Page 77 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

58 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
such Griffith contemporaries as Ince, King, Feuillade and Gance. As present it
seems clear that for all the attention the Soviets lavished on Intolerance, it was as
important to them for its flaws as for its virtues. 31

PROLOGUE TO INTOLERANCE 32
Hear ye, hear ye, O people!… Hear, ye who have come hither: men and women,
young and old–and behold! Beyond your life in the distant depths of history you
will see a broad road that the human race has been following for thousands of
years. Behold!… There is plump Virtue: she feeds on nothing but human blood and
her soul accepts nothing else. There are the Scribes and the Pharisees: those great
lackeys, who make great show of their worship, who preen themselves on their
merits and their morality even before God Himself, and everywhere there exist
even today the agents of that great sacrificial Golgotha. You will see the Girl: a little
slip of a girl, a dream, a flower tossed by the evil hand of life into the mud and dust,
beneath the filthy carts of the bazaar where souls are bought and sold. Who has
not trodden this road before you? The ancient patrician and the plebeian, the king
and his serf, Babylon and a simple settlement, love and hate, light and darkness,
the factory owner and the worker, sincerity and vile cunning, the height of
civilisation and the depth of ignorance, grief and joy, war and peace, life itself and
death, and, as a symbol of this great path, from the depths of history to the present
day, the eternally rocking cradle over which the golden head of the mother is bent
low.
What goes through your mind?
Four streams run down from the high old mountain of history: a picture of
33
everyday life; medieval Jerusalem; France; and Babylon the magnificent.
Nightmarish wealth! Millions and billions of riches, created by slave labour and
legally accumulated by those who have seized control of the law: the factory
owners, the governors, the public prosecutors, the emperors and their fine retinue
of concubines and lackeys. Those fleet-footed helmsmen…so obediently ready to
oblige, devour with their masters the living human body and quench their thirst by
drinking warm human blood.
The French Court with its overdressed dolls and a gallows demanding a
sacrifice. A smoke-filled episode of religious baseness from the stately priests and
St Bartholomew’s Eve; a humble carpenter from Galilee; clean-handed Pilate and
the wild instincts of the crowd, shouting, ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’
From the great old mountain that we call life the familiar flows before you and,
merging into the rapid change of days, leads unexpectedly to the Soviets.
The ‘Soviets’–that is our word.
What does it mean?
In the beautiful valley of life. At the foot of the mountain of history, creating
nobody knows what. With passionate faith and the iron strength of conviction.
Spread by the magic cauldron of the Revolution–the Soviets!