The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 13 - Episode #1.13 - 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 multimillion-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 The Story of Film:
An Odyssey,

an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,

six continents and 1,000 films.

In this chapter, we discover

that in the days
before digital fantasy films,

directors had a final love affair
with real emotions

in movies like 'In the Mood
for Love' and Japanese horror.

This is the story
of the end of an era.

For 100 years, movies had been shot
on this, celluloid -

paper thin, shiny, perforated...



..a medium so sensitive

that it could capture
the subtle colours in snow.

But in the '90s, the digital image
and 'Terminator 2' came along

and reality got less real.

In these last days
before that happened,

as if to stave off the moment

when the link between reality
and the movies

would finally be broken,

filmmakers around the world made
passionate movies about emotions,

not spaceships or other worlds.

The story starts here in snowy Iran.

(GASPS AND LAUGHS)

Take this extraordinary film,
'The Apple', based on a true story.

A hand-held camera moves into
the enclosed world of this girl.

Her father thinks that the outside
world is so scary and dangerous

that he's done something remarkable
to her and her sister.

The film's director,
Samira Makhmalbaf.

(SPEAKS PERSIAN)

This is the scene where the girls
come blinking back

out into the real world.

They taste it. They're shy.

Makhmalbaf captures
the gentleness of the moment.

It's remarkable
that she didn't judge the parents

for doing this to the girls.

But what's even more remarkable

is that these aren't actors
playing the girls.

(MAN SPEAKS PERSIAN)

The girls and the dad
play themselves,

not in a straight documentary
about what happened,

but in a kind of self-role play
or re-enactment...

..a risk that worked

because the family found
the process therapeutic,

and the film feels like
an extraordinary intimate myth

about modern parental love
gone wrong.

(ALL SPEAK PERSIAN)

The real-life event
was so fertile, so moving,

that Makhmalbaf used film
to double back over it.

This doubling back, so that the real
experience can fertilise the film,

was unique to Iranian cinema
of this time.

This is Makhmalbaf's dad, Mohsen,
in exile from Iran in Paris.

He doubled back on reality too.

His film 'A Moment of Innocence'

is even more remarkable
than his daughter's.

In the early '90s, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
put an advert in a newspaper

asking for non-professionals
to come to a casting call.

Nothing unusual in that.

But one of the people who showed up

to audition for a part
in Makhmalbaf's film

was a policeman who Makhmalbaf
had stabbed way back in the '70s

when Makhmalbaf was a teenager
fighting the Shah's regime.

Makhmalbaf loved this.

He scrapped his planned film

and decided instead
to make one about the stabbing.

He recreated the events on camera

from his, the attacker's,
point of view,

and, even more unusually,
he asked the policeman,

who, of course,
had never made a film before,

to recreate them from his,
the victim's point of view.

Here's a scene from the film,
directed by the policeman,

who films himself - he's the taller
of the two guys here -

telling a young actor who is playing
him in the '70s how to behave.

The policeman films
in a panning shot from far away

and has cast quite a handsome actor
as his younger self.

Already he's trying to make what
happened a touch more glamorous.

(BOTH SPEAK PERSIAN)

Again, we have doubling back
on a found experience

to imbue it with extra intensity.

In this case, the doubling back

revealed something
unexpectedly moving.

In the days of the stabbing,

the policeman
was in love with a girl

and he thought
that she might love him back.

During the shooting of the film
20 years later,

the policeman discovered
to his dismay

that she was only pretending
to like him to distract him

because she was a revolutionary too
and in cahoots with Makhmalbaf.

Here's Makhmalbaf's
restaging of the moment

where the real policeman discovers
that the love was not real.

An actress playing
the girl walks quickly

with the actor playing
the young Makhmalbaf.

The real policeman has now seen that
she was with the young Makhmalbaf

and, upset,

he puts his hand in front of
the camera to stop the filming.

Cut!

He's carried a flame for her all
these years and it's just gone out.

Makhmalbaf ends this film
about life reworked exquisitely -

beautiful close-ups, haunting music.

The girl asks the policeman
the time.

Will he be stabbed?
Will he shoot her?

A moment of innocence.

Then Makhmalbaf improves
on what really happened in the '70s.

He offers "flowers for Africa", as
he put it, and "bread for the poor."

'A Moment of Innocence'
is the single greatest work

of autobiography in cinema.

It brilliantly shows

that not only fantasy films
like 'The Matrix' are fascinating.

But fasten your seat belts

because the story of reality
in the last days of celluloid

is about to get
even more complicated.

In the '90s, this Iranian filmmaker,
Abbas Kiarostami,

seemed to worship reality
in a way that few artists ever did.

He started by trying to reduce

all falseness from the process
of filmmaking.

(SPEAKS PERSIAN)

This film,
'Where is the Friend's House?',

is a triumphant result

of Kiarostami filming
like a football coach.

He selected a great young player,
actor Babak Ahmadpour,

put him in a world that he knew,

this ordinary courtyard house
in northern Iran,

kept the camera on the sidelines

and asked Babak to do scenes
he could understand.

Here he talks to his mother
about his homework book.

(SPEAKS PERSIAN)

(SPEAKS PERSIAN)

'Where is the Friend's House?'

was one of the greatest films
about childhood and friendship.

But then tragedy struck.

A terrible earthquake hit the region

where 'Where is the Friend's House?'
was filmed.

50,000 people died,
including 10,000 kids.

Kiarostami and his crew
drove there at once, in tears,

to look for Babak.

Instead, when they got there,
they found something else -

human resilience.

In looking for one thing,
they found another.

And so Kiarostami decided
to make a film about them

going to an earthquake zone
to look for the boy.

Reality doubling back
on itself again.

It was called 'And Life Goes On'.

(MEN SPEAK PERSIAN)

This man's playing Kiarostami.

In this shot
it was Kiarostami himself

who was behind the camera
talking to the man.

The second film's
mostly set in the car.

On the second shoot, Kiarostami
met a man called Hossein,

who had a passionate story
about life going on.

Hossein got married
just days after the earthquake.

Kiarostami loved this.

Here, in the second film,

using a static camera
and naturalistic dialogue,

Kiarostami depicts himself meeting
Hossein and hearing this story.

Whilst filming this small scene,
Hossein, despite being married,

became rather infatuated
with the woman playing his fiancee.

She, however,
did not return his feelings.

Kiarostami was fascinated by this.

His response to it
was unique in movie history.

Two years later,
he made this whole third film

about the feelings during Hossein's
small scene in the second film.

The same actors,
the camera's still static,

but it's further back this time.

(MEN SPEAK PERSIAN)

We see a director who's playing
the man who was playing Kiarostami.

Hossein goes upstairs
to try to woo the new woman.

An objective frontal shot...

..and then Kiarostami films
from her position

and then his point of view.

'Through the Olive Trees'
was about Hossein's infatuation

but also, you could say,
Kiarostami's love of his love

and how he tried to film it,

and how cinema can film
the complex layers of reality,

and how cameras can change lives.

This complex trilogy
about the circle of life and love

had started seven years earlier
with this reserved boy

filmed from the sidelines.

Seven years later,
filmed from a car,

Kiarostami's favourite way
of looking at the world,

Babak suddenly appears again,
taller, but still serious.

He was still alive after all.

A country that didn't invent cinema,

that wasn't rich enough
to have a major film industry,

a country whose religion, Islam,

was in some ways
suspicious of imagery,

was, in the last days of celluloid,

using film devotionally,
as if it's sacred,

as if what it films is sacred.

One critic said, "We're living
in the era of Kiarostami."

Just as
'The Lord of the Rings' movies

were coming at us
like an express train,

Kiarostami's love of simple reality
captured the spirit of his times.

Far away from
the snowy north of Iran,

film was also being used
to transfigure,

to focus on real people,
not Hobbits or virtual reality.

So far in The Story of Film,

Hong Kong has been associated
with the action movies of Bruce Lee

and what came after.

But one team of Hong Kong
new-wave filmmakers

made films with such
an intoxicating look and texture

that they seemed to be celebrating
the sheen of celluloid itself

and the romantic melancholia
of real life.

(BOTH SPEAK ASIAN LANGUAGE)

To watch even a few frames
of 'Days of Being Wild',

the first distinctive film
of Wong Kar Wai,

his designer, editor muse,
William Chang,

and their cinematographer,
Chris Doyle,

is to notice the soft shadowing and
shallow focus and gorgeous colours,

the beauty of
the sad, lonely people.

Wong trained as a graphic designer.

He found the martial arts films
of the Shaw Brothers

too bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

Young people were sadder than that.

Fluorescent light, saturated colour,

and the landscape of faces,

together create the beauty
of the Wong world.

To travel around Hong Kong today

is to feel Wong's sense of time
and colour and composition.

Time drags its heels.

This exquisite film,
'In the Mood for Love',

sums up the night-time celluloid
vision of Wong's team.

Time is slowed down.
A woman slaloms past a man.

He glances.
We're in Hong Kong in 1962.

Music in 3/4 time.

Suddenly it rains like in a movie.

Steam and rain.

We feel the sultry heat.

The man and the woman
are in separate marriages

but are unhappy, lonely.

Heads lowered.

They're in the mood for love.

As in the films of Rainer Werner
Fassbinder and Terence Davies,

hope has left the building,

so rapture has migrated
into the imagery and sound.

Maggie Cheung and Wong's team

had created one of the most striking
personas in world cinema.

Soon Cheung was playing
a silent movie icon in France.

In a telling comment
on what directors
sometimes do to actors,

the director Olivier Assayas

literally scribbled
on the celluloid.

And in neighbouring Taiwan,

moviemakers seemed haunted
by slow photographic truths

and real, not fantasy, worlds too.

Bernardo Bertolucci said that this
Taiwanese director, Tsai Ming-liang,

reinvented film language.

Tsai's influenced
by Taiwanese history.

(SPEAKS ASIAN LANGUAGE)

Along with Edward Yang,
Hou Hsiao-hsien used film

to stare intensely
at Taiwanese society.

This is his movie 'City of Sadness'.

It's the late 1940s,

an uneasy moment of stasis
in Taiwan's turbulent history.

Hou captures this stasis
by using long static shots.

They average more than
40 seconds each.

Hou said that holding a long shot
has a certain kind of tension.

The pleasure and intellectual
distinction of Hou's films

lies in their rigour.

Take this scene, for example.

One of the brothers in the story
is treated in a local hospital.

The story takes us back
to the hospital several times.

An ordinary director might want
to vary the shots on each return

but Hou shoots from
the exact same camera angle -

reality doubling back
on itself again.

(LOUD HUBBUB)

Not a reverse angle
or alternative shot.

If 'City of Sadness'
is about national recall,

Hou seems to suggest that we
remember places in just one way.

Hou Hsiao-hsien revered
the other master of spatial rigour,

Yasujiro Ozu -

his frames within frames,
square-on imagery, no camera moves.

Like Ozu, Hou seldom uses
big close-ups.

Space in Hou is not something
to move through at speed

as it was for most '80s directors
and later films like 'The Matrix'.

This makes Hou the great classicist
of cinema's modern era.

Hou's bold seriousness
paved the way for Tsai.

Tsai's second film, 'Vive L'Amour',

is about the loneliness of life
in modern cities.

At its end, a young woman
walks to a park bench and cries.

We don't know exactly why.

Waves of emotion cross her face
as the sun comes out,

Tsai's camera remains static...

(SOBS LOUDLY)

..a scene that's the opposite of
fantasy cinema like 'Terminator 2'.

Tsai believes in the fascination
of the human face.

(URINATES SLOWLY)

James Cameron's 'Avatar'
was coming soon and was great fun,

but Tsai's focus on real
human bodies was timely indeed.

Move from Taiwan to Japan in the'90s

and you find movie makers

who were using film
in the opposite way

to those we've met so far
in The Last Days of Celluloid.

Many of Japan's best directors
used film to scare us.

Their movies were
so distinctively made

and so often re-made by Hollywood

that a new term,
'J-Horror', was coined.

To get under the skin
of '90s J-Horror,

let's start with
one of its pioneers, this man...

..Shinya Tsukamoto,
Japan's movie cyberpunk.

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

(SCREAMS)

In Tsukamoto's film 'Tetsuo',

an ordinary Japanese man
starts to turn into metal.

The handheld, punky,
black-and-white imagery

captures the man's terror
and disorientation.

(TYRES SCREECH)

And in the sequel to 'Tetsuo',

in which a man is transformed
into a gun,

Tsukamoto used 43 seconds
of single-frame images

of biology and women and space...

..the technique of Abel Gance
way back in 1923...

..1,000 images to represent
the flickering decay

in the man's cellular life.

'Tetsuo's wild energy
was a brilliant expression

of modern life's fear
of machinery and computerisation.

But then came
Hideo Nakata's 'Ringu',

the most influential
horror movie of its time.

Imagery coloured navy blue,

a haunted young woman,

industrial noise and screeching.

(SCREAMS)

It was Japan's biggest ever
international box office hit.

In the last days of celluloid,

in the country of Sony
and Panasonic,

the object of fear
was the video image itself -

a human emotion
about a digital future.

The scary thing - the girl -

climbed out of the video image
into our homes.

Nakata saw and loved 'The Exorcist'.

He borrowed its domestic setting,

innocent girl possessed
by the devil,

it's banging and sudden violence.

(MOANS GUTTURALLY)

Alright, Regan, let's see...

And he borrowed, too, the eerie calm

of the dreamlike female ghost
with the long black hair

in 'Ugetsu Monogatari'.

(SINGS IN JAPANESE)

Nakata put this demonism and grace
into his film

which was about people who die
after watching a videotape.

(PEOPLE MURMUR)

The sound in the videotape

combined a remarkable
50 tracks of effects...

..real sound
doubling back over itself.

'Ringu's scenes of the dead
walking amongst us

and its avoidance of the Christian
idea of the human soul

made it distinctly Asian.

Takashi Miike's film 'Audition'

also seemed to take place
in a floating world.

A TV producer has advertised
for actresses.

A shy young woman
with long black hair shows up -

echoes of 'Ugetsu Monogatari'
and 'Ringu'.

The camera is as stable as Ozu's.

Miike uses such blankness
and minimalism to wrong-foot us

before the terror.

We visit the woman's apartment.

(PHONE RINGS)

She's waiting
for the TV producer to call.

He does.

She smiles.

In the background of the shot
is a sack.

The horrific realisation
that she has tied someone in it.

Japanese directors of the '90s

were using stillness
as a counterpoint to violence

in an almost Buddhist way.

This and a chain of Japanese fears -

of the atomic bomb,
of machinery, of video, and of women

had led to the most distinctive
horror films in a generation.

If the Iranians worshipped reality
in the last days of celluloid

and the Japanese were scared of it,

here in Copenhagen,

movie makers made
a revolutionary manifesto about it.

They wanted to get back
to the basics of filmmaking

and to human nature

and to distance themselves
from fantasy cinema.

A group of filmmakers

who work in this sleepy looking
former army barracks

outside Copenhagen

led the revolution,
carried the banner.

These filmmakers had won scores
of international awards.

They call this wall
their "wall of shame", not fame.

They only hire lawyers if they can
also play a musical instrument.

They swim naked
in this unheated pool.

They've quotations
from Chairman Mao on their walls.

This editing table,

which belonged to the world's
most quietly spoken filmmaker,

Carl Theodor Dreyer,

sits like a shrine
in their corridor.

What sort of filmmakers live here?
Hippies? Punks? Provocateurs?

Yes, yes and yes.

And their leading light
is this man, Lars von Trier.

Von Trier works in this former
ammunitions bunker,

backed up against the world.

In 1995, he and Thomas Vinterberg

took a leaf out of the books
of Bresson and Pasolini

by arguing that cinema
had to become primitive again.

They said that the new wave
had turned to muck.

In their manifesto they pledged
a "vow of chastity"

to the following daunting rules -

the camera must be taken
off the tripod,

the shape of the screen
must not be wide,

no sets should be built,
real locations should be used,

no props should be brought
to those locations,

no music should be used,

no lighting can be added,
no flashbacks,

and the director
must not take credit.

All reminiscent
of what Abbas Kiarostami

was doing at this time in Iran -

a celebration of the primitive
in cinema

in the days before
computer-generated imagery.

I know you love me.

Von Trier's best film
of the '90s, 'Breaking the Waves',

broke many of the Dogme rules
but was revelatory and fresh.

It's about the suffering of this
naive young Scottish woman, Bess.

Von Trier follows her
with mostly handheld shots

as life does its worst to her.

Is there anything I can do for you?
No.

Anything at all?

Yes.

I'd like you to go to Jan
and pray for him to be cured

and to rise from his bed and walk.

The actors were free
to move anywhere.

Trier did take after take...

..then edited together
the moments of each take

which seemed to him most true...

..even if they were out of focus
or broke the 180-degree axis rules -

the ultimate movie roughness.

We saw a thing on...an American
television thing called 'Homicide'

that I'm sure you know,

that was kind of the groundbreaker,
so to say.

There was a lot of time cuts
and no continuity

and all this stuff.

And that was kind of really a burden
to be freed of, I think...

..and I've kind of toyed around
with that ever since.

COUSINS: Artier people like Godard
had done something similar.

Yeah, but that was kind of
more in a stylised way

and this was kind of more to kind
of be free of the whole thing,

and more like, you know,
if you cut a documentary

you don't care
if the cigarette has...

..you know, is as long
as in the other shot

or, you know, you don't care.

And if you film...when you film
these jet planes

coming flying into the twin towers,

you know, you don't care
on which side of the axis you are,

and nobody in doubt

of where the planes are coming from
or where, you know?

It was, for me, anyway,
very nice to get rid of.

At the end
of 'Breaking the Waves', Bess dies,

and then this happens -

the most audacious moment in the
whole of world cinema of the'90s.

(BELLS CHIME)

Bess's partner realises
she's gone to Heaven.

Then the camera's
suddenly in Heaven,

a static shot with heavenly bells
on either side of the screen.

Most movies are secular

but 'Breaking the Waves's ending
was Christian.

The good thing about
going too far, you know,

is that...that you kind of...

..if you see films that are going
too far, you kind of...

..you can kind of make a mark -
"How long did I stay with it?"

Right?

A lot of people
didn't stay with the bells.

And they...but some of them said

that it was a good film, er,
the rest of it.

I got it coming to me...

In 'Breaking the Waves' and this
later Von Trier film, 'Dogville',

he sometimes operated
the camera himself,

often touching Nicole Kidman
during a scene like this.

This intimacy between director
and actor was new in film history.

'Dogville' was even more innovative
than 'Breaking the Waves'.

It's good having Ma on your side.

Trier used no sets,
buildings or props...

..a technique as daring
as it must have been scary.

No, I was not scared,
no, because I...

You know, if you go back
to the '70s,

there was a lot of...people did much
more strange things and they worked.

You know?

So, no...I was pretty sure
that it would work.

But it only, of course, works if you
want it to work, as an audience.

And...and...no, I was...I was not.

I remember one of Nicole's friends,
Russell Crowe, came to the set

and he said,
"This demands an explanation."

I said, "Not from me," you know?
(LAUGHS)

No, no.
I'm very pleased with 'Dogville'.

Again, we follow
the suffering of a woman,

this time in an America village.

The villagers
start to enslave the woman.

In the end,
they shackle her like a dog.

VOICEOVER:
It was quite unlike Dogville

to restrain its indignation
on any point.

Perhaps things had turned out
well after all!

Good morning, Mrs Henderson.
Oh! Morning.

I would have come earlier,
but I...I overslept.

Oh, never mind. Liz put her
back into it this morning.

Von Trier again breaks
the editing rules.

We thought some time off
would be good for you.

Like his Scandinavian heroes,
Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer,

many of Von Trier's films
are about suffering women.

But whereas in most movies the women
are distant objects of desire...

..Von Trier's women
seem to be versions of himself.

I think I must admit that I'm...

..that it's very much me
in the... (LAUGHS) ..in the women.

It's... I don't know why
it has become this way.

But first of all, for me, it's much
easier to work with actresses,

whereas men, I think are...
or can be more difficult

because they...they want
to confront you, you know,

and want to discuss
which way we're going,

which is...something
that's difficult

because sometimes you don't know,
you just have a feeling,

which is something that actresses
for some reason has...

..it's easier for them
to accept, I think,

or it's easier
for them to accept

that they...they cannot give in
to the project in another way.

Von Trier once said that a film
should be like a pebble in a shoe.

No, I... The films that I like,
they hurt a little bit.

A lot of films
are, you know, reproductions.

And I don't believe so much
in doing that.

A lot of people do that

so I'm trying
to make something that...

..that in some sense
makes a little mark

or...a little pain.

The primitive radicalism
of the Dogme manifesto

and the searing, sometimes mocking
emotions of Von Trier

made it and him amongst the most
talked-about artists of their time.

In the days
before wizards and Hobbits,

the Dogme films showed
human nature, warts and all.

Jump from Copenhagen to this train
in France in the '90s

and you find a bunch
of French-language directors

reacting, like Lars von Trier,

against glossy fantasy cinema,

celebrating truth and celluloid,

but doing so with more working-class
and ethnically diverse characters.

This film, 'La Haine', was shot
in contrasty black and white.

Its sometimes static camera
stared at its blank characters.

It was filmed here, not in fancy
Paris, but in the banlieue,

the housing estates on the outskirts
at the end of the train line.

Director Matheiu Kassovitz
took as his starting point

the real-life shooting
whilst in police custody

of a black teenager.

Kassovitz shows us a day
in the life of several youths.

The first we meet, Said, is Islamic.

Not for Kassovitz the hand-held,
unplugged cinema of Lars von Trier.

He tracks into Said, in slow-mo,

then cranes over his head
like Sergio Leone.

The beauty of old-style
film techniques

in the last days of celluloid.

Then we meet Vinz.

(JOLLY MUSIC PLAYS)

We see him dancing.
It turns out to be a dream sequence.

Vinz is filmed in deep space,
like Orson Welles or John Ford.

Vinz gets up
and goes to the bathroom.

Kassovitz uses two actors mimicking
each other. There's no mirror.

If there was, we'd see the camera
reflected in it.

There are two sets of toothbrushes
to enhance the illusion.

Then Vinz starts to mimic
Robert De Nero in 'Taxi Driver'.

(SPEAKS FRENCH)

Kassovitz had been influenced
by Spike Lee's 'Do the Right Thing',

whose precise framing
and heightened colour

showed that films about street life

didn't have to be hand held,
or without style - far from it.

The street was style, form, grace.

'La Haine' used the old beauty
of film

to show new truths about
multicultural, working-class France.

This film,
Bruno Dumont's 'L'Humanite',

is also about working-class France,

but its film style
is totally different.

It's shot in colour.
Its camera hardly moves.

None of the craning of 'La Haine'.

This opening shot
shows a distant policeman

walking across a landscape.

But then we see him on the ground.

He's been traumatised by something.

A girl has been raped.

The blank face of people
in Robert Bresson films.

The film has a cold stare,
like marble.

It's as unglossy as an early
silent film shot on celluloid.

Later, astonishingly,
the man seems to levitate.

Dumont has the shot framed far back

so we just clock that
his feet are off the ground.

Maybe he's a saint.

And in the very last image, the
man's filmed in medium long shot,

turned away from us,
and we glimpse handcuffs on him.

Could the policeman be the rapist?

Or maybe he's a simple, innocent man
who's suffering for all our sins?

(GASPS, PANTS)

As devoted to real,
not fantasy, people

were the Belgian
former documentarists

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

Like Kassovitz and Dumont,
they took as their subject

disenfranchised life
in contemporary Europe.

'Rosetta' was about
this feral teenage girl

who's desperate for a job.

(WHISTLES)

The brothers' brilliantly
simple stylistic innovation

was to have her run
throughout the film

and follow her
with a hand-held camera.

Like Dumont, they seldom used
the shot/reverse shot techniques

which were established in the movies
by about 1913.

Always moving forward
with their camera

gave a unique sense of being
at the shoulder of the girl

as she runs through the world
looking for work.

It's a very easy thing
to learn, you know.

Perhaps the greatest French language
director of celluloid

in the '90s and since,
has been this woman - Claire Denis.

She worked with Wim Wenders, and is
thought of as an art-movie director

but insists that film is universal.

I would love
in a second life to be...

..a sort of James Cameron, you know?

For me there is no difference
between a James Cameron

and a Claire Denis, you know.

I want to make film.

Denis grew up in Africa
and greatly admired this film

in which this rebellious young man
slaughters oxen,

then puts their horns
on his motorbike -

old and new Africa
in a single image.

I saw 'Touki Bouki', which for me,

it still is one of the greatest
films I've seen about hope.

Teenage hopes, you know,
something like that.

I am a white person
who grew up in Africa

and it's a very powerful experience.

We people growing in a country...

..possessed by white people

but knowing we were not from there
and it was wrong...

..make us immensely not willing...

..to be giving lessons.

This is Denis's extraordinary
African film, 'Beau Travail'.

Its colours are beautiful -
burnt umber earth, azure sea.

Jean-Luc Godard said
the history of cinema

is the history of men
photographing women.

But in 'Beau Travail',
a woman photographs men,

French legionnaires, entrancingly.

Here, they walk around each other

like they're in a classic
Western gunfight,

but Denis is more interested
in the choreography

than the aggression.

(DRAMATIC OPERA MUSIC)

They fight.

Denis films the fight minimally,
without testosterone -

a single punch, slow motion.

(WIND BLOWS GENTLY)

The main character
decides to kill himself.

Close-ups of his body.

We see the blood
pumping in his veins...

..the rhythm of his life.

('RHYTHM OF THE NIGHT'
BY DEBARGE PLAYS)

And then, apparently after
his death, we see a final scene,

this extraordinary dance sequence.

He's filmed full height,

as Fred Astaire was
in Hollywood musicals.

The last days of disco,
the last days of celluloid.

DENIS: This scene,
it was written in the script

that he was going to
the night club...

..empty,

dancing a goodbye
to his life of a legionnaire.

Dance to death.

And then in the script after,
in Marseilles,

he was killing himself, you know?

But I shot the dance scene in
Gibertes before shooting Marseilles.

And when we did it,

I was so moved...

..and Denis was moved too.

We were all moved.

Only one take, you know?

I thought, "My God.

"How can I have that scene before...

"..him in his bed taking the gun...

"..to shoot himself now, you know?"

I think it's not fair.

It's better if the gun,
the last scene, comes before

and I keep this dance scene

as his last dream or his last...

..the last moment
he remembers, you know?

Something...

..um, plenty of life.

Denis compared this last dance scene

to the ending of Yasujiro's film
'Late Spring'.

In that case, the father alone.

He is peeling his apple
like a lonely man

instead of sharing the apple.

And the way he's peeling the apple

is also an elegant gesture,
you know?

Like the dance of Denis Lavant
at the end of 'Beau Travail'.

It's very close in a way, you know?

It's...you're very sad,
it's the end of something

and yet to show something
that is like...

..this beautiful loop
who is the apple skin.

And I think, of course,
it's the way Ozu touch...

..us deep -

deep in where...
there we cannot resist.

Claire Denis was using celluloid
in a non-masculine way in the 1990s,

and so was the Polish director
of this film, Dorota Kedzierzawska.

We're on a boat.

This little girl's been kidnapped
by an older girl

who's always ignored by her mum.

This is the older girl.

She's pretending
to be a mum herself.

(GIRLS SPEAK POLISH)

Kedzierzawska uses an old-fashioned,
almost square frames.

She keeps the filmmaking
as simple as possible

in order not to distract the girls,

to get these touchingly
naturalistic performances.

The film's colour coded
in yellows and greens.

'Crows' is a movie
about the human face,

the very thing that the coming
digital age will struggle to depict.

And this film boldly shows
the simple fact

that photographing human beings
is one of cinema's great strengths.

We're in St Petersburg.

Director Viktor Kossakovsky has
tracked down every single person

who was born in this city
on the day that he was,

Wednesday, 19th July 1961.

He follows a man
as he walks the street,

films others as they stand
in traffic...

..this person, as he makes music...
(PLAYS JAZZY MUSIC)

..and this woman as she gives birth,

all photographed naturally,
documentary style.

In just 93 minutes,

we feel we meet a whole generation,
a huge range of people,

even though each is on screen
on average for less than one minute.

(PANTS)
(NURSES SPEAK RUSSIAN)

'Wednesday' was a celebration
of real human beings

in the last days of celluloid.

This man, Michael Haneke,
saw them as dark days.

In this documentary we see him
tell an actor how to hit an actress.

The threat of violence in his work.

And he's always consulting
his marked-up screenplay,

which shows how meticulously
planned his films are.

Haneke studied philosophy
and started making films in 1989.

Here is his film 'Code Unknown'.

(BUSKER SINGS
LIVELY SONG IN FRENCH)

This is one of the first shots,
which lasts over 11 minutes.

No cut, and the camera starts
to move complexly,

like in a Jancso film.

A white lad throws rubbish
at a Kosovan refugee who's begging.

A black man confronts him.

(MEN SPEAK FRENCH)

A very unsettling scene of tension
and conflict in modern life.

But Haneke makes his point -

that we don't connect as
human beings in European cities -

with a brilliant stylistic coup.

Each long shot goes to black before
the next comes onto the screen.

Even the shots don't touch.
This was revolutionary.

(MAN SPEAKS FRENCH)

But it's this earlier film
by Haneke, 'Funny Games',

which really sums up
the last days of celluloid -

the anxiety, the sense
that something's on the brink,

that human beings
are becoming unreal.

Two youths visit their neighbours
to borrow eggs.

The neighbours are
a nice middle-class family.

The boys are dressed in white
and wear white gloves,

like archivists or thieves
or angels of death.

They brutally terrorise the family,

calmly, often off screen.

The power of suggestion,

the violence that's potentially
in all of us.

To break down the barrier
between them and us,

Haneke has the boys wink
at the camera, the audience.

This is unsettling,
but it's not groundbreaking.

But this scene is groundbreaking.

The boys take a TV handset
and press 'Rewind'.

The TV in the film doesn't rewind -

the film itself does,

the sort of thing

that people sometimes do
in the privacy of their own homes,

something that would never happen
in the age of celluloid.

Haneke is saying that we might be
enjoying, vicariously, the violence.

He's saying,
"Go on, you know you want to.

"You're a degenerate. We all are."

The film rewinding
is as shocking as this scene

in Ingmar Bergman's 'Persona'...

..where the film melts.

(PROJECTOR CLATTERS)

In both cases, we're suddenly
at a new level, in a new position.

The spell is broken
and we're woken up.

To what?

Something massive
to get our heads around -

a digital world where seeing
is no longer believing,

where suddenly the people on screen

are avatars, or Neo in 'The Matrix',
or Harry Potter or Hobbits.