D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance and the Ever-Present Now

Abstract

D. W. Griffith once claimed that film introduces the viewer directly to the present. Yet his own innovations tended to break up that present by multiplying points of view and cutting back and forth between separate narrative lines. Particularly in Intolerance, cutting between the four storylines of the film establishes a single, oddly distended present in which all four follow the same path, though it is also clear they are widely separated in historical time. With his motif of the “cradle endlessly rocking,” Griffith claims that this present is both instantaneous and eternal. For him, the relationship between the visual image and historical time is immediate, with no need for any of the adjustments of representation. In this belief, he resembles certain literary modernists, who also gambled that the isolated image could lead immediately to logical and historical generalities.