The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 11 - Episode #1.11 - 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 twelve decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter, we look at
Bollywood's greatest film, 'Sholay',
and feel the force of
a movie called 'Star Wars'.
Movie fans around the world,
most of them will have heard of the
box office smash hits of the '70s -
'Jaws', 'Star Wars', 'The Exorcist',
the Bruce Lee movies from Hong Kong
and the Indian epic 'Sholay'.
These films are some of the world's
most famous entertainments
but they were also innovative.
Just as in the previous decades,
so in the '70s and onwards,
the best of the mainstream films
did new things.
To see how, let's start here -
Hong Kong.
Less than a century previously,
Hong Kong looked like this.
Now it's this.
No city except New York
has been more filmed.
For 40 years, Hong Kong
was a kind of refugee camp,
transit lounge
and capitalist catch-all
for Chinese filmmakers fleeing Mao
or the Kuomintang's nationalism,
or censorship or seriousness.
Low cost, money-savvy production
has ruled here -
the cinema of the migrant, maybe -
movies made by those who know
what quickens the pulse of people
in other countries,
and who want to make a fast buck.
Maybe this old lady can remember
Hong Kong's first movie golden age -
the 1950s.
It was a gold rush.
The emperor of those times,
Hong Kong's Louis B. Mayer,
was Run Run Shaw.
In 1957, he came here,
bought 46 acres of this land
at 45c per square foot
and built the largest
private film studio in the world.
The Shaw Brothers employed
1,400 staff in 25 departments.
These buildings
were Asia's dream factories.
The legends of China's 4,000 years
of history were acted out here.
To see the Shaw Brothers logo -
orange silk pulled into perspective,
fanfare music -
was to be transported
to another world...
..a '50s world like this one -
feminine, studio set,
highly coloured, musical,
with perfect trees and clothes.
(ALL SING IN MANDARIN)
But then this man in blue, King Hu,
became a director
and changed the world
of Hong Kong cinema
from feminine to this...
..wider screen, more aggressive,
faster, swishing camera and swords,
every move designed.
Graceful,
exquisitely engineered cinema.
If John Ford had been into Buddhism,
ballet and zero gravity
he might have made films
like King Hu.
Styles of fighting called kung-fu
had taken over Hong Kong cinema.
In 500 AD, the Bodhidharma,
a Buddhist monk from India,
is said to have moved
to the Shaolin temple in China.
He stared at a wall
for nine years without speaking,
then taught Buddhist breathing
and meditation techniques
to the other monks.
This caught on.
It became a new martial art,
transmitted from master to pupil.
Loyalty and discipline were key.
It spread through Asia.
The Shaolin temple
was destroyed in 1674.
The surviving monks
formed secret societies.
They became swordsmen.
Folk tales were told about them.
Fantasies were spun.
Myths became legends -
epic, romantic or supernatural.
It was a no-brainer that
such legends would become cinema,
as the myth of the Wild West
did in America.
And they did.
And kung-fu cinema was born.
But King Hu's 'A Touch of Zen'
is no ordinary kung-fu movie.
It starts as an action movie
of sorts,
set in a village
during the Ming dynasty,
but then it turns into a ghost story
and then a reverie.
Sunlight cuts like a sword.
It sounds like steel.
The Buddhist monks levitate.
A social film
turns into a transcendental one.
This was action cinema
at its most innovative.
King Hu's daring
changed film history.
Most Asian directors revere him.
Taiwanese director Ang Lee's
'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'
was a homage to him.
It had a bouncing fight
in a bamboo forest
as stylised and beautiful
as this one.
King Hu made Hong Kong cinema
of the '60s somewhat more masculine,
but in the '70s came this -
the enraged dragon
of Hong Kong cinema.
Bruce Lee's fighting
had more attack, sweat and rage.
The rage came from the storylines
but also from Lee's private life.
(SCREAMS)
He'd experienced racism
and wanted to get even.
There's real anger in Lee's face.
His body, filmed in slow motion,
had a it's own kind
of muscular hyperrealism.
Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan
sees the shift to masculinity
as part of a bigger trend.
(SPEAKS ASIAN LANGUAGE)
But for all the dynamism
of the Bruce Lee films,
if we look again at them,
we see that though
he was fast and furious,
the camera work was anything but.
It patiently recorded the action.
It stayed out of the fight.
There wasn't much editing
in Hong Kong movies of the '70s.
The imagery was steady and wide.
Then, in 1986, came this...
We're in the world
of the Hong Kong triads
who run black market
businesses.
'80s clothes, sex, hedonism...
..a rowdy lunch...
..a story about male bonding,
loyalty and betrayal again.
What was really new, however,
was the style of the movie.
Influenced by Kurosawa
and Sam Peckinpah films,
director John Woo filmed shoot-outs
with several cameras -
some of them tracking -
and used slow motion.
Some called it
"the aesthetic of the glance".
Scenes were broken down
into fragments.
Sequels followed fast.
A cycle about amoral
heroic gangsters was born.
Hollywood couldn't fail to notice
filmmaking this intense
or box office on this scale,
so Woo was soon in America directing
Jean-Claude Van Damme movies
and then 'Mission: Impossible II'.
Hong Kong imagery
looked different now.
New nonlinear editing systems
and John Woo's brilliant eye
got the credit.
But looking back,
there were other reasons
for Hong Kong's new dynamism.
The first is this man...
..Master Yuen Woo-Ping,
who started making films
in the '70s.
Look at this fight scene
from the end of 'The Iron Monkey',
which he directed and choreographed.
The cutting's as fast
as in a John Woo movie,
and the camera angles
are as numerous.
But what was happening in front
of the camera, the fight,
was equally choreographed.
Where Bruce Lee's feet
were firmly on the ground,
Master Yuen, borrowing from King Hu
and Peking Opera,
spun his characters into the air.
(MAN SPEAKS CANTONESE)
Master Yuen's innovation
impressed Hollywood, of course.
This time it was the Wachowski
brothers who made the call.
They were planning a film
called 'The Matrix'.
And we can see Master Yuen's
influence in this scene.
I'm going to enjoy
watching you die, Mr Anderson.
The gravity defying
of Hong Kong cinema,
the feet fighting of Bruce Lee,
the fast, constant punching
of kung-fu.
John Woo and Master Yuen were
key innovators in Hong Kong cinema
after the '70s.
But this man is more central
to the story than either of them.
Tsui Hark is
the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong.
He produced both 'A Better Tomorrow'
and 'Iron Monkey',
and controlled the editing of both
and has directed 44 films himself.
Look at this scene from Tsui Hark's
'Once Upon a Time in China'.
This character is
a legendary kung-fu master.
Europeans and Americans
are invading China.
The story needs the guy to clock
that the enemy
is advancing by sea...
..and also meet
the Westernised woman
who will intrigue him
for much of the movie.
It could have been staged simply,
but Tsui Hark puts
the guy on a roof, mending it.
(SPEAKS CANTONESE)
He sees the woman because
he's slipped down the thatch.
His first glimpse of her
is a dramatic high angle.
Tsui films him
from her low-angle point of view.
No ordinary first encounter.
But then the director sets
a slapstick rabbit running.
Two buckets of glue or paint
begin to tumble.
The guy tumbles too, but in John Woo
or Sam Peckinpah slow motion
and spinning
just for the sake of it.
And he hits
the ground in slow-mo too.
(WOMAN SPEAKS CANTONESE)
And the glue gets its punchline.
(GASPS)
And then another.
There was no rational reason
for staging such a small scene
as if it was a gunfight,
with more than 25 shots.
Five would have been enough.
And look at this scene
from 'Dragon Inn'.
Maggie Cheung is the owner
of an inn in the desert.
She is unsettled by Brigitte Lin.
(SPEAKS CANTONESE)
They fight. What a fight!
It's like there's a whirlwind
in the room -
dance and erotics,
grace and, of course, spinning.
Hmm.
(GASPS INDIGNANTLY)
Tsui Hark produced
and strongly influenced this film.
His hyperactivity as a person makes
for hyperactive, innovative cinema.
Tsui Hark made Hong Kong cinema
of the '90s spin.
Many of his smash-hit movies
led to their own spin-offs.
'Dragon Inn' itself was a remake
of a King Hu movie.
Everything went in circles.
A quietly simmering kettle
was a key image in the calm
Asian films of the 1930s.
In Hong Kong cinema, the kettle
boiled over with intensity.
Not since Soviet films of the 1920s
had movie space been so fragmented.
Not since the '50s
had emotions been so heightened.
(UPBEAT '80S POP MUSIC PLAYS)
And what about the Shaw Brothers,
where mainstream Hong Kong cinema
got going?
This is their vast new studio
in the hills above Hong Kong.
It's state-of-the-art and built
on rubber to soundproof it.
Hollywood, be afraid.
Be very afraid.
But this place is nearly empty.
Hong Kongers remember with envy
the days of Bruce,
when its movies dealt a body blow
to world filmmaking.
Where Hong Kong seemed to turn
masculine and frenzied in the '70s,
mainstream Indian cinema, what in
the west is called 'Bollywood',
grew in scale
but also in inventiveness.
India,
in all its photogenic luminosity,
had quietly built the biggest
film industry in the world.
Epics from the '60s
such as this one, 'Moghal E Azam',
took more at the box office
than 'The Sound of Music'
did in the West.
A dancer enters the royal court, a
sparkling scene with mirrored sets.
The crown prince
who will marry her.
Director K. Asif wanted to make
the film in colour but couldn't.
But recently
it has been colourised,
a process that's looked down upon,
but look at the results.
Pink and pistachio...
..mother of pearl.
By the '70s, the Bollywood bauble
got bigger and shinier.
In 1971 alone,
India made 433 films...
..at least as many as were made
in America the same year.
Mainstream Hindi
entertainment cinema was magnetic.
When last we met her,
Sharmila Tagore was understated,
using tiny head movements
in close-up
in this fine-grain masterpiece
by Satyajit Ray.
Look at her now.
(SINGS IN HINDI)
Tagore's the queen of Bollywood,
in bright red,
it's soignee Elizabeth Taylor
in a full-throttle musical drama.
The film is 'Mausam', made by the
great director and lyricist Gulzar,
without whom '70s Indian cinema
is unthinkable.
Tagore's character is in love
with this doctor
played by the legendary
Sanjeev Kumar.
Tagore's modern look,
hair and eyeliner
influenced a generation
of Indian women.
But life's tragic
for Tagore's character,
and this is where
Gulzar's innovation comes in -
he shows Tagore and Kumar in
a romantic moment on a mountainside.
Then over the crest of the mountain
walks an older Kumar,
looking back
at his younger, happier self.
Past and present,
the joy of love and its pain,
all in the same scene.
Indian cinema was great at such
masterstrokes of storytelling.
Our films in Bombay were different.
Like songs, for instance.
There was a lot
of usage of songs too,
and which was part of the narrative,
so to speak.
And it was always
a little bit more, um...
..more flowery, more, um...
..not quite reality
but slightly more made-up reality,
so to speak.
So it was quite different.
And more glamour, more dressing up.
More accent on beauty,
more accent on youth.
And, um...and not...
and very general.
There was a lot of generalisation -
nothing pointing where you come from
or which time we are talking about.
Like, every time I worked
in Hindi cinema,
and if I took a little longer,
you know, to say something
or gave a little extra pause,
I was very teasingly told that,
you know, this is not a Ray cinema.
You know, you have to speed up
and speak up a little bit.
And, of course, in Bengali,
it would be exactly the opposite
and I would be told, "No, this
is not Bollywood. You have to..."
Of course, Bollywood wasn't called
Bollywood then - Hindi cinema.
And you have to pause
before you react.
So, yes, there was...both the forms
were very different.
If Tagore was
the queen of Bollywood,
there's no doubt who was the king -
Amitabh Bachchan.
Not since the days of
silent cinema and Charlie Chaplin
had world movies gilded
one human being with such fame.
MAN: I love the cinema.
That's the only job I know.
I've been in films for 40 years now.
15th February 1969
was when I signed my first contract
and entered the film industry
in India.
It's been 40 years, over 150 films.
And I still work.
I have four or five films
on the floor,
and hopefully there'll be many more.
I enjoy that.
I wanted to express myself
through a medium
which was going to project me,
put me in different
circumstances, situations,
give me different characters to do,
dress me up, you know,
in colourful clothes
and give me lovely moments
and emotions to emote.
I was interested in acting
and I found the medium
attractive enough for me to join it,
to be able for me to exercise
these wonderful desires of mine.
(DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)
Here's Bachchan as an honest cop
in the '70s classic 'Zanjeer'.
Zooms, freezes, close-ups,
dramatic fragments of fear and rage
and realisation.
Bells ring.
Music crashes like waves.
A whirlwind of a scene.
(GUNSHOTS)
(SHOUTS)
I do feel that in the late '60s
and early '70s
there was a desire
to communicate, um, ideas,
spend a lot more time
in expressing those ideas.
The written word had a great amount
of importance,
whether it was
the lyrics in our songs,
whether it was the dialogues
of our films.
In the '60s and the '70s,
there was the beginning
of a kind of turmoil
within the youth in the country.
They were not happy with the way
the system was functioning
and they felt that they needed
a vigilante or some single force
to suddenly come up and take charge
and solve their problems.
And they were all stories
of a person that rose virtually
from the gutter
and came up fighting against
the system single-handedly,
taking charge of affairs,
raising a voice against the system
and correcting it in his own manner,
so to say,
and then becoming a great hero.
And Bachchan plays the hero
in this movie -
'Sholay', the innovative colossus
of '70s cinema.
Widescreen titles like an epic.
Landscape like a western.
Music like an adventure film.
'Sholay' was all these things.
The greatest Bollywood film
of its time
and one of the most influential
movies in The Story of Film.
It was co-written by this man,
Javed Akhtar,
the great Urdu poet and screenwriter
who tried to capture the spirit
of the times in his screenplay.
As a matter of fact, the '70s
was, in a way, a traumatic time.
The whole psyche
after the partition -
I mean, after the independence -
was changing for the first time.
You know, in '47,
India got independence.
We got democracy,
an impeccable constitution,
secularism,
freedom of expression
and so on and so forth.
And we started believing
that...I mean, that prosperity
is on the next page of the calendar
and all the solutions
are around the corner.
But by the time we reached the '70s,
we realised that it is not so.
And that was the time
when everything was...
..idealism was shattering.
When idealism shatters,
art gets into trouble.
Art gets into a kind of a trauma.
And you see that trauma in poetry,
in short stories,
in novels, in theatre.
And that's reflected in
mainstream commercial cinema also.
And you saw
an angry young man emerging.
This man was a vigilante.
This man was a believer that,
"I have to look after myself."
And this kind of belief is developed
in moments when
an average person feels
that perhaps the institutions
"are not going to help me."
'Sholay' captured the spirit
of its time so much
that it was a huge
box office success
and played in this cinema
for seven years.
(GUNSHOT)
(CALLS OUT)
(CALLS OUT)
This scene's the dramatic core
of the movie.
The family of a policeman
is brutally gunned down.
Freeze frames, slow motion...
(SWING SQUEAKS)
..the squeak of a swing.
This trauma electrifies the film
and propels its operatic emotions -
the policeman's need for revenge.
This is the killer - one of cinema's
most psychotic characters.
If 'Sholay' looks like
'The Magnificent Seven'
or Sergio Leone's
'Once Upon a Time in the West',
that's because it's very like both.
It's full of ideas and conventions
ripped from other movies.
You must have seen children
playing with a string and a pebble.
They tie a string on a pebble
and they start swinging it
over their head.
And slowly they'll
keep swinging the string
and it makes
bigger and bigger circle.
Now, this pebble is the revolt
from the tradition.
It wants to move away...
..but the pebble...the string
is the tradition, the continuity.
It is holding it.
But if you break the string,
the pebble will fall.
If you remove the pebble,
the string cannot go that far.
This tension of tradition
and revolt against the tradition
are, in a way, contradictory
but as a matter of fact,
it is a synthesis.
You will always find the synthesis
of tradition
and revolt from the tradition
together in any good art.
And 'Sholay's revolt is in its
fearlessly inventive shifts in tone.
Bachchan, here in a sidecar,
plays a crook
who's hired by the policeman
to avenge the murder of his family.
But the movie finds room
for this famous musical scene.
(SINGS IN HINDI)
Bachchan and his friend -
carefree, singing in the sunshine,
the open road, constant movement,
friendship celebrated.
(SINGS IN HINDI)
One minute
it's a light buddy musical.
Then we have what looks like
a big Hollywood production number
for the Festival of Colour...
..purple dust in the air, a camera
on a Ferris wheel and carousel.
But the rapture of this
is suddenly blasted away.
(GUNFIRE)
(FAST PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)
Driving percussion,
more frenetic action.
Then take this scene, near the end.
The killer has the brassy girlfriend
of Bachchan's sidekick
dance for the sidekick's life.
To add to the intensity,
he has broken glass
scattered under her feet.
No Hollywood musical,
not even the dark ones
like 'Cabaret'
or Scorsese's 'New York, New York',
has dared to film a dance scene
this grim.
'Sholay' melds Chaplin and Leone,
Cliff Richard musicals
and horror cinema
in its furnace.
In 'Sholay', when the cops arrive
to take charge of everything,
it was really an afterthought.
Had we gone according to
the original idea of the script,
then Mr Sanjeev Kumar,
who had lost his hands
and who was the Thakur,
he was going to take his revenge
with the help of
these two individuals,
and that was the end of the story.
But we had to show in the end...
we had to show in the end
that, you know, the law is supreme
and it has to come in.
So a lot of the films
restructured the way
they made their stories
or added this little bit in the end
where you found the cops landing up
after the whole thing is over,
after three hours
of drama and emotion,
to come and take over and say,
"OK, now you are
in the hands of the law."
(SPEAKS HINDI)
'Sholay' has become some kind
of a watershed,
some kind of a milestone
in Indian cinema.
But let me tell you,
I've tried to remember,
think of a film in the world
that has so many
unforgettable characters.
Well, there are,
like, in 'Godfather',
you remember many characters,
you remember in 'Star Wars',
you remember certain characters
of 'Gone With the Wind'.
But not to the extent of 'Sholay'.
'Sholay' was released in 1975,
which is 34 years.
And the big players,
the big characters,
who appeared in one scene,
those characters are caricatured
and used in advertisements
after 34 years.
'Sholay' can boast of at least
10 unforgettable characters.
In a way, 'Sholay' is Bollywood
because, as Bachchan says...
I used to ask my father,
who...is no longer alive now,
but a great poet
and a literator in his own right,
"What is it about Indian cinema
"that makes it so interesting
and so exciting?"
And he said, "The most
exciting thing about Indian cinema
"is that you get poetic justice
in three hours."
You don't get poetic justice
in a lifetime, sometimes.
And that is the most
attractive portion.
We give...Indian cinema gives
poetic justice in three hours.
Bollywood was hugely popular in
the Middle East and North Africa too
but Arab filmmakers themselves
didn't shy away from
epic, popular cinema of the '70s.
Far from it.
Peace.
Take this movie -
'Mohammad, Messenger of God' -
perhaps seen by as many people
as have seen any film
in cinema history.
It looks like
a conventional Biblical epic
and in some ways it is.
It took four months
to build the sets,
crowd scenes,
period costumes and the like.
But look at this wide-screen shot,
for example.
We have to defend ourselves.
You are the messenger of God,
yet they mock, abuse and plunder us
and we do nothing.
In the baggage of war,
we are pathetic.
American actor Anthony Quinn
is talking to camera.
We are led by God...and you.
Now, I...I know how
you hate the sword...
..but we have to fight them.
Then he walks away.
They have stolen our property.
We expect a reverse angle
to the person he's been talking to
but it doesn't come.
I say, by God, get it back!
Instead, the camera raises up
and walks towards him.
We don't see or hear the person
because Quinn's character is talking
to the prophet Mohammad, his nephew,
not after the prophet
has ascended to paradise
but whilst he's still here on earth.
Islam doesn't allow
the depiction of the prophet,
and so this most visual of mediums,
cinema, refuses to picture him.
Fight them.
Filmmaker Moustapha Akkad
even leaves gaps in the soundtrack
where Mohammad's voice would be.
Akkad shot the film in Arabic too
with Abdullah Gaith
playing the uncle.
Akkad could have simply
dubbed the film into Arabic
for the vast Arab audience,
but he didn't.
He felt that Western and Arab
acting styles are so different
that he should make two versions.
(SPEAKS ARABIC)
Here, director Akkad walks from
the English language editing suite
to the Arab one.
The documentary footage
shows that he was a calm, hard
worker in the '70s, juggling tasks.
Akkad went on to produce
the famous 'Halloween' horror films.
He and his daughter were killed
by an Al-Qaeda suicide bomb
in a hotel in Jordan in 2005.
In Egypt, pioneering director
Youssef Chahine
was both populist and angry
in the '70s.
I'm the Third World?
COUSINS: Are you?
No, you are.
The Third World? Jesus Christ!
I've been around 7,000 years.
And, er, we've proven that we were
civilised 7,000 years ago.
Are we so underdeveloped?
That's not civilisation.
Civilisation is how do you contact
the other people.
Do you know how to love?
Do you know how to care?
This is civilisation.
If you go to a very poor man here
and he has nothing to give you,
he'll go and borrow from
his neighbours a loaf of bread
and he'd offer it to you.
In Europe, you...you may faint
and drop dead in the street
and people will just
walk away from you
and they don't give a shit.
So we have to know what the word
'civilisation' means.
And then we could say First World,
the Third World - then.
If you're still a savage...
I'm not talking
about you personally.
I like Irish people. (LAUGHS)
(SPEAKS ARABIC)
Chahine's film 'The Sparrow'
is a stunning account
of a terrible moment
in Arab history.
The Egyptian president, Nasser,
announces on TV
that Egypt has lost territory
to Israel in the Six Days War.
Chahine films his actors
watching the broadcast. Dismay.
He dollies in
to capture the emotion, the shock.
(SPEAKS ARABIC)
This is Bahiya, who owns the house
where people have gathered to watch.
(WOMAN YELLS IN ARABIC)
In Chahine's famous ending,
Bahiya runs out onto the streets.
Chahine tracks in front of her.
Windows open. Despair spills out.
It becomes a collective feeling.
(CROWD CHANTS IN ARABIC)
One of the most famous moments
in Arab filmmaking.
CHAHINE: And they still wanted to
make it look as if it was a victory.
So I wanted to show
the real people...
..the people who went down
into the streets.
(CROWD CONTINUES CHANTING)
This interview was done five years
before the revolution in Egypt that
threw Hosni Mubarak out of office.
But Chahine seemed to foresee it.
I hate the word...
Not to 'prophesise'.
But you must predict
what is going to happen...
..in view of all the factors
that you see around you,
especially economically right now.
It's really bad.
And the authority
is always very violent.
So I decided I would buy
some very hard sticks,
preferably in iron,
and give them as a gift
to the university.
I mean, the students just go out
with nothing,
so they get beaten each time.
You have to say no to somebody,
otherwise they become big-headed
and they become demigods
like Mugabe or Gaddafi
or our own people.
(UPBEAT POP SONG PLAYS)
Hong Kong, Indian and Arab movies
wowed cinema audiences in the '70s
and since,
but something happened in American
cinema which changed everything.
A movie about a shark
took $260 million dollars
at the US box office.
A scary film about a girl
possessed by the devil
took $200 million at the box office.
A sci-fi movie about the good Force
and the evil Darth Vader
demolished all records
by taking nearly $500 million.
Cinema was on a roller-coaster.
There'd never been figures
like this before.
'The Exorcist', 'Jaws'
and 'Star Wars'
changed American
and then world cinema.
Producers started to make films
about things that people
fantasised about seeing -
the devil, a monster shark,
spaceships, dinosaurs,
the sinking of the 'Titanic'.
Like very early cinema,
the promise of thrill, of sensation,
lured people back to the cinema.
This came to be known
in Hollywood as 'want-see' -
what the culture wants to see.
New movie theatres
called multiplexes were built.
The era of the blockbuster
had begun.
Here's 'The Exorcist'.
A believable middle-class home.
Mum's all dolled up.
Is it coming out, Willi?
Yes, I think so.
Good.
A maid.
GIRL: (SCREAMS) Mother!
Then the scream of evil.
A handheld wide-angle shot
captures the rush of fear.
And then this.
Mother! Mother!
Director William Friedkin's
innovation
was to slap horror cinema
in the face with realism.
'The Exorcist' tells the story of a
teenage girl possessed by the devil.
The devil's voice
was throaty, cigarettey, phlegmy.
Friedkin hired the brilliant actress
Mercedes McCambridge to do it.
And I'm the devil.
Now kindly undo these straps.
I had a feeling that if I could
become an entity, not a voice...
That drives me crazy
when people say,
"You were the voice
in 'The Exorcist'."
No.
I tried very hard to create
a character, a demon, Lucifer,
who was a part of the film.
To increase the realism
of the sound,
McCambridge swallowed raw eggs,
smoked cigarettes and got drunk
to make her bronchial voice
gurgle and emotional.
They tore a sheet up
and they restrained me -
my hands, my knees, my feet.
My neck. (GROANS HOARSELY)
Look what happens to your voice.
(GROANS HOARSELY AND THROATILY)
It has to happen
when you have no freedom.
The only way I can do it now
is by clutching my hands behind me.
Sonofabitch!
One of the most innovative vocal
performances in movie history.
But Friedkin pushed
other actors hard too.
He slapped this one, who's playing
a good priest, on the face,
then immediately filmed
his trembling response.
Take me!
(GIRL WEEPS)
But Friedkin's techniques
were traditional too.
He said, "I just want to tell
"a straight story from beginning
to the end, with no craperoo."
He got this no-nonsense approach
from, of all people,
veteran director Howard Hawks.
He was going out
with Hawks's daughter.
People queued around the block
to see the film,
to test their stamina
as they would on a roller-coaster.
Tremendous...tremendous film.
Just turned my mind.
I thought it was pretty disgusting.
Well, I wouldn't take my wife
to go and see it, anyway.
But I just found it really
horrible. I just had to come out.
I couldn't take any more.
The reaction in America, from all
reports, has been hysterical.
Audiences are reported
to have been fainting,
to have been vomiting themselves,
screaming,
in the tradition, really,
of those great horror films
where you get your money back
if you don't last the course.
An American documentary was made
about this audience reaction
to 'The Exorcist'.
It wasn't glossy
like entertainment TV.
It was rough and handheld,
like 'The Exorcist' itself
and caught the panic
of people actually fainting.
Said Friedkin.
These nine words killed
the complexity of new Hollywood.
They could also have been spoken
by this man,
who 'Time' magazine called
"the most influential director
in cinema history".
If you make a picture at...
Steven Spielberg had been making
amateur films since boyhood.
He was more influenced by this film
than European movies.
There he is, Dorinda.
Go on. I'm setting you free,
Dorinda.
I'm moving out of your heart.
Goodbye.
Goodbye, darling.
The pilot says goodbye
to the woman he loves
because he's been killed in the war.
He must watch her fall in love
with another man.
A famous Hollywood romance -
soft black and white, otherworldly,
big-hearted.
Unashamed emotions
that touched the young Spielberg.
"I was truly a child of
the establishment," he said later.
'Jaws' was both an establishment
film and an innovative one.
We're out to sea,
trying to catch a killer shark.
The camera's close to the water,
capturing the swell of the sea.
A nerdy scientist on the left,
a salty seen-it-all fisherman
in the middle,
a green-around-the-gills
police chief on the right.
Who's driving this boat?
Nobody. The tide.
Three very different men,
filmed in three-shot,
like Howard Hawks's 'Rio Bravo'.
To wear him down and bring him up.
It would've been easier
to shoot in a studio tank,
but Spielberg, like Friedkin,
wanted realism.
Electric toothbrushes. (CHUCKLES)
Jesus H. Christ.
Hey, Chief...
He had the scientist
crush a polystyrene cup
in mockery of the macho
crushing of a beer can.
In interviews, Spielberg speaks
as vividly as Alfred Hitchcock
about the point of view of his shots
in 'Jaws', and their unity.
He captures the sense
that a visual idea comes to mind,
then you work on it,
making it better
using colour and lenses.
SPIELBERG:
The death of the Kintner boy
and all the paranoia
and the tension and suspense
leading up to the actual attack
when he's out on the raft...
..I, in my mind, wanted to do it
in one shot.
And in trying to figure out,
you know,
in a perfect world, how could I have
done that in one sustained shot,
I came up with the idea
to have bathers with different
coloured bathing suits
walking in front of the camera,
that would wipe off Roy Scheider,
and the same colour in the reverse
moving in, certainly,
the other direction,
would wipe on what he's looking at,
which, even though
it wouldn't be one shot,
would give more of
a seamless feeling
and much more
of a clear point of view -
that you knew
who was looking at who,
that all this must be from
the police chief's point of view.
The scene's about him.
It's about his reaction.
It's not about the Kintner boy
being killed.
It's about the chief of police,
his fear of the water,
his chief responsibility -
to protect the public -
his fear that there is
a shark out there,
and he knows it's out there,
and these people
are going swimming anyway.
Did you see that?
Yes.
He dollied in and zoomed out
to create this queasy scene
of change of visual perspective...
..as Hitchcock did in 'Vertigo'.
And this scene in Spielberg's
'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'
shows his filmic signature -
the awe and revelation scene.
Wide shot, then the camera dollies
to people looking at something
through a screen.
We want to see what they see
but Spielberg doesn't cut to it.
Instead, the scene builds.
They get out, we track and rise...
..and the music rises.
And here's the one
in 'Jurassic Park'.
Looking again.
Removing glasses to see better.
Alan, this species of veriforman
was been extinct
since the Cretaceous period.
I mean, this thing isn't...
What? What?
And again.
Then getting out of the car
to see better still.
Then the camera rises,
and the music does too.
Master classes in point of view,
in the desire to see.
Spielberg wasn't so interested
in what urban elites dreamt of.
His was a world of suburbs,
absent fathers and underdogs
who encountered the sublime.
At his best,
he burnished mainstream cinema
and became the most successful
romantic director
in The Story of Film.
Less than 30 months after 'Jaws',
'Star Wars' almost doubled
its box office takings.
The film starts like a fairytale -
"A long time ago,
in a galaxy far, far away..."
The words drive backwards
into deep space.
The soundtrack,
recorded in the relatively
new format of Dolby Stereo,
seems to take place
in deep space too.
It felt as if the cinema shook.
And then models of spaceships
glided past such wide-angle lenses
that they plunged into perspective
too and looked enormous.
The camera moves
were programmed by computers.
Then the film introduces us to Luke,
who will become a knight
and save the universe.
We're in the realm of myth and
the film's design conjures the myth.
Interiors look like caves
or kitchens or spaceships.
There's talk of a mystical force.
Luke dresses like a samurai.
We meet two robots, little
and large - a metallic odd couple.
And we see, optically projected,
a message from a princess
asking for help.
We hear of an evil emperor
who director George Lucas
saw as the shamed American
president, Richard Nixon.
Oh, he says it's nothing, sir.
Merely a malfunction. Old data.
This is the most absurd plot
we've yet heard
in The Story of Film,
and yet the movie charms,
in part because it draws richly
from film history.
The robotic comic duo
was based on two funny characters
in Akira Kurosawa's
'The Hidden Fortress'...
..as were 'Star Wars's
soft-edge screen wipes.
And the spears in Kurosawa's film
became light sabres in Lucas's.
The evil characters
were filmed in a way
that was reminiscent of German
director Leni Riefenstahl's
the 'Triumph of the Will'.
In the climax of 'Star Wars',
Luke's attacking the Death Star.
Lucas has the camera plunge forward,
like a phantom ride
from silent cinema.
Fast cutting.
The music crashes like waves.
Luke uses a computer
to find his target.
But then Luke hears
the voice of his guru, Ben Kenobi.
He tells Luke to use his intuition.
BEN: Use the Force, Luke.
Let go, Luke.
The Force is strong with this one.
Luke, trust me.
So Luke puts away the computer,
the very thing that 'Star Wars'
helped to bring to cinema.
In this moment, the knight,
the hero
learns to feel rather than think,
which in a way is what happened
to American cinema in general
in the '70s.
(ROBOT SCREAMS)
Maybe Baby Boomers had tired
of activism, of change,
of new types of art,
and wanted to switch off for a bit.
Maybe they wanted to be blasted away
by light sabres,
the Force and spaceships.
Bruce Lee fans, Indian movie lovers
and Arab audiences in the '70s
and since
fell in love with the cinema
of sensation
rather than contemplation, too.
At the end of the decade,
Americans voted for an actor
called Ronald Reagan
to be the president
of the United States,
but Chinese people in the '80s
protested in Tiananmen Square.
What followed was exciting.
Movie makers got their banners out.
The '80s were the movie years
of protest.
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 twelve decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter, we look at
Bollywood's greatest film, 'Sholay',
and feel the force of
a movie called 'Star Wars'.
Movie fans around the world,
most of them will have heard of the
box office smash hits of the '70s -
'Jaws', 'Star Wars', 'The Exorcist',
the Bruce Lee movies from Hong Kong
and the Indian epic 'Sholay'.
These films are some of the world's
most famous entertainments
but they were also innovative.
Just as in the previous decades,
so in the '70s and onwards,
the best of the mainstream films
did new things.
To see how, let's start here -
Hong Kong.
Less than a century previously,
Hong Kong looked like this.
Now it's this.
No city except New York
has been more filmed.
For 40 years, Hong Kong
was a kind of refugee camp,
transit lounge
and capitalist catch-all
for Chinese filmmakers fleeing Mao
or the Kuomintang's nationalism,
or censorship or seriousness.
Low cost, money-savvy production
has ruled here -
the cinema of the migrant, maybe -
movies made by those who know
what quickens the pulse of people
in other countries,
and who want to make a fast buck.
Maybe this old lady can remember
Hong Kong's first movie golden age -
the 1950s.
It was a gold rush.
The emperor of those times,
Hong Kong's Louis B. Mayer,
was Run Run Shaw.
In 1957, he came here,
bought 46 acres of this land
at 45c per square foot
and built the largest
private film studio in the world.
The Shaw Brothers employed
1,400 staff in 25 departments.
These buildings
were Asia's dream factories.
The legends of China's 4,000 years
of history were acted out here.
To see the Shaw Brothers logo -
orange silk pulled into perspective,
fanfare music -
was to be transported
to another world...
..a '50s world like this one -
feminine, studio set,
highly coloured, musical,
with perfect trees and clothes.
(ALL SING IN MANDARIN)
But then this man in blue, King Hu,
became a director
and changed the world
of Hong Kong cinema
from feminine to this...
..wider screen, more aggressive,
faster, swishing camera and swords,
every move designed.
Graceful,
exquisitely engineered cinema.
If John Ford had been into Buddhism,
ballet and zero gravity
he might have made films
like King Hu.
Styles of fighting called kung-fu
had taken over Hong Kong cinema.
In 500 AD, the Bodhidharma,
a Buddhist monk from India,
is said to have moved
to the Shaolin temple in China.
He stared at a wall
for nine years without speaking,
then taught Buddhist breathing
and meditation techniques
to the other monks.
This caught on.
It became a new martial art,
transmitted from master to pupil.
Loyalty and discipline were key.
It spread through Asia.
The Shaolin temple
was destroyed in 1674.
The surviving monks
formed secret societies.
They became swordsmen.
Folk tales were told about them.
Fantasies were spun.
Myths became legends -
epic, romantic or supernatural.
It was a no-brainer that
such legends would become cinema,
as the myth of the Wild West
did in America.
And they did.
And kung-fu cinema was born.
But King Hu's 'A Touch of Zen'
is no ordinary kung-fu movie.
It starts as an action movie
of sorts,
set in a village
during the Ming dynasty,
but then it turns into a ghost story
and then a reverie.
Sunlight cuts like a sword.
It sounds like steel.
The Buddhist monks levitate.
A social film
turns into a transcendental one.
This was action cinema
at its most innovative.
King Hu's daring
changed film history.
Most Asian directors revere him.
Taiwanese director Ang Lee's
'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'
was a homage to him.
It had a bouncing fight
in a bamboo forest
as stylised and beautiful
as this one.
King Hu made Hong Kong cinema
of the '60s somewhat more masculine,
but in the '70s came this -
the enraged dragon
of Hong Kong cinema.
Bruce Lee's fighting
had more attack, sweat and rage.
The rage came from the storylines
but also from Lee's private life.
(SCREAMS)
He'd experienced racism
and wanted to get even.
There's real anger in Lee's face.
His body, filmed in slow motion,
had a it's own kind
of muscular hyperrealism.
Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan
sees the shift to masculinity
as part of a bigger trend.
(SPEAKS ASIAN LANGUAGE)
But for all the dynamism
of the Bruce Lee films,
if we look again at them,
we see that though
he was fast and furious,
the camera work was anything but.
It patiently recorded the action.
It stayed out of the fight.
There wasn't much editing
in Hong Kong movies of the '70s.
The imagery was steady and wide.
Then, in 1986, came this...
We're in the world
of the Hong Kong triads
who run black market
businesses.
'80s clothes, sex, hedonism...
..a rowdy lunch...
..a story about male bonding,
loyalty and betrayal again.
What was really new, however,
was the style of the movie.
Influenced by Kurosawa
and Sam Peckinpah films,
director John Woo filmed shoot-outs
with several cameras -
some of them tracking -
and used slow motion.
Some called it
"the aesthetic of the glance".
Scenes were broken down
into fragments.
Sequels followed fast.
A cycle about amoral
heroic gangsters was born.
Hollywood couldn't fail to notice
filmmaking this intense
or box office on this scale,
so Woo was soon in America directing
Jean-Claude Van Damme movies
and then 'Mission: Impossible II'.
Hong Kong imagery
looked different now.
New nonlinear editing systems
and John Woo's brilliant eye
got the credit.
But looking back,
there were other reasons
for Hong Kong's new dynamism.
The first is this man...
..Master Yuen Woo-Ping,
who started making films
in the '70s.
Look at this fight scene
from the end of 'The Iron Monkey',
which he directed and choreographed.
The cutting's as fast
as in a John Woo movie,
and the camera angles
are as numerous.
But what was happening in front
of the camera, the fight,
was equally choreographed.
Where Bruce Lee's feet
were firmly on the ground,
Master Yuen, borrowing from King Hu
and Peking Opera,
spun his characters into the air.
(MAN SPEAKS CANTONESE)
Master Yuen's innovation
impressed Hollywood, of course.
This time it was the Wachowski
brothers who made the call.
They were planning a film
called 'The Matrix'.
And we can see Master Yuen's
influence in this scene.
I'm going to enjoy
watching you die, Mr Anderson.
The gravity defying
of Hong Kong cinema,
the feet fighting of Bruce Lee,
the fast, constant punching
of kung-fu.
John Woo and Master Yuen were
key innovators in Hong Kong cinema
after the '70s.
But this man is more central
to the story than either of them.
Tsui Hark is
the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong.
He produced both 'A Better Tomorrow'
and 'Iron Monkey',
and controlled the editing of both
and has directed 44 films himself.
Look at this scene from Tsui Hark's
'Once Upon a Time in China'.
This character is
a legendary kung-fu master.
Europeans and Americans
are invading China.
The story needs the guy to clock
that the enemy
is advancing by sea...
..and also meet
the Westernised woman
who will intrigue him
for much of the movie.
It could have been staged simply,
but Tsui Hark puts
the guy on a roof, mending it.
(SPEAKS CANTONESE)
He sees the woman because
he's slipped down the thatch.
His first glimpse of her
is a dramatic high angle.
Tsui films him
from her low-angle point of view.
No ordinary first encounter.
But then the director sets
a slapstick rabbit running.
Two buckets of glue or paint
begin to tumble.
The guy tumbles too, but in John Woo
or Sam Peckinpah slow motion
and spinning
just for the sake of it.
And he hits
the ground in slow-mo too.
(WOMAN SPEAKS CANTONESE)
And the glue gets its punchline.
(GASPS)
And then another.
There was no rational reason
for staging such a small scene
as if it was a gunfight,
with more than 25 shots.
Five would have been enough.
And look at this scene
from 'Dragon Inn'.
Maggie Cheung is the owner
of an inn in the desert.
She is unsettled by Brigitte Lin.
(SPEAKS CANTONESE)
They fight. What a fight!
It's like there's a whirlwind
in the room -
dance and erotics,
grace and, of course, spinning.
Hmm.
(GASPS INDIGNANTLY)
Tsui Hark produced
and strongly influenced this film.
His hyperactivity as a person makes
for hyperactive, innovative cinema.
Tsui Hark made Hong Kong cinema
of the '90s spin.
Many of his smash-hit movies
led to their own spin-offs.
'Dragon Inn' itself was a remake
of a King Hu movie.
Everything went in circles.
A quietly simmering kettle
was a key image in the calm
Asian films of the 1930s.
In Hong Kong cinema, the kettle
boiled over with intensity.
Not since Soviet films of the 1920s
had movie space been so fragmented.
Not since the '50s
had emotions been so heightened.
(UPBEAT '80S POP MUSIC PLAYS)
And what about the Shaw Brothers,
where mainstream Hong Kong cinema
got going?
This is their vast new studio
in the hills above Hong Kong.
It's state-of-the-art and built
on rubber to soundproof it.
Hollywood, be afraid.
Be very afraid.
But this place is nearly empty.
Hong Kongers remember with envy
the days of Bruce,
when its movies dealt a body blow
to world filmmaking.
Where Hong Kong seemed to turn
masculine and frenzied in the '70s,
mainstream Indian cinema, what in
the west is called 'Bollywood',
grew in scale
but also in inventiveness.
India,
in all its photogenic luminosity,
had quietly built the biggest
film industry in the world.
Epics from the '60s
such as this one, 'Moghal E Azam',
took more at the box office
than 'The Sound of Music'
did in the West.
A dancer enters the royal court, a
sparkling scene with mirrored sets.
The crown prince
who will marry her.
Director K. Asif wanted to make
the film in colour but couldn't.
But recently
it has been colourised,
a process that's looked down upon,
but look at the results.
Pink and pistachio...
..mother of pearl.
By the '70s, the Bollywood bauble
got bigger and shinier.
In 1971 alone,
India made 433 films...
..at least as many as were made
in America the same year.
Mainstream Hindi
entertainment cinema was magnetic.
When last we met her,
Sharmila Tagore was understated,
using tiny head movements
in close-up
in this fine-grain masterpiece
by Satyajit Ray.
Look at her now.
(SINGS IN HINDI)
Tagore's the queen of Bollywood,
in bright red,
it's soignee Elizabeth Taylor
in a full-throttle musical drama.
The film is 'Mausam', made by the
great director and lyricist Gulzar,
without whom '70s Indian cinema
is unthinkable.
Tagore's character is in love
with this doctor
played by the legendary
Sanjeev Kumar.
Tagore's modern look,
hair and eyeliner
influenced a generation
of Indian women.
But life's tragic
for Tagore's character,
and this is where
Gulzar's innovation comes in -
he shows Tagore and Kumar in
a romantic moment on a mountainside.
Then over the crest of the mountain
walks an older Kumar,
looking back
at his younger, happier self.
Past and present,
the joy of love and its pain,
all in the same scene.
Indian cinema was great at such
masterstrokes of storytelling.
Our films in Bombay were different.
Like songs, for instance.
There was a lot
of usage of songs too,
and which was part of the narrative,
so to speak.
And it was always
a little bit more, um...
..more flowery, more, um...
..not quite reality
but slightly more made-up reality,
so to speak.
So it was quite different.
And more glamour, more dressing up.
More accent on beauty,
more accent on youth.
And, um...and not...
and very general.
There was a lot of generalisation -
nothing pointing where you come from
or which time we are talking about.
Like, every time I worked
in Hindi cinema,
and if I took a little longer,
you know, to say something
or gave a little extra pause,
I was very teasingly told that,
you know, this is not a Ray cinema.
You know, you have to speed up
and speak up a little bit.
And, of course, in Bengali,
it would be exactly the opposite
and I would be told, "No, this
is not Bollywood. You have to..."
Of course, Bollywood wasn't called
Bollywood then - Hindi cinema.
And you have to pause
before you react.
So, yes, there was...both the forms
were very different.
If Tagore was
the queen of Bollywood,
there's no doubt who was the king -
Amitabh Bachchan.
Not since the days of
silent cinema and Charlie Chaplin
had world movies gilded
one human being with such fame.
MAN: I love the cinema.
That's the only job I know.
I've been in films for 40 years now.
15th February 1969
was when I signed my first contract
and entered the film industry
in India.
It's been 40 years, over 150 films.
And I still work.
I have four or five films
on the floor,
and hopefully there'll be many more.
I enjoy that.
I wanted to express myself
through a medium
which was going to project me,
put me in different
circumstances, situations,
give me different characters to do,
dress me up, you know,
in colourful clothes
and give me lovely moments
and emotions to emote.
I was interested in acting
and I found the medium
attractive enough for me to join it,
to be able for me to exercise
these wonderful desires of mine.
(DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)
Here's Bachchan as an honest cop
in the '70s classic 'Zanjeer'.
Zooms, freezes, close-ups,
dramatic fragments of fear and rage
and realisation.
Bells ring.
Music crashes like waves.
A whirlwind of a scene.
(GUNSHOTS)
(SHOUTS)
I do feel that in the late '60s
and early '70s
there was a desire
to communicate, um, ideas,
spend a lot more time
in expressing those ideas.
The written word had a great amount
of importance,
whether it was
the lyrics in our songs,
whether it was the dialogues
of our films.
In the '60s and the '70s,
there was the beginning
of a kind of turmoil
within the youth in the country.
They were not happy with the way
the system was functioning
and they felt that they needed
a vigilante or some single force
to suddenly come up and take charge
and solve their problems.
And they were all stories
of a person that rose virtually
from the gutter
and came up fighting against
the system single-handedly,
taking charge of affairs,
raising a voice against the system
and correcting it in his own manner,
so to say,
and then becoming a great hero.
And Bachchan plays the hero
in this movie -
'Sholay', the innovative colossus
of '70s cinema.
Widescreen titles like an epic.
Landscape like a western.
Music like an adventure film.
'Sholay' was all these things.
The greatest Bollywood film
of its time
and one of the most influential
movies in The Story of Film.
It was co-written by this man,
Javed Akhtar,
the great Urdu poet and screenwriter
who tried to capture the spirit
of the times in his screenplay.
As a matter of fact, the '70s
was, in a way, a traumatic time.
The whole psyche
after the partition -
I mean, after the independence -
was changing for the first time.
You know, in '47,
India got independence.
We got democracy,
an impeccable constitution,
secularism,
freedom of expression
and so on and so forth.
And we started believing
that...I mean, that prosperity
is on the next page of the calendar
and all the solutions
are around the corner.
But by the time we reached the '70s,
we realised that it is not so.
And that was the time
when everything was...
..idealism was shattering.
When idealism shatters,
art gets into trouble.
Art gets into a kind of a trauma.
And you see that trauma in poetry,
in short stories,
in novels, in theatre.
And that's reflected in
mainstream commercial cinema also.
And you saw
an angry young man emerging.
This man was a vigilante.
This man was a believer that,
"I have to look after myself."
And this kind of belief is developed
in moments when
an average person feels
that perhaps the institutions
"are not going to help me."
'Sholay' captured the spirit
of its time so much
that it was a huge
box office success
and played in this cinema
for seven years.
(GUNSHOT)
(CALLS OUT)
(CALLS OUT)
This scene's the dramatic core
of the movie.
The family of a policeman
is brutally gunned down.
Freeze frames, slow motion...
(SWING SQUEAKS)
..the squeak of a swing.
This trauma electrifies the film
and propels its operatic emotions -
the policeman's need for revenge.
This is the killer - one of cinema's
most psychotic characters.
If 'Sholay' looks like
'The Magnificent Seven'
or Sergio Leone's
'Once Upon a Time in the West',
that's because it's very like both.
It's full of ideas and conventions
ripped from other movies.
You must have seen children
playing with a string and a pebble.
They tie a string on a pebble
and they start swinging it
over their head.
And slowly they'll
keep swinging the string
and it makes
bigger and bigger circle.
Now, this pebble is the revolt
from the tradition.
It wants to move away...
..but the pebble...the string
is the tradition, the continuity.
It is holding it.
But if you break the string,
the pebble will fall.
If you remove the pebble,
the string cannot go that far.
This tension of tradition
and revolt against the tradition
are, in a way, contradictory
but as a matter of fact,
it is a synthesis.
You will always find the synthesis
of tradition
and revolt from the tradition
together in any good art.
And 'Sholay's revolt is in its
fearlessly inventive shifts in tone.
Bachchan, here in a sidecar,
plays a crook
who's hired by the policeman
to avenge the murder of his family.
But the movie finds room
for this famous musical scene.
(SINGS IN HINDI)
Bachchan and his friend -
carefree, singing in the sunshine,
the open road, constant movement,
friendship celebrated.
(SINGS IN HINDI)
One minute
it's a light buddy musical.
Then we have what looks like
a big Hollywood production number
for the Festival of Colour...
..purple dust in the air, a camera
on a Ferris wheel and carousel.
But the rapture of this
is suddenly blasted away.
(GUNFIRE)
(FAST PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)
Driving percussion,
more frenetic action.
Then take this scene, near the end.
The killer has the brassy girlfriend
of Bachchan's sidekick
dance for the sidekick's life.
To add to the intensity,
he has broken glass
scattered under her feet.
No Hollywood musical,
not even the dark ones
like 'Cabaret'
or Scorsese's 'New York, New York',
has dared to film a dance scene
this grim.
'Sholay' melds Chaplin and Leone,
Cliff Richard musicals
and horror cinema
in its furnace.
In 'Sholay', when the cops arrive
to take charge of everything,
it was really an afterthought.
Had we gone according to
the original idea of the script,
then Mr Sanjeev Kumar,
who had lost his hands
and who was the Thakur,
he was going to take his revenge
with the help of
these two individuals,
and that was the end of the story.
But we had to show in the end...
we had to show in the end
that, you know, the law is supreme
and it has to come in.
So a lot of the films
restructured the way
they made their stories
or added this little bit in the end
where you found the cops landing up
after the whole thing is over,
after three hours
of drama and emotion,
to come and take over and say,
"OK, now you are
in the hands of the law."
(SPEAKS HINDI)
'Sholay' has become some kind
of a watershed,
some kind of a milestone
in Indian cinema.
But let me tell you,
I've tried to remember,
think of a film in the world
that has so many
unforgettable characters.
Well, there are,
like, in 'Godfather',
you remember many characters,
you remember in 'Star Wars',
you remember certain characters
of 'Gone With the Wind'.
But not to the extent of 'Sholay'.
'Sholay' was released in 1975,
which is 34 years.
And the big players,
the big characters,
who appeared in one scene,
those characters are caricatured
and used in advertisements
after 34 years.
'Sholay' can boast of at least
10 unforgettable characters.
In a way, 'Sholay' is Bollywood
because, as Bachchan says...
I used to ask my father,
who...is no longer alive now,
but a great poet
and a literator in his own right,
"What is it about Indian cinema
"that makes it so interesting
and so exciting?"
And he said, "The most
exciting thing about Indian cinema
"is that you get poetic justice
in three hours."
You don't get poetic justice
in a lifetime, sometimes.
And that is the most
attractive portion.
We give...Indian cinema gives
poetic justice in three hours.
Bollywood was hugely popular in
the Middle East and North Africa too
but Arab filmmakers themselves
didn't shy away from
epic, popular cinema of the '70s.
Far from it.
Peace.
Take this movie -
'Mohammad, Messenger of God' -
perhaps seen by as many people
as have seen any film
in cinema history.
It looks like
a conventional Biblical epic
and in some ways it is.
It took four months
to build the sets,
crowd scenes,
period costumes and the like.
But look at this wide-screen shot,
for example.
We have to defend ourselves.
You are the messenger of God,
yet they mock, abuse and plunder us
and we do nothing.
In the baggage of war,
we are pathetic.
American actor Anthony Quinn
is talking to camera.
We are led by God...and you.
Now, I...I know how
you hate the sword...
..but we have to fight them.
Then he walks away.
They have stolen our property.
We expect a reverse angle
to the person he's been talking to
but it doesn't come.
I say, by God, get it back!
Instead, the camera raises up
and walks towards him.
We don't see or hear the person
because Quinn's character is talking
to the prophet Mohammad, his nephew,
not after the prophet
has ascended to paradise
but whilst he's still here on earth.
Islam doesn't allow
the depiction of the prophet,
and so this most visual of mediums,
cinema, refuses to picture him.
Fight them.
Filmmaker Moustapha Akkad
even leaves gaps in the soundtrack
where Mohammad's voice would be.
Akkad shot the film in Arabic too
with Abdullah Gaith
playing the uncle.
Akkad could have simply
dubbed the film into Arabic
for the vast Arab audience,
but he didn't.
He felt that Western and Arab
acting styles are so different
that he should make two versions.
(SPEAKS ARABIC)
Here, director Akkad walks from
the English language editing suite
to the Arab one.
The documentary footage
shows that he was a calm, hard
worker in the '70s, juggling tasks.
Akkad went on to produce
the famous 'Halloween' horror films.
He and his daughter were killed
by an Al-Qaeda suicide bomb
in a hotel in Jordan in 2005.
In Egypt, pioneering director
Youssef Chahine
was both populist and angry
in the '70s.
I'm the Third World?
COUSINS: Are you?
No, you are.
The Third World? Jesus Christ!
I've been around 7,000 years.
And, er, we've proven that we were
civilised 7,000 years ago.
Are we so underdeveloped?
That's not civilisation.
Civilisation is how do you contact
the other people.
Do you know how to love?
Do you know how to care?
This is civilisation.
If you go to a very poor man here
and he has nothing to give you,
he'll go and borrow from
his neighbours a loaf of bread
and he'd offer it to you.
In Europe, you...you may faint
and drop dead in the street
and people will just
walk away from you
and they don't give a shit.
So we have to know what the word
'civilisation' means.
And then we could say First World,
the Third World - then.
If you're still a savage...
I'm not talking
about you personally.
I like Irish people. (LAUGHS)
(SPEAKS ARABIC)
Chahine's film 'The Sparrow'
is a stunning account
of a terrible moment
in Arab history.
The Egyptian president, Nasser,
announces on TV
that Egypt has lost territory
to Israel in the Six Days War.
Chahine films his actors
watching the broadcast. Dismay.
He dollies in
to capture the emotion, the shock.
(SPEAKS ARABIC)
This is Bahiya, who owns the house
where people have gathered to watch.
(WOMAN YELLS IN ARABIC)
In Chahine's famous ending,
Bahiya runs out onto the streets.
Chahine tracks in front of her.
Windows open. Despair spills out.
It becomes a collective feeling.
(CROWD CHANTS IN ARABIC)
One of the most famous moments
in Arab filmmaking.
CHAHINE: And they still wanted to
make it look as if it was a victory.
So I wanted to show
the real people...
..the people who went down
into the streets.
(CROWD CONTINUES CHANTING)
This interview was done five years
before the revolution in Egypt that
threw Hosni Mubarak out of office.
But Chahine seemed to foresee it.
I hate the word...
Not to 'prophesise'.
But you must predict
what is going to happen...
..in view of all the factors
that you see around you,
especially economically right now.
It's really bad.
And the authority
is always very violent.
So I decided I would buy
some very hard sticks,
preferably in iron,
and give them as a gift
to the university.
I mean, the students just go out
with nothing,
so they get beaten each time.
You have to say no to somebody,
otherwise they become big-headed
and they become demigods
like Mugabe or Gaddafi
or our own people.
(UPBEAT POP SONG PLAYS)
Hong Kong, Indian and Arab movies
wowed cinema audiences in the '70s
and since,
but something happened in American
cinema which changed everything.
A movie about a shark
took $260 million dollars
at the US box office.
A scary film about a girl
possessed by the devil
took $200 million at the box office.
A sci-fi movie about the good Force
and the evil Darth Vader
demolished all records
by taking nearly $500 million.
Cinema was on a roller-coaster.
There'd never been figures
like this before.
'The Exorcist', 'Jaws'
and 'Star Wars'
changed American
and then world cinema.
Producers started to make films
about things that people
fantasised about seeing -
the devil, a monster shark,
spaceships, dinosaurs,
the sinking of the 'Titanic'.
Like very early cinema,
the promise of thrill, of sensation,
lured people back to the cinema.
This came to be known
in Hollywood as 'want-see' -
what the culture wants to see.
New movie theatres
called multiplexes were built.
The era of the blockbuster
had begun.
Here's 'The Exorcist'.
A believable middle-class home.
Mum's all dolled up.
Is it coming out, Willi?
Yes, I think so.
Good.
A maid.
GIRL: (SCREAMS) Mother!
Then the scream of evil.
A handheld wide-angle shot
captures the rush of fear.
And then this.
Mother! Mother!
Director William Friedkin's
innovation
was to slap horror cinema
in the face with realism.
'The Exorcist' tells the story of a
teenage girl possessed by the devil.
The devil's voice
was throaty, cigarettey, phlegmy.
Friedkin hired the brilliant actress
Mercedes McCambridge to do it.
And I'm the devil.
Now kindly undo these straps.
I had a feeling that if I could
become an entity, not a voice...
That drives me crazy
when people say,
"You were the voice
in 'The Exorcist'."
No.
I tried very hard to create
a character, a demon, Lucifer,
who was a part of the film.
To increase the realism
of the sound,
McCambridge swallowed raw eggs,
smoked cigarettes and got drunk
to make her bronchial voice
gurgle and emotional.
They tore a sheet up
and they restrained me -
my hands, my knees, my feet.
My neck. (GROANS HOARSELY)
Look what happens to your voice.
(GROANS HOARSELY AND THROATILY)
It has to happen
when you have no freedom.
The only way I can do it now
is by clutching my hands behind me.
Sonofabitch!
One of the most innovative vocal
performances in movie history.
But Friedkin pushed
other actors hard too.
He slapped this one, who's playing
a good priest, on the face,
then immediately filmed
his trembling response.
Take me!
(GIRL WEEPS)
But Friedkin's techniques
were traditional too.
He said, "I just want to tell
"a straight story from beginning
to the end, with no craperoo."
He got this no-nonsense approach
from, of all people,
veteran director Howard Hawks.
He was going out
with Hawks's daughter.
People queued around the block
to see the film,
to test their stamina
as they would on a roller-coaster.
Tremendous...tremendous film.
Just turned my mind.
I thought it was pretty disgusting.
Well, I wouldn't take my wife
to go and see it, anyway.
But I just found it really
horrible. I just had to come out.
I couldn't take any more.
The reaction in America, from all
reports, has been hysterical.
Audiences are reported
to have been fainting,
to have been vomiting themselves,
screaming,
in the tradition, really,
of those great horror films
where you get your money back
if you don't last the course.
An American documentary was made
about this audience reaction
to 'The Exorcist'.
It wasn't glossy
like entertainment TV.
It was rough and handheld,
like 'The Exorcist' itself
and caught the panic
of people actually fainting.
Said Friedkin.
These nine words killed
the complexity of new Hollywood.
They could also have been spoken
by this man,
who 'Time' magazine called
"the most influential director
in cinema history".
If you make a picture at...
Steven Spielberg had been making
amateur films since boyhood.
He was more influenced by this film
than European movies.
There he is, Dorinda.
Go on. I'm setting you free,
Dorinda.
I'm moving out of your heart.
Goodbye.
Goodbye, darling.
The pilot says goodbye
to the woman he loves
because he's been killed in the war.
He must watch her fall in love
with another man.
A famous Hollywood romance -
soft black and white, otherworldly,
big-hearted.
Unashamed emotions
that touched the young Spielberg.
"I was truly a child of
the establishment," he said later.
'Jaws' was both an establishment
film and an innovative one.
We're out to sea,
trying to catch a killer shark.
The camera's close to the water,
capturing the swell of the sea.
A nerdy scientist on the left,
a salty seen-it-all fisherman
in the middle,
a green-around-the-gills
police chief on the right.
Who's driving this boat?
Nobody. The tide.
Three very different men,
filmed in three-shot,
like Howard Hawks's 'Rio Bravo'.
To wear him down and bring him up.
It would've been easier
to shoot in a studio tank,
but Spielberg, like Friedkin,
wanted realism.
Electric toothbrushes. (CHUCKLES)
Jesus H. Christ.
Hey, Chief...
He had the scientist
crush a polystyrene cup
in mockery of the macho
crushing of a beer can.
In interviews, Spielberg speaks
as vividly as Alfred Hitchcock
about the point of view of his shots
in 'Jaws', and their unity.
He captures the sense
that a visual idea comes to mind,
then you work on it,
making it better
using colour and lenses.
SPIELBERG:
The death of the Kintner boy
and all the paranoia
and the tension and suspense
leading up to the actual attack
when he's out on the raft...
..I, in my mind, wanted to do it
in one shot.
And in trying to figure out,
you know,
in a perfect world, how could I have
done that in one sustained shot,
I came up with the idea
to have bathers with different
coloured bathing suits
walking in front of the camera,
that would wipe off Roy Scheider,
and the same colour in the reverse
moving in, certainly,
the other direction,
would wipe on what he's looking at,
which, even though
it wouldn't be one shot,
would give more of
a seamless feeling
and much more
of a clear point of view -
that you knew
who was looking at who,
that all this must be from
the police chief's point of view.
The scene's about him.
It's about his reaction.
It's not about the Kintner boy
being killed.
It's about the chief of police,
his fear of the water,
his chief responsibility -
to protect the public -
his fear that there is
a shark out there,
and he knows it's out there,
and these people
are going swimming anyway.
Did you see that?
Yes.
He dollied in and zoomed out
to create this queasy scene
of change of visual perspective...
..as Hitchcock did in 'Vertigo'.
And this scene in Spielberg's
'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'
shows his filmic signature -
the awe and revelation scene.
Wide shot, then the camera dollies
to people looking at something
through a screen.
We want to see what they see
but Spielberg doesn't cut to it.
Instead, the scene builds.
They get out, we track and rise...
..and the music rises.
And here's the one
in 'Jurassic Park'.
Looking again.
Removing glasses to see better.
Alan, this species of veriforman
was been extinct
since the Cretaceous period.
I mean, this thing isn't...
What? What?
And again.
Then getting out of the car
to see better still.
Then the camera rises,
and the music does too.
Master classes in point of view,
in the desire to see.
Spielberg wasn't so interested
in what urban elites dreamt of.
His was a world of suburbs,
absent fathers and underdogs
who encountered the sublime.
At his best,
he burnished mainstream cinema
and became the most successful
romantic director
in The Story of Film.
Less than 30 months after 'Jaws',
'Star Wars' almost doubled
its box office takings.
The film starts like a fairytale -
"A long time ago,
in a galaxy far, far away..."
The words drive backwards
into deep space.
The soundtrack,
recorded in the relatively
new format of Dolby Stereo,
seems to take place
in deep space too.
It felt as if the cinema shook.
And then models of spaceships
glided past such wide-angle lenses
that they plunged into perspective
too and looked enormous.
The camera moves
were programmed by computers.
Then the film introduces us to Luke,
who will become a knight
and save the universe.
We're in the realm of myth and
the film's design conjures the myth.
Interiors look like caves
or kitchens or spaceships.
There's talk of a mystical force.
Luke dresses like a samurai.
We meet two robots, little
and large - a metallic odd couple.
And we see, optically projected,
a message from a princess
asking for help.
We hear of an evil emperor
who director George Lucas
saw as the shamed American
president, Richard Nixon.
Oh, he says it's nothing, sir.
Merely a malfunction. Old data.
This is the most absurd plot
we've yet heard
in The Story of Film,
and yet the movie charms,
in part because it draws richly
from film history.
The robotic comic duo
was based on two funny characters
in Akira Kurosawa's
'The Hidden Fortress'...
..as were 'Star Wars's
soft-edge screen wipes.
And the spears in Kurosawa's film
became light sabres in Lucas's.
The evil characters
were filmed in a way
that was reminiscent of German
director Leni Riefenstahl's
the 'Triumph of the Will'.
In the climax of 'Star Wars',
Luke's attacking the Death Star.
Lucas has the camera plunge forward,
like a phantom ride
from silent cinema.
Fast cutting.
The music crashes like waves.
Luke uses a computer
to find his target.
But then Luke hears
the voice of his guru, Ben Kenobi.
He tells Luke to use his intuition.
BEN: Use the Force, Luke.
Let go, Luke.
The Force is strong with this one.
Luke, trust me.
So Luke puts away the computer,
the very thing that 'Star Wars'
helped to bring to cinema.
In this moment, the knight,
the hero
learns to feel rather than think,
which in a way is what happened
to American cinema in general
in the '70s.
(ROBOT SCREAMS)
Maybe Baby Boomers had tired
of activism, of change,
of new types of art,
and wanted to switch off for a bit.
Maybe they wanted to be blasted away
by light sabres,
the Force and spaceships.
Bruce Lee fans, Indian movie lovers
and Arab audiences in the '70s
and since
fell in love with the cinema
of sensation
rather than contemplation, too.
At the end of the decade,
Americans voted for an actor
called Ronald Reagan
to be the president
of the United States,
but Chinese people in the '80s
protested in Tiananmen Square.
What followed was exciting.
Movie makers got their banners out.
The '80s were the movie years
of protest.