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ON THE ORIGIN OF FILM AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE PEOPLE: D.W.

GRIFFITH’S INTOLERANCE

L'historien […] voit souvent dans ses rêves une foule qui pleure et se lamente, la foule de ceux qui n'ont pas assez, qui voudraient revivre. Cette foule, c'est tout le monde, l'humanité. Demain nous en serons […]. (Michelet, Journal)

A woman sitting, her hands held together. In front of her a rocking cradle, and everything

else is darkness. Increasingly, a light from above, whose source is unknown, starts to

illuminate the scene. We are in a room, at the back of which are three women, all

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covered in black, who seem to be knitting. Darkness descends again, and everything

disappears. The first Image, announcing the birth of our movie, perhaps of the movies in

general, and of our own birth as cinematic spectators. Who are these figures? What is

this room? Who is in the cradle? Who are we? The caption following this first image,

from which we expect an elucidation, reads, “Today as yesterday, Endlessly Rocking,

ever bringing the same human passions, the same joys and sorrows.” The image seems

not to belong to any specific time or place, but to that which is endless, always the same,

always recurring. We are obviously in the realm of allegory. What we see is not itself but

stands for something other. Yet what is this other? It is not characterized by a noun, as in

classical allegory, but is designated only by a verb, as that which brings, and with a

temporal indication, ever or always. The Other given by the allegorical image is that

which always brings the same. What is this always the same? The only thing we might be

able to say about it, at the moment, is that it has to do with birth, with something newly

born, we presume, to occupy the cradle. Yet it is something newly born that we do not

see and whose place thus remains empty, always to be filled. But by whom, and how?

Who is being born? However, if the cradle is indeed empty, and surrounded by three

women in black, it might be that the image brings not the joy of birth but the sadness of

death or dying. The image, which in general refers to Whitman’s famous poem “Out of

the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” might then be echoing the line: “And again Death – Ever

death, death, death”……. Who is ever dying, we might then ask?

The questions I have been asking are some of those posed by the enigmatic

opening image of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. It will be the task of Intolerance, I will

argue, to develop film as a medium that will be equal to them.

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As is well known, Griffith is not just any name in the history of film. He seems to

hold, through his own self-promotion and through the judgment of some of his most

influential heirs, a quasi-mythical status—he has been anointed the originator of an

artistic medium, the messiah of a new form of expression. Griffith is the father of film, as

Lillian Gish came to call him. He is, in Chaplin’s words, the teacher of us all, or, in

Hitchcock’s formulation, a Columbus of the screen. Griffith himself, more modestly

perhaps, seems to have viewed his role as that of the Christ and Lincoln of film.

Whether we prefer the grandiose prophetic/artistic vocabulary, or a more toned-

down, historically informed line of scholarly judgment, ranging from Eisenstein to Tom

Gunning, the latter seeing Griffith at the origin of what he calls a cinema of narrative

integration1, there seems to be a broad consensus that something new happens with

Griffith, and that for better of worse film, as it has since been practiced, owes him an

enormous debt.

Neither the accuracy of these judgments, nor the precise role of Griffith in the

birth of the art of film, is really my concern here. What concerns me, rather, is that it

seems to be clear that the relation between the questions of birth and of originating, and

that of the medium of film as an art form, are obsessions that surround Griffith and his

work as with no other filmmaker. Because of this threshold status assigned to Griffith by

himself and others alike—because there seems to be a before Griffith and an after

Griffith, before the message of film and after its miraculous reception and transmission

by him—his work seems a particularly pregnant place through which to examine the

significance that cinema tries to assign to its own images and the place that cinema comes

                                                                                                               1  See  Tom  Gunning  D.W.  Griffith  and  the  Origins  of  American  Narrative  Film:  The  Early  Years  at  Biograph  (University  of  Illinois  Press,  1993)  

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to claim for itself within history in general, as well as the more specific histories of the

modern arts and of the thinking about the image.

Film with Griffith seems to be especially haunted by the question of its own

beginning, and desires to inscribe within itself, in a particularly insistent manner, the

difference its emergence makes.

This desire, which haunted and obsessed Griffith almost from the very beginning

of his work in film in 1908, perhaps reached its culmination in the second long feature

film he directed, 1916’s Intolerance, which immediately succeeded his breakthrough film

of the year before, Birth of a Nation, a breakthrough that in reviews and popular writing

about film has often been called the birth of the movies. In the Birth of a Nation Griffith,

the son of a confederate colonel, painfully carrying with him the trauma of national

division, wanted to announce the full-fledged emergence of the art of film as the second

coming, or perhaps the first true occurrence, of the United States. For Griffith the United

States and film are inextricably bound, each announcing the possibility and birth of the

other.

American democracy, understood as a collection of separate states riven with

painful divisions between them, is born as a unified enterprise in film, and film, a

medium composed of numerous frames divided by painful cuts and divisions between

them, is born as a full-fledged art form—an art form consisting in the capacity to bring

together the separate frames—in and with the American democracy. Standing under the

double patronage of Christ, the communicator of universal love, with whose image the

film ends, and of Lincoln, referred to as The Great Heart, the communicator of unifying

love in the political realm, Birth of a Nation presents itself as a supplement to the mission

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of these two figures, to whom Griffith himself, the film seems to imply, stands as a third.

It is as if the death of Lincoln, famously and brilliantly staged in the film itself, has left

something unfinished, something that cannot be accomplished at the political level and

can find its final accomplishment only via a new and unprecedented art form. Griffith and

film come to supplement Christ and Lincoln.

By presenting the birth of film as the emergence of an unprecedented art form

equal to the task of completing or complementing a political project, Griffith is squarely

inserting himself into an influential modern tradition, which includes dramatic artists

such as Wagner and Schiller who, after the French Revolution’s promise of universal

freedom seemed to have failed, called for the development of, in Wagner’s case, a new

dramatic art form, and, in Schiller’s case, a new type of education, an aesthetic education,

which would somehow fulfill through art the unrealized political promise of the

revolution.

In all these dramatic artists who saw themselves as completing a political

revolution by aesthetic means, troubling fascistic elements (quite notoriously in Wagner

and Griffith) coexist with compelling universalist and democratic sympathies. But my

aim in the talk today is not to ask why this is so, though it is an endlessly fascinating

question, nor to describe in all its complexity Griffith’s aesthetic political project, but,

more modestly perhaps, to take a somewhat closer look at how Griffith—and most

strikingly in Intolerance—develops a conception of the medium of film, of a new type of

imaging, whose aim is to fulfill his high hopes for the medium put forth in Birth of a

Nation: to originate a democratic collectivity, a people, in whom the trauma of division,

of having been cut from each other, enables the discovery of a new type of

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communication. What kind of medium is film, and what kind of images can it create that

will have this originating power? This is the task that Intolerance sets for itself and that I

would like to try, in a preliminary way, to understand. To put my cards on the table, my

intuition is that although Griffith comes dangerously close to possessing the trappings of

the Wagnerian tradition I’ve just mentioned— often associated with the fascistic

tendency of the so-called Gesamtkunstwerk to create an aesthetic state by subjecting the

political realm to an organicist unity—he actually points in a slightly different direction,

and allows us to conceive in a new way the place of the work of art within the context of

modernity’s social revolutions.

Intolerance is of course not only one of Griffith’s films, but his most ambitious

and experimental effort, the work where he himself felt he had finally managed to

achieve a new, unprecedented form of expression, transcending traditional concepts of

drama and image.

The structure of Intolerance is highly complex. It is composed of four narratives

of intolerant acts of violence and repression: the first is a modern melodrama, involving a

wealthy industrialist and his sister who join forces with a group of social reformers

aiming to correct and regulate the lives of the working poor; the second story consists of

selected episodes from the life of Christ, starting with the day of his first miracle, the

Marriage in Cana; the third story takes place around the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre

in France in 1572: the fourth story, perhaps the most famous, is set in ancient Babylon in

the days leading up to the city’s fall at the hands of the Persians. There is a short coda

that seems to take place during World War I, which was ongoing at the time of the film’s

release, and which is interrupted by a miraculous vision of the cross, giving the film a

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happy ending via utopian and paradisiacal images. Finally, inserted between the various

narratives, is the recurring enigmatic image of the cradle, belonging to none of them, and

appearing exclusively in the numerous transitions. Beyond that, it seems that Birth of a

Nation itself is to some extent a fifth episode, haunting all the rest as a filmic memory

trace. These stories are not presented sequentially. Instead, there is continual cross

cutting from one story to another, increasingly rapidly so that towards the end of the film

the transitions begin to create a dizzying montage in which we hardly know where we are

anymore, and the entirety of history seems to gather together in a universal cry or appeal,

an appeal that is answered in the final images of the film, so that history is redeemed

from the intolerance that has dominated it. But while it is the entirety of history that

somehow seems redeemed in these final images, it is actually only the modern story that

ends happily, in a last-minute escape from death. One of the main interpretative

challenges the film poses is to understand why this is so.

It will of course be impossible in a short piece to look in detail at the four

storylines, so instead I will concentrate on the opening images of the modern story and on

the first historical transition, to the story of Christ. I believe that this should be enough to

at least give us a sense of much of what is at stake in Intolerance. The procedure I will

follow is that of a fairly close reading of these opening moments, which, though far from

being the most cinematically exciting in the film, are nevertheless some of the most

pedagogical, and through which I would like to explicate some of the fundamental

aspects of Griffith’s cinematic grammar. It is his understanding of the grammar of the

cinematic image, I will argue, that is at the source of Griffith’s vision of the task of which

this new medium is capable. I will focus, toward the end of our discussion, on one

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particular question for which the grammar of the image, as Intolerance develops it, takes

on a particular significance, the question of history.

Let us start then. In the short prologue, which I will not discuss, we see a group of

social reformers deciding to go and ask the wealthy socialite Mary T. Jenkins for

financial support. It is thus that we are introduced into a party, given by Miss Jenkins,

where the reformers will try to persuade her to join their cause. The party will be the

stretch in which a decision needs to be taken: whether to join or not to join a moralizing

campaign of social reform directed towards the poor or, more broadly, the people. We are

at a party then, where a cut, by giving us a closer perspective, introduces us to a group of

four, of whom one, a distinguished-looking woman whom we learn is Miss Jenkins, bids

adieu to the others as she exits the frame. Another cut. We see the same action of leaving,

though now within the larger context of the party. Miss Jenkins starts to wander, again

exiting the frame. Another cut. Miss Jenkins is now in an adjoining space; a young man

joins her and shakes her hand. Before proceeding, let us reflect a bit on what we’ve just

“seen”. From the general context of a party, Miss Jenkins has become the focus of our

attention through two procedures; through a cut which isolates her from a larger whole,

and through the marking of her as the character who exits existing frames and enters new

ones. She thus seems to be subjected to a pattern of transition between frames, in-

between-which are cuts. What is this pattern, if not the way we can describe the medium

of film itself?

This gives us the first clue as to how to read a Griffith film: the film’s content will

have to be understood in relation to the medium itself, as reflecting or as communicating

with it. That is, Miss Jenkins’ adventure immediately seems to be implicated in the

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question of film itself in such a way that in order to understand who she is, we will have

to understand her relation to the medium in which she finds herself. The coming into

focus of Miss Jenkins signals to us that she is implicated in the question of cinema and

that we need to read her adventure as an allegory of the encounter with film. By Allegory

here I do not mean that we are looking for another meaning to which the image’s content

implicitly points, but rather that we are looking for the way in which an other to the

content, or to a given meaning, an other which is nothing but the medium of film itself,

inscribes itself in the content and communicates with it. The most important aspect of this

allegorical encounter with the medium in all of Griffith’s films is the way the characters

are put in communication with that which is off-screen, outside the frame we are given to

see. As a rule, we can say that the one who is put in communication with the off-screen is

the one whose adventure is most implicated in the question of the medium. What is this

outside the frame, the off-screen, and why should it be, perhaps paradoxically, the most

significant aspect of film, the aspect the involvement with which signals to us the

opening of the very question of the medium? On the one hand, we can say, the outside is

nothing but the adjoining spaces Miss Jenkins moves between, in which case the

transition between frames will articulate a meaningful continuity of a world. On another

level, however, we can say that the outside marks a fundamental difference between the

visible, or perceivable, and its invisible other. The framed image, then, is, as it has

always been, the inscription, at the heart of a meaningful content, of a difference between

a visible inside and an invisible outside. Yet what is this invisible outside as film comes

to articulate it? Nothing, but the very fact that the transition between the shots, a

transition enabled by cinematic editing, is not dictated by any pre-given order, and is not

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subjected to any privileged, unifying center of vision by which everything we see would

be oriented. In this case, film would seem to be the medium that shows how a continuous

meaningful world arises in relation to a contentless possibility to mean, that does not

dictate any pre-given meaning, and that remains inscribed at the heart of continuity as a

haunting. Griffith has famously liberated the place of the camera, no longer simulating

the position of a theatrical audience, and thus freed from occupying a constant center and

distance in relation to which a stage opens. This means that the perspective and order of

the shots were no longer subjected to the principle of a given center. As a consequence,

the outside-the-frame becomes that which marks the fact that the order of the shots is not

grounded in any given meaning but arises precisely because there is no given meaning.

Thus any continuous sequence is haunted by what we can call a groundlessness, the

possibility of being otherwise, seen from an elsewhere and given differently. The

cinematic image, created by the linking of frames and shots which are haunted by a

groundlessness enabling their transition, inscribes this abyss at the heart of the

perceivable or visible world.

If traditionally Griffith has been understood, and accused, as being the father of a

cinema of narrative continuity, we might say that he is actually, and even more

importantly, engaged in an investigation of a haunting and enigmatic cinema of exposure

and discontinuity.

Going back to Miss Jenkins, we have said that she becomes subject to, or perhaps

the subject of, cinema, because she is the one who is put in communication with the off-

screen, or, we can now say, with the principle of cinematic groundlessness, the exposure

to the non-givenness of meaning that the cinematic image activates. This exposure

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enacted by the series of cuts can be seen as suspending Miss Jenkins’ place in an ordered,

meaningful, continuous world, and opening her up to what can also be seen as a space of

decision, in the sense both of a decision regarding the meaning and orientation that would

follow the cut, as well as a decision regarding one’s relation to the cut itself, a decision

whether to accept this groundlessness that she has become a witness to, or perhaps to

reject it. At the level of narrative content, we saw, this latter decision will be about

whether or not to join the moral reformers. More importantly, though, Miss Jenkins’

decision is a formal or allegorical choice, a decision regarding the cinematic image itself.

Will she embrace cinema, in the sense of embracing a new relation to an immanent

groundlessness, thus becoming worthy of the formal principle of a new medium that she

seems to have become a witness to, or will she reject it? This, in essence, becomes the

question that every single character who comes into focus in a Griffith film will need to

answer: “Am I with cinema or against it?” An anti-cinematic morality, to which Griffith

here gives the general name “Intolerance,” will be weighed against an ethics of the

cinematic image. Intolerance is, on the formal level, the intolerance of the cinematic

image.

Let us follow Miss Jenkins a bit further as she slowly confronts the decision

facing her. Having come into the room out of the cut, she is joined by a young man who

enters the frame from the outside as well. It is as if both Jenkins and the young man carry

with them the disconnection and disorientation, the interruption of a continuity and

exposure to the groundless, from which they have emerged into the frame. Those who

come from the outside in a Griffith film always carry with them its disturbance as well as

its powers. The groundless, we have seen, as enacted in cinematic editing, is a principle

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of linking and delinking of shots and frames, without a pre-given order or center. As

such, the joining of hands of Miss Jenkins and the man reflects the medium that has

brought them into the same frame: they are joined, without a pre-given reason. But that

which joins also disconnects, that which brings without reason, creating new links, also

takes away. The very moment that their hands join becomes the moment of a cut that will

bring about their disconnection.

Another crucial dimension of the cinematic image as a carrier of groundlessness is

exemplified in the second separation suffered by Miss Jenkins, a split from yet another

young man who has briefly joined her from outside the frame. As they join their hands

there is another cut, taking us to a seated woman, alone in the frame. She rises and we see

her smile. A cut back to the young man, who seems to have suddenly been struck by a

call from nowhere, the call of the outside, and so takes his leave. What has happened in

this separation? The woman alone in the frame, as she often is in Griffith, becomes the

one who embodies the communicative power of the cinematic image as such. What is this

communicative power? The power of a call, or in other words, the power of a

communication coming from no-where specific or given, carrying no particular meaning,

and giving no reasons. The communicative call is the transmission of the power of the

groundless to interrupt any given meaning or order of reasons. It is because the

cinematic image has become a call that it can be said to operate telepathically, from a

distance or a gap that cannot be located in any spatial or temporal order, and is out of

time and out of place. The man in our scene has thus been called telepathically by the

young woman who carries the interruptive power of the medium. Of course, on another

level, we can say that the young woman stands quite close by, in the next room, at the

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same party, and the stringing together of the shots simply follows the temporal and causal

order of the events. And this brings us to one of the fundamental principles of Griffithian

cinema: The order of shots and frames seems to almost always have a double motivation,

or can be subjected to two frames of explanation, one following a causal, spatial-temporal

narrative order, and the other following the communicative logic of the image itself as

carrier of the groundless, and that seems to operate telepathically. When one is following

the telepathic frame of explanation, the transition between shots is explained not

according to the continuous order of the world but according to the discontinuous logic

of the image.

Returning once again to the abandoned Miss Jenkins, it seems she must finally

confront her subjection to cinema. In a brilliant shot, Griffith shows her looking in the

mirror, but the mirror itself, being isolated in the frame, seems to embody the very

principle of the cinematic image as exposure, so that what is reflected back to Miss

Jenkins is not a face, in the sense of embodying an identity she can recognize, but only

her exposure by and to the image, the abyss that the image as inscription of the

groundless brings and that confronts her with her own unrecognizable enigma. It is time

for decision: Will she accept her reflection in the image, that is, accept her exposure to

film, or will she reject it, becoming what Griffith understands to be a principle of

intolerance, a resentment against the abyss of time and its was? It is at this moment, a

juncture of suspension of decision, that Griffith cuts to the second part of the modern

story of Intolerance, bringing with it another protagonist who will come into focus

through her relationship to the outside.

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(SPOILER ALERT, SINCE WE WONT HAVE A CHANCE TO FOLLOW THIS

STORY, MISS JENKINS DECIDES AGAINST CINEMA, JOINING THE

INTOLERANT REFORMERS, AND NEVER LEAVES THE FRAME AGAIN.)

We will need to speed things up a bit, but this is possible since we have already

followed some of the fundamental principles of the Griffithian understanding of the

cinematic image.

The second part of the modern melodrama in Intolerance, the one whose focus is

the story of a young, poor, girl, opens with a remarkable sequence, consisting of three

very short scenes, and which encapsulates much of what is at stake in Intolerance: in the

first scene we see a man, leaving his house, pausing for a moment in the courtyard, and

he is quickly followed by the girl, his daughter, who comes out of a house running to bid

farewell to her father, who is a factory worker about to leave for work; in the second

scene we see a boy and his father, both of them leaving their house about to go to work

in the factory; and in the third scene we see a shot of the factory and of numerous

workers, entering the frame from various sides, on their way to work.

Let us briefly look at the main elements of this masterful sequence. Coming into

the exact center of the frame as he pauses before leaving for work, and occupying this

center before we get a glimpse of the girl coming from the outside the frame, the father, if

read in formal terms, can be said to be the one who can protect against the outside,

against the menacing groundlessness of the off frame, by being the one who holds the

power of a frame to serve as an enclosure. The girl immediately joins the father, as if she

were seeking protection, yet he soon leaves. His departure signals the girl’s exposure and

abandonment to the outside, thus, following the rule we have elaborated earlier, making

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her a focus of the story, another character whose adventure, like that of Miss Jenkins,

becomes an allegory of the implication with cinema. A quick cut followed to a closer

view of the girl. Isolated from her surroundings she calls her father, a call signaling her

abandonment by the protective frame, and her being put in closer communication with

the outside. In principle, the closer one gets to a close-up of the face in a Griffith film, the

closer one is put in contact with the outside, the more essentially one is implicated in the

power of the image as such to inscribe and communicate groundlessness.

Less like what happens with Miss Jenkins and more like what transpires with the

telepathic girl from the party, this abandonment of the girl to the groundless thus turns

her into someone who is implicated in the image’s communicative power. This

communication, now deepened by Griffith, goes beyond the simple telepathic attraction

possessed by the girl at the party, and is developed as involving three additional aspects:

the announcement of the deaths of fathers, a communication of love, and the coming-to-

be of a multiplicity without hierarchy that Griffith understands as “the people.” The shot

of the abandoned girl announces the death of her father that will soon be revealed, as well

as the death of the boy’s father. It also announces her love story with the boy that will

follow, as well as the appearance of the workers in the third part of the sequence we are

watching. What does this mean? If the father, formally understood, is the one who holds

the power of the frame to protect against the groundless, then the being of film as a

medium, the coming-to-be of a series of images enchained through a new activation of a

groundless off-screen, signifies the death of the father as an organizing principle. This

death opens a communication between those who are exposed to the outside that we can

understand as a communication of the abandoned (that is, abandoned by the fathers, and

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to the groundless). The sharing of this new type of communication between the

abandoned is at the heart of what Griffith understands as love, and it marks as well the

coming-to-be of a multiplicity of those who occupy exposed frames enchained according

to a principle other than that of the centralizing paternal enclosure, a multiplicity Griffith

understands as the people. It is the abandoned girl in the first part of our sequence who

seems to be the mysterious agent, or the medium, who announces through her telepathic

powers this coming-to-be of a new relation among the abandonment by the paternal

principle, love, and the people2. But the girl herself, it seems, has to take one further step,

which is to accept her cinematic destiny.

                                                                                                               2 From this distinction we have started to draw between the way Miss Jenkins responds to being in and on film, by ending up refusing the cinematic image, and the way the young, poor girl, responds to being in and on film, accepting the being of the groundless and becoming an agent, or a medium, of a new principle of communication, we can already see how the traditional and influential interpretations of Griffithian montage, from Eisenstein to Deleuze, have basically missed the profundity of the Griffithian understanding of the cinematic image. Eisenstein, in his extremely influential essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film today” has famously accused Griffithian montage of not being dialectical, thus, of treating social oppositions, say between the rich and the poor (in our case Miss Jenkins and the girl) as simply empirically given, oppositions that he then puts in dramatic conflict but without showing either the historical logic which is at the source of their being nor taking their conflict as a way to new, and higher, historical moment, but rather seeming to want to resolve it in an organic unity which does not point to a real historical logic. Similarly Deleuze, often so brilliant and precise, is unfortunately completely under the sway of this (insightful, yet finally mistaken) Eisensteinian interpretation. He can thus, in the section dedication to the question of montage in his Cinema 1: The Movement Image, declare Griffith as the father of what he calls organic montage, which follows the structure of a conflictual duel whose aim is to restore a lost, organic unity. The genius of Griffith’s idea of montage though is that the two sides he indeed puts in conflict are not interpreted as simply given social realities but, more profoundly, as alternative relations to the very question of the image, or the cinematic medium which they have come to occupy, as such. That is, what enters into conflict are not given social realities, but differing relations to the image, and what the task of the conflict is, is not to achieve a restoration of a lost organic unity, but rather to give birth to a new relation to, and being with, the image it is the task of the medium of film to bring about. One of the sides of the conflict in Griffith is thus always the visionary agent of the new medium of film, thus of a newly acquired capacity to communicate the groundless.

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No less than with Miss Jenkins, the girl’s subjection to film involves a decision:

Does she accept the cinematic image and the exposure to the groundless which it brings,

or will she intolerantly reject it? It is in a much later scene in Intolerance, that the girl, at

the moment of the actual death of her father, starts to assume her cinematic destiny. In

her most important close us, gazing to the off-screen as if she were under hypnosis, the

girl becomes an almost hallucinatory power to summon, to become a call, a call of the

groundless effected as love, and through this power she brings as if from out of nowhere

the boy into the room she occupies with her dying father. It is this call of love, the

acceptance by the girl - at the moment of her exposure to the groundless as her father dies

- of film as an unprecedented type of communication, that also serves as a summoning to

another part of Intolerance I want to briefly discuss, its version of the story of Christ.

Christ appears for the first time in the film in the scene immediately following the one

where the girl father dies, and he appears from out of nowhere, through another cut, out

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Even at the lowest, most deluded point of his interpretations of the conflict of the cinematic with the anti-cinematic and intolerant - that is, the famous cavalry ride in Birth of a Nation, where the riders of the KKK, draped in white sheets, gallop to the cabin under attack to save the white family entrapped in it – even then, the way Griffith understands the task of the riders is not as those allowing for a restoration of a lost organic unity, but rather as agents of the cinematic image whose task is to rescue us from anti-cinematic intolerance. The white sheets of the clan are in Griffith’s fevered and blinded imagination a series of movie screens or frames, whose movement announces a new activation of the groundless, a new ethics of the image. How could such a profound allegory of the arrival of cinema as a redemptive force be implicated in such a mistaken historical interpretation is a mystery I cannot say I have managed to figure out. In any case, because of the logic guiding his understanding of the conflict involved in montage, between the ethics of the image and the moralistic, iconoclastic, intolerance of the image, Griffith does not need - that is, is more radical – a dialectical logic a la Eisenstein where, as Eisenstein seems to say, a new meaning will be born out of the conflict that will elevate it to a new historical moment, but rather, what guides the Griffithian montage, is that one of the sides of the conflict, that of the agents of a new ethics of the image, becomes the communicators of a new type of lack of meaning, of a groundlessness that the editing cut activates, whose task is to liberate humanity to its creative capacities and to the opening of a new future.

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of the telepathic call of the girl who also brought her beloved, and he appears indeed as a

principle relating love with the people. Yet before moving on to the Christ story, and to

the examination of the logic of the image that brings him into our film, there is one more

crucial aspect involved in film as the medium of the communication of the abandoned I

want to discuss, and this has to do with the assembling of the many, or of the people, that

was shown by the third scene of the opening sequence discussed above, that of the

numerous workers assembling into the factory. It is as if this assembly represents all

those who are abandoned by the frame and are called to gather.

We can see them appearing from out of frame, out of nowhere, each from his own

groundlessness and exposure, as if summoned by the call of film, and we are summoned

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with them, since they are the figure for the cinematic audience as a multitude called by

the groundlessness exposed through the cuts between frames. Perhaps like no previous art

film is the art of the people understood as the collection of a multiplicity, which has

nothing substantial in common but its exposure to the groundless. The medium of film is

a stringing of exposed frames as the bringing together of the abandoned, of the people.

This is the essential connection Griffith tries to forge between his project and Lincoln’s.

Yet the people in our scene, the workers, are quickly led through the gates, towards the

factory, as if their very appearance constitutes a threat to the frame of the intolerant,

which at the level of the narrative is represented by the factory owner, Miss Jenkins’

brother, and they are led by this anti-cinematic force into an enclosure.

A lyrical communication of love and the call to a gathering of the many, both

occurring through the experience of the death of the father, are thus the two main

dimensions around which Griffith’s cinema, in its intimacy and its epic dimensions alike,

revolves. They are also the two main dimensions around which the last question I want to

deal with revolves, that of the relations between cinema and history as Griffith

understands it.

To sum up quickly before developing my claims, the history in which film is

interested, according to Griffith – the history of the fall of Babel, of Christ, of the

Massacre if St Bartholomew etc. - is a history of intolerance, within which it is as if the

relation between the communication of love and the gathering of the abandoned as

people, a relation of which cinema, as we saw, is the announcer, has remained inscribed

as an invisible excess, an excess that kept haunting humanity as an unconscious memory,

constantly and intolerably repressed, and that now, with the arrival of the medium of

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film, can finally cry out, or perhaps bleed, through the open wounds of cinematic cuts,

and come to be heard and to exist. As we have seen, intolerance for Griffith is also

always intolerance against the cinematic image, an iconoclastic intolerance. In this sense

the unconscious history of the abandoned as people is also to be thought of as a dormant

proto-cinematic image, and it is as if such an image kept haunting humanity until the

birth of film. Film is the bringing into existence of this unconscious image of the people,

repressed by the iconoclastic history of intolerance.

The first transition in Intolerance into history, which simultaneously serves as an

allegory for the general relations between history and the image, is to the story of Christ.

Let us take a quick look at its opening images.

An establishing shot of the people at the Jaffa gate. (As an aside we can say that

the people, like the girl outside the threshold of the door earlier, and like the people in the

famous Babylonian scenes, are always those standing just outside the gates.) an

establishing shot, then, is followed by three quick shots, the first in which the camera

moves, accompanying a leisurely walking camel; the next, showing a seller of doves,

always a sign of love in Griffith; then an image of a woman and child alone in the frame,

as if exposed to the mercy of the outside, serving as a call. Then, we get a glimpse of the

house in Cana, the site of the first miracle. Thus are we introduced to the story of Christ.

Where is Christ? He is nowhere to be seen, but he is announced. What is it that

announces him? Nothing but the medium of film, which with the powers of the outside

activated by the transitions between the shots as well as the camera movement, becomes

a call. Christ is nowhere to be seen in the first segment of the Christ story in Intolerance,

since he is nothing but the very event of film as such as a call. If Christ appears, it is in

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the cuts, and as the cuts. What is Christ for Intolerance? He is nothing but the medium

that allows for the people with whom the scene opens to be expressed through a new way

of communication. Christ might come from the outside, the non-earthly and invisible, but

this outside is no longer a transcendent realm, but rather is nothing but the very

groundlessness of this world, inscribed in-between the frames as a haunting. It is cinema

as the art of an immanent outside that summons Christ; and Christ, the one called by the

people, the abandoned to the outside the frame or gate, calls cinema. This is the way in

which history enters, through a cut in the modern story, into Intolerance, a cut that will

slowly expand into a complex system of Griffith’s favorite cinematic technique, that of

cross cutting, going back and forth between the various stories constituting Intolerance.

History enters, then, as a call of an ancient people at the gate, outside the frame, waiting

for a new medium. I will soon return to this point, but let us quickly take a look at the

moment of Christ’s appearance in Intolerance, the moment of the first miracle, which is

no less than the appearance of the medium of film as such.

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What is the moment where the miraculous power of Christ is effected, a moment

which I claim is that of the very appearing of the medium of film itself? It is a very

simple moment. As Christ stands among the people, whose festivities have ben

interrupted, and blesses the water, we see a shadow - that is something that the off -screen

projects on screen, in the shape of a cross that implicitly cuts the screen into four frames.

This showing of the shadow of the cross as the creation of four separate frames between

which are shadowy cuts is, I claim, the very miracle itself. What is this showing?

Nothing, but the inscription of the off-frame, thus of a new principle of groundlessness,

inside the frame as a haunting shadow and as a method of cutting, in such a way that a

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new type of medium, and a new type of principle is brought about, a principle of

montage, of relating a series of frames, each of which is exposed to the outside, and

between which there is no pre-given order of connections. Christ, here, is not a principle

of transcendence, of the shining of another world, but of immanence, a bringing of a

principle of groundlessness into this world as a haunting shadow. This cutting division of

the screen into four frames is reminiscent of the division into the four stories of which

Intolerance is composed, four stories between which Griffith, assuming as his cinematic

signature the very message of Christ, cross cuts. Standing in the midst of the people,

Christ brings in the outside as an immanent cut resulting in a series of exposed frames,

i.e. the very being of the medium of film, a series that allows for the miracle of the

people’s love’s communication, their wedding, to happen.

What, then, are the people? Nothing but all those who do not have a specific place

in a framed order of connections, whose messiah is Christ in the sense of a principle of

communication of exposed frames connected through cuts that do not stand in relation to

each other according to any specific spatial or temporal order or placement. The many are

those who have neither a place in a given order, nor a specific time in a pre-given

sequence , nor a name (and the movie gives names only to those who have power and

place, never to the members of the people).

Cinema, the art of exposure to the groundless, thus becomes that anachronic non-

place where the displaced many, who never had their time, and who thus were never fully

part of a linear history, gather. The people of Babylon, the people suffering from the

struggles of the intolerant powerful in 17th century France, the poor and the destitute of

ancient Judea, and beyond that, the people of the French and American revolutions, all

  24  

gather in and as cinema. For Griffith it is as if these people always belonged to cinema,

prefigured it, desired and dreamed of it, but never actually possessed it. Their anachronic,

anonymous dreams, which persisted as a sort of unconscious and excessive traumatic scar

on the linear body of conscious history, can thus be fulfilled, in the sense of finally

coming to expression, only with the arrival of this messianic new medium, the medium of

anachrony itself, that serves as the paradoxical giving of place to the placeless of history,

but as placeless, as cinematic, not as occupiers of a new territory or identitarian

community. The very method of editing of Intolerance, cross cutting between all the eras

of the people, results in a universal anachrony wherein each age is displaced and comes

to haunt another, so that a universal placelessness is achieved through the powers of the

medium. Only because of this can the modern story of Intolerance, the story that belongs

to the era of film, find a happy ending, the happy ending being the achievement of the

medium of the exposed frames as a new principle of communication. The happy ending

of the people is the grasping of cinema itself, and thus the coming to expression of all

those for whom linear history had no place, and whose embodiment of the dream of the

cinematic image avant la lettre was intolerated and imprisoned.3

                                                                                                               3 Miriam Hansen, in her well known, and remarkable, piece “Babel in Babylon: D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)” with which this essay has many agreements as well as disagreements, that are too numerous to mention, examines Griffith’s attempts to think film as a universal language, and she suggests that “Griffith wanted to make a name for himself as the father of American cinema, but he wanted to do so by making a new name, by founding a new language of images that would recover a prelapsarian transparency and univocity” (p. 185). I too want to say that Griffith thought of film in relation to the question of universality, and that indeed what he understands by the people, and by the becoming people of the cinematic audience (see my remarks to follow soon) has to do with the opening of the isolated members of the audience into a universal sharing, yet this universal sharing is precisely not dependent on some transparent and univocal universal language, understood as a common way of meaning, but rather on the groundless cut, on the encounter with an empty moment of non-meaning. What brings the audience

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It is this cinematic desire of the people, prefiguring cinema yet not fulfilled in its

time, that makes the appearance of the medium of film the miracle of the resurrection and

second coming of Christ, understood as the principle of the communication of the many

exposed frames. Christ is thus for Griffith nothing but the principle of the resurrection of

the people achieved through the medium of film.

This resurrection, happening in and as the cinematic image, is the very origin of film, in

the sense both that it is as if the people who have always called film, waiting for its

arrival, and in the sense that the people are those which film manages to originate, give

birth to and bring about. What is it that film originates? All of us as filmic audience, the

many who precisely have no origin, in the sense of a given origin-point in a teleological

order of things, all of us as audience who belong to the principle of the groundless rather

than to an ordered series of frames subjected to a center. The origin is thus simply the cut,

and is that which happens in the groundlessness the cut exposes us to, a cut that is thus

discovered—as the ever-recurring image of the cradle with which we started, re-surfacing

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         together, and what they share, is nothing but the empty cut and not a transparent language of images. In this sense, I also disagree with Hansen’s interpretation of the relation between the modern story that allows, as we saw, for the redeeming from the history of intolerance, and the three historical narratives of intolerance. Speaking about the enigmatic image of the cradle with which we opened Hansen can thus say “On a larger structural level, the three-versus-one figure could be said to telescope the opposition between the three historical narratives, with their well-known fatal outcomes and their pronounced stylistic particularity, and the ostensibly neutral, realistic, and ‘universal’ idiom of the modern narrative, with its fictional characters and classical suspense strategies. It is this effect of homogeneity, identity, and presence that enables the modern narrative (an American film, a Griffith film) to prevail over the fatal script of History.” (209) I agree that Griffith wants the modern story to be that which prevails against the fatal script of history, but its capacity to prevail is not due to its homogenizing methods, its effects of identity, but to the contrary, on the fact that the modern story belongs to the era of film, an era that allows for the first time for the groundless cut, the universal dispossession of identity that the cinematic image activates, to be expressed, and through this expression, originate a new type of audience, liberated by the ethics of the cinematic image from the intolerant iconoclasm of history.

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in the transitional cuts between the stories—to be the cradle of humanity, in the sense of

that groundlessness whose encounter is the event of our dying and living in the cinematic

image as people, an image/cut that always repeats, is always the same, since it is nothing

but the ever-recurring, ever-new principle of the world as being without origin, and with

no end.