Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman rocks a cradle. The shot keeps returning — Lillian Gish, half-lit, the cradle going slowly back and forth — and each time, it lets go into a different century: Babylon's walls, the road to Calvary, a Paris street on the night the Huguenots were slaughtered, a tenement where a young wife waits to learn whether her husband will hang. Griffith took the image from Whitman and asked it to do something no shot had been asked to do before. He asked it to hold four thousand years inside one frame.

Start there, with the cradle, because it is the key to what Griffith was actually building — and to why a film theorist like Gilles Deleuze, writing decades later, treated Griffith as the man who invented an entire grammar. Deleuze's name for it is the organic composition, the founding gesture of what he calls the American montage. The idea is simple and enormous. A film is not just a string of shots laid end to end. It is an organism: a Whole made of differentiated parts that grow, that answer each other, and that finally rush toward one another. Griffith's instinct was to cut a story into opposed halves and let the cut itself carry the meaning. You don't need a title card to tell you that the rich and the poor inhabit different worlds; you feel it the instant the film cuts from a banquet to a bread line. Deleuze calls this opposition the binomial — force set against force, one milieu against another — and Griffith had been rehearsing it for years. His 1909 short A Corner in Wheat already cross-cut the speculator gorging himself against the starving who can't afford his bread. Intolerance is that small experiment swollen to the size of history.

What makes the film vertiginous is that Griffith doesn't run his binomial inside one story. He runs it across four, set centuries apart, and binds them with the cradle. Watch what the cradle does and you understand a concept Deleuze places at the heart of all montage: the Open, the sense that the framed world keeps spilling into a larger whole that is itself changing. The four eras don't connect in space or by cause. A baby in a Los Angeles tenement has nothing to do with Belshazzar's feast. They connect only as parts of one thing — humanity, intolerance repeating itself down the ages — and that whole is exactly what the cradle figures. Each return to it says: this is all one continuous body, still being rocked, not finished. The montage isn't describing time. It is making time visible as the form of the whole.

Then Griffith does the thing the film is remembered for. As all four stories near their crises, he cuts between them faster and faster — the modern race to stop the execution, the fall of Babylon, the march to Calvary, the massacre in Paris — until the centuries are braided at a tempo that has nothing to do with where anyone stands or what causes what. This is Deleuze's convergent or concurrent montage, the American school's signature: alternating actions that accelerate toward a single climax, the last-minute rescue stretched to a near-abstract limit. Griffith had perfected the durational trick in miniature — shortening shot after shot as the rescue nears in The Lonedale Operator (1911), then multiplying it into the crosscut climax of The Birth of a Nation (1915). Here he scales it past anything causal. Four rescues, four executions, one rhythm. The structure is what Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image: an encompassing situation builds and builds until it demands a decisive act — will they reach the governor in time? — except Griffith stacks four such pressures and asks the cut alone to make them rhyme. Many in 1916 found the constant leaping incoherent. They weren't wrong about the difficulty; they were wrong about the failure. Griffith had discovered that editing could argue.

And he could move. The famous crane shot over the Babylonian feast — the camera gliding down from a great height across the elephant-columns and the crowd — is what Deleuze means by the shot as a mobile section: not a fixed view of a thing but a movement that expresses a change in the whole, the eye descending into history. Griffith and Bitzer didn't invent the move from nothing; they were answering Italy's Cabiria (1914), whose slow tracking dolly through deep architecture gave them the model. Griffith built a purpose-made elevator-and-track rig and made the borrowed gesture monumental.

This is where Intolerance earns its place in the discourse. Griffith took fragments he had been assembling across the Biograph years — the parallel cut, the accelerating rescue, the binomial of rich and poor, the massed epic crowd from Judith of Bethulia and Quo Vadis? — and proved that montage was not joinery but thought. The film flopped, ruined him, and won anyway: the young Soviets studied this print frame by frame. Eisenstein took Griffith's organic, convergent montage and turned it inside out, replacing the rich/poor parallel with the collision — shots that smash together to strike a third meaning the images don't contain. The whole quarrel Deleuze stages between American organic montage and Soviet dialectical montage begins with someone watching this film and deciding the cut could do more than rhyme. It could detonate.

Watch it again for the cradle. It is not sentimental filler. It is Griffith telling you, every few minutes, that the four stories are one story, that the cut is the idea, and that cinema had just learned to think across time.