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How to watch Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

1916 · D.W. Griffith · Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages on Sightlines

5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.

On a first viewing

1. Notice the woman rocking a cradle keep returning. (structure)

   Lillian Gish's shot of a mother at a cradle punctuates the film again and again, breaking in between Babylon, Judea, Paris, and the modern city.

   Payoff: Each return reminds you that four separate centuries are being told as one single, continuous story. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls this a symbol: one image condensing the film's whole claim that history keeps repeating itself.

2. Notice how many layers of crowd fill the Babylon shots. (staging)

   Action is staged across foreground, middle ground, and background of a genuinely vast set, and the moving crowds give the architecture its sense of scale.

   Payoff: You are meant to feel small in front of it, the same way the film's own characters do.

3. Watch the frame narrow to a circle around a face. (camera)

   Griffith uses an iris to open and close around a detail, directing your eye inside enormous compositions that could otherwise swallow any single figure.

   Payoff: This one device lets a story about civilizations still land on the scale of a single human face.

4. Notice the film jump between four different centuries. (cutting)

   Babylon, the road to Calvary, the Huguenot massacre, and a modern tenement are cut together with no shared place or cause connecting them at all.

   Payoff: The stories connect only as parts of one larger thing, human cruelty repeating itself across every age. In the reading: the Open. The reading calls this the Open: a whole that keeps spilling past any single frame, still forming as you watch it.

5. Watch the modern story favor small, quiet reactions. (performance)

   Mae Marsh plays her scenes with restrained, detailed facial expression rather than the broad theatrical gesturing common at the time.

   Payoff: The intimacy of her acting is what keeps the film's largest scale from ever feeling merely abstract.

Once you have seen it

1. Notice the cuts between eras speed up near the end. (cutting)

   As the four crises converge, Griffith intercuts the stories faster and faster until centuries are braided into one accelerating rhythm.

   Payoff: The rhythm alone argues that these four separate emergencies are really the same emergency. In the reading: action-image-large-form. The reading calls this the large form of the action-image: mounting pressure across four situations that the cut forces to rhyme.

2. Watch the camera glide down over the Babylon feast. (camera)

   A purpose-built rig lets the camera descend from a great height into the crowd and architecture below, instead of cutting between separate shots to cover it.

   Payoff: One continuous move gives you the whole scale of Babylon that a series of cuts never could.

3. Notice a rich scene cut directly against a poor one. (structure)

   Griffith repeatedly sets a scene of excess against a scene of want, letting the cut itself state an inequality no title card explains.

   Payoff: You feel the gap between two worlds instantly, before any character says a word about it.

Carry this in: Watch for the cradle whenever it returns; it is telling you all four stories are really one story.

A Deleuzian reading of Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages →

How Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages was received →