character of the entrepreneur Jenkins was modeled on John D. Rockefeller , who, like Jenkins in the film, had also founded a charity and was also involved in the Ludlow massacre. Another reference to the situation at that time can be seen in the final scenes, where the film pleads for an end to the First World War. That was also in line with Griffith's pacifist attitudes. After the USA entered the war in 1917, Griffith was so influenced that he made the propaganda film Hearts of the World (1918), which he regretted decades later.
occupation
For the cast, Griffith brought together some of the most famous film actors of the time, some of whom had already worked with him on The Birth of a Nation . His girlfriend and often leading actress Lillian Gish , who was one of America's greatest movie stars at the time, took on the small but central role of the Eternal Mother, who connects the individual episodes with one another. A real pastor named AW McClure was hired for the role of prison chaplain in the modern episode. Jesus actor Howard Gaye, who was involved in a sex scandal with a 14-year-old girl during filming, caused a special kind of irritation. Since this was particularly spicy, not least because of his role, Gaye was shipped back to his home country Great Britain and his name was deleted from the opening credits.
Numerous prominent personalities from the film and theater world of that time completed cameo appearances as extras . The most striking guest appearance of this kind has probably Douglas Fairbanks senior , who plays around with a monkey as a drunken soldier in the Babylon episode. Other cameo appearances in the film: Mary Alden , Frank Borzage , Tod Browning , Constance Collier , Donald Crisp , Carol Dempster , Mildred Harris , Dell Henderson , Harold Lockwood , Wilfred Lucas , Francis McDonald , Owen Moore , Carmel Myers , Wallace Reid , Pauline Starke , Erich von Stroheim , Ruth St. Denis , Natalie Talmadge , Ethel Gray Terry , Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and King Vidor .
Filming
Griffith himself produced the film and financed it primarily with his income from The Birth of a Nation . With a production cost of nearly two million US dollars (the equivalent of around 48 million dollars today), Intolerance became the most expensive film of all time to date. To compare the unimaginable sum at the time: The birth of a nation had become the most expensive film production of all time at "only" around 100,000 US dollars, so intolerance now cost twenty times as much.
The extreme effort that went into the production of the Babylonia episode became legendary. The Babylon alone, designed by set designer and builder Frank Wortman , was over 50 meters high and 600 meters long. Inspired by the Italian monumental films Quo Vadis? (1913) and Cabiria (1914), it was by far the largest film set of all time. The organization scene in Babylonia alone is said to have devoured around 200,000 US dollars. The Babylonia set stood in Hollywood for a few years until it became increasingly ailing and had to be torn down. The lavish architecture and décor of Intolerance influenced many monumental films of the coming decades, such as that of Cecil B. DeMille .
The Anti-Defamation League and representatives of the B'nai B'rith turned against the portrayal of the Pharisees as opponents and conspirators against Jesus and the Jews in the crucifixion scene, which promoted and increased anti-Semitic resentment in the US public through this film feared. They met with Griffith, who then cut out individual scenes or had them re-shot. In the newly filmed scenes there were fewer Jews, but more Roman soldiers. For the authenticity of the wedding scene in Kanaa, Griffith took advice from a Jewish rabbi, whose daughter was an extra on the film set.
Shape and style
In 1916, mainly short films were still being produced, most of which had a very simple plot, which ultimately brought the cinema the accusation of being undemanding and not an art form. With the three-hour work, which constantly changes between four storylines that take place over a period of several millennia, Griffith presented what was probably the most complex film ever in terms of narrative form. Griffith's most important tool here was parallel montage , which he had established in the film business a few years earlier with his short films. He shot the individual episodes separately and only later assembled them into a film. Not least because of the unusually complex narrative style, the film met with incomprehension and skepticism from the broader audience even then, in 1916.
In 1970, film scholar Paul O'Dell wrote in his biography Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood : “In intolerance , we see for the first time Griffith's extraordinary confidence in the thing he is doing and his daring approaches to narrative structures. This film is Griffith's first truly adult work. ”Griffith commented on his work many years later:“ The intention was to trace a universal theme through different periods of human history. These elements are not put together in their historical sequence or according to a dramatic construction, but in the way they could shoot through the head if one tries to compare life in different ages. ”Griffith achieves these comparisons between the ages with contrast montages. The pomp of Babylon is set against the poverty of the workers in the 20th century. Towards the end of the film, when the innocent boy is about to be executed, pictures of Jesus, who was also wrongly executed, are interspersed.
Griffith and his cameraman Billy Bitzer were one of the first filmmakers to work on an aestheticization of the film, for example through the then new close-up technique, different cutting speeds or lighting effects. He colored the film scenes differently, depending on the mood that was about to be expressed: “Night and melancholy in blue, war and passion in red, silence and calm in green and sepia for interior shots.” Karl Brown , Bitzer's assistant, designed the technique of “double printing”, in which several images are superimposed in the Jesus sequence, giving it a supernatural atmosphere.
Different versions
Of intolerance are several restored versions in circulation. In 2007 the film was restored and republished by Arte, for example .
reception
The film received very good reviews at its premiere on September 5, 1916. Regardless, it was a flop and the Triangle Studios involved in the production went bankrupt. Director Griffith also got into debt. The mammoth work was produced in the middle of the war, the mood in the population was completely contrary to the basic message of the film - to show what human cruelty is capable of and where it leads - and the audience did not want to see the film: America was preparing for it Entry into the war. Griffith's appeal went unheard. Only over the decades did intolerance develop a reputation as a masterpiece of silent film cinema and as one of the milestones in film history.
“INTOLERANCE is not just the world's greatest film. In terms of layout and scope, it has been the largest work of art of any kind for decades. It's the most incredible storytelling experiment ever undertaken. Its uniqueness lies not in the individual strands of the narrative, but in the way in which the threads are woven together. None of the four stories are told consistently. We stand in medieval France and in the next moment we slide on the banana peel of the time to Babylon. You think America has you firmly in its grip - in no time it will carry you back to Palestine. It is like listening to a quartet of excellent speakers who are reading four completely different novels at the same time. "
“INTOLERANCE is the unmatched high point of early spectacular cinema. Indeed, the parallel montage developed in Griffith's previous film comes into play here even more perfectly, and the end of modern history is the most perfect example of Griffith's 'last minute rescue'. While the film suffered a major box-office defeat, it does its status as a great humanistic epic and a true almanac of the possibilities of the cinema. "
“Griffith's silent film classic became famous not only because of its gigantic genesis, but also thanks to its unconventional imagery and narrative strategy, which was style-defining at the time. The film is now in an excellently restored, viraged version with excellently composed new music. "
Awards
Intolerance was included in the National Film Registry in 1989 , the directory of particularly conservative films.
literature
- Kevin Brownlow : pioneers of film. From silent films to Hollywood (OT: The Parade's Gone by ... ). Series of publications by the German Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Stroemfeld, Basel / Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-87877-386-2 .
- William M. Drew: DWGriffith's Intolerance: Its Genesis and Its Vision . 1986.
- Günter Giesenfeld: Intolerance / Intolerance. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films - descriptions and comments. 5th edition. Volume 1 (1913-1945) , Reclam junior, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 978-3-15-030033-6 , pp. 27-33.
Web links
- Intolerance in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Intolerance in the online film database
- Intolerance as a complete film in theInternet Archive
- Summary and discussion of the film at filmsite.org (English)
- Intolerance at arte-tv.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Trivia at the Internet Movie Database
- ^ Trivia at the Internet Movie Database
- ^ Trivia at the Internet Movie Database
- ↑ The Most Expensive Films Ever. (No longer available online.) In: Inside Kino. Archived from the original on April 10, 2012 ; Retrieved September 28, 2013 .
- ^ Scott McGee: Intolerance (1916) Articles. In: Turner Classic Movies . Retrieved October 25, 2019 .
- ↑ Article on the film at Arte
- ↑ Patricia Erens : The Jew in American Cinema. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1984, pp. 71 f.
- ^ Trivia at the Internet Movie Database
- ↑ Article on the film at Arte
- ^ "Intolerance" at the British Film Institute
- ↑ Article on the film at Arte
- ↑ Article on the film at Arte
- ^ AP: Karl Brown, 93, Hollywood Pioneer In Cinematography . In: The New York Times . March 30, 1990, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed February 28, 2018]).
- ↑ a b Quoted from: INTOLERANCE (INTOLERANZ). (No longer available online.) Bonner Kinemathek , archived from the original on October 12, 2007 ; Retrieved September 28, 2013 .
- ↑ intolerance. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed November 15, 2016 .