Page 70 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

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Intolerance and the Soviets: a historical
investigation
Vance Kepley, Jr

Tracing lines of influence in film history is one of the most popular endeavours
among film scholars; it is also one of the most treacherous. The appearance of
similar styles or conventions among different schools of film often invites
premature conclusions about direct lines of descent. The historian, therefore, must
penetrate below such surface observations to identify the complexities and
contradictions of historical continuity if we are truly to understand the links
between one cinematic movement and another.
Historians agree that the most influential early film-maker was D.W. Griffith and
that among his most precocious students were the Soviet directors of the 1920s.
Furthermore, Intolerance is singled out as the most conspicuous link between
Griffith and the Soviets, with the explanation that the radical editing style of Griffith’s
1916 feature was instrumental in shaping the montage school of film which
culminated in the USSR in the middle and late 1920s. Intolerance was admired in
the Soviet Union. It was reputedly studied in the Moscow Film Institute for the
possibilities of montage and ‘agitational’ cinema [agitfil’m], and leading Soviet
directors, including Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov, acknowledged a debt to
Griffith in their writings. 1
Such evidence would seem to support the assumption that Griffith and Intolerance
were of paramount importance to the Soviets. Griffith’s most loyal partisans
attribute many of the salient characteristics of Soviet cinema to Griffith’s legacy. 2
But more balanced studies argue that Intolerance was actually one of several
sources for the Soviets and that the Soviet montage aesthetic originated in
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Russian avant-garde art, theatre and literature. An examination of the
circumstances and ramifications of the distribution of Intolerance in the USSR will
considerably qualify our assumptions about Griffith’s supposed hold over the
Soviets.

I
The Soviet directors of the early post-Revolutionary period were excited primarily
by American films. These young artists dismissed the Russian cinema of the tsarist
period, with its preponderance of love triangles and uneven literary adaptations, as
hopelessly decadent. American adventure and mystery films–to which the Soviets