The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 12 - Episode #1.12 - full transcript
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 is 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 The Story Of Film -
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter, we discover
a new generation of Chinese films
and David Lynch's movie,
'Blue Velvet'.
(CAMERAS CLICK)
The 1980s. Greed is good.
Thatcher and Reagan
are in power in the West.
Around the world,
conservative ideologues
tell false stories
about life and love.
The most innovative filmmakers
speak back at these falsehoods.
This is their story,
the story of '80s protest.
The story of speaking truth
to power in the '80s starts here.
China.
Probably the most interesting place
on earth at the time.
China looked like this in the '80s.
But it looked like this too.
There was a new openness in China.
It was debating
where it stood in the world,
how modern and democratic
it wanted to be.
Standing up
to the old Maoist repressions.
The fervent was thrilling
and moving.
And out of it came the greatest
rebirth in filmmaking
of the whole decade.
Mao's Cultural Revolution
had stamped out the fire
of moviemaking in China
and closed its legendary film
school, the Beijing Film Academy.
Director Tian Zhuangzhuang.
The so-called 5th Generation
who graduated from it in 1982
would be the most distinguished ever
to spill out of a film school.
They made some of the best films
of the '80s.
Tian's film 'The Horse Thief'
spoke truth to power
because it focused on
a very un-Maoist subject.
We're at a traditional burial.
A horse thief's young son has died.
Tian films Buddhist monks
in subtle slow motion.
And these vultures
who eat the corpse,
a horrifying idea to Westerners,
but a sacred sky burial
for the horse thief and his family.
Tian was interested in the mystical
traditions of his characters,
themes that were banned under Mao.
The themes of Sergei Parajanov
in the Ukraine.
Having eaten the body, the vultures
take its spirit into the sky.
And Tian's films looked different.
He framed like this
and treated colour like this.
Martin Scorsese called 'The Horse
Thief' the best film of the decade.
Whereas Maoist films were about
patriotic and exemplary types,
the 5th Generation
were challenging their time
by making movies about
individual psychology.
(MAN SINGS IN DISTANCE)
The greatest village film made
in China in the '80s was this one,
'Yellow Earth'.
Again, we're far away
from modernity and big cities.
Static shots, a sense of the scale
of the landscape,
muted yellows and greens.
(SINGING CONTINUES)
Communist soldiers
collecting folk songs.
He writes the ones he hears
here in this notebook.
Then the soldier meets
this 14-year-old girl
and the film becomes about her
gentle, but confident femininity.
She's sewing.
Her head's downturned.
The frame's static.
She questions the soldier,
but doesn't look at him.
Women in Maoist cinema were supposed
to be strutting and heroic.
Director Chen Kaige
and cinematographer Zhang Yimou,
who had himself become
a successful director,
framed the imagery
like Chinese painting.
Instead of being here,
the horizon would be here...
..or here.
Male and female stood together
in 'Yellow Earth's'
remarkably framed landscapes.
The film wasn't Maoist because
it had little action or conflict.
But nor was it traditionally male
and Confucian.
The girl wants to join the army,
to strike out at life
rather than to stay home.
Instead,
it used emptiness within the frame
as a compositional element,
and saw maleness within femaleness
and good within bad...
..ideas more associated with another
great Asian philosophy, Taoism.
All this was deeply challenging.
The legacy of Chinese film
of the '80s was complex.
Tian worked consistently until 1993
when his film about the Cultural
Revolution, 'The Blue Kite',
was banned, and he was forbidden
to work for nearly a decade.
'Yellow Earth's cinematographer,
Zhang Yimou, went on to direct
some of the most rigorously
beautiful movies of the '90s.
His film 'Raise the Red Lantern'
was boldly symmetrical
and had a striking
orange-red colour palette.
But even it didn't prepare us
for his mastery of digital cinema.
We're in a richly decorated
peony pavilion.
Zhang studied Chinese painting
and uses its ultra widescreen
compositions.
Slow motion and a gravity-defying
Buddhist sense
of the grace of movement.
A pictorial masterclass.
The imagery in Chinese cinema
was becoming as beautiful
as anywhere in the world.
All that was in the future.
But back in the '80s, five years
after the release of 'Yellow Earth',
the sun went down
on China's moving and exciting
decade of self-discovery.
Thousands of pro-democracy
protesters
were killed by their own
government in Tiananmen Square.
One of the greatest images ever
of speaking truth to power.
In another Communist sphere,
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
in the '80s,
the powerful Communist authorities
were starting to lose their grip.
Life was tough,
but people persevered
and society began to open up.
Filmmakers told stories
about taboo subjects.
The resulting movies literally
changed the world in some cases
and are some of the most
troubling films ever made.
This film, 'Repentance',
created a sensation.
It tells, in an almost comic book
manner, of this dictator.
He has a Hitler moustache,
but, like Stalin, is Georgian.
A woman imagines
that she and her man are buried -
an echo of this much earlier
Soviet film, 'Arsenal'.
A haunting static shot
of a smiling, dead soldier.
The Stalin-like dictator
eventually dies
but, astonishingly,
a woman digs up his body
and stands it here,
in the garden
of his morally corrupt son.
The corpse looks unremarkable,
like it's just relaxing
against a tree.
Director Abuladze had it filmed
from far away, in daylight.
A symbol, of course, of the fact
that atrocity cannot be buried...
..that the Stalinist genocide
stinks of death.
The president of Georgia
and the new modernising boss
of the Soviet Union in the '80s ,
Mikhail Gorbachev, saw the
film and approved it for release.
It was seen by millions
and helped spark Glasnost,
the period of new openness
in the Soviet Union.
A rare example of film
actually changing the world.
'Repentance' was premiered here,
the film union building, Dom Kino,
in Moscow.
As was this astonishing Soviet film
from the mid '80s, 'Come and See'.
We're in Belorussia in 1943.
(HIGH-PITCHED WHISTLING)
(PANTING)
Nazi bombs have just exploded.
Into the frame
comes the teenage boy of the story.
He's fighting the Nazis.
The camera moves up a bit,
to adult height.
The boy seems to get smaller
because of the wide-angle lens.
The peak of his cap
seems to reach out to us.
The bomb has given him tinnitus.
Whistle. Roar.
He meets a girl.
They go to his village.
He can't find his family.
They run to look for them.
Then the girl looks back
and sees them.
He doesn't.
The wide-angle camera tracking them,
as if it's the awful thing
she's just seen.
In their flight,
they come across this bog.
(WALTZ MUSIC PLAYS OVER TENSE DRONE)
This is acting
at the limit of endurance.
The roar of fear.
We hardly hear their screams.
The absurdity of a Viennese
waltz on the soundtrack.
No film is more physical.
Another Soviet film
about a near burial.
'Come and See's
acting, sound design,
staring, wide-angle camerawork
and moral seriousness
made it the greatest
war film ever made.
The director of 'Come and See',
Elem Klimov,
became head of the Soviet Film Union
in the '80s.
In this very room
in the Union Building
he and politicians
discussed censorship,
the digging up of the past
and films that had been banned
because they were anti-Soviet,
because they spoke truths
other than the sanctioned ones.
One such film was this one,
'Long Goodbyes',
directed by the brilliant
Kira Muratova.
We see a middle-aged woman.
Cut to a train.
Looking outside first,
then zoom out to show that
the mother is talking to her son.
Jump cut. He's trying to sleep.
She talks.
(STRANGE SINGING AND PIANO
OVER DIALOGUE)
The strange high-pitched voice
on the soundtrack.
No sound of the train itself.
Throughout the film,
Muratova has the mother and son
look away from each other.
She nags him. The music erupts.
Match cut to a man. Then to the son.
Strange jump cut on his hands.
The man's been replaced
by an older man.
More splintered cuts
from different angles.
Then we're outside the train
and then we seem to be
in an aeroplane.
What was all this about?
This earlier scene helps us see.
The mum and son again.
Not looking at each other again.
Filmed in long lens again,
a lens so long
that the space seems paper thin.
Muratova's theme here was the way
people can suffocate each other.
Soviet films of the '70s and '80s
were supposed to be
about social themes
but this one's about
psychological bondage.
They couldn't accuse Muratova
of being anti-Soviet
but the archives say
that the authorities were
"terribly unnerved by the form"
of this film.
And so, like the films of Sergei
Parajanov, whom Muratova adored,
'Long Goodbyes' was banned.
Maybe they thought
Muratova's long lenses
and almost hidden camera positions
were commenting
on Soviet surveillance.
Whatever, one official wrote,
"How can you allow such an outrage?"
Written in chalk on the film's
canister was, "Not to be given out."
But back in this smoke-filled room
in the late '80s,
a decade after it was made,
Muratova's beautiful film
was unbanned and released
to acclaim.
It had come back from the dead
to speak a truth to power.
She's one of
the most underrated directors
in the whole story of film.
By the '80s, large chunks of
the Eastern bloc looked like this.
But what if you did this to it?
And what if you shifted
its colour to this?
These are the questions
that the Polish director
Krzysztof Kieslowski asked.
His answers were about
love and death.
Meet Jacek, this 20-year-old
in an '80s Polish city.
Kieslowski pictures him
in yellow-green imagery.
The shots are hooded. Jaundiced.
He sees a rock.
He decides to do harm with the rock.
If he can do this,
he can do anything.
(CRASH!)
This makes us scared of him,
an old Hitchcock trick.
What'll he do next?
This is what he does next.
He gets in a taxi.
He's going to kill the taxidriver,
but the driver doesn't know this.
He stops to let kids cross the road.
An echo of the scene
in Hitchcock's 'Psycho'
where Janet Leigh,
who doesn't know she's about to die,
lets people cross the road.
But where Hitchcock's film
was fear as entertainment
Kieslowski's film is about
the dirt and sickness of fear.
Jacek strangles the man.
We see the man's foot
come out of his sock.
He takes forever to die.
The scene lasts
three minutes 45 seconds.
35 shots.
Real time.
(CAR HORN BLARES)
The man's saliva.
The masking of the imagery
is so heavy
that at times
it looks like night.
The man's false teeth.
The murder reduced to a sock,
spit and dentures.
Extraordinary innovation.
Then we jump a year and Jacek's
sentenced to death for his crime.
Green light
and hooded imagery again.
The ugly fury of death.
He's gone in a moment...
..and then the shit
drips from his body.
Only at the end in this starburst
after Jacek has died
is the light white.
'A Short Film About Killing'
has used physical things to rage
against the dying of the light,
literally, because
the greenness and masking
make it look like
the light of the world is dying.
'A Short Film About Killing'
has to be seen to be believed.
It changed the death penalty
in Poland.
Talking truth to power, indeed.
African cinema in the '80s
was not undergoing such dark days
as the films of Eastern Europe.
Although some African countries were
forced to mortgage their economies
to the International Monetary Fund,
innovation in African movies soared.
In the '70s, African films
had been about society,
the here and now,
the immediate post-colonial world.
But in the '80s, directors started
to look beyond the present tense,
to the horizon, the past,
before colonialisation.
A rethink of what
African cinema was for.
This man, Gaston Kabore,
did this brilliantly.
His movie, 'Wend Kuuni',
was one of the first films to do so.
A landmark in African cinema.
This orphan boy called Wend Kuuni,
which means "gift from God",
has been found in the bush.
He doesn't speak. He herds goats.
Director Kabore's camera
follows him from a distance
and frames him alone,
outside the village.
Then we get a flashback to a time
when his mum was still alive.
The boy's sick,
they're under a tree in the shade.
Then Kabore makes the time line
of his film more complex.
KABORE: I put in, when Kuuni...
a flashback inside another flashback
and I did it without questioning
myself and it worked.
Here, the mother has
her own flashback to her husband,
a flashback within a flashback.
You see how aesthetic
could be invented
just because an artist is doing
what he feels or she feels
to be good for the story
he or she is telling.
Then we return
to the first flashback,
the boy's memory of his mum,
and soon afterwards we get back
to the present tense.
I believe in mixed instinct
in art.
I believe in, uh...
..in, uh...audacity,
you know, in art.
And Africa has a tremendous treasure
of stories,
tales, mythology, legends.
We need that
because it's the food of the soul.
Kabore's film speaks truth
to the past, you could say.
But then came another African film
about the past, the Dreamtime.
In this film, 'Yeelen',
which means "brightness",
this man, Niankoro,
has been tracking down
his sorcerer father.
Director Souleymane Cisse
tracks around Niankoro,
like in a Sergio Leone shoot-out.
Niankoro has to destroy his father,
so he's in tears.
He faces him.
(LOW, RUMBLING DRONE)
A water buffalo in slow motion
and a sci-fi roar on the soundtrack.
Cisse tracks up to
Niankoro's stony look.
Then his father becomes
a mythic elephant...
..and Niankoro is a lion.
And then mystical rods
seem to channel
the brightness of the cosmos.
'Yeelen' is as big
as 'Lawrence of Arabia',
as shape-shifting as
'2001: A Space Odyssey',
a magic realist film
and one of cinema's
most complex works of art.
In America in the '80s,
if power was anywhere,
it was here on Wall Street.
Greed was good here.
Money gushed through this canyon
like a torrent.
This man, Ronald Reagan,
America's president,
said that the money would
trickle down to places like this.
But it didn't.
A new television channel,
Music Television,
broadcast its first music video,
this one, in 1981.
SONG:
# Video killed the radio star... #
The song was about video.
The imagery
used screens within screens,
pink light,
fast editing and stepped cuts.
All these things
became part of the language
of popular imagery around the world.
SONG: # She's a maniac,
maniac on the floor
# And she's dancing
like she's never danced before... #
A scene like this shows
how music video influenced film.
The editing's fast,
the angles are numerous and sexy.
The music is the only thing
in the soundtrack.
We don't hear her feet, for example,
and the scene has no story element.
It's pure impressionism.
But '80s America was mostly
a male Reaganite dreamland.
This film was part of the dreamland.
Rich colour.
A roller-coaster in the sky.
Close-ups of pilots
like those in 'Star Wars'.
Tom Cruise is flying
over the Persian Gulf.
He encounters Russian MiG pilots,
so flies upside down, this close,
and gives them the finger.
Greetings. (LAUGHS)
Watch the birdie.
Jeez, I crack myself up.
Pure Cold War male fantasy.
It's a big one, Goose.
Many of the shots last
just two or three seconds,
the cutting rate
of pop promos and adverts.
Edited on computers.
Scenes could be moved around,
shortened, lengthened and reviewed
in computer edit suites in seconds.
An advert for the new masculinity,
the new America,
the new cinema, the new dreaming.
No American dream was more potent
than this one.
SONG: # Blue velvet, whoa, whoa... #
We float into David Lynch's
'Blue Velvet',
like a spaceship landing on earth.
We're in an idealised
American small town,
the sort of place where
firemen wave as they pass.
# Bluer than velvet was the night
# Whoa, whoa, whoa... #
White picket fence,
children go to school
in slow motion,
# From the stars
# She wore blue... #
But Lynch's velvety textures
usually give way
to something more fearful.
He took us to the dark world
of Victorian London
in 'The Elephant Man', for example,
and tracked into a close-up
of a doctor
who's sympathetic to John Merrick,
just as the actor, Anthony Hopkins,
drops a tear.
Luck and beautiful craftsmanship.
But the movie shows us the
surrealism of Lynch's imagination.
As he filmed side-on the bulbous
growths on Merrick's skull,
here, for example,
he was reminded of
the explosions of smoke
from a recently erupted volcano,
Mount St Helens.
A deeply original visual rhyme.
Such connections take us
to the crux of Lynch.
His films protest against
the rationality and
understandability of everyday life.
He worked with unconscious material
the way that a carpenter
works with wood.
He says that the key scene
of any of his films,
the scene that often combines
the beauty of life with its terror,
is the "eye of the duck scene"
because, as he put it,
"when you look at a duck, the eye
is always in the right place."
(SINGS) # A candy-coloured
clown they call the sandman... #
The eye of the duck scene
in 'Blue Velvet' is this one.
# Just to sprinkle stardust
and to whisper
# Go to sleep, everything is alright
# I close my eyes
# Then I drift away
# Into the magic night... #
The beauty of Roy Orbison's song
combines with the intoxication
of Dennis Hopper's character...
# Oh, smile and pray
# Like dreamers do
# Then I fall asleep to dream... #
..as if that beauty hurts.
# My dreams of you... #
In dreams, indeed.
Like Ronald Reagan,
David Lynch had an almost
abstract fear of the outside world.
But he didn't try to push
that fear away.
He stared at it
through a brilliant frame.
Lynch said that as people get older,
their window on the world closes.
This is what was happening
to his country in the '80s
and its cinema.
After David Lynch,
the second great American director
to emerge in the '80s was Spike Lee.
He thumbed his nose at white America
and bourgeois blackness
and was inventive with movie form.
Take his film 'Do The Right Thing',
which was shot
on this block in Brooklyn.
It's set on a single, sweltering day
and builds like a pressure cooker
as tensions between
local blacks, Latinos and whites
are sparked by events at a pizzeria.
Lee and his cinematographer,
Ernest Dickerson,
use heightened colours
to match the film's boiling themes.
Hey!
They filmed
with tilted camera angles
to render things off-kilter...
Move on. You're blockin' my view.
You are ugly enough.
Don't stare at me!
The evil eye doesn't work on me.
Mother Sister...
..a technique borrowed from
one of Lee's favourite films,
'The Third Man',
in which the non-horizontal camera
was used
to show the imbalance
of the world of the story.
Lee himself plays the character
Mookie in the film's climax,
the most striking moment of protest
in '80s American cinema.
Again, saturated colour,
Lee picks up a trash can.
The camera tracks with him.
Hey!
Then it rushes with the can
as Lee throws it
through the window of the pizzeria.
At the end, Lee pairs a quotation
from Martin Luther King
denouncing violence
with one from Malcolm X
advocating it in self-defence.
David Lynch and Spike Lee
were high-water marks
in the otherwise low tide
of American cinema in the '80s.
Neither, however,
spoke the truth about modern life
and helped create the radical
independent film movement
in America in the '80s
as much as this man and woman,
writer/director John Sayles
and producer Maggie Renzi.
They used a road less travelled
to get their movies made,
and became America's
State of the Nation filmmakers.
When we started we really had
no idea of the future.
Yeah, that there
was any place for us.
We didn't really analyse it
a whole lot.
No.
We just started making stories.
We probably knew by that time,
that, like, Lucas and Spielberg
had gone to film school,
but they belonged to Hollywood
which was a place
that we never thought
we'd have anything to do with,
although, John had started
writing for Hollywood,
so there you were
on the periphery of it,
but there was no expectation
that we were building a career
when we made
'Return of the Secaucus Seven'.
It was about the reunion of a group
of college friends,
ten years after they'd been arrested
on their way
to an anti-war demonstration.
The film felt truthful because it
wasn't edited in a flashy, MTV way.
The camera patiently observed
intelligent, adult conversations
about politics.
I mean, fighting
for what you believe in.
No offence, but your senator is just
fighting to keep his job
and his house on Martha's Vineyard.
Do you know that?
Do you really know that?
Have you looked at his record?
Alright, how did he stand
on the Canal Treaty?
Wait a minute.
SAYLES:
When we started making movies
one of the things
that I was always interested in
was what do I see
in life around me
that I don't see on a big screen?
When I started working
for the studios
a lot of those
were more heroic movies
um...and I was aware of, you know,
that's movie moviemaking, you know?
And there's the hero
and the girl and the best friend
and everybody else is an extra.
Whereas the stories
I was interested in,
and I came out of
being a novelist...
..on screen
the characters were more complex
and they weren't absolutely heroic.
They might be the protagonist,
but, like your friends,
they might be somebody
you love and care about,
but they don't always act
in a noble way.
They don't always do
what you wish they would do.
I think from the beginning
the smartest thing that we did
is decide to make the movies
in our own way.
That meant casting them
in our own way
and having complete creative control
over the way we made them
and that includes non-hierarchical
and not luxurious.
It was like Hollywood was only there
to see if John could get
screenwriting work.
I have less and less respect
for them.
I think they don't even do
what they do very well anymore.
They spend much too much money.
They've lost whole, huge sections
of the marketplace.
I was talking before
about the adult audience.
It takes them, you know,
nine writers
to come up with a script that's
no better than the first version.
I used to be afraid of them
and intimidated by them
and now I realise they don't
do their jobs very well.
And that's one reason
why the dinosaur is dying.
And now you're older than them.
And now I'm older.
Now I could be their mother,
heaven forfend.
Our movies do require
paying attention, taking time,
engaging with characters
and because of that,
I mean, the legacy's good.
It's tough...tough to get
the money for what we do,
but when I meet the audience
I'm always glad
that we have never changed that.
Yeah, and most, you know,
mainstream filmmakers that we know
who work within the studio system
haven't done much better
than we have
as far as the number of movies
they've gotten to make
and getting to make
their dream projects or whatever
and they're much more likely
to end up saying,
"Oh, you should have seen my cut",
you know,
which we've never had to do.
Sayles and Renzi
were the standard-bearers
for new independent
American film.
Much of the do-it-yourself
and political cinema of the '90s
derives from their approach.
In France in the '80s,
movies seemed to want to kick
the protest films
of Sayles and Renzi in the teeth.
Influenced by advertising,
cinema became shining again.
French philosophy
had become interested
in popular culture
and postmodernism.
This was a protest too.
A reaction against seriousness.
Into all this sped
Luc Besson's 'Subway'.
Besson had excelled in pop promos
and had lived in America.
A rollerskater's snatched a handbag,
his flight from the cops
filmed like a car chase on skates,
the flow of action,
the camera in his point of view,
wide-angle shots
to make the space deeper.
The best new French director
of the '80s, Leos Carax,
combined the visual hyperactivity
of Besson
with a punky sense of outrage
at modern life.
We're on the Pont Neuf in the grand
centre of Paris, the city of light.
Fireworks, Public Enemy plays,
Juliette Binoche.
This could be a modern dance
about high-class people,
but, in fact,
these characters are homeless.
They sleep rough on the bridge.
She's going blind.
He's a drunk.
Around this gritty truth
about modern life,
Carax built his gigantic film,
the most expensive
ever made in Paris.
He had the entire bridge
rebuilt as a set,
a folie de grandeur,
with sweeping camera moves,
glossy and wasteful
in a glossy, wasteful age.
The plight of homelessness
was treated with the exact same
style as this Hollywood musical.
Grand studio sets of Paris,
modern dance.
Colour splashed across the screen.
Romantic ecstasy and agony.
Sashay down to Spain in the '80s
and you find that protest had
had a sex change.
On the left is Pedro Almodovar
Camp,
a touch of goth in his eyeliner
and purple, drawn-on sideburns.
Purple '80s lighting.
Dictator Franco had died.
Madrid's underground culture
was transgressive, anarchic.
And to this,
Almodovar lobbed in a dash
of the stylistic antics
of this Beatles film.
He loved its celebration
of pop music,
camera work that makes you feel
you're there,
its youthful surface.
A scene like this
was so provocative.
It's a porn shoot, which
conservative Spain would have hated.
But the porn star is male,
even more of a no-no,
and it's making fun of the so-called
"driller killer" video nasty.
And the porn star's wearing fur
and the colour's bright
and the style's cheap, not classy.
Almodovar's signature
was the comic grotesque.
He challenged old-fashioned Spain
with sex and style.
And in complete contrast,
to see the range of Spanish cinema
after Franco, look at this film -
'The Quince Tree Sun',
directed by Victor Erice.
A man has been painting
this quince tree for weeks.
He painted a line on the fruit,
then drew a line on the canvas
to get the fruit's position
exactly right.
But then,
the fruit tree drooped a bit,
so he painted another line
and another.
Erice uses no camera moves.
Natural light and a gentle pace
to capture the passing of time
and the delicacy of the moment.
Spain under Franco
was all about lies.
'The Quince Tree Sun'
was a return to the truth.
A national detox.
Where politics softened
in Spain in the '80s,
here in Britain they hardened.
A right-wing government
brought protesters to the streets.
The government's view was that
culture should reassure and bolster
a traditional sense
of national pride.
But the best filmmakers kicked back
or focused on other identities.
We're in London.
A high-level shot like a musical.
A middle-class
Pakistani businessman
is reopening his laundrette.
The right-wing government
liked entrepreneurs.
Immigrants, less so.
And you're tired of work.
He dances with this white woman.
A sadhu of south London.
Yes.
But the film lobbed in
more provocations.
In the back room, the entrepreneur's
nephew's having sex.
With a bloke. A white bloke.
The guy dribbles champagne, the
drink of '80s nouveau riche yuppies,
into the mouth of the nephew.
Gay, mixed race sex.
Oh, and the white bloke's
a neo-Nazi.
A waltz of multi-cultural Britain.
'My Beautiful Laundrette'
was a knee in the balls
to the right-wing government.
As much of a provocation as Bunuel's
films were in Franco's Spain.
Shit!
Far more serious but equally bold
was this Scottish film.
This boy, wee Jamie, is being
brought up in poverty by his granny.
She sits at the fire,
keeps her back to him.
He's always behind her here
in the cold, watching.
This shot's exactly
from Jamie's point of view
under the table.
We see the top of it in the image.
The granny sits down as usual,
ignoring Jamie.
But then, unusually,
she takes a swig of beer.
The beer seems to warm her heart...
..because she reaches back
into Jamie's space.
As director Bill Douglas had
rigorously filmed the spaces,
we know how unusual this reach is.
Who's the best boy
in all the wide world?
A simple scene, but one of the great
moments of reconciliation in cinema.
Who is it, my darling?
Another Scottish filmmaker,
Bill Forsyth,
looked at working-class life too,
but he was more romantic.
I mean, I could just sit in a hole
and look at a housing estate
and listen to the ice-cream van,
you know,
for quite a long while, you know.
That would fill me
with good feelings.
Do you want to dance?
It's really good.
You just lie flat down and dance.
I'll show you want I mean.
I'll start it off
and you just join in
when you feel confident enough.
OK?
Forsyth's movie 'Gregory's Girl'
looked at young people
and the ordinary places
where they fall in love.
For most of the film,
the camera's horizontal, as normal,
but then he has it tilted,
a touch of poetry.
We are clinging to the surface
of this planet
while it spins through space
at a thousand miles an hour,
held only by the mystery force
called gravity.
Wow.
A lot of people panic
when you tell them that
and they just fall off.
But I see you're not falling off.
That means you've got
the hang of it.
You know, people in a landscape,
I don't mean that in a visual way,
but just someone
finding themselves somewhere
in that moment of,
you know, apprehension
that you're here
and this is where you are.
It's a difficult moment to describe,
but it's a moment that
is very, very cinematic for me.
This man, Terence Davies, made the
greatest British film of the '80s,
'Distant Voices, Still Lives'.
We're in Davies' own childhood,
Liverpool in the 1950s.
A family home
terrorised by a brutal father.
We see his mum in the present
and then hear the kids in the past.
We're flashed backwards in time
without a cut.
So this image is a memory image.
Tony, are those two sisters
of yours up yet?
Yeah. They're just coming down.
(FOOTSTEPS)
Oh, hiya, Mum.
Morning, Maisie.
Morning, Mum.
Morning, Eileen.
Nervous, love?
A bit.
Have a cuppa and a ciggie.
(SINGS) # I get the blues
# When it's raining
# The blues I can't lose
when it rains
# Now each little raindrop... #
Davies' camera tracks down
the hallway.
# ..falls on my windowpane
# Reminds me of the tears I shed
# The tears were all in vain
# So I sit and wait
for the sun to shine
# To shine all my blues away
# It rained when I met you
# And it rained when I lost you
# So I get the blues
when it rains... #
One of Davies' signatures
is the very slow dissolve.
(WOMAN SINGS)
# There's a man going round
# Taking names
# There's a man going round... #
Davies nearly always frames
symmetrically.
I think it's due to Catholicism
and because when I was growing up
it was the Tridentine Mass
and the altar was there
and you were looking at it
like this.
I mean, it was literally like that
and everything in the...
in the church
tended to be like that, symmetrical.
And my great love is Vermeer,
and I'm sure that's had
a huge subconscious effect on me,
you know,
that stillness that you get,
that everything
tends to be symmetrical
and beautifully composed.
There's the most wonderful
stillness about it.
Davies' love of
the slow forward tracking shot
comes from this moment
in 'Intolerance'.
And they literally built a crane
and they haul the camera
up this crane
and you see it come up like this
and these elephants and all these
people going up these steps.
Absolutely breathtaking.
If you are feeling exactly the same
at the beginning
and the end of the track,
you're using your track incorrectly.
You've got to feel different
towards the subject.
And another influence on Davies
was this crane shot
in the Hollywood musical
'Young at Heart'
A main character seems to have
killed himself,
a painful moment in the story.
But the camera glides
beautifully into a perfect world.
And Davies uses this combination
of beauty and pain
in 'Distant Voices, Still Lives'.
His youth was often painful.
He lines it up
and re-enters it through cinema.
# Going round taking names... #
In doing so, he makes it beautiful
and so transcends the pain.
# Oh, Death is that man... #
A wholly cinematic way
of speaking truth to power.
# ..taking names
# Oh, Death is that man
taking names
# He has taken... #
And then look at this movie by the
Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway.
Like Terence Davies,
Greenaway likes his frames
to be perfectly symmetrical.
Like this small piece of gristle
that separates the nostrils.
But here he takes symmetry
much further.
Why do we have to have two nostrils?
Why do we have to have
two of everything?
Symmetry is all.
We're twins.
The two chairs and lamps balance.
The woman's hair is echoed
by the gilt mirror.
Everything is symmetrical
except that the woman
has only one leg.
Doesn't mean I have to be surprised.
And so, like the director himself,
she wants to make the scene,
her world, symmetrical,
so she has the other leg cut off.
Greenaway analysed imagery more than
any other British director.
He says that the story of film
is only just beginning.
If British cinema of the '80s
was a brilliant tempest,
its god of thunder was Derek Jarman.
A man walks through a bleak,
ruined landscape.
It's like we're in an Italian rubble
movie after World War Two.
This is intercut, fast, '80s style,
with men with machine guns,
and Morris dancers,
a symbol of genteel village England.
It's like there's been
an ideological storm.
(MAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
Jarman's rage and values
could not be clearer.
Here a male dancer is intercut
with a wreath
to remember the war dead
of the British Empire...
..and with a fire
and we hear a Nazi speech.
Video editing meets
Leni Riefenstahl,
meets Kenneth Anger's imagery
of magic and dance and frenzy.
'The Last of England' was
a thunderbolt in '80s cinema.
It's hard to imagine a greater
provocation to the Establishment.
As was this film, 'Videodrome'.
A man's watching TV alone
late at night,
half switched off, half turned on.
The TV throbs.
WOMAN: I want you, Max.
You.
Come on.
Come on.
The idea that a machine
can be sensual,
something that we can kiss,
have sex with.
Writer/director David Cronenberg
is foreseeing the sexualisation
of our solitary relationships
with screens.
Please.
Cronenberg continued to be
fascinated by the boundary
between hard and soft,
skin and metal in modern life.
Never more so than in this
scene from his film 'Crash'.
A car showroom as an erotic place.
Almost whispered dialogue.
I'm caught.
No outside traffic noise or music.
Gleaming metal.
Pacing like velvet.
Rosanna Arquette's hair the same
colour as the leather upholstery.
Cronenberg's using a novel
by J.G. Ballard
to tell modern, liberal society
that we're all more down and dirty
than we pretend.
Canadian directors
have been particularly good
at blasting hypocrisy.
Norman McLaren won an Oscar for this
astonishing stop-frame animation
in which two neighbours fight over
a single flower in their garden.
He used an innovative
electronic score,
a white picket fence,
symbol of suburbia.
Painter Pablo Picasso called it
the best film ever made.
And in French-speaking Canada
the decade ended
with this brilliant assault
on hypocrisy and '80s consensus.
A group of actors stages
a passion play as a promenade,
where the audience
walks to follow the action.
The brutalisation of Christ
is very real,
but the actors describing
historical crucifixions
do so coolly,
like a textbook almost.
And they make the audience
feel uncomfortable
by pointing out their voyeurism.
'Jesus of Montreal',
like the best films of the '80s,
again speaks truth to power.
This time, the power is us,
the audience.
It and Cronenberg's films
tell us that we lie to ourselves
about our bodies, our sex,
our values.
The bravery of the best '80s films
was exciting.
And then came the '90s,
the era of digital and the internet,
when reality started
to lose its realness,
but cinema entered
another golden age.
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 is 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 The Story Of Film -
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter, we discover
a new generation of Chinese films
and David Lynch's movie,
'Blue Velvet'.
(CAMERAS CLICK)
The 1980s. Greed is good.
Thatcher and Reagan
are in power in the West.
Around the world,
conservative ideologues
tell false stories
about life and love.
The most innovative filmmakers
speak back at these falsehoods.
This is their story,
the story of '80s protest.
The story of speaking truth
to power in the '80s starts here.
China.
Probably the most interesting place
on earth at the time.
China looked like this in the '80s.
But it looked like this too.
There was a new openness in China.
It was debating
where it stood in the world,
how modern and democratic
it wanted to be.
Standing up
to the old Maoist repressions.
The fervent was thrilling
and moving.
And out of it came the greatest
rebirth in filmmaking
of the whole decade.
Mao's Cultural Revolution
had stamped out the fire
of moviemaking in China
and closed its legendary film
school, the Beijing Film Academy.
Director Tian Zhuangzhuang.
The so-called 5th Generation
who graduated from it in 1982
would be the most distinguished ever
to spill out of a film school.
They made some of the best films
of the '80s.
Tian's film 'The Horse Thief'
spoke truth to power
because it focused on
a very un-Maoist subject.
We're at a traditional burial.
A horse thief's young son has died.
Tian films Buddhist monks
in subtle slow motion.
And these vultures
who eat the corpse,
a horrifying idea to Westerners,
but a sacred sky burial
for the horse thief and his family.
Tian was interested in the mystical
traditions of his characters,
themes that were banned under Mao.
The themes of Sergei Parajanov
in the Ukraine.
Having eaten the body, the vultures
take its spirit into the sky.
And Tian's films looked different.
He framed like this
and treated colour like this.
Martin Scorsese called 'The Horse
Thief' the best film of the decade.
Whereas Maoist films were about
patriotic and exemplary types,
the 5th Generation
were challenging their time
by making movies about
individual psychology.
(MAN SINGS IN DISTANCE)
The greatest village film made
in China in the '80s was this one,
'Yellow Earth'.
Again, we're far away
from modernity and big cities.
Static shots, a sense of the scale
of the landscape,
muted yellows and greens.
(SINGING CONTINUES)
Communist soldiers
collecting folk songs.
He writes the ones he hears
here in this notebook.
Then the soldier meets
this 14-year-old girl
and the film becomes about her
gentle, but confident femininity.
She's sewing.
Her head's downturned.
The frame's static.
She questions the soldier,
but doesn't look at him.
Women in Maoist cinema were supposed
to be strutting and heroic.
Director Chen Kaige
and cinematographer Zhang Yimou,
who had himself become
a successful director,
framed the imagery
like Chinese painting.
Instead of being here,
the horizon would be here...
..or here.
Male and female stood together
in 'Yellow Earth's'
remarkably framed landscapes.
The film wasn't Maoist because
it had little action or conflict.
But nor was it traditionally male
and Confucian.
The girl wants to join the army,
to strike out at life
rather than to stay home.
Instead,
it used emptiness within the frame
as a compositional element,
and saw maleness within femaleness
and good within bad...
..ideas more associated with another
great Asian philosophy, Taoism.
All this was deeply challenging.
The legacy of Chinese film
of the '80s was complex.
Tian worked consistently until 1993
when his film about the Cultural
Revolution, 'The Blue Kite',
was banned, and he was forbidden
to work for nearly a decade.
'Yellow Earth's cinematographer,
Zhang Yimou, went on to direct
some of the most rigorously
beautiful movies of the '90s.
His film 'Raise the Red Lantern'
was boldly symmetrical
and had a striking
orange-red colour palette.
But even it didn't prepare us
for his mastery of digital cinema.
We're in a richly decorated
peony pavilion.
Zhang studied Chinese painting
and uses its ultra widescreen
compositions.
Slow motion and a gravity-defying
Buddhist sense
of the grace of movement.
A pictorial masterclass.
The imagery in Chinese cinema
was becoming as beautiful
as anywhere in the world.
All that was in the future.
But back in the '80s, five years
after the release of 'Yellow Earth',
the sun went down
on China's moving and exciting
decade of self-discovery.
Thousands of pro-democracy
protesters
were killed by their own
government in Tiananmen Square.
One of the greatest images ever
of speaking truth to power.
In another Communist sphere,
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
in the '80s,
the powerful Communist authorities
were starting to lose their grip.
Life was tough,
but people persevered
and society began to open up.
Filmmakers told stories
about taboo subjects.
The resulting movies literally
changed the world in some cases
and are some of the most
troubling films ever made.
This film, 'Repentance',
created a sensation.
It tells, in an almost comic book
manner, of this dictator.
He has a Hitler moustache,
but, like Stalin, is Georgian.
A woman imagines
that she and her man are buried -
an echo of this much earlier
Soviet film, 'Arsenal'.
A haunting static shot
of a smiling, dead soldier.
The Stalin-like dictator
eventually dies
but, astonishingly,
a woman digs up his body
and stands it here,
in the garden
of his morally corrupt son.
The corpse looks unremarkable,
like it's just relaxing
against a tree.
Director Abuladze had it filmed
from far away, in daylight.
A symbol, of course, of the fact
that atrocity cannot be buried...
..that the Stalinist genocide
stinks of death.
The president of Georgia
and the new modernising boss
of the Soviet Union in the '80s ,
Mikhail Gorbachev, saw the
film and approved it for release.
It was seen by millions
and helped spark Glasnost,
the period of new openness
in the Soviet Union.
A rare example of film
actually changing the world.
'Repentance' was premiered here,
the film union building, Dom Kino,
in Moscow.
As was this astonishing Soviet film
from the mid '80s, 'Come and See'.
We're in Belorussia in 1943.
(HIGH-PITCHED WHISTLING)
(PANTING)
Nazi bombs have just exploded.
Into the frame
comes the teenage boy of the story.
He's fighting the Nazis.
The camera moves up a bit,
to adult height.
The boy seems to get smaller
because of the wide-angle lens.
The peak of his cap
seems to reach out to us.
The bomb has given him tinnitus.
Whistle. Roar.
He meets a girl.
They go to his village.
He can't find his family.
They run to look for them.
Then the girl looks back
and sees them.
He doesn't.
The wide-angle camera tracking them,
as if it's the awful thing
she's just seen.
In their flight,
they come across this bog.
(WALTZ MUSIC PLAYS OVER TENSE DRONE)
This is acting
at the limit of endurance.
The roar of fear.
We hardly hear their screams.
The absurdity of a Viennese
waltz on the soundtrack.
No film is more physical.
Another Soviet film
about a near burial.
'Come and See's
acting, sound design,
staring, wide-angle camerawork
and moral seriousness
made it the greatest
war film ever made.
The director of 'Come and See',
Elem Klimov,
became head of the Soviet Film Union
in the '80s.
In this very room
in the Union Building
he and politicians
discussed censorship,
the digging up of the past
and films that had been banned
because they were anti-Soviet,
because they spoke truths
other than the sanctioned ones.
One such film was this one,
'Long Goodbyes',
directed by the brilliant
Kira Muratova.
We see a middle-aged woman.
Cut to a train.
Looking outside first,
then zoom out to show that
the mother is talking to her son.
Jump cut. He's trying to sleep.
She talks.
(STRANGE SINGING AND PIANO
OVER DIALOGUE)
The strange high-pitched voice
on the soundtrack.
No sound of the train itself.
Throughout the film,
Muratova has the mother and son
look away from each other.
She nags him. The music erupts.
Match cut to a man. Then to the son.
Strange jump cut on his hands.
The man's been replaced
by an older man.
More splintered cuts
from different angles.
Then we're outside the train
and then we seem to be
in an aeroplane.
What was all this about?
This earlier scene helps us see.
The mum and son again.
Not looking at each other again.
Filmed in long lens again,
a lens so long
that the space seems paper thin.
Muratova's theme here was the way
people can suffocate each other.
Soviet films of the '70s and '80s
were supposed to be
about social themes
but this one's about
psychological bondage.
They couldn't accuse Muratova
of being anti-Soviet
but the archives say
that the authorities were
"terribly unnerved by the form"
of this film.
And so, like the films of Sergei
Parajanov, whom Muratova adored,
'Long Goodbyes' was banned.
Maybe they thought
Muratova's long lenses
and almost hidden camera positions
were commenting
on Soviet surveillance.
Whatever, one official wrote,
"How can you allow such an outrage?"
Written in chalk on the film's
canister was, "Not to be given out."
But back in this smoke-filled room
in the late '80s,
a decade after it was made,
Muratova's beautiful film
was unbanned and released
to acclaim.
It had come back from the dead
to speak a truth to power.
She's one of
the most underrated directors
in the whole story of film.
By the '80s, large chunks of
the Eastern bloc looked like this.
But what if you did this to it?
And what if you shifted
its colour to this?
These are the questions
that the Polish director
Krzysztof Kieslowski asked.
His answers were about
love and death.
Meet Jacek, this 20-year-old
in an '80s Polish city.
Kieslowski pictures him
in yellow-green imagery.
The shots are hooded. Jaundiced.
He sees a rock.
He decides to do harm with the rock.
If he can do this,
he can do anything.
(CRASH!)
This makes us scared of him,
an old Hitchcock trick.
What'll he do next?
This is what he does next.
He gets in a taxi.
He's going to kill the taxidriver,
but the driver doesn't know this.
He stops to let kids cross the road.
An echo of the scene
in Hitchcock's 'Psycho'
where Janet Leigh,
who doesn't know she's about to die,
lets people cross the road.
But where Hitchcock's film
was fear as entertainment
Kieslowski's film is about
the dirt and sickness of fear.
Jacek strangles the man.
We see the man's foot
come out of his sock.
He takes forever to die.
The scene lasts
three minutes 45 seconds.
35 shots.
Real time.
(CAR HORN BLARES)
The man's saliva.
The masking of the imagery
is so heavy
that at times
it looks like night.
The man's false teeth.
The murder reduced to a sock,
spit and dentures.
Extraordinary innovation.
Then we jump a year and Jacek's
sentenced to death for his crime.
Green light
and hooded imagery again.
The ugly fury of death.
He's gone in a moment...
..and then the shit
drips from his body.
Only at the end in this starburst
after Jacek has died
is the light white.
'A Short Film About Killing'
has used physical things to rage
against the dying of the light,
literally, because
the greenness and masking
make it look like
the light of the world is dying.
'A Short Film About Killing'
has to be seen to be believed.
It changed the death penalty
in Poland.
Talking truth to power, indeed.
African cinema in the '80s
was not undergoing such dark days
as the films of Eastern Europe.
Although some African countries were
forced to mortgage their economies
to the International Monetary Fund,
innovation in African movies soared.
In the '70s, African films
had been about society,
the here and now,
the immediate post-colonial world.
But in the '80s, directors started
to look beyond the present tense,
to the horizon, the past,
before colonialisation.
A rethink of what
African cinema was for.
This man, Gaston Kabore,
did this brilliantly.
His movie, 'Wend Kuuni',
was one of the first films to do so.
A landmark in African cinema.
This orphan boy called Wend Kuuni,
which means "gift from God",
has been found in the bush.
He doesn't speak. He herds goats.
Director Kabore's camera
follows him from a distance
and frames him alone,
outside the village.
Then we get a flashback to a time
when his mum was still alive.
The boy's sick,
they're under a tree in the shade.
Then Kabore makes the time line
of his film more complex.
KABORE: I put in, when Kuuni...
a flashback inside another flashback
and I did it without questioning
myself and it worked.
Here, the mother has
her own flashback to her husband,
a flashback within a flashback.
You see how aesthetic
could be invented
just because an artist is doing
what he feels or she feels
to be good for the story
he or she is telling.
Then we return
to the first flashback,
the boy's memory of his mum,
and soon afterwards we get back
to the present tense.
I believe in mixed instinct
in art.
I believe in, uh...
..in, uh...audacity,
you know, in art.
And Africa has a tremendous treasure
of stories,
tales, mythology, legends.
We need that
because it's the food of the soul.
Kabore's film speaks truth
to the past, you could say.
But then came another African film
about the past, the Dreamtime.
In this film, 'Yeelen',
which means "brightness",
this man, Niankoro,
has been tracking down
his sorcerer father.
Director Souleymane Cisse
tracks around Niankoro,
like in a Sergio Leone shoot-out.
Niankoro has to destroy his father,
so he's in tears.
He faces him.
(LOW, RUMBLING DRONE)
A water buffalo in slow motion
and a sci-fi roar on the soundtrack.
Cisse tracks up to
Niankoro's stony look.
Then his father becomes
a mythic elephant...
..and Niankoro is a lion.
And then mystical rods
seem to channel
the brightness of the cosmos.
'Yeelen' is as big
as 'Lawrence of Arabia',
as shape-shifting as
'2001: A Space Odyssey',
a magic realist film
and one of cinema's
most complex works of art.
In America in the '80s,
if power was anywhere,
it was here on Wall Street.
Greed was good here.
Money gushed through this canyon
like a torrent.
This man, Ronald Reagan,
America's president,
said that the money would
trickle down to places like this.
But it didn't.
A new television channel,
Music Television,
broadcast its first music video,
this one, in 1981.
SONG:
# Video killed the radio star... #
The song was about video.
The imagery
used screens within screens,
pink light,
fast editing and stepped cuts.
All these things
became part of the language
of popular imagery around the world.
SONG: # She's a maniac,
maniac on the floor
# And she's dancing
like she's never danced before... #
A scene like this shows
how music video influenced film.
The editing's fast,
the angles are numerous and sexy.
The music is the only thing
in the soundtrack.
We don't hear her feet, for example,
and the scene has no story element.
It's pure impressionism.
But '80s America was mostly
a male Reaganite dreamland.
This film was part of the dreamland.
Rich colour.
A roller-coaster in the sky.
Close-ups of pilots
like those in 'Star Wars'.
Tom Cruise is flying
over the Persian Gulf.
He encounters Russian MiG pilots,
so flies upside down, this close,
and gives them the finger.
Greetings. (LAUGHS)
Watch the birdie.
Jeez, I crack myself up.
Pure Cold War male fantasy.
It's a big one, Goose.
Many of the shots last
just two or three seconds,
the cutting rate
of pop promos and adverts.
Edited on computers.
Scenes could be moved around,
shortened, lengthened and reviewed
in computer edit suites in seconds.
An advert for the new masculinity,
the new America,
the new cinema, the new dreaming.
No American dream was more potent
than this one.
SONG: # Blue velvet, whoa, whoa... #
We float into David Lynch's
'Blue Velvet',
like a spaceship landing on earth.
We're in an idealised
American small town,
the sort of place where
firemen wave as they pass.
# Bluer than velvet was the night
# Whoa, whoa, whoa... #
White picket fence,
children go to school
in slow motion,
# From the stars
# She wore blue... #
But Lynch's velvety textures
usually give way
to something more fearful.
He took us to the dark world
of Victorian London
in 'The Elephant Man', for example,
and tracked into a close-up
of a doctor
who's sympathetic to John Merrick,
just as the actor, Anthony Hopkins,
drops a tear.
Luck and beautiful craftsmanship.
But the movie shows us the
surrealism of Lynch's imagination.
As he filmed side-on the bulbous
growths on Merrick's skull,
here, for example,
he was reminded of
the explosions of smoke
from a recently erupted volcano,
Mount St Helens.
A deeply original visual rhyme.
Such connections take us
to the crux of Lynch.
His films protest against
the rationality and
understandability of everyday life.
He worked with unconscious material
the way that a carpenter
works with wood.
He says that the key scene
of any of his films,
the scene that often combines
the beauty of life with its terror,
is the "eye of the duck scene"
because, as he put it,
"when you look at a duck, the eye
is always in the right place."
(SINGS) # A candy-coloured
clown they call the sandman... #
The eye of the duck scene
in 'Blue Velvet' is this one.
# Just to sprinkle stardust
and to whisper
# Go to sleep, everything is alright
# I close my eyes
# Then I drift away
# Into the magic night... #
The beauty of Roy Orbison's song
combines with the intoxication
of Dennis Hopper's character...
# Oh, smile and pray
# Like dreamers do
# Then I fall asleep to dream... #
..as if that beauty hurts.
# My dreams of you... #
In dreams, indeed.
Like Ronald Reagan,
David Lynch had an almost
abstract fear of the outside world.
But he didn't try to push
that fear away.
He stared at it
through a brilliant frame.
Lynch said that as people get older,
their window on the world closes.
This is what was happening
to his country in the '80s
and its cinema.
After David Lynch,
the second great American director
to emerge in the '80s was Spike Lee.
He thumbed his nose at white America
and bourgeois blackness
and was inventive with movie form.
Take his film 'Do The Right Thing',
which was shot
on this block in Brooklyn.
It's set on a single, sweltering day
and builds like a pressure cooker
as tensions between
local blacks, Latinos and whites
are sparked by events at a pizzeria.
Lee and his cinematographer,
Ernest Dickerson,
use heightened colours
to match the film's boiling themes.
Hey!
They filmed
with tilted camera angles
to render things off-kilter...
Move on. You're blockin' my view.
You are ugly enough.
Don't stare at me!
The evil eye doesn't work on me.
Mother Sister...
..a technique borrowed from
one of Lee's favourite films,
'The Third Man',
in which the non-horizontal camera
was used
to show the imbalance
of the world of the story.
Lee himself plays the character
Mookie in the film's climax,
the most striking moment of protest
in '80s American cinema.
Again, saturated colour,
Lee picks up a trash can.
The camera tracks with him.
Hey!
Then it rushes with the can
as Lee throws it
through the window of the pizzeria.
At the end, Lee pairs a quotation
from Martin Luther King
denouncing violence
with one from Malcolm X
advocating it in self-defence.
David Lynch and Spike Lee
were high-water marks
in the otherwise low tide
of American cinema in the '80s.
Neither, however,
spoke the truth about modern life
and helped create the radical
independent film movement
in America in the '80s
as much as this man and woman,
writer/director John Sayles
and producer Maggie Renzi.
They used a road less travelled
to get their movies made,
and became America's
State of the Nation filmmakers.
When we started we really had
no idea of the future.
Yeah, that there
was any place for us.
We didn't really analyse it
a whole lot.
No.
We just started making stories.
We probably knew by that time,
that, like, Lucas and Spielberg
had gone to film school,
but they belonged to Hollywood
which was a place
that we never thought
we'd have anything to do with,
although, John had started
writing for Hollywood,
so there you were
on the periphery of it,
but there was no expectation
that we were building a career
when we made
'Return of the Secaucus Seven'.
It was about the reunion of a group
of college friends,
ten years after they'd been arrested
on their way
to an anti-war demonstration.
The film felt truthful because it
wasn't edited in a flashy, MTV way.
The camera patiently observed
intelligent, adult conversations
about politics.
I mean, fighting
for what you believe in.
No offence, but your senator is just
fighting to keep his job
and his house on Martha's Vineyard.
Do you know that?
Do you really know that?
Have you looked at his record?
Alright, how did he stand
on the Canal Treaty?
Wait a minute.
SAYLES:
When we started making movies
one of the things
that I was always interested in
was what do I see
in life around me
that I don't see on a big screen?
When I started working
for the studios
a lot of those
were more heroic movies
um...and I was aware of, you know,
that's movie moviemaking, you know?
And there's the hero
and the girl and the best friend
and everybody else is an extra.
Whereas the stories
I was interested in,
and I came out of
being a novelist...
..on screen
the characters were more complex
and they weren't absolutely heroic.
They might be the protagonist,
but, like your friends,
they might be somebody
you love and care about,
but they don't always act
in a noble way.
They don't always do
what you wish they would do.
I think from the beginning
the smartest thing that we did
is decide to make the movies
in our own way.
That meant casting them
in our own way
and having complete creative control
over the way we made them
and that includes non-hierarchical
and not luxurious.
It was like Hollywood was only there
to see if John could get
screenwriting work.
I have less and less respect
for them.
I think they don't even do
what they do very well anymore.
They spend much too much money.
They've lost whole, huge sections
of the marketplace.
I was talking before
about the adult audience.
It takes them, you know,
nine writers
to come up with a script that's
no better than the first version.
I used to be afraid of them
and intimidated by them
and now I realise they don't
do their jobs very well.
And that's one reason
why the dinosaur is dying.
And now you're older than them.
And now I'm older.
Now I could be their mother,
heaven forfend.
Our movies do require
paying attention, taking time,
engaging with characters
and because of that,
I mean, the legacy's good.
It's tough...tough to get
the money for what we do,
but when I meet the audience
I'm always glad
that we have never changed that.
Yeah, and most, you know,
mainstream filmmakers that we know
who work within the studio system
haven't done much better
than we have
as far as the number of movies
they've gotten to make
and getting to make
their dream projects or whatever
and they're much more likely
to end up saying,
"Oh, you should have seen my cut",
you know,
which we've never had to do.
Sayles and Renzi
were the standard-bearers
for new independent
American film.
Much of the do-it-yourself
and political cinema of the '90s
derives from their approach.
In France in the '80s,
movies seemed to want to kick
the protest films
of Sayles and Renzi in the teeth.
Influenced by advertising,
cinema became shining again.
French philosophy
had become interested
in popular culture
and postmodernism.
This was a protest too.
A reaction against seriousness.
Into all this sped
Luc Besson's 'Subway'.
Besson had excelled in pop promos
and had lived in America.
A rollerskater's snatched a handbag,
his flight from the cops
filmed like a car chase on skates,
the flow of action,
the camera in his point of view,
wide-angle shots
to make the space deeper.
The best new French director
of the '80s, Leos Carax,
combined the visual hyperactivity
of Besson
with a punky sense of outrage
at modern life.
We're on the Pont Neuf in the grand
centre of Paris, the city of light.
Fireworks, Public Enemy plays,
Juliette Binoche.
This could be a modern dance
about high-class people,
but, in fact,
these characters are homeless.
They sleep rough on the bridge.
She's going blind.
He's a drunk.
Around this gritty truth
about modern life,
Carax built his gigantic film,
the most expensive
ever made in Paris.
He had the entire bridge
rebuilt as a set,
a folie de grandeur,
with sweeping camera moves,
glossy and wasteful
in a glossy, wasteful age.
The plight of homelessness
was treated with the exact same
style as this Hollywood musical.
Grand studio sets of Paris,
modern dance.
Colour splashed across the screen.
Romantic ecstasy and agony.
Sashay down to Spain in the '80s
and you find that protest had
had a sex change.
On the left is Pedro Almodovar
Camp,
a touch of goth in his eyeliner
and purple, drawn-on sideburns.
Purple '80s lighting.
Dictator Franco had died.
Madrid's underground culture
was transgressive, anarchic.
And to this,
Almodovar lobbed in a dash
of the stylistic antics
of this Beatles film.
He loved its celebration
of pop music,
camera work that makes you feel
you're there,
its youthful surface.
A scene like this
was so provocative.
It's a porn shoot, which
conservative Spain would have hated.
But the porn star is male,
even more of a no-no,
and it's making fun of the so-called
"driller killer" video nasty.
And the porn star's wearing fur
and the colour's bright
and the style's cheap, not classy.
Almodovar's signature
was the comic grotesque.
He challenged old-fashioned Spain
with sex and style.
And in complete contrast,
to see the range of Spanish cinema
after Franco, look at this film -
'The Quince Tree Sun',
directed by Victor Erice.
A man has been painting
this quince tree for weeks.
He painted a line on the fruit,
then drew a line on the canvas
to get the fruit's position
exactly right.
But then,
the fruit tree drooped a bit,
so he painted another line
and another.
Erice uses no camera moves.
Natural light and a gentle pace
to capture the passing of time
and the delicacy of the moment.
Spain under Franco
was all about lies.
'The Quince Tree Sun'
was a return to the truth.
A national detox.
Where politics softened
in Spain in the '80s,
here in Britain they hardened.
A right-wing government
brought protesters to the streets.
The government's view was that
culture should reassure and bolster
a traditional sense
of national pride.
But the best filmmakers kicked back
or focused on other identities.
We're in London.
A high-level shot like a musical.
A middle-class
Pakistani businessman
is reopening his laundrette.
The right-wing government
liked entrepreneurs.
Immigrants, less so.
And you're tired of work.
He dances with this white woman.
A sadhu of south London.
Yes.
But the film lobbed in
more provocations.
In the back room, the entrepreneur's
nephew's having sex.
With a bloke. A white bloke.
The guy dribbles champagne, the
drink of '80s nouveau riche yuppies,
into the mouth of the nephew.
Gay, mixed race sex.
Oh, and the white bloke's
a neo-Nazi.
A waltz of multi-cultural Britain.
'My Beautiful Laundrette'
was a knee in the balls
to the right-wing government.
As much of a provocation as Bunuel's
films were in Franco's Spain.
Shit!
Far more serious but equally bold
was this Scottish film.
This boy, wee Jamie, is being
brought up in poverty by his granny.
She sits at the fire,
keeps her back to him.
He's always behind her here
in the cold, watching.
This shot's exactly
from Jamie's point of view
under the table.
We see the top of it in the image.
The granny sits down as usual,
ignoring Jamie.
But then, unusually,
she takes a swig of beer.
The beer seems to warm her heart...
..because she reaches back
into Jamie's space.
As director Bill Douglas had
rigorously filmed the spaces,
we know how unusual this reach is.
Who's the best boy
in all the wide world?
A simple scene, but one of the great
moments of reconciliation in cinema.
Who is it, my darling?
Another Scottish filmmaker,
Bill Forsyth,
looked at working-class life too,
but he was more romantic.
I mean, I could just sit in a hole
and look at a housing estate
and listen to the ice-cream van,
you know,
for quite a long while, you know.
That would fill me
with good feelings.
Do you want to dance?
It's really good.
You just lie flat down and dance.
I'll show you want I mean.
I'll start it off
and you just join in
when you feel confident enough.
OK?
Forsyth's movie 'Gregory's Girl'
looked at young people
and the ordinary places
where they fall in love.
For most of the film,
the camera's horizontal, as normal,
but then he has it tilted,
a touch of poetry.
We are clinging to the surface
of this planet
while it spins through space
at a thousand miles an hour,
held only by the mystery force
called gravity.
Wow.
A lot of people panic
when you tell them that
and they just fall off.
But I see you're not falling off.
That means you've got
the hang of it.
You know, people in a landscape,
I don't mean that in a visual way,
but just someone
finding themselves somewhere
in that moment of,
you know, apprehension
that you're here
and this is where you are.
It's a difficult moment to describe,
but it's a moment that
is very, very cinematic for me.
This man, Terence Davies, made the
greatest British film of the '80s,
'Distant Voices, Still Lives'.
We're in Davies' own childhood,
Liverpool in the 1950s.
A family home
terrorised by a brutal father.
We see his mum in the present
and then hear the kids in the past.
We're flashed backwards in time
without a cut.
So this image is a memory image.
Tony, are those two sisters
of yours up yet?
Yeah. They're just coming down.
(FOOTSTEPS)
Oh, hiya, Mum.
Morning, Maisie.
Morning, Mum.
Morning, Eileen.
Nervous, love?
A bit.
Have a cuppa and a ciggie.
(SINGS) # I get the blues
# When it's raining
# The blues I can't lose
when it rains
# Now each little raindrop... #
Davies' camera tracks down
the hallway.
# ..falls on my windowpane
# Reminds me of the tears I shed
# The tears were all in vain
# So I sit and wait
for the sun to shine
# To shine all my blues away
# It rained when I met you
# And it rained when I lost you
# So I get the blues
when it rains... #
One of Davies' signatures
is the very slow dissolve.
(WOMAN SINGS)
# There's a man going round
# Taking names
# There's a man going round... #
Davies nearly always frames
symmetrically.
I think it's due to Catholicism
and because when I was growing up
it was the Tridentine Mass
and the altar was there
and you were looking at it
like this.
I mean, it was literally like that
and everything in the...
in the church
tended to be like that, symmetrical.
And my great love is Vermeer,
and I'm sure that's had
a huge subconscious effect on me,
you know,
that stillness that you get,
that everything
tends to be symmetrical
and beautifully composed.
There's the most wonderful
stillness about it.
Davies' love of
the slow forward tracking shot
comes from this moment
in 'Intolerance'.
And they literally built a crane
and they haul the camera
up this crane
and you see it come up like this
and these elephants and all these
people going up these steps.
Absolutely breathtaking.
If you are feeling exactly the same
at the beginning
and the end of the track,
you're using your track incorrectly.
You've got to feel different
towards the subject.
And another influence on Davies
was this crane shot
in the Hollywood musical
'Young at Heart'
A main character seems to have
killed himself,
a painful moment in the story.
But the camera glides
beautifully into a perfect world.
And Davies uses this combination
of beauty and pain
in 'Distant Voices, Still Lives'.
His youth was often painful.
He lines it up
and re-enters it through cinema.
# Going round taking names... #
In doing so, he makes it beautiful
and so transcends the pain.
# Oh, Death is that man... #
A wholly cinematic way
of speaking truth to power.
# ..taking names
# Oh, Death is that man
taking names
# He has taken... #
And then look at this movie by the
Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway.
Like Terence Davies,
Greenaway likes his frames
to be perfectly symmetrical.
Like this small piece of gristle
that separates the nostrils.
But here he takes symmetry
much further.
Why do we have to have two nostrils?
Why do we have to have
two of everything?
Symmetry is all.
We're twins.
The two chairs and lamps balance.
The woman's hair is echoed
by the gilt mirror.
Everything is symmetrical
except that the woman
has only one leg.
Doesn't mean I have to be surprised.
And so, like the director himself,
she wants to make the scene,
her world, symmetrical,
so she has the other leg cut off.
Greenaway analysed imagery more than
any other British director.
He says that the story of film
is only just beginning.
If British cinema of the '80s
was a brilliant tempest,
its god of thunder was Derek Jarman.
A man walks through a bleak,
ruined landscape.
It's like we're in an Italian rubble
movie after World War Two.
This is intercut, fast, '80s style,
with men with machine guns,
and Morris dancers,
a symbol of genteel village England.
It's like there's been
an ideological storm.
(MAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
Jarman's rage and values
could not be clearer.
Here a male dancer is intercut
with a wreath
to remember the war dead
of the British Empire...
..and with a fire
and we hear a Nazi speech.
Video editing meets
Leni Riefenstahl,
meets Kenneth Anger's imagery
of magic and dance and frenzy.
'The Last of England' was
a thunderbolt in '80s cinema.
It's hard to imagine a greater
provocation to the Establishment.
As was this film, 'Videodrome'.
A man's watching TV alone
late at night,
half switched off, half turned on.
The TV throbs.
WOMAN: I want you, Max.
You.
Come on.
Come on.
The idea that a machine
can be sensual,
something that we can kiss,
have sex with.
Writer/director David Cronenberg
is foreseeing the sexualisation
of our solitary relationships
with screens.
Please.
Cronenberg continued to be
fascinated by the boundary
between hard and soft,
skin and metal in modern life.
Never more so than in this
scene from his film 'Crash'.
A car showroom as an erotic place.
Almost whispered dialogue.
I'm caught.
No outside traffic noise or music.
Gleaming metal.
Pacing like velvet.
Rosanna Arquette's hair the same
colour as the leather upholstery.
Cronenberg's using a novel
by J.G. Ballard
to tell modern, liberal society
that we're all more down and dirty
than we pretend.
Canadian directors
have been particularly good
at blasting hypocrisy.
Norman McLaren won an Oscar for this
astonishing stop-frame animation
in which two neighbours fight over
a single flower in their garden.
He used an innovative
electronic score,
a white picket fence,
symbol of suburbia.
Painter Pablo Picasso called it
the best film ever made.
And in French-speaking Canada
the decade ended
with this brilliant assault
on hypocrisy and '80s consensus.
A group of actors stages
a passion play as a promenade,
where the audience
walks to follow the action.
The brutalisation of Christ
is very real,
but the actors describing
historical crucifixions
do so coolly,
like a textbook almost.
And they make the audience
feel uncomfortable
by pointing out their voyeurism.
'Jesus of Montreal',
like the best films of the '80s,
again speaks truth to power.
This time, the power is us,
the audience.
It and Cronenberg's films
tell us that we lie to ourselves
about our bodies, our sex,
our values.
The bravery of the best '80s films
was exciting.
And then came the '90s,
the era of digital and the internet,
when reality started
to lose its realness,
but cinema entered
another golden age.