Page 76 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INTOLERANCE AND THE SOVIETS: A HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION 57
and rottenness, from which we emerged with pain and torment towards the
radiant Soviets: towards our temples of labour and liberty, through which we shall
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resurrect everything.’ The prologue then ends with an affirmation and a rallying
cry reminiscent of a varsity cheer:

The Soviets! The Soviets!–the earth hums.
The road of the Soviets–the Soviets are our salvation!!! 28

By insisting that the stories of Intolerance represent some dreadful past, the
Soviets could fit the film into a Marxist schema which promises a glorious future.
The utopian vision in the prologue is no less naive than the film’s coda which calls
for an era of brotherhood when prison walls will dissolve. Griffith invests his faith
in an amorphous notion of brotherly love, and the Soviets celebrate an equally
dubious confidence in the ability of socialism to eradicate all strife. The
reconciliation between Marx and Griffith proved an ingenious, albeit tenuous one.
The prologue’s metaphor of the parallel streams originated in a playbill which
accompanied the New York première of Intolerance:

Our theme is told in four little stories.
These stories begin like four currents, looked at from a hilltop. As they
flow they grow nearer and nearer together, and faster and faster, ‘until in the
end, in the last act, they mingle in one mighty river of expressed emotion’.
Then you see that, though they seem unlike, through all of them runs one
thought, one theme. 29

The metaphor here is restricted to describing the structure of the film itself. The
four stories merge in the last reel of Intolerance through cross-cutting to create an
emotional climax, ‘one mighty river of expressed emotion’. The Soviet prologue
expands the metaphor into a historical one. Significantly, Eisenstein’s celebrated
analysis of Intolerance in ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today’, specifically cites
the American playbill’s stream metaphor to analyse Griffith’s montage. He argues
that Griffith’s film, contrary to the claim set out in the playbill, fails to achieve a true
synthesis of tales. For him, Griffith’s montage is not truly dialectical, and he claims
Intolerance remains a drama of comparisons–‘a combination of four different
stories, rather than a fusion of four phenomena into a single imagist
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generalisation’. The Soviet prologue subtly apologises for the ideological faults of
Intolerance, and Eisenstein, who borrows the same metaphor from the same
source, exposes what he considers the film’s formal problems. In honouring
Griffith, the Soviets were compelled to criticise him.
This investigation of the early history of Intolerance in Russia reveals some of
the hazards of too-easy assumptions of historical continuity. The evidence on the
Soviet reception of Intolerance raises questions about the actual extent of the
Soviet debt to Griffith that can only be resolved through meticulous stylistic
comparisons of the work of the early Soviets and that of Griffith–not to mention