The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 10 - Episode #1.10 - full transcript
MARK COUSINS: 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 was in 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:
An epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and 1,000 films.
In this chapter,
we encounter the wild cinema
of Werner Herzog and Nicolas Roeg
and discover how movie making
in the '70s
asked big questions
about identity and sex.
When most people
think of '70s movies,
they think of Scorsese and Coppola,
Spielberg and Lucas,
but beyond the heat shimmer of LA
and the urban canyons of New York,
a world of exciting new cinema
opened up in the '70s.
As Willy Brandt
became chancellor in Germany,
as Iran got rich,
as decolonised Africa
worked out what it wanted to be,
as Japan got even more radical,
movie makers in Germany, Iran,
Britain, Africa, Asia and Italy
asked big, brilliant questions
about themselves
and their countries.
German cinema conquered
the world in the 1910s and '20s,
and Leni Riefenstahl
had been brilliant but misguided
in the '30s and '40s.
After the war
and the division of Germany,
a great studio, DEFA,
started making films in the East.
Then the Berlin Wall was built.
Come the '70s, there was so much
to deplore and rethink
that it's no surprise
that German cinema of the time
was about identity and history.
This man, Wim Wenders, was one
of a generation of young filmmakers
who wanted to create
a new German film.
They did so through common cause.
WENDERS: The New German cinema
was nothing but that -
that sort of solidarity
of 15 powerless people
to become a powerful union.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder stated
the aims clearly to interviewers.
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
TRANSLATION: The basic idea
of the New German cinema
is to make films again
which are important
and have something to say -
films born out of our own life
and experience.
A massive generation gap
had opened up
between baby boomers
and their parents
who either voted for Adolf Hitler
or endured him.
An economic boom in West Germany
had begun to numb the guilt
about the Holocaust.
New right-wing tabloid newspapers
pasted contentment over everything.
The New German filmmakers
knew they wanted none of this,
but what did they want?
Who were they?
What made their hearts beat fast?
Here is the most prolific
of them, Fassbinder,
naked in front of his own camera,
displaying his personal life
on the big screen.
He said, "The ideal is to make films
as beautiful as America's
"but to move the content
to other areas".
So he took this beautiful,
romantic American film,
with sweet orchestral music,
'All That Heaven Allows',
about this woman who's shunned
because she has a romance with her
younger, working-class gardener...
..and remade it as this far less
glossy, less beautiful movie -
'Fear Eats the Soul'.
Fassbinder uses this
very Hollywood tracking shot
to show the prejudice
of the woman's family,
and here he plays a part
in the film.
In the remake, the woman
is shunned by society
not because her lover is working
class but because he's black.
'Fear Eats the Soul' was about
the darkness of human identity,
as was this film that Fassbinder
made two years previously.
'The Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant',
Fassbinder's 13th film,
told the story
of a famous clothes designer
who lives with her assistant,
Marlene, who is really her slave.
Fassbinder has his actors
move slowly, inexpressively,
as if they are haunted or exhausted.
The part of Marlene
was partly based on Irm Hermann,
who plays her herself in the movie,
always in this same black dress.
She was Fassbinder's secretary
and lover in real life
and he treated her appallingly,
sometimes beating her in public.
Body language in the film
expresses its tragedy,
wigs and make-up conjure
its cruel artifice.
('SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES'
PLAYS ON RECORD PLAYER)
Fassbinder had in mind this classic
American movie, 'All About Eve',
another film about two women
controlling each other,
fuelled by alcohol
and all dolled up.
Tuck me in, turn out the lights
and tiptoe out.
Eve would, wouldn't you, Eve?
If you'd like.
I wouldn't like.
But as he always did,
Fassbinder took the American story
much further.
Petra falls in love
with this woman in brown, Karin,
and becomes her slave.
The Poussin painting
in the background
is also about abjection -
Midas begs Bacchus to rid him
of the power to turns things
into gold.
Eventually, the agonies of love
ruin Petra.
Spit drips from her mouth.
She's alone in an empty room,
waiting for the phone to ring.
The New German cinema
had stolen an American story,
then rubbed its nose in the dirt.
It loved Hollywood but sneered at
its lies about identity and love.
Where Fassbinder's films were often
about women in confined spaces,
those of Wim Wenders
were about men in open spaces.
And where it was the style
of American films
that influenced Fassbinder,
it was America itself,
and its utopianism,
that was Wenders' jumping-off point.
In his unforgettable road movie
'Alice in the Cities',
the camera cranes down
under a boardwalk
to find Rudiger Vogler, a
journalist who's drifting and numb.
Wenders saw himself in him.
This is Wenders' notebook and
storyboard for this boardwalk scene.
Later, Wenders has Vogler
arrange to meet a woman
at the top of
the Empire State Building.
Again he's using an
iconic American location.
He shoots in natural light.
Vogler is drifting -
melancholic music.
17 years earlier, but a world away,
Hollywood director Leo McCarey
had Cary Grant arrange
to meet Deborah Kerr there.
This scene was shot in a studio -
visually precise, crisp,
coloured, controlled...
..whereas Wenders' eye roams,
long lens,
unsure of what it's looking for.
It's as if Wenders is saying,
"Remember what it was like to feel?"
Where Wenders defined
modern German identity
in relationship to America,
our next director
was more interested in gender.
Margarethe von Trotta
started as an actress.
This is her in a Fassbinder film,
insolent,
like a German Julie Christie.
Then she made her
solo directorial debut
with 'The Second Awakening
of Christa Klages'.
(LAID-BACK, JAZZY MUSIC)
The title character, Christa, robs
a bank, but Von Trotta's robbery
is one of the least tense
or macho ever filmed.
There's no shouting
or sync sound, just mellow music.
Von Trotta focuses instead
on the relationship
between Christa
and this bank clerk
who Christa at first takes hostage.
In the film's climax,
Christa's caught by the police
and confronted by the clerk.
The clerk's been hunting her
throughout the movie,
but then this happens.
Von Trotta's uses close-ups,
almost direct-to-camera eye lines.
This creates intimacy and equality
between the two women.
Where Leni Riefenstahl's films
were expressionist and about men,
Von Trotta's
were impressionist portraits
of women's intimacy
in violent times.
The next German filmmaker
of the '70s
went to the end of the earth
to find himself.
He's German cinema's wild man,
its explorer.
At the age of 18, Werner Herzog
ventured across the Sudan.
He walked from Munich to Paris.
In 1982, to make
his film 'Fitzcarraldo',
Herzog and his crew
hauled a full-sized ship -
this is a model of it -
up and over a hilly jungle isthmus
in Peru,
a dangerous idea that people
tried to make safer.
But as this location filming,
with Herzog speaking
passionately in Spanish, shows,
he saw the haul
not only as a physical feat,
but in symbolic terms.
And look at this key moment
in the film.
The boat's being hauled,
the crew seems to move it.
The documentary camera
is far back from the action
but captures the rejoicing.
But then one of
the ropes breaks.
(MEN GRUNT EXCITEDLY)
WOMAN: Something went wrong.
All these dreams are...
are yours as well.
And the only distinction
between me and you
is that I can articulate them.
And that is what poetry or painting
or literature, filmmaking
is all about.
It's as simple as that.
Herzog's eyes in this interview
show his exhaustion.
He's talking about universal things
but he's almost crying.
And I know I can do it
to a certain degree.
Like Pasolini,
Herzog was a romantic.
He wasn't much interested
in the feminism of Von Trotta
or the Americana of Wenders.
He was far more taken
by primeval life.
After John Ford, he is the most
important landscape filmmaker
to appear so far in our story.
The geographical, historical,
class, gender,
sexual and spiritual diversity
of the New German cinema directors
made their innovative movies
wildly different,
but one thing's clear -
the films all ask the question,
"If I don't want to be what
my parents are, then what am I?"
We definitely changed the way
Germans looked at each other.
Germans had not looked
at German history anymore.
Fassbinder, more than any of us,
confronted them with their
own image, their own history.
Italy in the '70s
had industrialised,
and was haunted
by its fascist past, too.
But its great '70s films
asked questions
not about identity and history
but identity and sex.
The boldest Italian depicter
of sex in the '70s
was that '60s radical
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Italy had become so commercialised,
said Pasolini,
that "enjoying life and the body
"means precisely enjoying a life
that historically no longer exists".
In other words,
you can't be who you are.
And so he set his so-called
'Trilogy of Life' films in the past.
This is the ending
of the last of the trilogy,
the 'Arabian Nights'.
Nur Ed Din, a young man,
has been looking everywhere for
his beloved maidservant, Zummurud.
Pasolini filmed
in Iranian mirrored rooms.
Instead, Nur Ed Din finds himself
in front of this king,
who wears a golden beard.
(KING SPEAKS ITALIAN)
The young man reluctantly
submits to sex with the king,
not realising that the king
is Zummurud in disguise.
Zummurud can't contain her giggles.
(GIGGLES)
In contemporary Italy,
said Pasolini,
such fun was not possible -
consumerism had ruined everything.
He was murdered
by a male prostitute in 1975.
Bernardo Bertolucci,
who started as Pasolini's assistant,
became the greatest
European filmmaker of his time.
In 1970 he made this film.
The camera tracks right
to reveal a piazza
and a man standing in it.
Then he walks
and we see a statue -
his father, an antifascist hero
in the village.
Then the camera
is again moving right.
This time the man's visiting
an old girlfriend of his father.
She's standing still too,
and then she starts to walk also,
as if she's been static for decades
and is suddenly swept into movement
by the camera's tracking.
And as the film
sweeps into the past,
the man finds that his father
wasn't a hero.
He collaborated with the Fascists.
What sort of identity
does that give the son?
But what made
'The Spider's Stratagem'
different from most '70s films
about identity
was its concern for visual beauty,
as well as it's gliding
camera work.
Look at this shot -
blue dusk light in the sky
and yellow-white petroleum light
of the lamp
in the same magic moment.
(SOBS SOFTLY)
Bertolucci and his cinematographer,
Vittorio Storaro,
loved the haunting dusk lighting
in the surreal paintings
of Rene Magritte
and tried to capture it.
And then Bertolucci
upped the beauty even further.
In the same year, 1970,
aged just 30,
he released a second masterpiece,
'The Conformist'.
It was also about fascism
and identity
and it too
was determinedly beautiful.
Look at this bold composition
with its plunging perspective.
(SPEAKS ITALIAN)
Look at this shot -
the camera sweeps
and the leaves do too,
as if they're both blown
by the same wind,
like a Gene Kelly musical.
In the radical '60s,
visual beauty had been seen
as too Hollywood, too shallow,
but here Bertolucci was bringing
beauty back to Italian cinema.
That most hardcore '60s director,
Jean-Luc Godard,
saw 'The Conformist's beauty
as a betrayal of radicalism.
He met Bertolucci at a cafe.
BERTOLUCCI:
I was waiting for Godard,
and finally Jean-Luc appears next
to me with these dark sunglasses.
He doesn't say anything
but he gives me a note.
And then he leaves.
And his comments
on 'The Conformist' were...
.."One has to fight against
imperialism and capitalism."
All that written on a portrait
of Chairman Mao.
I was so upset that I tore it up
in thousands of pieces, that note.
And I am very sorry today.
I would like to see it
and to look at that again.
Godard notwithstanding,
'The Conformist'
was one of the most influential
movies of the '70s,
especially in America.
Francis Ford Coppola poached
cinematographer Storaro
for 'Apocalypse Now'.
And the beauty of this scene
in 'Taxi Driver'
derives from 'The Conformist'.
It would be easy to film
this violent moment
with a wobbly hand-held camera...
..but Martin Scorsese goes high
and has the shot glide
across the ceiling -
an ugly event
turned into gorgeous form.
Innovative British movies
in the '70s
were about identity, too.
Like Italian films of the time,
sexual identity was a key theme
but so was the idea
that identity is fragmented.
Ken Russell served in the air force,
then became a ballet dancer,
a rare career move,
then became
Britain's Frederico Fellini.
In this scene in 'Women in Love'
he films a sex scene
as a slow-motion,
long lens, outdoor dance...
..and puts the camera on its side,
making the action vertical...
..defying gravity as had hardly
ever been done before,
and it's strangeness reminds us
how horizontal cinema normally is.
More daring still
was this film, 'Performance',
by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell.
It's about this London gangster,
Chas.
He keeps checking himself
in the mirror -
his hair, nails, waistline.
This scene in Martin Scorsese's
'Mean Streets',
made three years later,
is about another narcissist
getting all dolled up.
Again, a mirror scene.
Again, clothes
are the gangster's uniform.
Movie gangsters have often
been about display.
Chas in 'Performance'
comes to this place in London
to hide out, because he's shot
another gangster
and the mobsters will be after him.
He holes up in the house
of a fading pop star, Turner,
played by Mick Jagger,
as bohemian as Chas is clean-cut.
Van Gogh, eh?
Oh, no, this is the normal.
The normal?
Yeah. I was just having a laugh.
And then this happens.
Here Chas is talking to Turner.
The camera moves
behind Turner's head,
then dissolves through it to Chas
who sounds more echoey now
and looks straight at us.
It's time for a change.
It's time for a change.
The two men's faces dissolve
into each other. Chas is changing.
Personally,
casting one's mind back...
His identity is merging
with Turner's,
an idea taken from
this strikingly similar scene
in one of Ingmar Bergman's
greatest films, 'Persona'.
(SPEAKS SWEDISH)
In the end, the mobsters
come for Chas.
His last act, before he's taken
away, is to shoot Turner,
maybe because he's shown him
too much of himself.
No!
His bullet travels
through Turner's brain
and a picture of
the Argentine writer
about dreams and labyrinths,
Borges,
then crashes through a mirror,
then back to London...
..the most imaginative shooting
in The Story of Film.
Then Chas is led away
by the gangsters
but things are not what they seem.
A child toddles backwards.
Hello, Chas.
And as Chas
heads off to his likely death,
we glimpse him in close-up
and he's Turner.
'Performance' was not only the
greatest '70s film about identity,
if any film
in the whole Story of Film
should be compulsory viewing
for filmmakers, maybe this is it.
Australian film in the '70s
gathered momentum,
and Nicolas Roeg fuelled it.
This is Roeg's film 'Walkabout'.
A white city-girl and her brother
head out into the outback.
Do you know where to go?
Their father has just shot himself
and tried to shoot them.
They're scared.
Roeg films with wide-angle lenses
to stretch the space before them.
Roeg's film is about the contrast
you see all over Australia
between nature and city,
the sea and swimming pools,
the raw and the cooked.
Years later, we're in a white world
of tower blocks
and chlorinated swimming pools.
The girl's married now.
She's in her clean,
middle-class kitchen.
She wears make up, like a mask.
She's with her husband
but thinks back to
a half-imagined free moment
when she swam naked in the outback
with an Aboriginal lad,
a life less ordinary.
Which means old male
looks like being out of a job.
(VOICE FADES AWAY)
(DREAMY ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)
She's like Chas in 'Performance',
shedding her clean-cut self when
she meets a more vital human being.
It's like she's remembering
what Aboriginals call the Dreamtime.
Her sense of loss is overwhelming.
Plus, with all this
changing around,
there's bound to be good news
as far as salary's concerned.
I tell you, darl, in two years
we'll be holidaying
on the Gold Coast...
In modern-day Australia,
people swim in man-made pools.
The dreams and fears of Roeg's film
are still here.
The raw and the cooked
became a stable of Aussie cinema.
The films were about
what sort of person you are -
one who swims in a chlorinated pool
or the open sea.
What sort of person's this girl?
She and her friends are wearing
long, white Victorian dresses
in the sultry heat
of the Australian outback.
I feel awful. Really awful.
They're fish out of water.
Miranda, I feel perfectly awful.
The film is
'Picnic at Hanging Rock'.
Director Peter Weir films the girls
in slight slow motion
to create a sense of mystery.
The girls are about to disappear.
Miranda?
Miranda?
Miranda!
Miranda, don't go up there!
Come back!
(SCREAMS)
(CONTINUES SCREAMING)
Weir's plan was to explain
this disappearance
at the end of the film.
They were to be discovered
and brought home on stretchers,
but his editor, Max Lemon,
instead did this -
he repeated earlier picnic scenes
in step motion, the camera roaming,
no sync sound,
as if the girls are ghosts.
White Australian identity
evaporating in the heat.
Gillian Armstrong's debut feature
is set in Victorian times, too.
But 'My Brilliant Career'
isn't about a woman's relationship
with nature, but with men.
Her main character here
has the overview.
MAN: Do you, um...need a hand?
No, thank you.
Sam Neill is glamorised and filmed
in dappled light, not her.
Work in the kitchen?
I'd be obliged to you, sir,
if you'd take yourself
out of the way.
Unless you want me foot
in your big, fat face.
The female point of view of the film
hinted at how gendered Aussie cinema
would become in the '90s
with the films of Jane Campion
and Baz Luhrmann.
A reward?
Let me go.
Sam Neill was in more women's films
than most actors.
Being in women's films
makes as much sense to me
as being in a bloke's films.
And, um,
there's a certain sensibility
that these things...these films
have in common, I think,
that I find agreeable.
Australia and New Zealand
are both post-colonial societies
where it's taken us a while
to wake up to women's issues -
probably a little bit longer
than elsewhere.
Move from Australia to Japan
in the '70s
and you find some of the most
radical filmmakers of the decade...
..who took a hammer rather
than a mirror to the real world
and tried to shape Japanese identity
with groundbreaking documentaries.
This is the climax of one of
the greatest documentaries ever made
which was filmed over 17 years.
We're at the packed
annual general meeting
of Japanese chemical company Chisso.
Over many years, it dumped
methyl mercury into fishing waters,
causing hundreds of deaths
and bio-deformities.
The company denied
all responsibility.
Its bosses sit at a long table
on the stage.
(LARGE CROWD CLAMOURS)
The families of the dead
and the severely disabled are here.
(RINGS BELL)
They bought shares in Chisso
to force its board of directors
to take responsibility
for their appalling actions.
Director Noriaki Tsuchimoto
knew the protesters
and so got close to them.
His small 16mm camera allowed him
to be at the centre
of such explosive moments.
He uses little sync sound.
The jostled hand-held camera
and torrent of words
make fiction film look staid.
In Japan, where identity's
not traditionally asserted,
such scenes were shocking.
Claude Lanzmann, who made
the Holocaust documentary 'Shoah',
called Tsuchimoto "a great artist
with a profound vision as a fighter,
"a marvellous filmmaker and a
rigorous creator of sublime work."
This man, Kazuo Hara,
made a documentary masterpiece
about Japanese assertiveness
at its most shocking.
It's about an ex-soldier
called Mr Okuzaki.
This is Mr Okuzaki.
He's meeting the brother and sister
of a friend of his
who disappeared, a soldier
with whom he fought in World War II.
Hara films with hand-held camera.
He follows as they go to this house.
An old commander lives here.
Together they want to find out
what happened to the soldier.
But this visit
doesn't dig up the truth
and the two siblings
drop out of the investigation.
And so, astonishingly,
Okuzaki hires these two actors,
walking dolefully behind him,
to pretend to be the siblings.
He'll tell the next commanders
that the actors
are the real siblings,
using emotional blackmail
to try to get to the truth
of what happened.
As the filming continued,
Okuzaki discovered that his friends
were probably cannibalised
by the commanders.
Okuzaki's in this
commander's house now,
just to the right of this close-up,
again filmed
by Hara's hand-held camera.
Okuzaki's angry now.
We hold our breath.
Okuzaki attacks the commander.
Hara uses slow motion.
The fraught experience
of making the film
gave Hara a sense
that unpalatable truth in life
is buried under layers of lies.
As we've seen, filmmaking
in Germany, Italy, Britain,
Australia and Japan
in the '70s
was radical and about identity.
Jump to here, Senegal, in
West Africa, in the '70s, however,
and a whole new world
of radical movie making opens up.
A manifesto called
'Towards a Third Cinema -
'Notes and Experiences
for the Development
'of a Cinema of Liberation
in the Third World',
by South Americans Fernando
Solanas and Octavio Getino,
angrily criticised cinema
for always having been a commodity.
They argued that
this great collective medium
should fight poverty and oppression.
The manifesto had a huge impact.
This is a cinema in Burkina Faso,
one of the poorest countries
in the world,
but painted on it is "A cinema
can be the heart of the community,"
and "Cinema is a dream."
The manifesto said that
there are three types of film.
The first, made mostly in Hollywood,
is the commercial entertainment -
the bauble.
The second type of cinema
is the modernist art movie genre
made by individual directors
like Godard, Antonioni,
Bergman and Fellini.
Third Cinema,
opposed to both industrial
and autobiographical art cinema,
is political,
about post-colonial identity
and made in the non-Western world
after 1969.
These ideals were
the rocket fuel of '70s cinema
here in Africa, in South America
and in the Middle East.
In Burkina Faso today, for example,
these people aren't going
to a football match,
they're going to the opening
of a film festival,
in their tens of thousands.
Burkinabe filmmaker
Gaston Kabore believes
that making films is crucial
to people's identities.
If we continue consuming
the images coming from abroad
telling the stories
of...other people,
it might be interesting
at the beginning
but, slowly, we are going to lose
our own way of looking, the reality.
As we've seen, there'd been Arab
filmmaking in Egypt since the '30s,
and this famous moment
in 'The Black Girl' -
a boy removes a mask
and looks hauntingly
into the eyes of the audience -
was the bold start of black feature
filmmaking in Africa in the '60s.
But scenes like this...
..Tarzan's scrubbed-clean,
white family
having breakfast in a fantasy jungle
were still the most popular
movie images of Africa.
But here's a more realistic
African man.
He's Algerian.
There's no sync sound, Arabic music.
The film's been poorly preserved,
but it's dreamlike.
The camera tracks backward.
Director Assia Djebar's
main character
sees her man on his horse.
She towers over him. He falls.
Then he's in a wheelchair.
Djebar's is no fantasy Africa.
She looks at Algeria
through a feminist lens.
In West Africa, in the '70s,
Third Cinema movies about identity
were on a roll, too.
Where Scorsese
and Coppola and the rest
were kicking down
the doors of Hollywood,
in this city, Dakar,
tens of thousands of miles away
from the pool parties
and Oscar ceremonies of Los Angeles,
film was buzzing
and cameras were on the streets.
Ousmane Sembene
was still leading the way.
His follow-up to 'The Black Girl',
'Xala', was funny and rude.
It was about the move from colonial
to post-colonial identity.
It starts here,
the Chamber of Commerce in Dakar.
It's the end of colonial rule.
Senegalese triumphantly kick out
the symbols of the French state -
including jackboots
and a gendarme cap.
They look forlorn.
Their time has gone.
But, in the very next scene,
the new businessmen
are aping their colonisers.
Sembene mocks
their new trophy briefcases.
One of the businessmen
has his car washed in Evian...
..Sembene's tart way of showing
the decadence of the new regime.
Sembene was against religion
and wanted Africa to undergo
a radical enlightenment.
This is his house, Galle Ceddo -
it means 'home of the unbeliever'.
From the front -
it's on the left of this image -
you can see that it's
just metres away from a mosque.
Sembene planted his tripod
on the soil of Senegal
and created a new, radical type
of African cinema - Third Cinema.
This man, Djibril Diop Mambety,
seemed to love cinema even more.
He spoke slowly,
in an almost dreamlike way,
as this interview shows.
Sembene's point of view
was ideologically certain,
but Mambety chopped up
such certainty into fragments.
Mambety's films
helped create African modernism.
Look at this scene in his caustic
second short film, 'Badou Boy'.
A man and a boy saddle up a horse -
very simple.
But the repetition of "Ca va?"
and the standing up and
hunkering down of the two people,
give it an abstract rhythm
and jagginess.
Ca va bien?
Ca va.
Ca va tres bien?
Ca va.
Ca va?
Bien.
Ca va?
Non.
Ca va tres bien?
Ca va.
Mambety said, "You either
engage in stylistic research
"or just record reality."
Mambety lived here.
He struggled to get
financing for his films.
His punkiness found little favour.
In 1992, he made
this masterpiece, 'Hyenes'.
This woman is half made of gold.
She's returned to the village
where she fell in love with
this man, who then spurned her.
She's as rich as the World Bank now.
This is director Mambety himself,
on the left.
She treats the villagers to
luxuries, consumer goods.
The villagers love these.
They become greedy. They want more.
The village becomes
like a shopping channel,
a fun fair to celebrate
the joys of capitalism.
Then, devastatingly, the woman says
that they can have more luxuries,
but there's a price to pay -
they must kill the man
who spurned her.
They're so hooked now on capitalism
that they do kill him.
Mambety films the lynching
where he himself grew up.
The mob closes in, murmuring.
Mambety had become as angry at
consumerism as Pasolini in Italy.
Sembene and Mambety showed
that African filmmakers
were making cinema say
what they wanted it to say
about who modern West Africans were.
The result was a exciting,
the joy of discovery -
new types of African symbolism
and storytelling.
And other directors emerged.
Safi Faye, Africa's first
important female director,
made this film,
'Peasant Letter', in 1974.
She shows her village at dawn -
the beauty of the smoke,
mid-sized framings.
Everyday scenes.
Off-screen, in a gentle voice,
she describes what we see.
The film's a show-and-tell
to the outside world.
An Ethiopian, Haile Gerima,
made this remarkable film,
'Harvest - 3,000 Years'.
Its story stretches
over three millennia.
It starts at dawn, as if all
of history has been just one day.
Low contrast black-and-white.
Extremely long lenses,
to telescope the land and eternity.
This makes us feel distant,
but Gerima is passionate.
He shows farmers treated like shit
by a trilby-hatted armchair tyrant.
Again, shot long lens,
barking orders.
Then comes this old madman, Kebebe.
Kebebe tells a story
about the Queen of England.
Colonial power told almost like
a myth to everyone and no-one.
Two hours into the film, Kebebe
batters the landlord with a stick.
(SHOUTS IN LOCAL LANGUAGE)
(PEOPLE SHOUT AND WAIL)
Voices begin to flood
the soundtrack.
People are beginning
to talk to each other -
a key idea in Third Cinema.
(SHOUTING AND WAILING INTENSIFIES)
The popular radicalism
of Third Cinema
made movies innovative
across the globe.
In the Middle East,
the great films of the '70s
were about identity
and national liberation.
The most notorious Middle Eastern
filmmaker of the '70s
was this Kurdish man, Yilmaz Guney.
This is him acting
in the film 'Hope'.
His ripped clothing
shows how poor he is.
He's a scruffy, masculine hero,
like a Kurdish Sean Connery.
He plays, here, an illiterate man
who's been searching for treasure
to feed his family
and has almost gone mad - spinning
in space, let down by life.
Then Guney started directing.
Here's a film he wrote
and codirected, 'Yol'.
A man has been released
from prison for five days.
He's happy, free,
running with his dog.
Wide open spaces,
long lens filming,
wind in the grass.
(LAUGHS, SHOUTS)
He comes to his village
and smiles, looks to camera.
(DISTANT MACHINE-GUN FIRE)
Then the smile dies on his face.
The village is cowering.
The music dies.
(GUNFIRE CONTINUES)
The state military are here.
(WIND WHISTLES)
Still-life shots of confrontation.
No words needed -
people look imprisoned
in their own windows and doorways.
Guney is credited as codirector
of the film, with Serif Goren,
because, remarkably, he was
in prison for the whole shoot
but escaped in time
for the post-production.
He sent out explicit notes
on how shots should be filmed.
He was accused of killing
an anti-communist judge
in a restaurant,
though it was probably
Guney's nephew that did it.
(WIND WHISTLES)
This character in 'Yol'
was typical of Guney's men -
old-fashioned, proud, but powerless,
their hopes dashed,
banging their heads
against the wall of life.
Guney was a communist,
a spokesperson for ordinary people,
and adored.
'Yol' won the main prize
at the Cannes Film Festival.
(SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE)
Back in South America, where
the Third Cinema ideas were born,
this, one of the most compelling
Third Cinema films, was made.
It was about identity and betrayal,
filmmaking that makes you feel
in the centre of the action.
Marxist Salvador Allende
was democratically elected
President of Chile in 1970.
On September 11, 1973,
Allende gives what will be
his last radio broadcast.
(ALLENDE SPEAKS SPANISH OVER PA)
(MACHINE-GUN FIRE)
Then the military, led by
General Pinochet, moves in.
Director Patricio Guzman
and his team
film from rooftops
with hand-held cameras,
zoomed in, to see soldiers
running like ants.
They'd been shooting for months
before the violent coup,
which was supported by the CIA.
History dramatically
unfolded in front of them.
They were sometimes hiding,
so walls and railings
would half-obscure their view.
They used direct sound.
No gloss, no distance.
The 'Battle of Chile' said,
"Here's what we are.
Here's what we're losing."
(CROWD CHANTS IN SPANISH)
And we end our tour
of identity movies
around the world in the '70s
with this unforgettable,
outrageous film.
It was made by a Chilean-born
director too,
but it's far more about identity
and psychedelics than betrayal.
A near-naked thief
climbs a vast tower.
Below him is a mad world of fascists
and religious obsessives
who have used his body as a mould
to make images of Christ -
a very Third Cinema set-up.
But, when the thief gets
to the top of the tower,
the film becomes something like
'The Wizard of Oz' -
a strange corridor, like a rainbow.
The thief advances.
He meets a man dressed in white,
flanked by goats,
a naked woman and a camel.
It's the director,
Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Jodorowsky studied mime in Paris.
He believed in Zen Buddhism -
the idea that people
should dethrone themselves...
..and he studied Carl Jung,
so this scene, in a way,
is a man climbing into
the maze of his own mind,
where he discovers
strange images and archetypes
that he shares
with all human beings.
Indian music plays.
Jodorowsky's man in white
is an alchemist.
He asks the thief if he wants gold.
He does, of course.
But the manner of its making
is extraordinary.
The thief must defecate
and give the alchemist
his own sweat.
(CELLO MUSIC PLAYS)
The thief's
spiritual awakening begins.
Eventually,
his own excrement becomes gold.
Jodorowsky certainly
had a sense of humour.
But his journey to the holy mountain
of self-discovery and self-loss
is only just beginning.
Primary colours, egg shapes,
a pelican, nudity,
a very '70s production design.
You are excrement.
You can change yourself into gold.
The thief's journey
of self-discovery
mirrored that of '70s cinema itself.
Its political, innovative filmmakers
had stripped cinema naked,
loaded it with
symbolism about selfhood
and turned it into gold.
And, above and beyond these things,
they used movies to ask,
"Who are we, as modern Europeans,
Asians, Africans, South Americans?"
But movies in the '70s
weren't only innovative
when they were political
or about identity.
Mainstream
and entertainment directors
in Mumbai, Hong Kong
and Hollywood in the '70s
were about to change
the story of film forever.
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 was in 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:
An epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and 1,000 films.
In this chapter,
we encounter the wild cinema
of Werner Herzog and Nicolas Roeg
and discover how movie making
in the '70s
asked big questions
about identity and sex.
When most people
think of '70s movies,
they think of Scorsese and Coppola,
Spielberg and Lucas,
but beyond the heat shimmer of LA
and the urban canyons of New York,
a world of exciting new cinema
opened up in the '70s.
As Willy Brandt
became chancellor in Germany,
as Iran got rich,
as decolonised Africa
worked out what it wanted to be,
as Japan got even more radical,
movie makers in Germany, Iran,
Britain, Africa, Asia and Italy
asked big, brilliant questions
about themselves
and their countries.
German cinema conquered
the world in the 1910s and '20s,
and Leni Riefenstahl
had been brilliant but misguided
in the '30s and '40s.
After the war
and the division of Germany,
a great studio, DEFA,
started making films in the East.
Then the Berlin Wall was built.
Come the '70s, there was so much
to deplore and rethink
that it's no surprise
that German cinema of the time
was about identity and history.
This man, Wim Wenders, was one
of a generation of young filmmakers
who wanted to create
a new German film.
They did so through common cause.
WENDERS: The New German cinema
was nothing but that -
that sort of solidarity
of 15 powerless people
to become a powerful union.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder stated
the aims clearly to interviewers.
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
TRANSLATION: The basic idea
of the New German cinema
is to make films again
which are important
and have something to say -
films born out of our own life
and experience.
A massive generation gap
had opened up
between baby boomers
and their parents
who either voted for Adolf Hitler
or endured him.
An economic boom in West Germany
had begun to numb the guilt
about the Holocaust.
New right-wing tabloid newspapers
pasted contentment over everything.
The New German filmmakers
knew they wanted none of this,
but what did they want?
Who were they?
What made their hearts beat fast?
Here is the most prolific
of them, Fassbinder,
naked in front of his own camera,
displaying his personal life
on the big screen.
He said, "The ideal is to make films
as beautiful as America's
"but to move the content
to other areas".
So he took this beautiful,
romantic American film,
with sweet orchestral music,
'All That Heaven Allows',
about this woman who's shunned
because she has a romance with her
younger, working-class gardener...
..and remade it as this far less
glossy, less beautiful movie -
'Fear Eats the Soul'.
Fassbinder uses this
very Hollywood tracking shot
to show the prejudice
of the woman's family,
and here he plays a part
in the film.
In the remake, the woman
is shunned by society
not because her lover is working
class but because he's black.
'Fear Eats the Soul' was about
the darkness of human identity,
as was this film that Fassbinder
made two years previously.
'The Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant',
Fassbinder's 13th film,
told the story
of a famous clothes designer
who lives with her assistant,
Marlene, who is really her slave.
Fassbinder has his actors
move slowly, inexpressively,
as if they are haunted or exhausted.
The part of Marlene
was partly based on Irm Hermann,
who plays her herself in the movie,
always in this same black dress.
She was Fassbinder's secretary
and lover in real life
and he treated her appallingly,
sometimes beating her in public.
Body language in the film
expresses its tragedy,
wigs and make-up conjure
its cruel artifice.
('SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES'
PLAYS ON RECORD PLAYER)
Fassbinder had in mind this classic
American movie, 'All About Eve',
another film about two women
controlling each other,
fuelled by alcohol
and all dolled up.
Tuck me in, turn out the lights
and tiptoe out.
Eve would, wouldn't you, Eve?
If you'd like.
I wouldn't like.
But as he always did,
Fassbinder took the American story
much further.
Petra falls in love
with this woman in brown, Karin,
and becomes her slave.
The Poussin painting
in the background
is also about abjection -
Midas begs Bacchus to rid him
of the power to turns things
into gold.
Eventually, the agonies of love
ruin Petra.
Spit drips from her mouth.
She's alone in an empty room,
waiting for the phone to ring.
The New German cinema
had stolen an American story,
then rubbed its nose in the dirt.
It loved Hollywood but sneered at
its lies about identity and love.
Where Fassbinder's films were often
about women in confined spaces,
those of Wim Wenders
were about men in open spaces.
And where it was the style
of American films
that influenced Fassbinder,
it was America itself,
and its utopianism,
that was Wenders' jumping-off point.
In his unforgettable road movie
'Alice in the Cities',
the camera cranes down
under a boardwalk
to find Rudiger Vogler, a
journalist who's drifting and numb.
Wenders saw himself in him.
This is Wenders' notebook and
storyboard for this boardwalk scene.
Later, Wenders has Vogler
arrange to meet a woman
at the top of
the Empire State Building.
Again he's using an
iconic American location.
He shoots in natural light.
Vogler is drifting -
melancholic music.
17 years earlier, but a world away,
Hollywood director Leo McCarey
had Cary Grant arrange
to meet Deborah Kerr there.
This scene was shot in a studio -
visually precise, crisp,
coloured, controlled...
..whereas Wenders' eye roams,
long lens,
unsure of what it's looking for.
It's as if Wenders is saying,
"Remember what it was like to feel?"
Where Wenders defined
modern German identity
in relationship to America,
our next director
was more interested in gender.
Margarethe von Trotta
started as an actress.
This is her in a Fassbinder film,
insolent,
like a German Julie Christie.
Then she made her
solo directorial debut
with 'The Second Awakening
of Christa Klages'.
(LAID-BACK, JAZZY MUSIC)
The title character, Christa, robs
a bank, but Von Trotta's robbery
is one of the least tense
or macho ever filmed.
There's no shouting
or sync sound, just mellow music.
Von Trotta focuses instead
on the relationship
between Christa
and this bank clerk
who Christa at first takes hostage.
In the film's climax,
Christa's caught by the police
and confronted by the clerk.
The clerk's been hunting her
throughout the movie,
but then this happens.
Von Trotta's uses close-ups,
almost direct-to-camera eye lines.
This creates intimacy and equality
between the two women.
Where Leni Riefenstahl's films
were expressionist and about men,
Von Trotta's
were impressionist portraits
of women's intimacy
in violent times.
The next German filmmaker
of the '70s
went to the end of the earth
to find himself.
He's German cinema's wild man,
its explorer.
At the age of 18, Werner Herzog
ventured across the Sudan.
He walked from Munich to Paris.
In 1982, to make
his film 'Fitzcarraldo',
Herzog and his crew
hauled a full-sized ship -
this is a model of it -
up and over a hilly jungle isthmus
in Peru,
a dangerous idea that people
tried to make safer.
But as this location filming,
with Herzog speaking
passionately in Spanish, shows,
he saw the haul
not only as a physical feat,
but in symbolic terms.
And look at this key moment
in the film.
The boat's being hauled,
the crew seems to move it.
The documentary camera
is far back from the action
but captures the rejoicing.
But then one of
the ropes breaks.
(MEN GRUNT EXCITEDLY)
WOMAN: Something went wrong.
All these dreams are...
are yours as well.
And the only distinction
between me and you
is that I can articulate them.
And that is what poetry or painting
or literature, filmmaking
is all about.
It's as simple as that.
Herzog's eyes in this interview
show his exhaustion.
He's talking about universal things
but he's almost crying.
And I know I can do it
to a certain degree.
Like Pasolini,
Herzog was a romantic.
He wasn't much interested
in the feminism of Von Trotta
or the Americana of Wenders.
He was far more taken
by primeval life.
After John Ford, he is the most
important landscape filmmaker
to appear so far in our story.
The geographical, historical,
class, gender,
sexual and spiritual diversity
of the New German cinema directors
made their innovative movies
wildly different,
but one thing's clear -
the films all ask the question,
"If I don't want to be what
my parents are, then what am I?"
We definitely changed the way
Germans looked at each other.
Germans had not looked
at German history anymore.
Fassbinder, more than any of us,
confronted them with their
own image, their own history.
Italy in the '70s
had industrialised,
and was haunted
by its fascist past, too.
But its great '70s films
asked questions
not about identity and history
but identity and sex.
The boldest Italian depicter
of sex in the '70s
was that '60s radical
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Italy had become so commercialised,
said Pasolini,
that "enjoying life and the body
"means precisely enjoying a life
that historically no longer exists".
In other words,
you can't be who you are.
And so he set his so-called
'Trilogy of Life' films in the past.
This is the ending
of the last of the trilogy,
the 'Arabian Nights'.
Nur Ed Din, a young man,
has been looking everywhere for
his beloved maidservant, Zummurud.
Pasolini filmed
in Iranian mirrored rooms.
Instead, Nur Ed Din finds himself
in front of this king,
who wears a golden beard.
(KING SPEAKS ITALIAN)
The young man reluctantly
submits to sex with the king,
not realising that the king
is Zummurud in disguise.
Zummurud can't contain her giggles.
(GIGGLES)
In contemporary Italy,
said Pasolini,
such fun was not possible -
consumerism had ruined everything.
He was murdered
by a male prostitute in 1975.
Bernardo Bertolucci,
who started as Pasolini's assistant,
became the greatest
European filmmaker of his time.
In 1970 he made this film.
The camera tracks right
to reveal a piazza
and a man standing in it.
Then he walks
and we see a statue -
his father, an antifascist hero
in the village.
Then the camera
is again moving right.
This time the man's visiting
an old girlfriend of his father.
She's standing still too,
and then she starts to walk also,
as if she's been static for decades
and is suddenly swept into movement
by the camera's tracking.
And as the film
sweeps into the past,
the man finds that his father
wasn't a hero.
He collaborated with the Fascists.
What sort of identity
does that give the son?
But what made
'The Spider's Stratagem'
different from most '70s films
about identity
was its concern for visual beauty,
as well as it's gliding
camera work.
Look at this shot -
blue dusk light in the sky
and yellow-white petroleum light
of the lamp
in the same magic moment.
(SOBS SOFTLY)
Bertolucci and his cinematographer,
Vittorio Storaro,
loved the haunting dusk lighting
in the surreal paintings
of Rene Magritte
and tried to capture it.
And then Bertolucci
upped the beauty even further.
In the same year, 1970,
aged just 30,
he released a second masterpiece,
'The Conformist'.
It was also about fascism
and identity
and it too
was determinedly beautiful.
Look at this bold composition
with its plunging perspective.
(SPEAKS ITALIAN)
Look at this shot -
the camera sweeps
and the leaves do too,
as if they're both blown
by the same wind,
like a Gene Kelly musical.
In the radical '60s,
visual beauty had been seen
as too Hollywood, too shallow,
but here Bertolucci was bringing
beauty back to Italian cinema.
That most hardcore '60s director,
Jean-Luc Godard,
saw 'The Conformist's beauty
as a betrayal of radicalism.
He met Bertolucci at a cafe.
BERTOLUCCI:
I was waiting for Godard,
and finally Jean-Luc appears next
to me with these dark sunglasses.
He doesn't say anything
but he gives me a note.
And then he leaves.
And his comments
on 'The Conformist' were...
.."One has to fight against
imperialism and capitalism."
All that written on a portrait
of Chairman Mao.
I was so upset that I tore it up
in thousands of pieces, that note.
And I am very sorry today.
I would like to see it
and to look at that again.
Godard notwithstanding,
'The Conformist'
was one of the most influential
movies of the '70s,
especially in America.
Francis Ford Coppola poached
cinematographer Storaro
for 'Apocalypse Now'.
And the beauty of this scene
in 'Taxi Driver'
derives from 'The Conformist'.
It would be easy to film
this violent moment
with a wobbly hand-held camera...
..but Martin Scorsese goes high
and has the shot glide
across the ceiling -
an ugly event
turned into gorgeous form.
Innovative British movies
in the '70s
were about identity, too.
Like Italian films of the time,
sexual identity was a key theme
but so was the idea
that identity is fragmented.
Ken Russell served in the air force,
then became a ballet dancer,
a rare career move,
then became
Britain's Frederico Fellini.
In this scene in 'Women in Love'
he films a sex scene
as a slow-motion,
long lens, outdoor dance...
..and puts the camera on its side,
making the action vertical...
..defying gravity as had hardly
ever been done before,
and it's strangeness reminds us
how horizontal cinema normally is.
More daring still
was this film, 'Performance',
by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell.
It's about this London gangster,
Chas.
He keeps checking himself
in the mirror -
his hair, nails, waistline.
This scene in Martin Scorsese's
'Mean Streets',
made three years later,
is about another narcissist
getting all dolled up.
Again, a mirror scene.
Again, clothes
are the gangster's uniform.
Movie gangsters have often
been about display.
Chas in 'Performance'
comes to this place in London
to hide out, because he's shot
another gangster
and the mobsters will be after him.
He holes up in the house
of a fading pop star, Turner,
played by Mick Jagger,
as bohemian as Chas is clean-cut.
Van Gogh, eh?
Oh, no, this is the normal.
The normal?
Yeah. I was just having a laugh.
And then this happens.
Here Chas is talking to Turner.
The camera moves
behind Turner's head,
then dissolves through it to Chas
who sounds more echoey now
and looks straight at us.
It's time for a change.
It's time for a change.
The two men's faces dissolve
into each other. Chas is changing.
Personally,
casting one's mind back...
His identity is merging
with Turner's,
an idea taken from
this strikingly similar scene
in one of Ingmar Bergman's
greatest films, 'Persona'.
(SPEAKS SWEDISH)
In the end, the mobsters
come for Chas.
His last act, before he's taken
away, is to shoot Turner,
maybe because he's shown him
too much of himself.
No!
His bullet travels
through Turner's brain
and a picture of
the Argentine writer
about dreams and labyrinths,
Borges,
then crashes through a mirror,
then back to London...
..the most imaginative shooting
in The Story of Film.
Then Chas is led away
by the gangsters
but things are not what they seem.
A child toddles backwards.
Hello, Chas.
And as Chas
heads off to his likely death,
we glimpse him in close-up
and he's Turner.
'Performance' was not only the
greatest '70s film about identity,
if any film
in the whole Story of Film
should be compulsory viewing
for filmmakers, maybe this is it.
Australian film in the '70s
gathered momentum,
and Nicolas Roeg fuelled it.
This is Roeg's film 'Walkabout'.
A white city-girl and her brother
head out into the outback.
Do you know where to go?
Their father has just shot himself
and tried to shoot them.
They're scared.
Roeg films with wide-angle lenses
to stretch the space before them.
Roeg's film is about the contrast
you see all over Australia
between nature and city,
the sea and swimming pools,
the raw and the cooked.
Years later, we're in a white world
of tower blocks
and chlorinated swimming pools.
The girl's married now.
She's in her clean,
middle-class kitchen.
She wears make up, like a mask.
She's with her husband
but thinks back to
a half-imagined free moment
when she swam naked in the outback
with an Aboriginal lad,
a life less ordinary.
Which means old male
looks like being out of a job.
(VOICE FADES AWAY)
(DREAMY ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)
She's like Chas in 'Performance',
shedding her clean-cut self when
she meets a more vital human being.
It's like she's remembering
what Aboriginals call the Dreamtime.
Her sense of loss is overwhelming.
Plus, with all this
changing around,
there's bound to be good news
as far as salary's concerned.
I tell you, darl, in two years
we'll be holidaying
on the Gold Coast...
In modern-day Australia,
people swim in man-made pools.
The dreams and fears of Roeg's film
are still here.
The raw and the cooked
became a stable of Aussie cinema.
The films were about
what sort of person you are -
one who swims in a chlorinated pool
or the open sea.
What sort of person's this girl?
She and her friends are wearing
long, white Victorian dresses
in the sultry heat
of the Australian outback.
I feel awful. Really awful.
They're fish out of water.
Miranda, I feel perfectly awful.
The film is
'Picnic at Hanging Rock'.
Director Peter Weir films the girls
in slight slow motion
to create a sense of mystery.
The girls are about to disappear.
Miranda?
Miranda?
Miranda!
Miranda, don't go up there!
Come back!
(SCREAMS)
(CONTINUES SCREAMING)
Weir's plan was to explain
this disappearance
at the end of the film.
They were to be discovered
and brought home on stretchers,
but his editor, Max Lemon,
instead did this -
he repeated earlier picnic scenes
in step motion, the camera roaming,
no sync sound,
as if the girls are ghosts.
White Australian identity
evaporating in the heat.
Gillian Armstrong's debut feature
is set in Victorian times, too.
But 'My Brilliant Career'
isn't about a woman's relationship
with nature, but with men.
Her main character here
has the overview.
MAN: Do you, um...need a hand?
No, thank you.
Sam Neill is glamorised and filmed
in dappled light, not her.
Work in the kitchen?
I'd be obliged to you, sir,
if you'd take yourself
out of the way.
Unless you want me foot
in your big, fat face.
The female point of view of the film
hinted at how gendered Aussie cinema
would become in the '90s
with the films of Jane Campion
and Baz Luhrmann.
A reward?
Let me go.
Sam Neill was in more women's films
than most actors.
Being in women's films
makes as much sense to me
as being in a bloke's films.
And, um,
there's a certain sensibility
that these things...these films
have in common, I think,
that I find agreeable.
Australia and New Zealand
are both post-colonial societies
where it's taken us a while
to wake up to women's issues -
probably a little bit longer
than elsewhere.
Move from Australia to Japan
in the '70s
and you find some of the most
radical filmmakers of the decade...
..who took a hammer rather
than a mirror to the real world
and tried to shape Japanese identity
with groundbreaking documentaries.
This is the climax of one of
the greatest documentaries ever made
which was filmed over 17 years.
We're at the packed
annual general meeting
of Japanese chemical company Chisso.
Over many years, it dumped
methyl mercury into fishing waters,
causing hundreds of deaths
and bio-deformities.
The company denied
all responsibility.
Its bosses sit at a long table
on the stage.
(LARGE CROWD CLAMOURS)
The families of the dead
and the severely disabled are here.
(RINGS BELL)
They bought shares in Chisso
to force its board of directors
to take responsibility
for their appalling actions.
Director Noriaki Tsuchimoto
knew the protesters
and so got close to them.
His small 16mm camera allowed him
to be at the centre
of such explosive moments.
He uses little sync sound.
The jostled hand-held camera
and torrent of words
make fiction film look staid.
In Japan, where identity's
not traditionally asserted,
such scenes were shocking.
Claude Lanzmann, who made
the Holocaust documentary 'Shoah',
called Tsuchimoto "a great artist
with a profound vision as a fighter,
"a marvellous filmmaker and a
rigorous creator of sublime work."
This man, Kazuo Hara,
made a documentary masterpiece
about Japanese assertiveness
at its most shocking.
It's about an ex-soldier
called Mr Okuzaki.
This is Mr Okuzaki.
He's meeting the brother and sister
of a friend of his
who disappeared, a soldier
with whom he fought in World War II.
Hara films with hand-held camera.
He follows as they go to this house.
An old commander lives here.
Together they want to find out
what happened to the soldier.
But this visit
doesn't dig up the truth
and the two siblings
drop out of the investigation.
And so, astonishingly,
Okuzaki hires these two actors,
walking dolefully behind him,
to pretend to be the siblings.
He'll tell the next commanders
that the actors
are the real siblings,
using emotional blackmail
to try to get to the truth
of what happened.
As the filming continued,
Okuzaki discovered that his friends
were probably cannibalised
by the commanders.
Okuzaki's in this
commander's house now,
just to the right of this close-up,
again filmed
by Hara's hand-held camera.
Okuzaki's angry now.
We hold our breath.
Okuzaki attacks the commander.
Hara uses slow motion.
The fraught experience
of making the film
gave Hara a sense
that unpalatable truth in life
is buried under layers of lies.
As we've seen, filmmaking
in Germany, Italy, Britain,
Australia and Japan
in the '70s
was radical and about identity.
Jump to here, Senegal, in
West Africa, in the '70s, however,
and a whole new world
of radical movie making opens up.
A manifesto called
'Towards a Third Cinema -
'Notes and Experiences
for the Development
'of a Cinema of Liberation
in the Third World',
by South Americans Fernando
Solanas and Octavio Getino,
angrily criticised cinema
for always having been a commodity.
They argued that
this great collective medium
should fight poverty and oppression.
The manifesto had a huge impact.
This is a cinema in Burkina Faso,
one of the poorest countries
in the world,
but painted on it is "A cinema
can be the heart of the community,"
and "Cinema is a dream."
The manifesto said that
there are three types of film.
The first, made mostly in Hollywood,
is the commercial entertainment -
the bauble.
The second type of cinema
is the modernist art movie genre
made by individual directors
like Godard, Antonioni,
Bergman and Fellini.
Third Cinema,
opposed to both industrial
and autobiographical art cinema,
is political,
about post-colonial identity
and made in the non-Western world
after 1969.
These ideals were
the rocket fuel of '70s cinema
here in Africa, in South America
and in the Middle East.
In Burkina Faso today, for example,
these people aren't going
to a football match,
they're going to the opening
of a film festival,
in their tens of thousands.
Burkinabe filmmaker
Gaston Kabore believes
that making films is crucial
to people's identities.
If we continue consuming
the images coming from abroad
telling the stories
of...other people,
it might be interesting
at the beginning
but, slowly, we are going to lose
our own way of looking, the reality.
As we've seen, there'd been Arab
filmmaking in Egypt since the '30s,
and this famous moment
in 'The Black Girl' -
a boy removes a mask
and looks hauntingly
into the eyes of the audience -
was the bold start of black feature
filmmaking in Africa in the '60s.
But scenes like this...
..Tarzan's scrubbed-clean,
white family
having breakfast in a fantasy jungle
were still the most popular
movie images of Africa.
But here's a more realistic
African man.
He's Algerian.
There's no sync sound, Arabic music.
The film's been poorly preserved,
but it's dreamlike.
The camera tracks backward.
Director Assia Djebar's
main character
sees her man on his horse.
She towers over him. He falls.
Then he's in a wheelchair.
Djebar's is no fantasy Africa.
She looks at Algeria
through a feminist lens.
In West Africa, in the '70s,
Third Cinema movies about identity
were on a roll, too.
Where Scorsese
and Coppola and the rest
were kicking down
the doors of Hollywood,
in this city, Dakar,
tens of thousands of miles away
from the pool parties
and Oscar ceremonies of Los Angeles,
film was buzzing
and cameras were on the streets.
Ousmane Sembene
was still leading the way.
His follow-up to 'The Black Girl',
'Xala', was funny and rude.
It was about the move from colonial
to post-colonial identity.
It starts here,
the Chamber of Commerce in Dakar.
It's the end of colonial rule.
Senegalese triumphantly kick out
the symbols of the French state -
including jackboots
and a gendarme cap.
They look forlorn.
Their time has gone.
But, in the very next scene,
the new businessmen
are aping their colonisers.
Sembene mocks
their new trophy briefcases.
One of the businessmen
has his car washed in Evian...
..Sembene's tart way of showing
the decadence of the new regime.
Sembene was against religion
and wanted Africa to undergo
a radical enlightenment.
This is his house, Galle Ceddo -
it means 'home of the unbeliever'.
From the front -
it's on the left of this image -
you can see that it's
just metres away from a mosque.
Sembene planted his tripod
on the soil of Senegal
and created a new, radical type
of African cinema - Third Cinema.
This man, Djibril Diop Mambety,
seemed to love cinema even more.
He spoke slowly,
in an almost dreamlike way,
as this interview shows.
Sembene's point of view
was ideologically certain,
but Mambety chopped up
such certainty into fragments.
Mambety's films
helped create African modernism.
Look at this scene in his caustic
second short film, 'Badou Boy'.
A man and a boy saddle up a horse -
very simple.
But the repetition of "Ca va?"
and the standing up and
hunkering down of the two people,
give it an abstract rhythm
and jagginess.
Ca va bien?
Ca va.
Ca va tres bien?
Ca va.
Ca va?
Bien.
Ca va?
Non.
Ca va tres bien?
Ca va.
Mambety said, "You either
engage in stylistic research
"or just record reality."
Mambety lived here.
He struggled to get
financing for his films.
His punkiness found little favour.
In 1992, he made
this masterpiece, 'Hyenes'.
This woman is half made of gold.
She's returned to the village
where she fell in love with
this man, who then spurned her.
She's as rich as the World Bank now.
This is director Mambety himself,
on the left.
She treats the villagers to
luxuries, consumer goods.
The villagers love these.
They become greedy. They want more.
The village becomes
like a shopping channel,
a fun fair to celebrate
the joys of capitalism.
Then, devastatingly, the woman says
that they can have more luxuries,
but there's a price to pay -
they must kill the man
who spurned her.
They're so hooked now on capitalism
that they do kill him.
Mambety films the lynching
where he himself grew up.
The mob closes in, murmuring.
Mambety had become as angry at
consumerism as Pasolini in Italy.
Sembene and Mambety showed
that African filmmakers
were making cinema say
what they wanted it to say
about who modern West Africans were.
The result was a exciting,
the joy of discovery -
new types of African symbolism
and storytelling.
And other directors emerged.
Safi Faye, Africa's first
important female director,
made this film,
'Peasant Letter', in 1974.
She shows her village at dawn -
the beauty of the smoke,
mid-sized framings.
Everyday scenes.
Off-screen, in a gentle voice,
she describes what we see.
The film's a show-and-tell
to the outside world.
An Ethiopian, Haile Gerima,
made this remarkable film,
'Harvest - 3,000 Years'.
Its story stretches
over three millennia.
It starts at dawn, as if all
of history has been just one day.
Low contrast black-and-white.
Extremely long lenses,
to telescope the land and eternity.
This makes us feel distant,
but Gerima is passionate.
He shows farmers treated like shit
by a trilby-hatted armchair tyrant.
Again, shot long lens,
barking orders.
Then comes this old madman, Kebebe.
Kebebe tells a story
about the Queen of England.
Colonial power told almost like
a myth to everyone and no-one.
Two hours into the film, Kebebe
batters the landlord with a stick.
(SHOUTS IN LOCAL LANGUAGE)
(PEOPLE SHOUT AND WAIL)
Voices begin to flood
the soundtrack.
People are beginning
to talk to each other -
a key idea in Third Cinema.
(SHOUTING AND WAILING INTENSIFIES)
The popular radicalism
of Third Cinema
made movies innovative
across the globe.
In the Middle East,
the great films of the '70s
were about identity
and national liberation.
The most notorious Middle Eastern
filmmaker of the '70s
was this Kurdish man, Yilmaz Guney.
This is him acting
in the film 'Hope'.
His ripped clothing
shows how poor he is.
He's a scruffy, masculine hero,
like a Kurdish Sean Connery.
He plays, here, an illiterate man
who's been searching for treasure
to feed his family
and has almost gone mad - spinning
in space, let down by life.
Then Guney started directing.
Here's a film he wrote
and codirected, 'Yol'.
A man has been released
from prison for five days.
He's happy, free,
running with his dog.
Wide open spaces,
long lens filming,
wind in the grass.
(LAUGHS, SHOUTS)
He comes to his village
and smiles, looks to camera.
(DISTANT MACHINE-GUN FIRE)
Then the smile dies on his face.
The village is cowering.
The music dies.
(GUNFIRE CONTINUES)
The state military are here.
(WIND WHISTLES)
Still-life shots of confrontation.
No words needed -
people look imprisoned
in their own windows and doorways.
Guney is credited as codirector
of the film, with Serif Goren,
because, remarkably, he was
in prison for the whole shoot
but escaped in time
for the post-production.
He sent out explicit notes
on how shots should be filmed.
He was accused of killing
an anti-communist judge
in a restaurant,
though it was probably
Guney's nephew that did it.
(WIND WHISTLES)
This character in 'Yol'
was typical of Guney's men -
old-fashioned, proud, but powerless,
their hopes dashed,
banging their heads
against the wall of life.
Guney was a communist,
a spokesperson for ordinary people,
and adored.
'Yol' won the main prize
at the Cannes Film Festival.
(SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE)
Back in South America, where
the Third Cinema ideas were born,
this, one of the most compelling
Third Cinema films, was made.
It was about identity and betrayal,
filmmaking that makes you feel
in the centre of the action.
Marxist Salvador Allende
was democratically elected
President of Chile in 1970.
On September 11, 1973,
Allende gives what will be
his last radio broadcast.
(ALLENDE SPEAKS SPANISH OVER PA)
(MACHINE-GUN FIRE)
Then the military, led by
General Pinochet, moves in.
Director Patricio Guzman
and his team
film from rooftops
with hand-held cameras,
zoomed in, to see soldiers
running like ants.
They'd been shooting for months
before the violent coup,
which was supported by the CIA.
History dramatically
unfolded in front of them.
They were sometimes hiding,
so walls and railings
would half-obscure their view.
They used direct sound.
No gloss, no distance.
The 'Battle of Chile' said,
"Here's what we are.
Here's what we're losing."
(CROWD CHANTS IN SPANISH)
And we end our tour
of identity movies
around the world in the '70s
with this unforgettable,
outrageous film.
It was made by a Chilean-born
director too,
but it's far more about identity
and psychedelics than betrayal.
A near-naked thief
climbs a vast tower.
Below him is a mad world of fascists
and religious obsessives
who have used his body as a mould
to make images of Christ -
a very Third Cinema set-up.
But, when the thief gets
to the top of the tower,
the film becomes something like
'The Wizard of Oz' -
a strange corridor, like a rainbow.
The thief advances.
He meets a man dressed in white,
flanked by goats,
a naked woman and a camel.
It's the director,
Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Jodorowsky studied mime in Paris.
He believed in Zen Buddhism -
the idea that people
should dethrone themselves...
..and he studied Carl Jung,
so this scene, in a way,
is a man climbing into
the maze of his own mind,
where he discovers
strange images and archetypes
that he shares
with all human beings.
Indian music plays.
Jodorowsky's man in white
is an alchemist.
He asks the thief if he wants gold.
He does, of course.
But the manner of its making
is extraordinary.
The thief must defecate
and give the alchemist
his own sweat.
(CELLO MUSIC PLAYS)
The thief's
spiritual awakening begins.
Eventually,
his own excrement becomes gold.
Jodorowsky certainly
had a sense of humour.
But his journey to the holy mountain
of self-discovery and self-loss
is only just beginning.
Primary colours, egg shapes,
a pelican, nudity,
a very '70s production design.
You are excrement.
You can change yourself into gold.
The thief's journey
of self-discovery
mirrored that of '70s cinema itself.
Its political, innovative filmmakers
had stripped cinema naked,
loaded it with
symbolism about selfhood
and turned it into gold.
And, above and beyond these things,
they used movies to ask,
"Who are we, as modern Europeans,
Asians, Africans, South Americans?"
But movies in the '70s
weren't only innovative
when they were political
or about identity.
Mainstream
and entertainment directors
in Mumbai, Hong Kong
and Hollywood in the '70s
were about to change
the story of film forever.