The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 15 - Episode #1.15 - full transcript
NARRATOR: At the end of the 1800s,
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multi-billion 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 movies 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, 6 continents
and 1,000 films.
In this chapter,
'Fahrenheit 9/11' takes
the temperature of the real world
and a movie
called 'Mulholland Drive'
plays with our dreams.
The 21st century came
and movies filmed it.
Nature still looked lovely,
cities looked even more.
Lots happened in
innovative cinema in recent years.
One of the most surprising things
was that editing lessened.
Slow cinema came to the fore.
But deep down,
21st century movies
had been about what movies
started out to be about -
the clash between reality
and dreaming.
This is the story of that clash.
The story starts way back here
with Laurel and Hardy.
I can't! Oh! Hey!
They're pulling a piano
in the Swiss Alps,
a studio set and painted backdrop.
We know something'll go wrong.
It always does. But what?
What'll happen next?
(PANTS, GASPS)
That's the question the filmmakers
asked and will always ask.
They racked their brains.
In those days, there was a guy
on the set called the wildy,
the wild man, often drunk,
whose job was to come up with
bizarre ideas.
In this case, the wildy suggested
that they should meet a gorilla.
And here it comes.
Silly but funny.
Everything's OK.
From now on,
it's going to be easy sailing.
The wild man had innovated.
The gorilla was his innovation.
The story of film
is the story of innovation,
the story of the gorilla.
And then look at this scene
from one of Hollywood's
most surreal films, 'Blonde Venus'.
We're in a nightclub, a frame
densely packed, soft-top lighting.
The sort of lighting used to
photograph Marlene Dietrich.
And then the reveal.
It IS Marlene Dietrich.
She shed her skin and the sparkles
of the dresses soften
because of a diffusion filter
on the lens.
Hollywood at its most playful,
absurd, new.
So, since the new millennium,
what's been new in cinema?
What's come at it?
What's been the gorilla?
At first, it looks like
there hasn't been a gorilla,
that it's been business as usual.
The movies started
with this documentary in 1895 -
workers leaving a factory,
filmed square on.
But the big movie story
of the new millennium
was that the reality came back.
At first,
in the form of documentaries,
which were suddenly big box office,
the first time
in the whole story of film
that nonfiction cinema
had held its own on the big screen.
This happened, in part,
because of what used to stand here.
When the Twin Towers fell,
history got bigger.
The camcorder footage of 9/11
outHollywooded Hollywood,
image-wise.
Fiction cinema looked a bit old hat
in comparison
and reality was more dramatic
than escapism.
This film, 'Fahrenheit 9/11',
was one of the biggest box office
hits in the history of documentary.
MOORE: When informed
of the first plane hitting...
It told a story about two families
called Bush and Saud.
President Bush was being filmed
as he heard about the attacks
on the Twin Towers.
CHILDREN: Good morning.
BUSH: Good morning.
All director Michael Moore had to do
was show the footage,
add a commentary and a clock
in the corner of the screen
to make 2004's most memorable movie
moment about power and indecision.
MOORE: When the second plane
hit the tower,
his chief of staff
entered the classroom
and told Mr Bush,
"The nation is under attack."
Not knowing what to do,
with no-one telling him what to do
and no Secret Service rushing in
to take him to safety,
Mr Bush just sat there
and continued to read 'My Pet Goat'
with the children.
Nearly seven minutes passed
with nobody doing anything.
As Bush sat
in that Florida classroom,
was he wondering if maybe he should
have shown up to work more often?
'Fahrenheit 9/11' took over
$250,000,000 at the box office.
Something remarkable was happening
in the story of film
because that's as much as
this fiction entertainment film,
'The Bourne Supremacy',
released the same year.
But look at 'The Bourne Supremacy'
and you notice how like
a documentary it's trying to be.
Its director came from documentary.
These shots could have been
much steadier, glossier,
but rough documentary imagery
had become exciting and new
in the 21st century,
so fiction films
hitched a ride on it.
Documentaries held the screen
for some years.
This film, 'Etre Avoir', which came
a bit before 'Fahrenheit 9/11',
was a classic -
observational, character-based.
It's the end of a year
in a rural school.
The teacher, Mr Lopez, is retiring.
It's the last time
he'll see the kids.
The camera is at the child's height,
then tilts up
to capture his sadness.
Where heroes in fiction cinema
often have to strike out
and fight the world,
Mr Lopez just stands there.
And yet he was one of the most vivid
human beings on screen in 2002.
And Douglas Gordon's
and Philippe Parreno's
'Zidane - A Portrait
in the 21st Century'
also a documentary
was one of the most innovative films
of its time.
It used extra long lenses
to film a football match
but it didn't follow
the story of the match
so much as one hypnotic,
roving presence within it.
The presence, footballer Zinedine
Zidane, became almost mythic.
We heard his breathing
and his thoughts were subtitled
even though he didn't speak.
At times,
he's so isolated and blown up
that, as in an Antonioni film,
he almost dispersed,
like a pointillist
impressionist painting.
MAN: He had two incompletely healed
bullet holes in his chest
and another in his thigh.
But it wasn't only in documentaries
that reality bounced back
in the new millennium.
Look at this film,
'The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford'.
And it caused him to blink
more than usual.
Look at its photography, sepia.
Shallow focus.
No attempt to sex up the image
or make it look 21st century
or computery.
The defocusing of the edge
of the image
was done in part by computer.
Sounds were amplified.
But if the way this famous face is
photographed reminds us of anything,
it's the delicate photorealism
of a face like this.
Lillian Gish, softly lit.
Talk about coming full circle.
And where was all this
post 9/11 realism heading?
In the direction
of an intimate scene like this.
It's in 'Climates',
one of the most innovative
fiction films of the 21st century.
We're in Turkey now
and a new master director,
Nuri Bilge Ceylan,
has had 'Climates' shot digitally.
A hotel room. A wife in close-up.
A drip of water on the soundtrack.
We cut to her older husband,
director Ceylan himself.
Shallow focus
and his face half obscured.
Sad eyes. Then a similar framing.
Each plane of focus
so carefully chosen.
Then this focus pull
and the pores on his forehead.
No dialogue or music.
Then this shot -
where's the focus here?
The hand shows us, up close.
The camera's now lower than the bed
and mysterious focus again.
The search for it makes us feel
as if we're on the bed,
in the head of this sad marriage.
We think of Ingmar Bergman's
sad films about marriage.
And then a naked light...
..like a scene
in an Italian neorealist picture.
And then it's over,
whatever it was. Sex?
The greatest use of focus in cinema.
Realist time stood still.
The gorilla, the sparky new idea
in 21st century movies
was a very old idea,
that real people still matter,
that tender realism is beautiful.
This honesty flowed
from Turkey to Romania,
where great new honest pictures
like this one emerged.
Welcome to new Romanian cinema.
This is Mr Lazarescu.
We've followed him all night,
from hospital to hospital,
which have all been full
because of a bus accident.
We've watched him
get worse and worse.
Now he's dying.
The woman in orange is a paramedic
who's helped him all night.
Director Cristi Puiu said
that he wanted to use camera work
like the TV series 'ER' -
hand-held, shooting in the round,
dowdy greenish fluorescent lighting.
He used these techniques
to show a long night's journey
into day and death
and the human decency
of the paramedic.
'The Death of Mr Lazarescu'
was one of the most moving works
of film realism of the new century.
It passionately showed
that we're all in
this scary new century together.
Argentina's films
in the new millennium
boldly confronted reality too.
This is 'The Headless Woman'
by Lucrecia Martel.
Veronica is a well-to-do dentist.
Her phones goes.
(PHONE BEEPS)
Bam! She's hit something.
(BEEPING CONTINUES)
(RADIO PLAYS SOFT ROCK MUSIC)
Usually car accidents in movies
are done with fast editing.
Here there's none.
Veronica's been crying.
Light rock music is counterpoint.
She tries to calm down -
static camera, shallow focus.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
Then she drives on.
(ENGINE REVS)
We see what she hit.
A tense, tragic, mysterious moment
that gives the film its tone.
Then she stops.
She's probably concussed.
And as we see
in the rest of the film,
she keeps secrets
from her family and from herself.
You'd think the camera
would go with her but it stays here.
(THUNDER CRASHES)
Thunder then rain.
Then she's out of focus, headless.
A woman who's lost her head.
Veronica's isolation
is brilliantly shown
in this haunting, unglossy movie,
one of the best ever made
in South America.
And in Mexico in the 21st century,
cinema was brilliantly honest
about human beings too.
Look at this scene -
a close-up of a dark hand holding
a light-skinned one.
Then cut to this angle,
made famous by a Renaissance
painting of Christ by Mantegna.
The woman's thin, rich, privileged.
The man's her chauffeur -
poorer, darker skinned, fatter.
Then the camera rises.
Music like at a funeral.
A blank room like a funeral parlour.
We get a God's-eye view,
or a Karl Marx-eye view.
The social gap between them
so profound,
the only way of bridging it
is through touch,
in this case, sexual touch.
A moment ago they had sex
and the camera did this -
went out into the world
in this single uncut crane shot
of more than three minutes...
..to show workers
taking down a TV aerial.
A Marriott hotel
for tourists and rich people.
The backstory of Mexico City.
The inequalities in Mexico
are epic in scale,
and director Carlos Reygadas
uses an epic crane shot
to dramatise the enormity
of the problem, the stand-off.
Cinema coming full circle
to show that sometimes
there's a world between two people,
even as they cling to each other.
And if the realism of the new
millennium wasn't rich enough,
Korean cinema suddenly darkened it
and gave it a strange brutality.
The result was called
new Korean cinema.
There'd been good Korean movies
since the 1920s
and a golden age in the '60s.
But in the year 2003 alone,
three movies
show how daring it had become.
This is Lee Chang-dong's film
'Oasis'.
We're at a family party.
A man who's just out of prison
is dominating the conversation,
talking nonsense.
He's antisocial.
He's brought with him
an uninvited guest -
this young woman in the foreground
who has cerebral palsy.
The situation is awkward...
..more so when we hear
that the woman
is the daughter of the man
he's supposed to have killed
and when they first met,
he raped her.
And yet, somehow,
these people have a friendship.
Maybe it's because both are spurned
by their families.
New Korean cinema was transgressive.
Here's the ending
of another 2003 Korean film,
Bong Joon-ho's 'Memories of Murder'.
The film is set in the late '80s.
A serial killer
has murdered 10 Korean women,
a true story
that scandalised the country.
This policeman
has been trying to find the killer.
He's stopped his car
and goes to look one last time
at the gully
where one of the victims was found.
Flat, deserted, yellow land,
like the crop dusting scene in
Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest'.
POV camera
approaching the dark space.
Somehow we think
of David Lynch films.
The tunnel seems haunted
by the memory of the murder.
And then this - a girl.
But she reveals that she's probably
seen the murderer.
A conversation simply shot.
All through the film
the detective has been hoping
for such a breakthrough
but now that it happens,
it's so ordinary.
A stare into camera.
Maybe the murderer is us.
More transgressive still was
this new Korean film, 'Old Boy'.
We're in a dark, stylised world.
This man was locked up for 15 years
and not told why.
Now he's out and angry,
almost comically angry.
He wants revenge.
The film was based on a Japanese
manga cartoon book, and it shows.
The man has found the place
where he was imprisoned.
He's going to bash
this security guard with a hammer.
And, as in a cartoon,
he sees the hammer's trajectory.
Once he's in the prison, we get this
remarkable stylised fight scene.
We're in a prison corridor.
(SHOUTING)
The wall nearest to us
has been taken away,
a bit like
one of those wildlife programs
in which we see moles
in their burrows underground.
The shot is far back and makes the
scene look like a cell in a cartoon.
Our man fights 14 other men,
almost comic odds.
The camera keeps its distance -
on a dolly,
not hand-held in the fight.
This isn't the realism of the early
movies of the Lumiere brothers.
New Korean cinema in the year 2003
was also doing something
like the opposite to realism.
Stylised, dreamlike, magical almost.
Like this film, Georges Melies'
'The Moon at One Metre',
one of the first
science fiction films.
Theatrical, wearing it's dreaminess
on its sleeve.
Movies in the new millennium
were dreamlike as well as realistic.
The gorilla, the innovation
in 21st century cinema
was dreamlike
as well as naturalistic.
Film history
coming full circle again.
In the most famous American movie
about a dream, 'The Wizard of Oz,
a girl goes over a rainbow,
meets people from her real life,
clicks her ruby slippers together
and discovers
that there's no place like home.
The best dream film of the new
millennium, 'Mulholland Drive',
is as if someone dreamed
'The Wizard of Oz' dream.
It's about a girl who wants to
climb the hill of movie stardom,
Mulholland Drive,
where all the movie stars live..
(UPBEAT BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS)
..but instead falls asleep and dives
down into her own consciousness.
Down in that consciousness,
we hear of this dance in Ontario.
When she was a girl...
..her moment of innocence.
People jitterbug,
shot against purple.
Their own shadows
create moving digital windows
through which we see more layers.
This is the girl,
luminous and smiling.
But then the girl grows up,
falls in love with another girl,
and then gets so jealous of her that
she asks this hit man to kill her.
Director David Lynch
has the scene filmed conventionally,
shot reverse shot,
almost natural light,
medium close-ups,
in a cafe called Winkie's.
But out of the corner of her eye,
the girl sees this man.
He looks at her
as she arranges the murder.
Bang.
It's like he sees her commit
the crime, the thought crime.
And so in her long dream,
we see him, not her,
confronting something awful
behind a wall
at the back of Winkie's.
Hand-held camera.
A roar on the soundtrack.
A shock so great
that everything goes silent.
This monster seems to be her terror
at planning the killing.
She doesn't dream
of herself confronting it
but of the man who looked at her
doing so.
And this place, Club Silencio,
also in Diane's subconscious,
is like Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz'.
Diane's dream
comes to a climax here.
She shakes because
her subconscious is flooding.
A wizard conjures blue lights,
disappears.
Light like we're underwater.
'Mulholland Drive' was so innovative
because it was 'The Wizard of Oz'
plunged into the black night
of film noir
and the rabbit hole
of David Lynch's brain.
And then in the new millennium,
there was
an astonishing dream film of sorts,
'Requiem for a Dream'.
Anybody want to waste some time?
It looked with piteous recognition
at people on drugs.
MAN 1: Angel says that this is
the time - we should do it now.
MAN 2: Shit,
I'm gonna call Brody tomorrow.
WOMAN: Who's Brody?
That's my sweet connection.
He's got some unbelievable shit.
Righteous!
It was the great distortion movie
about how drugs distort the world.
Speed it up,
give it a fish-eye lens.
..then we get us a pound of pure and
retire and you know what that means.
No more hassle.
We get off hard knocks
and be on easy street.
Shit.
What's the catch?
Here's the catch.
This woman wanted to be on TV
so took far too many
weight reduction pills.
Now she's scared
by her own apartment.
It flickers.
It floats around her
like a gyroscope.
Darren Aronofsky's film was a
paranoid dream in a fearful century.
So if the story of film
in the new millennium
has been the story of realist films
and dream films,
that story is as old
as movies itself.
There's nothing new there.
But in the new millennium,
film also combined reality
and fantasy in new ways.
The line between them blurred.
They got closer to each other.
Look what we find here in Stockholm.
The unique films of this man,
Roy Andersson,
combine reality and dream
in a new way
that few have ever done
in the story of film.
You know,
I was grown up in a worker family
and I grew up with impressions that
people really humiliated each other
and themselves also.
In Andersson's film
'Songs From the Second Floor'
this man in the middle,
covered in ashes,
has burnt down his business,
a serious social theme.
And the colour in this shot
is a drab green.
But suddenly the movie becomes
heightened like a musical fantasy.
(ALL SING OPERATICALLY)
Unhappiness is not only the result
of poorness, without money,
it's also the result of...
What is richdom in life?
Is it money
or how to be happy, so to say?
And I think that nowadays
and the last 30 years,
people have been...
They are lost. They are lost.
In the extraordinary ending
of 'Songs From the Second Floor',
symbols of religion are being dumped
into a wasteland beyond the city.
We built the road of wood
and we put in complete pieces
to the right
so that you get the impression that
there is a huge modern city there.
(YELLS)
It's like the end of the world
and then minutes
into the uncut shot...
..people who have been there
the whole time
stand up from the land,
like the Day of Judgement.
It's a theme
that I'm very, very interested in,
namely, the question of guilt,
personal guilt
and even collective guilt.
We are carrying guilt,
collective guilt,
as representatives
of the human being, mankind.
We are responsible and we have to
get that feeling of guilt...
We have to get it reconciliated...
to get rid of it.
And I think it's infected -
it infects the society,
it infects our time.
And I have that theme in the
'Songs From the Second Floor'.
And Andersson found
a striking visual style
to show the humiliation, guilt
and comedy of modern life.
He muted colour,
favouring greys and greens.
He loved plunging perspectives
and flat Nordic light.
A bleak dream.
And his camera seldom moves.
I really don't want a single frame
in my movie that is indifferent,
visually indifferent.
And I mean that
the modern way of filmmaking
contains a lot of indifferent frames
because they are built up
to concentrate
on the very special situations,
most of the time the killing
or, yeah, mainly stupid situations.
Why can't movie
has the same qualities as painting?
So you are fascinated by
each singular frame.
But what makes Andersson
so significant for modern cinema
is that he combines this exactitude
with a real sense of humour.
He's a fan of Laurel and Hardy.
(RAGTIME MUSIC PLAYS)
The simplicity of the way
this scene is shot, for example.
Square on, symmetrical.
They are so tragic
and so funny at the same time.
And it's two losers.
They want to be accepted
by the middle class or upper class
and they try so hard to get that,
to come to this...
..to be accepted, but they fail
all the time, all the time.
(LAUGHS)
It's not only simple jokes.
It's also social tragedy.
Political tragedy, I suppose.
It's the underdog's efforts
to be accepted,
to reach a higher level in society.
Andersson gets the gorilla,
the innovation.
He partially funds his films
himself, a one-man movie studio.
A one-man film history.
No-one has quite combined reality
and dream like this before.
21st cinema built on the past,
combining worlds.
In the '60s we saw how
Stanley Donen,
director of 'Singin' in the Rain',
used this split-screen
to get around censorship
by making it look like
two lovers are in bed together.
He filmed with two cameras at the
same time and combined the shots.
I have decided to do it.
Jump forward to the new millennium,
to this scene in Roger Avery's
'Rules of Attraction'.
Saturday morning
on an American campus.
We've just watched,
for several minutes,
these two students
get up and go to class.
Hi.
Like Donen, Avery uses split-screen,
but has his characters
look to camera, to us,
rather than to each other.
Typical.
Never seen you there before.
We feel in the middle
of this flirtatious moment.
Yeah. You've got bad timing.
Saturdays suck ass.
(SIGHS)
I don't have to put up
with this shit.
I'm dropping this fucking class!
(LAUGHS)
Yeah, me too.
Really?
Mm-hm.
I think I'm going to change...
But then she says,
"Show me your eyes"
and a hand takes his glasses off.
Show me your eyes.
And it's not his hand.
Then the cameras each pull out
and swing round
and the two worlds combine.
(GIGGLES)
We go from inside the moment
to an outside observer.
Each camera's move
was computer programmed
and the two images
were digitally stitched together.
Movies have always tried to make
people meet in memorable ways.
Few meetings
are as memorable as this one.
And in this film, 'Avatar',
computers also helped create
new 21st century syntheses
of reality and fantasy.
In real life,
this character is a marine,
who, because he's in a wheelchair,
can't walk or run.
But here, he's on a mission
to the planet Pandora
and has been transformed into
an attenuated creature
who enjoys the sprint,
moves like a dancer.
Sorry.
Watch it!
Canadian director James Cameron has
his camera flow, the creature move.
He feels the soil between his toes.
Hey, Marine!
Grace?
Well, who did you expect, numbnuts?
Think fast.
Everything about this scene
was animated on computers,
as you'd expect,
except the most important thing -
the facial expressions.
This energetic documentary
shows that the faces were filmed
with mini-cameras.
The set of a modern sci-fi film
looks like a factory -
bright lights, computers,
no hint of an enchanted planet.
Director James Cameron's
excited by the process.
You know, there's
a carbon fibre boom that comes out
with a little camera
on the front of it
and that camera shoots the face
in a nulled out close-up,
so even though the actor
is moving all around -
running, jumping, yelling,
screaming, jumping off stuff,
jumping over logs, you know,
running flat out, whatever -
we're getting that facial
performance absolutely locked off.
This split-screen in the documentary
shows the after and before.
And that proved to exactly be
the kind of Holy Grail approach.
21st century cinema
managed to insert
the mystery of human feeling
into a digital
and electronic universe.
But far away from Hollywood,
in Thailand in the new millennium,
Apichatpong Weerasethakul did
something even more inventive.
Look at this scene
from 'Tropical Malady'.
A Thai soldier, Keng,
and his farmer friend, Tong.
Two shy young men in Thailand,
filmed in natural light,
in long takes,
in the languor of summer days.
A backdrop so still
that it looks almost painted.
Then, about halfway through
the film, it seems to break down.
There's black
and then the story starts again.
This time we're in a forest -
a soundtrack full
of the night chorus
of insects, frogs and cicadas.
This time,
soldier Keng is lit by moonlight.
He sees a tree full of fireflies.
It's like the Eiffel Tower lit up.
We hear that his friend, Tong,
has become a tiger.
He must hunt him.
Director Weerasethakul films
the spirit of a water buffalo
leaving its own body.
Keng's breathless, agog,
seeing life and death and the Gaea.
The spirit takes him
into the forest.
Not only has the farmer been
reincarnated as a tiger,
but the film
seems to have been reincarnated...
..from a naturalistic tale
of friendship
to a mythic tale
of hunter and hunted.
Seldom in the whole history
of cinema
has such a bold story shift
happened.
The wild man, the gorilla.
Our last examples
of wildly inventive cinema
in the new millennium
come from this man,
Alexander Sokurov.
This is his film 'Mother and Son'.
We're in a Russian cottage
in the countryside.
A mother's dying. Her son tends her.
She's happy to die
in her son's arms.
The pearly light
is in the trees outside.
They whisper to each other.
Utter peace.
(BOTH SPEAK RUSSIAN)
Sokurov explains his approach.
'Mother and Son' is one of
the defining movies
in what would come
to be called slow cinema.
Director Sokurov's imagery
is as beautiful as his teachers,
Andrei Tarkovsky's,
but also derives from painting.
And in shots like this, Sokurov
had the image stretched diagonally,
as if it was made of rubber
to change how we see it.
Many critics felt
that 'Mother and Son' was one of
the best films of its time.
But then Sokurov made this film,
perhaps the most inventive
ever made,
the greatest gorilla
in film history.
We're in the Hermitage Museum
in St Petersburg,
at the end of the 19th century.
These Tsarist aristocrats
have been partying all night
and now they're flowing
down the steps, like a river.
But the revolution is coming.
This will be
the last of the great balls.
Soon they will be dead.
Sokurov saw the film as a single
last breath of this civilisation
and so, astonishingly, he filmed
the whole movie in a single take.
There hasn't been one cut
in the whole film.
This shot has travelled
1,300 metres, through 33 galleries,
filming 867 people -
cavaliers, museum officials, spies,
great balls and portents of the
horrors to come, over 90 minutes.
Sokurov and his team
rehearsed for six months.
Filming took place on 23 December,
when there are only four hours
of daylight.
This allowed for just two takes.
Take one had to be abandoned
after five minutes.
Then take two, this one, unfolds.
Unbelievable tension.
The steadicam so heavy
that the operator
almost buckles at the knees in pain.
Here's documentary footage of
the moment the filming was finished.
Their breath
shows how freezing it was.
The hand-held camera
captures the relief.
Tears of joy
that something entirely new in
the story of film had taken place.
TV cameras to capture this moment.
The camera mills around the people -
moved, tired, exhilarated.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
Sokurov is one of the most serious
filmmakers of the 21st century
and one of the most
stylistically daring.
He and filmmakers like him
suggest that the future of cinema
is in provocative hands.
If the history of film
has been the story of innovation,
of passion, of breaking the mould...
..what's its future?
Maestro di Angeles, here
in the Roman film studio Cinecitta
made props for Fellini,
but long after he's gone,
will people still be breaking
the movie mould?
Maybe in the year 2046,
movie-going will be like Christopher
Nolan's film 'Inception'.
It's an innovative sci-fi film
about layers of reality,
but maybe it's a metaphor too
for what film-going could become.
Look at this scene.
Leonardo di Caprio
and his friends wake up in a plane.
They've just been dreaming together.
Thank you.
The camera glides.
Greens and blues.
Atmospheric beds of music.
They're groggy,
embarrassed almost at the intimacy
of the dream they've just shared.
They dreamt that they were
in this van,
falling ultra-slowly off a bridge,
shot at maybe 1,000 frames
per second.
No natural sound.
But in it,
they dream a dream within a dream,
in which they're in a hotel
whose gravity's on the blink.
WOMAN: If you'd like to make a call,
please hang up and try again.
It's colour-coded orange.
The camera floats.
The actors are on wires.
And in that dream within a dream,
they dream a fourth layer -
they're in a James Bond-style battle
in a snow lodge.
Now the camera's hand-held.
The action's edgy.
The sound natural.
The dominant colour's white.
They live and die together.
Maybe this is what
movie-going is like in 2046 -
playing a game of living and dying
together.
Plunging into an underwater YouTube.
Or maybe something awful happens.
Look at this scene in 'Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'.
We're going to see my grandma.
Former lovers Joel and Clementine
are running through
Grand Central Station.
People start to disappear,
because they're undergoing
a brainwashing process
where their memories of their
relationship are being removed.
Then the brainwashing
becomes a nightmare.
It's shot like a TV crime programme.
The camera's roving around,
with a light on it.
Their past, their stories,
disappearing.
Everything you can remember.
JOEL: Mierzwiak! Wake me up!
Oh, I'm sorry, Mr Barish.
I thought you understood
what was going on here.
She no longer has a face.
You're erasing me from her.
I don't know.
You got this thing.
I'm in my bed. I know it.
My brain!
I'm part of your imagination too,
Joel.
How can I help you from there?
I'm inside your head.
The eyes on another face
are upside down.
Sorry.
Look. Who's that?
What if the same happened to film?
Maybe there'll be
some digital or ideological storm
and cinema will be wiped or banned.
And it'll be impossible to see it...
..except in a hidden bunker
or room like this,
where all its treasures are kept,
in secret.
If so, then those of us
who loved the movies
will have to remember them,
talk about them,
tell the story of them.
Of the people who made them.
The places where they were made.
The objects that appeared in them.
Even the places where the great
filmmakers sat and thought.
Or maybe movies will take up
a bigger part in our lives.
This is what the city of Ouagadougou
in Burkina Faso looked like in 2011.
At the very centre of the city
is this huge monument to cinema.
Maybe more cities will do this.
Back in 2011, filmmakers from around
the world gathered at this monument,
held hands in the sweaty heat
and walked around it three times,
in tribute to the filmmakers
who died in the previous year.
And to the movies.
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multi-billion 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 movies 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, 6 continents
and 1,000 films.
In this chapter,
'Fahrenheit 9/11' takes
the temperature of the real world
and a movie
called 'Mulholland Drive'
plays with our dreams.
The 21st century came
and movies filmed it.
Nature still looked lovely,
cities looked even more.
Lots happened in
innovative cinema in recent years.
One of the most surprising things
was that editing lessened.
Slow cinema came to the fore.
But deep down,
21st century movies
had been about what movies
started out to be about -
the clash between reality
and dreaming.
This is the story of that clash.
The story starts way back here
with Laurel and Hardy.
I can't! Oh! Hey!
They're pulling a piano
in the Swiss Alps,
a studio set and painted backdrop.
We know something'll go wrong.
It always does. But what?
What'll happen next?
(PANTS, GASPS)
That's the question the filmmakers
asked and will always ask.
They racked their brains.
In those days, there was a guy
on the set called the wildy,
the wild man, often drunk,
whose job was to come up with
bizarre ideas.
In this case, the wildy suggested
that they should meet a gorilla.
And here it comes.
Silly but funny.
Everything's OK.
From now on,
it's going to be easy sailing.
The wild man had innovated.
The gorilla was his innovation.
The story of film
is the story of innovation,
the story of the gorilla.
And then look at this scene
from one of Hollywood's
most surreal films, 'Blonde Venus'.
We're in a nightclub, a frame
densely packed, soft-top lighting.
The sort of lighting used to
photograph Marlene Dietrich.
And then the reveal.
It IS Marlene Dietrich.
She shed her skin and the sparkles
of the dresses soften
because of a diffusion filter
on the lens.
Hollywood at its most playful,
absurd, new.
So, since the new millennium,
what's been new in cinema?
What's come at it?
What's been the gorilla?
At first, it looks like
there hasn't been a gorilla,
that it's been business as usual.
The movies started
with this documentary in 1895 -
workers leaving a factory,
filmed square on.
But the big movie story
of the new millennium
was that the reality came back.
At first,
in the form of documentaries,
which were suddenly big box office,
the first time
in the whole story of film
that nonfiction cinema
had held its own on the big screen.
This happened, in part,
because of what used to stand here.
When the Twin Towers fell,
history got bigger.
The camcorder footage of 9/11
outHollywooded Hollywood,
image-wise.
Fiction cinema looked a bit old hat
in comparison
and reality was more dramatic
than escapism.
This film, 'Fahrenheit 9/11',
was one of the biggest box office
hits in the history of documentary.
MOORE: When informed
of the first plane hitting...
It told a story about two families
called Bush and Saud.
President Bush was being filmed
as he heard about the attacks
on the Twin Towers.
CHILDREN: Good morning.
BUSH: Good morning.
All director Michael Moore had to do
was show the footage,
add a commentary and a clock
in the corner of the screen
to make 2004's most memorable movie
moment about power and indecision.
MOORE: When the second plane
hit the tower,
his chief of staff
entered the classroom
and told Mr Bush,
"The nation is under attack."
Not knowing what to do,
with no-one telling him what to do
and no Secret Service rushing in
to take him to safety,
Mr Bush just sat there
and continued to read 'My Pet Goat'
with the children.
Nearly seven minutes passed
with nobody doing anything.
As Bush sat
in that Florida classroom,
was he wondering if maybe he should
have shown up to work more often?
'Fahrenheit 9/11' took over
$250,000,000 at the box office.
Something remarkable was happening
in the story of film
because that's as much as
this fiction entertainment film,
'The Bourne Supremacy',
released the same year.
But look at 'The Bourne Supremacy'
and you notice how like
a documentary it's trying to be.
Its director came from documentary.
These shots could have been
much steadier, glossier,
but rough documentary imagery
had become exciting and new
in the 21st century,
so fiction films
hitched a ride on it.
Documentaries held the screen
for some years.
This film, 'Etre Avoir', which came
a bit before 'Fahrenheit 9/11',
was a classic -
observational, character-based.
It's the end of a year
in a rural school.
The teacher, Mr Lopez, is retiring.
It's the last time
he'll see the kids.
The camera is at the child's height,
then tilts up
to capture his sadness.
Where heroes in fiction cinema
often have to strike out
and fight the world,
Mr Lopez just stands there.
And yet he was one of the most vivid
human beings on screen in 2002.
And Douglas Gordon's
and Philippe Parreno's
'Zidane - A Portrait
in the 21st Century'
also a documentary
was one of the most innovative films
of its time.
It used extra long lenses
to film a football match
but it didn't follow
the story of the match
so much as one hypnotic,
roving presence within it.
The presence, footballer Zinedine
Zidane, became almost mythic.
We heard his breathing
and his thoughts were subtitled
even though he didn't speak.
At times,
he's so isolated and blown up
that, as in an Antonioni film,
he almost dispersed,
like a pointillist
impressionist painting.
MAN: He had two incompletely healed
bullet holes in his chest
and another in his thigh.
But it wasn't only in documentaries
that reality bounced back
in the new millennium.
Look at this film,
'The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford'.
And it caused him to blink
more than usual.
Look at its photography, sepia.
Shallow focus.
No attempt to sex up the image
or make it look 21st century
or computery.
The defocusing of the edge
of the image
was done in part by computer.
Sounds were amplified.
But if the way this famous face is
photographed reminds us of anything,
it's the delicate photorealism
of a face like this.
Lillian Gish, softly lit.
Talk about coming full circle.
And where was all this
post 9/11 realism heading?
In the direction
of an intimate scene like this.
It's in 'Climates',
one of the most innovative
fiction films of the 21st century.
We're in Turkey now
and a new master director,
Nuri Bilge Ceylan,
has had 'Climates' shot digitally.
A hotel room. A wife in close-up.
A drip of water on the soundtrack.
We cut to her older husband,
director Ceylan himself.
Shallow focus
and his face half obscured.
Sad eyes. Then a similar framing.
Each plane of focus
so carefully chosen.
Then this focus pull
and the pores on his forehead.
No dialogue or music.
Then this shot -
where's the focus here?
The hand shows us, up close.
The camera's now lower than the bed
and mysterious focus again.
The search for it makes us feel
as if we're on the bed,
in the head of this sad marriage.
We think of Ingmar Bergman's
sad films about marriage.
And then a naked light...
..like a scene
in an Italian neorealist picture.
And then it's over,
whatever it was. Sex?
The greatest use of focus in cinema.
Realist time stood still.
The gorilla, the sparky new idea
in 21st century movies
was a very old idea,
that real people still matter,
that tender realism is beautiful.
This honesty flowed
from Turkey to Romania,
where great new honest pictures
like this one emerged.
Welcome to new Romanian cinema.
This is Mr Lazarescu.
We've followed him all night,
from hospital to hospital,
which have all been full
because of a bus accident.
We've watched him
get worse and worse.
Now he's dying.
The woman in orange is a paramedic
who's helped him all night.
Director Cristi Puiu said
that he wanted to use camera work
like the TV series 'ER' -
hand-held, shooting in the round,
dowdy greenish fluorescent lighting.
He used these techniques
to show a long night's journey
into day and death
and the human decency
of the paramedic.
'The Death of Mr Lazarescu'
was one of the most moving works
of film realism of the new century.
It passionately showed
that we're all in
this scary new century together.
Argentina's films
in the new millennium
boldly confronted reality too.
This is 'The Headless Woman'
by Lucrecia Martel.
Veronica is a well-to-do dentist.
Her phones goes.
(PHONE BEEPS)
Bam! She's hit something.
(BEEPING CONTINUES)
(RADIO PLAYS SOFT ROCK MUSIC)
Usually car accidents in movies
are done with fast editing.
Here there's none.
Veronica's been crying.
Light rock music is counterpoint.
She tries to calm down -
static camera, shallow focus.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
Then she drives on.
(ENGINE REVS)
We see what she hit.
A tense, tragic, mysterious moment
that gives the film its tone.
Then she stops.
She's probably concussed.
And as we see
in the rest of the film,
she keeps secrets
from her family and from herself.
You'd think the camera
would go with her but it stays here.
(THUNDER CRASHES)
Thunder then rain.
Then she's out of focus, headless.
A woman who's lost her head.
Veronica's isolation
is brilliantly shown
in this haunting, unglossy movie,
one of the best ever made
in South America.
And in Mexico in the 21st century,
cinema was brilliantly honest
about human beings too.
Look at this scene -
a close-up of a dark hand holding
a light-skinned one.
Then cut to this angle,
made famous by a Renaissance
painting of Christ by Mantegna.
The woman's thin, rich, privileged.
The man's her chauffeur -
poorer, darker skinned, fatter.
Then the camera rises.
Music like at a funeral.
A blank room like a funeral parlour.
We get a God's-eye view,
or a Karl Marx-eye view.
The social gap between them
so profound,
the only way of bridging it
is through touch,
in this case, sexual touch.
A moment ago they had sex
and the camera did this -
went out into the world
in this single uncut crane shot
of more than three minutes...
..to show workers
taking down a TV aerial.
A Marriott hotel
for tourists and rich people.
The backstory of Mexico City.
The inequalities in Mexico
are epic in scale,
and director Carlos Reygadas
uses an epic crane shot
to dramatise the enormity
of the problem, the stand-off.
Cinema coming full circle
to show that sometimes
there's a world between two people,
even as they cling to each other.
And if the realism of the new
millennium wasn't rich enough,
Korean cinema suddenly darkened it
and gave it a strange brutality.
The result was called
new Korean cinema.
There'd been good Korean movies
since the 1920s
and a golden age in the '60s.
But in the year 2003 alone,
three movies
show how daring it had become.
This is Lee Chang-dong's film
'Oasis'.
We're at a family party.
A man who's just out of prison
is dominating the conversation,
talking nonsense.
He's antisocial.
He's brought with him
an uninvited guest -
this young woman in the foreground
who has cerebral palsy.
The situation is awkward...
..more so when we hear
that the woman
is the daughter of the man
he's supposed to have killed
and when they first met,
he raped her.
And yet, somehow,
these people have a friendship.
Maybe it's because both are spurned
by their families.
New Korean cinema was transgressive.
Here's the ending
of another 2003 Korean film,
Bong Joon-ho's 'Memories of Murder'.
The film is set in the late '80s.
A serial killer
has murdered 10 Korean women,
a true story
that scandalised the country.
This policeman
has been trying to find the killer.
He's stopped his car
and goes to look one last time
at the gully
where one of the victims was found.
Flat, deserted, yellow land,
like the crop dusting scene in
Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest'.
POV camera
approaching the dark space.
Somehow we think
of David Lynch films.
The tunnel seems haunted
by the memory of the murder.
And then this - a girl.
But she reveals that she's probably
seen the murderer.
A conversation simply shot.
All through the film
the detective has been hoping
for such a breakthrough
but now that it happens,
it's so ordinary.
A stare into camera.
Maybe the murderer is us.
More transgressive still was
this new Korean film, 'Old Boy'.
We're in a dark, stylised world.
This man was locked up for 15 years
and not told why.
Now he's out and angry,
almost comically angry.
He wants revenge.
The film was based on a Japanese
manga cartoon book, and it shows.
The man has found the place
where he was imprisoned.
He's going to bash
this security guard with a hammer.
And, as in a cartoon,
he sees the hammer's trajectory.
Once he's in the prison, we get this
remarkable stylised fight scene.
We're in a prison corridor.
(SHOUTING)
The wall nearest to us
has been taken away,
a bit like
one of those wildlife programs
in which we see moles
in their burrows underground.
The shot is far back and makes the
scene look like a cell in a cartoon.
Our man fights 14 other men,
almost comic odds.
The camera keeps its distance -
on a dolly,
not hand-held in the fight.
This isn't the realism of the early
movies of the Lumiere brothers.
New Korean cinema in the year 2003
was also doing something
like the opposite to realism.
Stylised, dreamlike, magical almost.
Like this film, Georges Melies'
'The Moon at One Metre',
one of the first
science fiction films.
Theatrical, wearing it's dreaminess
on its sleeve.
Movies in the new millennium
were dreamlike as well as realistic.
The gorilla, the innovation
in 21st century cinema
was dreamlike
as well as naturalistic.
Film history
coming full circle again.
In the most famous American movie
about a dream, 'The Wizard of Oz,
a girl goes over a rainbow,
meets people from her real life,
clicks her ruby slippers together
and discovers
that there's no place like home.
The best dream film of the new
millennium, 'Mulholland Drive',
is as if someone dreamed
'The Wizard of Oz' dream.
It's about a girl who wants to
climb the hill of movie stardom,
Mulholland Drive,
where all the movie stars live..
(UPBEAT BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS)
..but instead falls asleep and dives
down into her own consciousness.
Down in that consciousness,
we hear of this dance in Ontario.
When she was a girl...
..her moment of innocence.
People jitterbug,
shot against purple.
Their own shadows
create moving digital windows
through which we see more layers.
This is the girl,
luminous and smiling.
But then the girl grows up,
falls in love with another girl,
and then gets so jealous of her that
she asks this hit man to kill her.
Director David Lynch
has the scene filmed conventionally,
shot reverse shot,
almost natural light,
medium close-ups,
in a cafe called Winkie's.
But out of the corner of her eye,
the girl sees this man.
He looks at her
as she arranges the murder.
Bang.
It's like he sees her commit
the crime, the thought crime.
And so in her long dream,
we see him, not her,
confronting something awful
behind a wall
at the back of Winkie's.
Hand-held camera.
A roar on the soundtrack.
A shock so great
that everything goes silent.
This monster seems to be her terror
at planning the killing.
She doesn't dream
of herself confronting it
but of the man who looked at her
doing so.
And this place, Club Silencio,
also in Diane's subconscious,
is like Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz'.
Diane's dream
comes to a climax here.
She shakes because
her subconscious is flooding.
A wizard conjures blue lights,
disappears.
Light like we're underwater.
'Mulholland Drive' was so innovative
because it was 'The Wizard of Oz'
plunged into the black night
of film noir
and the rabbit hole
of David Lynch's brain.
And then in the new millennium,
there was
an astonishing dream film of sorts,
'Requiem for a Dream'.
Anybody want to waste some time?
It looked with piteous recognition
at people on drugs.
MAN 1: Angel says that this is
the time - we should do it now.
MAN 2: Shit,
I'm gonna call Brody tomorrow.
WOMAN: Who's Brody?
That's my sweet connection.
He's got some unbelievable shit.
Righteous!
It was the great distortion movie
about how drugs distort the world.
Speed it up,
give it a fish-eye lens.
..then we get us a pound of pure and
retire and you know what that means.
No more hassle.
We get off hard knocks
and be on easy street.
Shit.
What's the catch?
Here's the catch.
This woman wanted to be on TV
so took far too many
weight reduction pills.
Now she's scared
by her own apartment.
It flickers.
It floats around her
like a gyroscope.
Darren Aronofsky's film was a
paranoid dream in a fearful century.
So if the story of film
in the new millennium
has been the story of realist films
and dream films,
that story is as old
as movies itself.
There's nothing new there.
But in the new millennium,
film also combined reality
and fantasy in new ways.
The line between them blurred.
They got closer to each other.
Look what we find here in Stockholm.
The unique films of this man,
Roy Andersson,
combine reality and dream
in a new way
that few have ever done
in the story of film.
You know,
I was grown up in a worker family
and I grew up with impressions that
people really humiliated each other
and themselves also.
In Andersson's film
'Songs From the Second Floor'
this man in the middle,
covered in ashes,
has burnt down his business,
a serious social theme.
And the colour in this shot
is a drab green.
But suddenly the movie becomes
heightened like a musical fantasy.
(ALL SING OPERATICALLY)
Unhappiness is not only the result
of poorness, without money,
it's also the result of...
What is richdom in life?
Is it money
or how to be happy, so to say?
And I think that nowadays
and the last 30 years,
people have been...
They are lost. They are lost.
In the extraordinary ending
of 'Songs From the Second Floor',
symbols of religion are being dumped
into a wasteland beyond the city.
We built the road of wood
and we put in complete pieces
to the right
so that you get the impression that
there is a huge modern city there.
(YELLS)
It's like the end of the world
and then minutes
into the uncut shot...
..people who have been there
the whole time
stand up from the land,
like the Day of Judgement.
It's a theme
that I'm very, very interested in,
namely, the question of guilt,
personal guilt
and even collective guilt.
We are carrying guilt,
collective guilt,
as representatives
of the human being, mankind.
We are responsible and we have to
get that feeling of guilt...
We have to get it reconciliated...
to get rid of it.
And I think it's infected -
it infects the society,
it infects our time.
And I have that theme in the
'Songs From the Second Floor'.
And Andersson found
a striking visual style
to show the humiliation, guilt
and comedy of modern life.
He muted colour,
favouring greys and greens.
He loved plunging perspectives
and flat Nordic light.
A bleak dream.
And his camera seldom moves.
I really don't want a single frame
in my movie that is indifferent,
visually indifferent.
And I mean that
the modern way of filmmaking
contains a lot of indifferent frames
because they are built up
to concentrate
on the very special situations,
most of the time the killing
or, yeah, mainly stupid situations.
Why can't movie
has the same qualities as painting?
So you are fascinated by
each singular frame.
But what makes Andersson
so significant for modern cinema
is that he combines this exactitude
with a real sense of humour.
He's a fan of Laurel and Hardy.
(RAGTIME MUSIC PLAYS)
The simplicity of the way
this scene is shot, for example.
Square on, symmetrical.
They are so tragic
and so funny at the same time.
And it's two losers.
They want to be accepted
by the middle class or upper class
and they try so hard to get that,
to come to this...
..to be accepted, but they fail
all the time, all the time.
(LAUGHS)
It's not only simple jokes.
It's also social tragedy.
Political tragedy, I suppose.
It's the underdog's efforts
to be accepted,
to reach a higher level in society.
Andersson gets the gorilla,
the innovation.
He partially funds his films
himself, a one-man movie studio.
A one-man film history.
No-one has quite combined reality
and dream like this before.
21st cinema built on the past,
combining worlds.
In the '60s we saw how
Stanley Donen,
director of 'Singin' in the Rain',
used this split-screen
to get around censorship
by making it look like
two lovers are in bed together.
He filmed with two cameras at the
same time and combined the shots.
I have decided to do it.
Jump forward to the new millennium,
to this scene in Roger Avery's
'Rules of Attraction'.
Saturday morning
on an American campus.
We've just watched,
for several minutes,
these two students
get up and go to class.
Hi.
Like Donen, Avery uses split-screen,
but has his characters
look to camera, to us,
rather than to each other.
Typical.
Never seen you there before.
We feel in the middle
of this flirtatious moment.
Yeah. You've got bad timing.
Saturdays suck ass.
(SIGHS)
I don't have to put up
with this shit.
I'm dropping this fucking class!
(LAUGHS)
Yeah, me too.
Really?
Mm-hm.
I think I'm going to change...
But then she says,
"Show me your eyes"
and a hand takes his glasses off.
Show me your eyes.
And it's not his hand.
Then the cameras each pull out
and swing round
and the two worlds combine.
(GIGGLES)
We go from inside the moment
to an outside observer.
Each camera's move
was computer programmed
and the two images
were digitally stitched together.
Movies have always tried to make
people meet in memorable ways.
Few meetings
are as memorable as this one.
And in this film, 'Avatar',
computers also helped create
new 21st century syntheses
of reality and fantasy.
In real life,
this character is a marine,
who, because he's in a wheelchair,
can't walk or run.
But here, he's on a mission
to the planet Pandora
and has been transformed into
an attenuated creature
who enjoys the sprint,
moves like a dancer.
Sorry.
Watch it!
Canadian director James Cameron has
his camera flow, the creature move.
He feels the soil between his toes.
Hey, Marine!
Grace?
Well, who did you expect, numbnuts?
Think fast.
Everything about this scene
was animated on computers,
as you'd expect,
except the most important thing -
the facial expressions.
This energetic documentary
shows that the faces were filmed
with mini-cameras.
The set of a modern sci-fi film
looks like a factory -
bright lights, computers,
no hint of an enchanted planet.
Director James Cameron's
excited by the process.
You know, there's
a carbon fibre boom that comes out
with a little camera
on the front of it
and that camera shoots the face
in a nulled out close-up,
so even though the actor
is moving all around -
running, jumping, yelling,
screaming, jumping off stuff,
jumping over logs, you know,
running flat out, whatever -
we're getting that facial
performance absolutely locked off.
This split-screen in the documentary
shows the after and before.
And that proved to exactly be
the kind of Holy Grail approach.
21st century cinema
managed to insert
the mystery of human feeling
into a digital
and electronic universe.
But far away from Hollywood,
in Thailand in the new millennium,
Apichatpong Weerasethakul did
something even more inventive.
Look at this scene
from 'Tropical Malady'.
A Thai soldier, Keng,
and his farmer friend, Tong.
Two shy young men in Thailand,
filmed in natural light,
in long takes,
in the languor of summer days.
A backdrop so still
that it looks almost painted.
Then, about halfway through
the film, it seems to break down.
There's black
and then the story starts again.
This time we're in a forest -
a soundtrack full
of the night chorus
of insects, frogs and cicadas.
This time,
soldier Keng is lit by moonlight.
He sees a tree full of fireflies.
It's like the Eiffel Tower lit up.
We hear that his friend, Tong,
has become a tiger.
He must hunt him.
Director Weerasethakul films
the spirit of a water buffalo
leaving its own body.
Keng's breathless, agog,
seeing life and death and the Gaea.
The spirit takes him
into the forest.
Not only has the farmer been
reincarnated as a tiger,
but the film
seems to have been reincarnated...
..from a naturalistic tale
of friendship
to a mythic tale
of hunter and hunted.
Seldom in the whole history
of cinema
has such a bold story shift
happened.
The wild man, the gorilla.
Our last examples
of wildly inventive cinema
in the new millennium
come from this man,
Alexander Sokurov.
This is his film 'Mother and Son'.
We're in a Russian cottage
in the countryside.
A mother's dying. Her son tends her.
She's happy to die
in her son's arms.
The pearly light
is in the trees outside.
They whisper to each other.
Utter peace.
(BOTH SPEAK RUSSIAN)
Sokurov explains his approach.
'Mother and Son' is one of
the defining movies
in what would come
to be called slow cinema.
Director Sokurov's imagery
is as beautiful as his teachers,
Andrei Tarkovsky's,
but also derives from painting.
And in shots like this, Sokurov
had the image stretched diagonally,
as if it was made of rubber
to change how we see it.
Many critics felt
that 'Mother and Son' was one of
the best films of its time.
But then Sokurov made this film,
perhaps the most inventive
ever made,
the greatest gorilla
in film history.
We're in the Hermitage Museum
in St Petersburg,
at the end of the 19th century.
These Tsarist aristocrats
have been partying all night
and now they're flowing
down the steps, like a river.
But the revolution is coming.
This will be
the last of the great balls.
Soon they will be dead.
Sokurov saw the film as a single
last breath of this civilisation
and so, astonishingly, he filmed
the whole movie in a single take.
There hasn't been one cut
in the whole film.
This shot has travelled
1,300 metres, through 33 galleries,
filming 867 people -
cavaliers, museum officials, spies,
great balls and portents of the
horrors to come, over 90 minutes.
Sokurov and his team
rehearsed for six months.
Filming took place on 23 December,
when there are only four hours
of daylight.
This allowed for just two takes.
Take one had to be abandoned
after five minutes.
Then take two, this one, unfolds.
Unbelievable tension.
The steadicam so heavy
that the operator
almost buckles at the knees in pain.
Here's documentary footage of
the moment the filming was finished.
Their breath
shows how freezing it was.
The hand-held camera
captures the relief.
Tears of joy
that something entirely new in
the story of film had taken place.
TV cameras to capture this moment.
The camera mills around the people -
moved, tired, exhilarated.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
Sokurov is one of the most serious
filmmakers of the 21st century
and one of the most
stylistically daring.
He and filmmakers like him
suggest that the future of cinema
is in provocative hands.
If the history of film
has been the story of innovation,
of passion, of breaking the mould...
..what's its future?
Maestro di Angeles, here
in the Roman film studio Cinecitta
made props for Fellini,
but long after he's gone,
will people still be breaking
the movie mould?
Maybe in the year 2046,
movie-going will be like Christopher
Nolan's film 'Inception'.
It's an innovative sci-fi film
about layers of reality,
but maybe it's a metaphor too
for what film-going could become.
Look at this scene.
Leonardo di Caprio
and his friends wake up in a plane.
They've just been dreaming together.
Thank you.
The camera glides.
Greens and blues.
Atmospheric beds of music.
They're groggy,
embarrassed almost at the intimacy
of the dream they've just shared.
They dreamt that they were
in this van,
falling ultra-slowly off a bridge,
shot at maybe 1,000 frames
per second.
No natural sound.
But in it,
they dream a dream within a dream,
in which they're in a hotel
whose gravity's on the blink.
WOMAN: If you'd like to make a call,
please hang up and try again.
It's colour-coded orange.
The camera floats.
The actors are on wires.
And in that dream within a dream,
they dream a fourth layer -
they're in a James Bond-style battle
in a snow lodge.
Now the camera's hand-held.
The action's edgy.
The sound natural.
The dominant colour's white.
They live and die together.
Maybe this is what
movie-going is like in 2046 -
playing a game of living and dying
together.
Plunging into an underwater YouTube.
Or maybe something awful happens.
Look at this scene in 'Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'.
We're going to see my grandma.
Former lovers Joel and Clementine
are running through
Grand Central Station.
People start to disappear,
because they're undergoing
a brainwashing process
where their memories of their
relationship are being removed.
Then the brainwashing
becomes a nightmare.
It's shot like a TV crime programme.
The camera's roving around,
with a light on it.
Their past, their stories,
disappearing.
Everything you can remember.
JOEL: Mierzwiak! Wake me up!
Oh, I'm sorry, Mr Barish.
I thought you understood
what was going on here.
She no longer has a face.
You're erasing me from her.
I don't know.
You got this thing.
I'm in my bed. I know it.
My brain!
I'm part of your imagination too,
Joel.
How can I help you from there?
I'm inside your head.
The eyes on another face
are upside down.
Sorry.
Look. Who's that?
What if the same happened to film?
Maybe there'll be
some digital or ideological storm
and cinema will be wiped or banned.
And it'll be impossible to see it...
..except in a hidden bunker
or room like this,
where all its treasures are kept,
in secret.
If so, then those of us
who loved the movies
will have to remember them,
talk about them,
tell the story of them.
Of the people who made them.
The places where they were made.
The objects that appeared in them.
Even the places where the great
filmmakers sat and thought.
Or maybe movies will take up
a bigger part in our lives.
This is what the city of Ouagadougou
in Burkina Faso looked like in 2011.
At the very centre of the city
is this huge monument to cinema.
Maybe more cities will do this.
Back in 2011, filmmakers from around
the world gathered at this monument,
held hands in the sweaty heat
and walked around it three times,
in tribute to the filmmakers
who died in the previous year.
And to the movies.