The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 1 - Birth of the Cinema - full transcript

NARRATOR: At the end of the 1800s,
a new art form flickered into life.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are a multibillion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz -

it's passion, innovation.

So, let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.

We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made 'Singin' in the Rain'...

..and in Jane Campion
in Australia...

..and in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,

who isn't perhaps
the greatest movie ever made...



..and in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world,

and in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,

Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to The Story Of Film:
An Odyssey,

an epic tale of innovation

across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.

1944, World War II,
the Normandy beaches.

A bunch of Allied troops
have just plunged underwater

to stop being shot
by German machine guns.

(METAL CLANKING)

Above the water's hell...

..bullets tinkle on iron.

Cameras all over the place.

This scene was actually shot
on a peaceful beach in Ireland.



But director Steven Spielberg
brought bullets and blood

and bones to that beach.

A lie to tell the truth.

This is filmmaking...

..the art of making us feel
that we're there.

(GUNSHOTS)

(FLUTE PLAYS)

A young woman in Paris
has her eyes closed

to feel the warmth of the sun
on her face.

At the same time, unseen by her,

this little street drama
takes place.

White light floods the screen,

links the young and old woman.

We want to reach into the screen
to help the old lady.

This is filmmaking,
cinema as an empathy machine.

The Normandy beach scene
and the French lady

show that, in its use of sound
and light and truth,

cinema can be great.

The story of film
is the story of that greatness.

It's a story full of surprises.

At first thought,
you'd guess that The Story of Film

will be about scenes
like this one from 'Casablanca',

full of yearning, story and stardom,

because 'Casablanca'
is a Hollywood classic.

Ingrid Bergman is lit
like a movie star,

highlights in her eyes.

It's all filmed on a studio set.

But films like 'Casablanca'
are too romantic

to be classical in the true sense.

Instead, Japanese films like this
are the real classical movies.

Romantic films are always
in a rush but this moment,

in 'Record of a Tenement Gentleman',
is a pause in the story.

(CLOCK CHIMES, KETTLE HISSES)

A cat, a chiming clock,
a kettle quietly coming to the boil,

the almost square frame filled
with smaller squares and rectangles.

Calm, emotionally restrained,

like a little
classical Greek temple.

So, Hollywood's not classical,
Japan is.

With all its talk of box office,

the film business would have us
believe that money drives movies...

Ticket sales...

..marketing, glamour, premieres,
red carpets.

..but it doesn't.

Money doesn't drive cinema.

The money men don't know
the secrets of the human heart

or the brilliance
of the medium of film.

But if money doesn't drive movies,
what does?

Here's the answer -

ideas.

Watch how a shot of bubbles
becomes an idea in movie history.

This is a scene
from British director Carol Reed's

1946 movie, 'Odd Man Out'.

A guy's in a mess,

sees his troubles reflected
in the bubbles of a spilled drink.

Now look at another close-up
of bubbles in a drink.

Again, a character is in trouble,
self-absorbed.

This film's director,
Jean-Luc Godard,

knew and admired Carol Reed's work.

So he's probably thinking about
'Man Out' when, 20 years later,

he filmed this moment.

Now look at Martin Scorsese's film
'Taxi Driver' of 1976.

Scorsese loves the films
of Carol Reed and Jean-Luc Godard,

and so used the same idea that
a character looking into bubbles

can see their own troubles
and also, somehow, the cosmos.

Visual ideas,
more than money or marketing,

are the real things
that drive cinema...

..innovating with those ideas.

It doesn't always seem like it
but sitting in the dark,

it's images and ideas
that excite us,

not money or showbiz.

But if the business people
don't control film, who does?

Who knows
how to get inside your head?

David Lynch does,

and Baz Luhrmann does

and in a different way,
Samira Makhmalbaf does.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey
is a global road movie

to find the innovators,
the people in films

that give life to the sublime,
ineffable art form cinema.

And here's a third surprise -
in the '70s,

you would guess
that moments like this...

..a camera racing through space
like a bullet,

the scream of tyres on the road
as a car chases a train,

would be the big story.

(TYRES SCREECH)

New American cinema was wonderful
but Dakar in Senegal

was as exciting as Los Angeles
in the '70s, movie-wise.

A surprise indeed.

Much of what we assume
about the movies is off the mark.

It's time to redraw the map of movie
history that we have in our heads.

It's factually inaccurate
and racist by omission.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey could
be an exciting, unpredictable one.

Fasten your seatbelts.
It's going to be a bumpy ride.

New Jersey, East Coast America.

A mum and two daughters
are going to the movies.

Why are we here?

Because something extraordinary
happened here.

In the 1890s movies were born here.

Lyon, France.

Two college friends
are going to the movies.

Movies were born here too, maybe
even more so than in New Jersey.

So, what is there to discover
about movies in New Jersey?

We find this man, Thomas Edison.

Edison was a manic,
passionate inventor.

Here's his office where he invented
the light bulb and the phonograph.

Here's his desk, full
of compartments, full of detail,

obsessive, like he was.

Here's Edison's factory.

The beauty of Victorian engineering,
the care and detail.

Look at this quotation
on the wall of the factory

from the painter Joshua Reynolds.

"There's no expedient
to which a man will not resort

"to avoid the real labour
of thinking."

Edison loved it
and moved it around the factory

so that his colleagues wouldn't
get used to seeing it in one place.

So Edison's factory
was an ideas factory.

Before Edison,
there had been fun fairs, circuses,

magic lantern shows,
magicians' acts.

Still images were reflected
on mirrors or spun in a box.

This happened not in fancy cities
in the world...

..but places like this -
Leeds in England.

The American George Eastman came up
with the idea of film on a roll.

Edison and his colleague
W.K.L. Dickson egged each other on

to find that
if you spin these images in a box...

..they give the illusion
of movement.

And then look at this,
invented by Edison.

It's called the Black Maria.

Edison and many of the other manic
ideasy inventors of cinema...

..realise that beyond the equipment
and machines...

..what you needed most
for movies was light.

It probably didn't occur to them

that cinema would become
the art of light.

But somehow,
in building this box on wheels

that turned to follow the sun,

whose roof opened
by turning this wheel,

Edison took the first steps
in that direction.

He had a hunch that cinema was
a dark room where light mattered.

He shot little movies here.

This couple kissing, for example.

A little moment
that everyone could understand.

But to see these films, you had
to look inside something like this.

That wasn't enough.

It was too private and small.

Cinema had to be bigger
and it became so

here in Lyon in this house

in the minds
of these passionate men -

Louis Lumiere
and his brother Auguste.

The brothers
were as ideasy as Edison.

Louis in particular
was technically brilliant.

He realised that the grab advanced
mechanism of a sewing machine

would allow the strip of film
to be advanced, paused, exposed,

advanced, paused, exposed.

This is one of the very first
Lumiere cameras.

Open its back,

shine a light through it
and it becomes a projector.

Count Leo Tolstoy called the result

'the clicking machine,
like a human hurricane.'

One of the first films
the Lumieres shot was this one...

..a short documentary
of everyday life,

their workers leaving a factory,
the Lumiere factory.

This is the factory today.

The place of the first movie,
the source of the Nile.

But it wasn't enough for the
Lumieres to make such home movies.

They wanted to show them,

not just in a box to one person
at a time like Edison,

but to groups.

On 28 December 1895,

in this building on the Boulevard
des Capucines in Paris,

the Lumiere brothers projected film.

Light shone through it
onto a screen bigger than life.

It's hard for us today to picture
how enchanting it was.

This is one of the very first films
that the Lumieres shot

and showed
on the Boulevard des Capucines.

It's said to have
unnerved the audience.

They thought the train
was coming at them.

This is laughable today.

But look at this.

Light projected on a building
in 21st-century Lyon.

The effect is startling.

Digital imagery of a type
we haven't seen before.

The shock of the new,
just like the Lumiere train.

Something that had already happened,

light from a distant star came back
to life for the very first time.

Neither the Lumiere brothers
nor Edison

nor the other inventors of cinema

could have known how big
the movies would become...

..how they'd make us want to escape,

play with our erotic imaginations...

..fail to film
the Nazi gas chambers,

make us want to be a princess
or a hero or a cowboy.

Neither the Lumieres nor Edison
could foresee

that the movies would invent
flashbacks...

There are no flashbacks
in Shakespeare.

..that they'd glamorise war...

..capture the horror
of the D-Day landings...

..give us an image bank
to flick through in our heads

when we're bored or happy or sad.

Movies would become
the world's greatest mirror

and sometimes, a hammer too
that would bash reality into shape.

By the end of 1896,

much of the globe knew about
this new invention, movies.

But almost at once it was seen
as lowbrow, for the working classes.

Its jokes and jolts
were unsophisticated

and soon became boring.

So, from about 1898,
the earliest filmmaker inventors

turned their minds
from the machinery of cinema

to shots and cuts.

Things started to get exciting.

In Paris, for example, a theatre
illusionist called George Melies

who had been at the Boulevard
des Capucines that first night...

..filmed on a street - films
now lost but here is what happened.

His camera jammed
then started again.

When he looked at the results,
streetcars seemed to disappear,

just like these people
seem to disappear.

Cinema's first magic trick.

In this scene, he used the same
technique to make a man appear,

rather than a streetcar disappear.

Innovation by accident,
you could say...

..but it drove the medium forward.

Where the Lumieres
were cinema's first documentarists,

Melies was its first
special effects director.

His film 'The Moon at One Metre'
astonished people too.

In Lyon today,
in the Festival of Lights,

a moon rises over the city,
as if in tribute to Melies.

Lumiere, the name of the brothers,
means 'light', of course.

And where other countries saw movies
as a sideshow in these years,

France took them seriously.

Film historian Jean-Michel Frodon.

FRODON: France has been doing
something completely different

with cinema
because of the French Revolution

and because of this dream

to project something
to the world and to itself

like what we would call the Lumiere

and this
is the Lumiere advanced cinema.

Before, they were Lumiere in
the sense of the French Revolution,

of the 'Encyclopedie', of Kant, etc.

In the decades to come,

France believed that cinema
was such a beacon,

almost an element of foreign policy,

that it funded French filmmaking
like no other country in the world.

Also in France, the world's first
female director, Alice Guy Blache,

became as interested
in magic as Melies.

And Brighton in England
was a buzzing place

in Victorian times too.

Maybe the buzz and the light
explains why local photographer

George Albert Smith became
one of the movies' early innovators.

He was one of the first to film
from the front of a train,

creating a ghostly tracking shot

which became known
as 'the phantom ride'

as if a ghost was floating
through the air.

There was a magic in such shots.

In this great documentary
about the Holocaust,

Claude Lanzmann filmed shots
of the same train lines

that took the Jews
to the gas chambers,

the phantom ride
at its most morally serious.

And in a completely different way,
director Stanley Kubrick

used a phantom ride scene near
the end of '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

The camera seems to zoom through
the coloured light of the cosmos,

as if the main character,
or the film itself,

is tripping or having
an out-of-body experience.

In 1900 Smith used one
of the first close-ups in cinema.

Filmmakers usually kept
their camera wide

because they hadn't considered
other options

or assuming that if they went close,

it would confuse or disrupt
the audience

but then G.A. Smith did this.

He wanted to show us
the cat eating in more detail.

The cut between the wide and close
not only worked,

it seemed natural
and so close-ups were born.

The films of some
of the greatest directors

are hard to imagine without them.

In this incredible moment in
Sergei Eisenstein's film 'October',

the government raises a bridge

to stop revolutionary workers
storming a city

but it's the close-ups
of a dead woman's hand and hair

being pulled off the raising bridge

that give the real sense
of movement and tragedy.

In Sergio Leone's
'Once upon a Time in the West',

it's only when Charles Bronson
looks, in big close-up,

into the eyes of Henry Fonda

that he realises
that Fonda is the murderer

he's been searching for
all his life.

(MUSIC BUILDS TO CRESCENDO)

Back in America, Enoch J. Rector
extended film in another way.

He filmed a boxing match,

not with the standard size
of film, 35mm,

but with a negative
that was 63mm wide.

The broader image
showed more of the action.

Widescreen cinema was born.

It's the norm now but would not
become commercially so until 1953.

Film had already come far.

It was born as a sideshow,
a novelty, quick fun like fast food.

But almost at once, it became
clear that it was also a language -

a new language,
a language of ideas.

The early 1900s
were a remarkable time to be alive.

The first aeroplane flight.

Albert Einstein announced
that light,

the flickering stuff of cinema, is
the only constant in the universe.

Here in Copenhagen,
other physicists expanded his ideas.

The Titanic sank.

World War I began.

Compared to all of this,

the changes in movies
might seem tiny but they aren't.

By 1903, filmmakers had developed

many of the key elements
of the shot.

But they still had to learn
how to do this...

..cut.

Editing made cinema.

To see how, look at
'The Life of an American Fireman'

made in 1903 by
a Pennsylvanian dynamo of a man

called Edwin Stanton Porter.

A fireman arrives outside
a blazing house

to rescue a mother and her child.

We see the street action first.

Then the same action again
from inside.

Some years later,
Porter recut the film.

This time,
after the fireman arrives,

we cut inside the house
to see the first rescue,

then outside again to see her
being brought down the ladder,

then inside again to see him rescue
the child, then back outside again.

The audience follows the story
of the rescue

despite the fact that one space -
the street,

suddenly disappears from the screen

and is magically replaced
by another space - the room.

This could never happen in theatre.

The earlier version of the film,

which you could call the theatrical
version, doesn't fragment the space

but repeats the time,
like an action replay.

The intercut version
has a continuous timeline.

We see everything in the order
in which it was done

but the space is fragmented.

Cinema was learning, experimenting,
thinking, even.

It could now show the flow of action
from one space to another.

This made chase sequences possible.

It liberated movies.
It emphasised movement.

Nearly every scene
in The Story of Film

will in some way use this most
basic of storytelling devices -

continuity cutting,

the editing equivalent
of the word 'then'.

This was a landmark.

Theatrical cinema was giving way
to action cinema

and Porter?

He lost everything in
the Wall Street Crash of the '20s

and died forgotten in 1941.

It's easy to forget
what a conceptual jump editing was,

but 21 years after
'The Life of an American Fireman',

the comic genius Buster Keaton
shot a scene using double exposure

which reminds us.

Keaton plays a film projectionist.

He falls asleep, dreams of cinema,

climbs into a film.

And then bam! A cut.

The world around him is suddenly
replaced by another world

instantly, magically.

In 1907,
cinematic innovation went up a gear.

Look at 'The Horse that Bolted'
by the Frenchman Charles Pathe.

A man leaves his horse on the street

as he delivers food
to an upstairs customer.

The horse spies something to eat
and tucks in.

Cut to the man climbing the stairs.

Then cut back to the horse,
which isn't doing a new thing.

It's still eating.

Then back to the man
just a second later.

Then back to the horse.

In 'The Life
of an American Fireman',

the cuts showed what happened next.

Here, they're showing
what's happening at the same time.

This isn't continuity editing,
it's parallel editing.

It doesn't say 'then',
it says 'meanwhile'.

Great filmmakers have used
this 'meanwhile editing' ever since

to contrast events, build tension
or advance two storylines at once.

And soon after continuity
and parallel editing were invented,

another remarkable editing technique
was born.

This woman is looking towards us,

as if she's on stage
and we're in the audience.

But what if she does this?

In the earliest movies,

people seldom turned their backs
to the camera like this.

This film, made in 1908, was one
of the first in which this was done.

But if directors were to give actors

the freedom to turn their backs
to the camera like this,

then it occurred to them

they could point the camera
in the opposite direction

to see what would eventually
be called the reverse angle shot.

Directors were putting their cameras
into the action,

freeing themselves
to film from any angle.

This new freedom was
an exhilarating break with theatre

and seemed entirely natural
to cinema, central to it.

So, in the '60s in France,

when Jean-Luc Godard refused
to bring his camera round

to show the face of Anna Karina
at the start of 'Vivre Sa Vie',

the effect was shocking.

Combine this with this -

G.A. Smith's close-up
and the actor rather than the set

began to be the thing
that was filmed.

And just as the movie buildings
were changing,

the movies themselves
took another leap forward.

A look back at 'The Life
of an American Fireman' shows why.

Audiences watching this film

felt concerned for the safety
of this woman.

But they knew nothing
about the actress who played her,

not even her name.

If they had known about her life
or recognised her from other films,

they'd care even more.

Then enter into the movies
this actress,

dressed in white, wearing a hat.

She was known semianonymously
as the 'Imp Girl'

but in 1910,
her producer, Carl Laemmle,

announced in the press
that she had died.

She hadn't.

And when she miraculously showed up
in a scene like this,

very much alive,
anxious and looking around,

Laemmle then told the newspapers

that the crowds were so hysterical
that they tore her clothes off.

This wasn't true either

but the furore burned her name
into the public consciousness.

Florence Lawrence.

Lawrence became famous.

She earned $80,000 in 1912
then her career fizzled out.

In 1938, aged 48, she committed
suicide by eating ant poison.

Florence Lawrence
was the first movie star

and set a pattern for stardom -
hype, fame, tragedy.

Here in Denmark,
this actress, Asta Nielsen,

became even more famous.

There was less censorship in Europe.

Actors could be more sexual.

He's tied up, she's hip-grinding
in her slinky black dress.

Hollywood learned from Nielsen's
fame and instead of sex...

..as this reveal of Gloria Swanson
shows,

it trowelled on the luxury
and costuming.

Hollywood was adding
an element of sublime to stardom.

Almost every aspect of cinema
was affected by the star system.

As the adoring public became more
and more interested in Lawrence,

Nielsen or Swanson,

so moviemakers started to show
their faces more clearly.

Except it wasn't really their faces,

it was their thoughts
that audiences became interested in.

The star system meant

that psychology became
the driving force of films,

especially American ones.

And through these years -
1907, 1908, 1909, 1910 -

small movie theatres, places
for working-class people, emerged.

In America,
they were called nickelodeons.

This one, Tally's,
was on Spring Street in LA.

This is the same spot now.

This little cinema, built in 1914,
is in Leeds in England.

And on this famous corner, the first
nickelodeon in New York was built.

(CHURCH BELLS TOLL)

In the early 1910s,
the best filmmaking in the world

was taking place here,
in Scandinavia.

Maybe it was the northern light,
how it changed,

or maybe it was the sense of destiny
and mortality

in Scandinavian literature

that made Danish and Swedish movies
more graceful and honest.

By 1912, for example,

the most innovative use
of film light in the world

was in the work
of Benjamin Christensen.

Christensen studied at this theatre
in Copenhagen

then made this film,
'The Mysterious X', in 1913.

Gorgeous photography,
crosscutting, a dream drawn on film.

One of the most daring debuts
in film history.

Later he built a vast studio
here in Hellerup,

in the suburbs of Copenhagen,
to make 'Haxan',

a masterpiece about witchcraft
through the ages.

The light sources were multiple,
the effects, complex.

Christensen himself
played the naked devil.

This telegram
in the Danish Film Archives

says, "Your masterful film 'Haxan'

"had its first screening
to a full house

"with a standing ovation."

In Sweden, director Victor Sjostrom
was just as great an early director

and was more influential
than Christensen.

Sjostrom started
by selling doughnuts

but soon found himself here,
Svenska Bio,

Sweden's first major film studio.

His 1913 film, 'Ingeborg Holm',
had naturalism and grace.

But seven years later,
still at Svenska,

Sjostrom made one
of the great multilayered films

of the silent era -
'The Phantom Carriage'.

It had stories within stories,
moods within moods.

In tinted blue evening light,
an alcoholic, David Holm,

tells a drunken story
about a phantom carriage

which arrives at New Year
to collect the souls of the dead.

Here on the right,
Sjostrom plays Holm himself.

Later in the story, David dies.

Sjostrom re-exposes the film to show
the separation of his body and soul.

The carriage driver arrives

and shows him how horrible
his life has been,

a wasted life
wrapped in a haunted myth.

And Sjostrom was brilliant at women.

His strong mother died
when he was young.

Sjostrom ended his days
in this cottage by the sea,

west of Stockholm.

Christensen and Sjostrom
became star directors and,

as was to become the pattern
for European talents,

they were seduced by what
would be, in the years to come,

the centre of the movie world -
a place called Hollywood.

They sailed there,

as a certain Swedish movie star
called Greta Garbo did,

and later, another called
Ingrid Bergman did.

As a result of their departures,

Scandinavia would not be central
to the story of film again

until the 1950s.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far,
far away from Scandinavia...

..there was a garden that didn't
know what was about to hit it.

Sagebrush in the rain.
The eucalyptus in the rain.

You see, the spring
was such a marvellous thing there.

The garden was about to be invaded,
built upon.

It was about to bring in artists
and business people

from around the world to paint
clouds to look like real clouds...

..to create people
to look like real people.

The sort of place

where you would wear
costume jewellery in the daytime.

The sort of place
that invented youth and glamour...

..where Marlene Dietrich
could wear black feathers

and be framed in a train window

and be lit in a lattice of shadows
and somehow look believable.

Youth and glamour
came out of its test tubes.

No-one was supposed to be plain
here, or sad or old

or racially equal
or sexually different.

What denial. What eugenics.

And yet, it attracted people,
selves,

ideas, styles, shape-shifters.

It became a bauble, this place,
shiny, perfect, brittle,

something you could see yourself in.

Movies started to be
in the air here.

Of course, this place is called
Hollywood...

..a fantasy name because one of
the things that won't grow here

is this - holly.

Why did movie people come here?

Because of weather, sunlight...

..and because on the East Coast,

New Jersey and New York,

the film process had been patented,
copyrighted.

Take this example of copyright.

For years, film running
through viewing machines had snapped

because of the tension in the spool.

Then the Latham brothers
and people around Thomas Edison

had the brainwave of creating
this simple loop

which created a bit of slack which
would allow the machine to stop,

project an image and then move on
again without tearing the film.

This so-called Latham loop

was patented
by its East Coast inventors.

You had to pay people to use it
and other discoveries.

But California was very far away
from those rights owners

so you could break the law there.

This is South Spring Street in 1897.

Here's the same spot today.

Things moved quickly.

The first studio was built in 1911.

It was like an outdoor tent.

It was built here.

The first feature-length movie ever
made, 'The Story of the Kelly Gang',

was filmed in Australia, outdoors,
available light, head-on framing.

Seven years later,
Cecil B. DeMille

shot the first Hollywood
feature here.

Here it is - 'The Squaw Man'.

In it, we can see another
crucial element of filmmaking

that fell into place in these years.

A decent man is trying to decide
whether to do a good deed.

He looks right through a window

and sees a young woman
who will benefit from the deed.

Their eyes meet for a second.

He feels her pain
and decides to do the good deed.

But imagine if DeMille
and his cameraperson

had lifted their camera from here,

brought it round
to the far side of this room

and filmed the young woman
from over there.

The shot of her would
have looked something like this...

..as if she was looking away from
the man, rather than towards him.

And the scene wouldn't have had
the same power.

It's because their eyes
match across the cut,

him looking right, her looking left,
that they connect emotionally.

Filmmakers in these years
were discovering

that to make it look
like people in different shots

were looking at each other,

or that armies
were marching towards each other...

..the camera had to stay on the same
side of an invisible 180-degree line

drawn between the two people looking
at, or talking to, each other.

Because this rule was new,

filmmakers in the late 1910s
sometimes broke it by mistake.

Later in 'The Squaw Man',
DeMille made such a mistake.

A man is dangling from a cliff.

He's looking right.
The cliff is on the right.

But then DeMille goes to the bottom
of the cliff to show the man's fall.

But he films from
the wrong side of the man

so it looks like the cliff has
switched to the left of the screen.

The shot would have been more
spatially clear if it was like this.

And to make matters worse,
his friends come to the rescue,

leaving screen left but entering
the next shot screen right,

as if they have taken a detour
to the pub.

Once this discovery was made, it was
used throughout mainstream cinema.

This scene from
'The Empire Strikes Back',

an old-style movie
made 60 years later,

shows how enduring
the discovery was.

Darth Vader is on the left
of screen, looking right.

His underling, to whom he is
speaking, is in a separate shot,

looking left.

Because of the 180-degree rule,

we completely believe that
they're looking at each other.

Set your course for the Hoth system.

General Veers...

Crucial to the inventiveness of
American cinema before the 1920s

was how female it was.

Film historian Cari Beauchamp.

Hollywood was built by women,
immigrants and Jews,

people who would not be accepted
in any other profession at the time

so Hollywood became this magnet
for people who wanted to work,

who were incredibly creative

but wouldn't be accepted
in other professions.

Well, half of all films written
before 1925 were written by women

so that shows you
how just comfortable women were

in the business then.

Perhaps the first woman
to direct a film

and the first female studio boss
was Alice Guy Blache.

Most of the film companies
focused on the machinery

and Gaumont started
to make actual films

and Alice Guy was a secretary there

and they let her play
with the cameras after hours,

as long as she'd gotten
her secretarial work done.

And Alice Guy was not only
one of the first female directors,

she was one of the first directors.

She was one of the first

to actually put film together
into a story with an arc.

Up until then,
we'd had the sneeze, the wave,

individual actions.

But Alice created some dramatic
arc films for the very first time.

Here is an example
of Guy Blache's touching poetics.

A little girl overhears a doctor
say that her sister will die

before the leaves fall
from the trees

so she goes outside
and starts to tie them back on.

One of the most innovative directors
of the time was Lois Weber.

Here, she also plays
the lead in her film 'Suspense'.

A woman's at home with her child.

She hears an intruder,
looks out the window,

sees him in this remarkable
sideways POV shot.

She calls her husband.

Weber users a split screen

to show the husband, the intruder
and herself all in the same moment.

The husband jumps in a car
and tries to race to save his wife.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS)

He's chased by the police,

who Weber shows in this inventive
shot of the wing mirror.

The intruder climbs the stair.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS)

And again, Weber's camera position
emphasises the approach, the threat.

In the end, the police
and husband arrive and save the day.

The film was, for years, credited
to a male director, D.W. Griffith.

Frances Marion
was an even more significant figure.

Well, Frances Marion
was the highest-paid screen writer,

male or female, from 1915 to 1935.

That's an incredible accomplishment
right there.

She also is the only woman ever
to win two Oscars for writing

and she won her Oscars
for 'The Big House',

the seminal prison film,

and 'The Champ',
the classic boxing film.

What I love about that
is it just, right there,

puts the lie to the idea,

"Well, these women writers
were writing the matinee weepies

"or the women's films,"
quote, unquote.

No. They were writing
every conceivable genre of film.

Women like Frances,
Adela Rogers St. Johns,

Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos.

I mean, these were the
creme de la creme of the writers,

the ones that the Thalbergs
and the Mayers went to

when they had big productions
they knew they needed to count on.

Marion's screenplay
for the film 'The Wind'

was about a woman living in a shack.

The wind is incessant.
Sand's everywhere.

It seems to blast the visual image.

An aggressive man forces himself
on her.

She shoots him
then buries him in the sand

but the wind blows the sand away.

The corpse is exposed,
just like her fear,

just like her unconscious mind.

'The Wind' was an epic tone poem,

cut like a thriller
but filmed like a dream.

Hollywood films like it

showed female audiences
things they'd probably felt

but never seen.

Most people in America

did not go further than 20 miles
from their home

from when they were born
till they died.

So, you have this incredible country

that really only lives in
this bell jar of their own community

and as films start coming out,

as movie theatres are being built...

By 1920, there's over
15,000 theatres in this country.

So, all of a sudden,
you can go around the corner,

put down your nickel or your dime
or your quarter

and have this entire world
open up to you.

And it's not just they're
seeing Paris for the first time,

they're seeing New York City
or San Francisco.

They're seeing women's fashions.

They are seeing women acting in ways
that nobody would dare do.

With talking films, the price
of making movies skyrocketed

and so, with talking films,

Wall Street really entered
the business for the first time.

And when money entered into it,
the jobs started paying more.

It was taken seriously as a business
and men wanted those jobs.

If the great women filmmakers
of the 1910s are underremembered,

you could say that this man, lanky,

here in a stagey family scene with a
painted skyline, is overremembered.

People say that D.W. Griffith
invented close-ups or editing,

which isn't true.

But he did something far more
valuable for the art of cinema.

He said it needs to show this -
the wind in the trees.

Before Griffith, film had a tendency
to be stagey like this.

Airless.

He brought the wind
in the trees to cinema...

..a sense of the outside world.

The delicacy of Lillian Gish's
performance here

matches the delicacy of the light,
the visual softness.

Decades later,
the critic Roland Barthes

said that some images have
unplanned natural details in them

that move us.

Barthes called this the 'punctum',

the thing that pricks our feelings.

Griffith's work is full of
the punctum, the wind in the trees.

This scene, from 'Way Down East', is
set on a treacherous, thawing river.

Griffith could never have planned
that Lillian Gish's right arm

would push ice off
the adjacent ice flow...

..but we notice the realness
of the moment.

Griffith worked with one of the best
cinematographers in the business,

Billy Bitzer.

Bitzer disliked the hard edge
of the film image

so put a collar around the lens hood

to make the edge of the image
go slightly darker,

adding class to the picture,
as Bitzer himself put it,

and influencing the look of film
in America for a generation.

Griffith and Bitzer understood the
psychological intensity of a lens.

They used visual softness
and backlighting,

which gave a halo to hair

and made actors stand out
against backgrounds.

What Griffith and Bitzer did
in 1914 and 1915,

with all their talents,

their haloed imagery,
their splendid tracking shots

and feel for the outdoors

is one of the great shocks
in The Story of Film.

They made this deceitful
state-of-the-nation movie

that raised a racist flag

which showed the power of cinema
and its danger.

The 'Birth of a Nation'

looks like it was shot
in Griffith's native Kentucky...

..but it was actually filmed here,
near Los Angeles.

It showed the American Civil War.

Griffith mixed the epic
with the intimate.

A southern officer returns home.

He goes to his mother.

Her arms come out
of the doorway to enfold him.

We don't see the rest of her.

Such subtlety made the racism
all the more dangerous.

Black senators were shown as drunk
and unclean.

('RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES'
BY WAGNER PLAYS)

In this scene,
Griffith used Wagner music.

The Cameron family are being
attacked by black soldiers.

They're rescued by the clan,
heroic and thrilling.

After some screenings,

black audience members
were attacked with clubs.

The Ku Klux Klan had been disbanded
in 1869

but by the mid-1920s, its
membership was back up to 4 million.

Talk about the wind in the trees.

More than 80 years later,
DJ Spooky sampled and played

with the toxic scenes
of 'Birth of a Nation',

almost as if he were scribbling
on them.

The year after
the 'Birth of a Nation',

Griffiths saw this,
the epic Italian film 'Cabiria'.

He was stunned, particularly
by these moving dolly shots.

Inspired by these moves

and production designs such as this,
using elephants to suggest scale...

..and also by the novels
of Charles Dickens,

he made a 3.5-hour film,
'Intolerance',

about love's struggle
through history.

The film showed
human intolerance in Babylon...

..and the life of Jesus Christ
tinted in sepia...

..and the massacre of St Bartholomew
in medieval ages.

Violent scenes tinted blue...

..and in modern gangsterism,
all shiny cars and jazz outfits...

..and then intercut these.

Griffith said,
"Dickens intercuts, so so will I."

He took storyline A so far
then jumped to storyline B,

advanced it a certain amount
then went back again to A

and picked up where he had left off.

Previously, a cut from one shot
to the next meant, as we've seen,

'then' or 'meanwhile'.

Griffith's cutting between
time periods wasn't saying either.

It was saying, "Look,

"these very different events
from different eras

"all show the same human trait -
intolerance

"or the failure of love,"

editing as an intellectual signpost

asking people to notice
not something about action or story,

but about the meaning
of the sequence.

Soviets such as Eisenstein
wrote about this editing

and as far away as Japan in 1921,

Minoru Murata made this film,
'Souls on the Road'.

Two storylines intertwine.

In the end of the film,
they come together.

Two ex-convicts from one storyline

here find a son from
the other storyline in the snow.

Their story has been one of hope
but the son has died.

A pioneering use
of parallel editing in Asia.

This made 'Souls on the Road'
the first great Japanese film.

In LA today, a shopping mall
on Hollywood Boulevard

where the Oscars take place

has partially rebuilt the massive
Babylonian gate from 'Intolerance'.

The original was here,
a mile away from the shopping mall.

It was demolished
when Hollywood didn't care much

about its own history.

But what history, what ideas,

filmed with a dolly on a crane

and even on a balloon to get
high enough up into the wind

that flaps these vast hangings.

Cinema was just 20 years old
when this shot was filmed.

A new art form had been born.

Scandinavian directors
had made it an art of light.

Nickelodeons had given way
to movie palaces,

places built like cathedrals...

..or Egyptian temples...

..or Chinese pavilions.

A garden called Hollywood started to
pump fantasies out into the world.

Film editing captured the fragmented
experiences of modern life.

New creatures called movie stars

became the most famous people
in the world.

They lived in places of rapture
and escape.

The story of film seemed
to have reached its climax.

But in fact,
it was only just beginning.