The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 2 - The Hollywood Dream - 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 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 meet the great
film comedian Charlie Chaplin

and discover the realist directors
who threatened Hollywood.

1918 - World War I had just ended.

Much of Europe was scorched earth.

The seeds of Nazism
had been planted.

A few years later,

the Surrealist Manifesto
said that art should record dreams,

but what dreams?



In the hills of Los Angeles,

the myth of Hollywood
had just been born.

The town had started
to burnish itself.

Starlets with the especial
slenderness of youth

were attracted by the bauble
that is Hollywood -

shiny and romantic with its escapism
and promise of perfection.

This part of the story of film

is about the strengthening
of Hollywood,

how it becomes an industry,

a factory with which
the world would fall in love.

But as we'll see,
for all its strength and power,

many inside
the factory system of Hollywood

seemed not to notice
how fragile it was...

..how breakable.

Before the 1920s were over,

key filmmakers were trying
to break the bauble.

Investment in cinema increased
tenfold in the late teens and '20s.

Hollywood became an industry.

The money often came from
the East Coast bankers.

On the West Coast, it was spent by
a series of production bosses -

working-class, Jewish businessmen.

Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian immigrant
and fur trader,

set up Famous Players
which would become Paramount.

Four Canadian-Polish brothers
set up Warner Bros.

A brash Russian called
Louis B. Mayer ran MGM.

They built big, boring bunkers
called sound stages

so that filming could move indoors,
into the dark, to control this...

..light.

This scene in 'Citizen Kane'

shows that Hollywood
would work wonders with light.

The beams make the library
look like a sepulchre.

The documents gleam.

WOMAN: Thank you, James.

Hollywood set up
a production line system,

the way that the Model T
Ford motor car was assembled.

In Japan at the time,

directors led
the production process,

but in Hollywood,
it was production bosses,

like Zukor and Mayer and Warner.

Below them in the movie barns,
writers would concoct stories.

Talent scouts
would find new starlets

in coffee shops or magazines.

Set designers
in the boring buildings

would invent magnificent buildings.

This is what legendary Hollywood
designer William Cameron Menzies

thought Baghdad might look like -

inhuman in scale,
elegant and decorative.

(GONG CHIMES)

(FANFARE SOUNDS)

Costume designers conjured
lifestyles and selves

and got to know the bodies
of their stars.

This is one of
Marilyn Monroe's dresses.

Make-up artists came up
with new types of foundation

and eyelash and look.

This is the room and table
where Marilyn Monroe went blonde.

Engineers devised new technology -

lights to illuminate hair,

to make eyelashes cast shadows

on the face of Marlene Dietrich in
'Desire'...

..dollies on which to move
the camera to make the image glide.

The image glided in
'Gone with the Wind',

as if blown by the wind,
away from the lovers and the sunset.

And new cameras themselves -
beautiful objects.

This one, used in World War II,
half camera, half gun.

This one, from the 1960s,
portable and nosey.

And then the money men thought,
"Wait a minute.

"Why don't we buy
the screens as well

"so we can control where
the films are shown and when?"

And so things that were made
in boring buildings

were shown in grand ones.

The whole point was
to standardise and control.

Actress Joan Crawford's contract
specified when she should go to bed.

Johnny Weissmuller's
'Tarzan' contract fined him

for every pound he weighed
over 190 pounds.

Novelist Henry Miller
called Hollywood's production line

a dictatorship in which
the artist is silenced.

It was a dictatorship and yet,

some say there was genius in it.

A genius of sorts, Busby Berkeley,
choreographed this fantasy -

girls in the snow
making patterns with their moves -

increasingly abstract, geometric.

Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain'.

The studio system...

..in my opinion,
didn't really get into the film.

The studio system was the garden
where we all worked.

I mean, there I was at MGM with
a lot of enormously gifted people

and I often think about that...

..that idea of having a company
which brought people together.

To make money is all
they were doing.

They weren't doing it
for any other reason.

What was behind it
was an economic thing.

They were a company making money
or hoping to make money.

So, the industry was a bauble,
but also a garden,

which is what Agnes de Mille
called Hollywood a decade earlier.

And what varied flowers grew there.

MGM, for example,
which was so proud of itself

that it filmed
its own neoclassical buildings,

was said to have more stars
than there are in heaven.

Its movies had an opulence,
an optimism.

In this dance scene in
'Singin' in the Rain',

even the shadows have light in them.

Warner Bros. was more streetwise.

Its stars were angels
with dirty faces.

Scenes like this one from
'The Maltese Falcon'

had a downtrodden hero,
harder lighting, sharper shadows,

gangster outfits,
night-time settings.

Murder, melodrama, movie journalism.

This scene from
'The Scarlet Empress'

shows Paramount's style -
sparkling, champagney,

costumes on display,
feminine, romantic, wry,

more taken by
the veiled in the east.

WOMAN: Tell me, Alexei,
are you still fond of me?

Yes, Your Imperial Majesty.
I love you.

The studio system was
a capitalist production line.

It was copied around the world

in India, Mexico, Italy, Britain,
China, Hong Kong, Korea and France.

Each of those industries made
formulaic, copycat movies.

But the system also fostered
expertise and taste,

extravagance and brilliance.

The ghost in the machine was art.

Is it cold?

By the mid-'20s,

the boring buildings were making
700 films a year.

This is one of them -
'The Thief of Bagdad'.

It could stand for many of them.

It states its theme upfront.

A holy man shows
that happiness must be earned -

a tweak of the American dream.

Then a wide shot of a street scene.

We hardly notice the man lying
at the head height of the merchants.

But then we dissolve inwards
to see him.

We recognise him.

He's the movie star
Douglas Fairbanks.

He's also its producer.

He's asleep at
the centre of the action,

unaware that we're looking at him.

We dissolve in again.

Soft lighting, shallow focus,
make-up, a certain femininity.

But then he steals a man's wallet.

Our beautiful,
dreaming hero is a thief.

The passerby exits screen right,
notices his wallet is missing.

Cut to Doug, who looks screen right.

The camera doesn't cross the line.

We know he's looking at his victim,
smiling.

In just 90 seconds,
the film has told us its theme -

romantic and American,

introduced us to a society,
then a scene...

..then an individual,
seduced us with style -

the poetics of lighting,

amused us with character -
a likeable rogue,

a human being like us,

but more glamorous
and with a more exciting life.

It makes the space very clear.

We're not confused about
where we are.

The story kicks in, of course.
The thief has broken into a palace.

He hears that a princess is there,
glimpses her fairytale bed.

Will he go down to look at her?

No...no...maybe.

No.

Yes.

We can't wait to see her either.

The curl of the fantasy balcony,

the elegant attenuation
of her mosquito net,

his trousers are see-through now.

He looks through the net.
His shadow.

Hollywood cinema - the bauble -

is brilliant at
the anticipation of seeing,

the desire to see,
the pleasure of seeing.

The thief falls in love, of course

and his love sets in motion
the rest of the film.

This sort of movie is
usually called classical,

but really, it's romantic.

It became Hollywood's
claim to fame in the '20s.

It's what most people mean
when they even say the word 'movie'.

It's the mainstream, the bauble.

So, Hollywood mainstream films
in the '20s

were entertaining and romantic,

but our theme is
innovation in cinema.

Were they innovative?

Some of the most popular films
of the '20s -

the comedies - most certainly were.

Three filmmakers - Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd

were the greatest of
the American comedy directors.

Before them,
there was mostly slapstick.

This sight gag
on a fast-moving train was typical -

a good cheap laugh
using a bucket of water.

But then came Keaton,
obsessed by the camera.

In this scene from his film
'The Cameraman',

he shows that fascination.

Keaton became
the greatest comic image maker

the cinema had yet seen.

He thought like an architect.

In this sequence in a short film
he made in 1920,

the house he's built
becomes a playpen.

It falls around him.

Keaton helped define silent cinema.
He just got it.

We've already seen that he got that,
in editing,

a cut replaces one space
with another.

Here, he jokes about it as if,
as he's walking down a street,

he's suddenly on a clifftop.

But as this scene shows,

he also got
that movies are about looking.

And he got that
they're brilliant at daredevilling.

He begins this sequence
with an overhead shot

to make the building
look really high.

In the story, Buster must jump
between the tall buildings.

He had a set built above
this 3rd Street tunnel in LA...

..right at the very top of
this old archive shot of the tunnel.

Keaton's camera position makes him
look far higher up than he was.

There was a net just below,
out of shot.

Just as well
because Keaton didn't make it

and was badly bruised.

Keaton's inventiveness
was often highly planned,

but sometimes, spontaneous.

Here, he saw a train arriving
and so improvised a gag

to make it look like he himself
stopped it then started it again.

One of his greatest movies,
'The General',

was a comedy epic about a train.

It's set during
the American Civil War.

Buster's a Southern train driver -
a bit eccentric, obsessed by detail.

In the first half of the film,

he travels north
to the captive's lair

and rescues his sweetheart.

Every visual joke and set-up
in the first half

is repeated and amplified
in the second,

but in reverse order.

We get the pattern.

We see the next joke coming

and we're laughing
before it even starts.

The climax of the film
has been called

the most stunning visual event
ever arranged for a comedy,

perhaps for any kind of film.

The northern enemies advance in
so Keaton sets fire to a bridge.

Their train crosses,
the bridge gives way.

This is no trick shot.

The locomotive and the bridge
were real.

The wreck of the train
was visible for years to come.

Such scale, such sublime
was a key element of silent film.

Labour was cheap.
Wall Street hadn't crashed.

Imaginations were
extravagant and uncapped.

Studios were not yet afraid
of the size of directors' dreams.

Keaton's dreams
outstripped his box office.

He was eventually sacked by MGM.

He hit the bottle

and lived in a trailer in a car park
beside his former studio.

He was forgotten for years,

but as this rare
archive footage of him shows,

Keaton was joking till the end.

This little cigarette routine shows
he still had the urge to improvise.

In 1965,
at the Venice Film Festival,

he got a standing ovation.

He died the next year.

Amongst the scores of filmmakers
who were influenced by Keaton

is Palestine's Elia Suleiman.

This scene shows that Suleiman,
like Keaton, filmed in deadpan.

He keeps back from the action
and finds grumpiness funny.

Buster Keaton
only once shared the screen

with our next great
silent film comedian,

Charlie Chaplin.

In this scene in 'Limelight',

Chaplin shows that whilst he was
less into the camera than Keaton,

he was far more into body movement.

(PIANO PLAYS OUT OF TUNE)

Chaplin thought like a dancer
and a vaudevillian.

Here, he rehearses a comic movement
before filming it in costume.

Actor and producer Norman Lloyd
knew Chaplin

and also Alfred Hitchcock,

who was born not far
from Chaplin in London.

Hitch came from
a middle-class family.

His father was a poultry dealer -
fish and poultry and...

..Hitch always had an aspiration
to be part of that world.

Charlie came out of the direst
poverty that you can imagine.

Unbelievable poverty.

I mean, stuff like
he and his brother, Sydney,

who was his half-brother...

..stealing fruit - rotten fruit.

They would know where the wagon was

with fruit
that was going to be dumped.

They'd go and get that fruit,
eat that fruit.

His mother, being put into an asylum
and out - in and out.

I think his father was a drinker.

Charlie had such an upbringing
that it's in the movies.

And never more so than in
his first feature-length picture,

'The Kid', which recreated
the rooms and relationships

of Chaplin's childhood -
cold mornings, worn-out bedding,

life in a London garret
with a bath on the wall.

Chaplin plays a version
of his by now famous character,

a penniless tramp who thinks
he's a gentleman dilettante.

He finds an orphan boy
and brings him up.

The boy starts to work for his dad.

He breaks windows
so his dad can fix them.

Shot in America, of course,
but English-style windows and doors.

Eventually,
the boy is taken to an orphanage.

Chaplin coaxed a brilliant
performance from Jackie Coogan

as he's taken away.

The film humanised comic cinema.

It D.W. Griffith-ised it,
you could say.

It showed Chaplin's passion
and empathy with the poor.

He was a huge hit around the world.

Chaplin was cinema's
Charles Dickens.

He built his own studio in LA
in the English style

and filmed it in time lapse.

A rare thing to do,
which shows his pride in it.

He had final cut on his films.

His premiers were mobbed.

The studio today looks like
a row of English houses

plonked in a megalopolis.

A deleted scene from his film
'City Lights'

that Chaplin made 10 years later
shows how his mind worked.

He's on a street corner.

A piece of wood
is stuck in an air vent.

Chaplin begins to play with it,
to improvise.

The Soviets thought of him
as a Marxist,

but Chaplin was almost
a Jungian too -

a believer in play, inspiration,

finding ideas within yourself.

It's like he's strumming
on the table,

letting his unconscious do its work.

60 years later,
the British director Nicolas Roeg

also seemed to try to show the
unconscious lives of his characters.

Could be right.
Then again, why spoil the mystery?

The people act cool with each other,
but their hands, filmed in close-up,

suggest twitchy mental energy.

Chaplin's deleted scene
is a lovely little poem

about daydreaming
on street corners.

Stanley Donen sees ideas
in Chaplin too.

To be wonderful choreography,

it has to have an idea which
overwhelms the whole production

or dance or whatever
you'd like to call it

and that's what's hard to find -

a great, wonderful, encompassing
idea for the musical number.

Well, the idea of the dictator
kicking the balloon

is a great metaphor

because it's Adolf Hitler
making the world his toy

and the image is so spectacular

that that's the kind of thing
I'm talking about.

If you can come up with
that kind of idea...

But it had to be...

First, he was going to make,

I don't know how he thought of it
in what order,

but he was going to make a film
about Adolf Hitler

and he was going to play Hitler

and how is he going
to make a buffoon of him, but not...

..not make him be the ogre
that he was.

That's quite an accomplishment.

Fascism and ballet.

Who else would have thought up
a scene like this?

No-one else in the story of film

combines entertainment,
ideas, movement, improvisation

and politics like Chaplin.

In France in the 1940s,
Chaplin inspired Jacques Tati,

but Tati leant forwards
and wore short trousers,

where Chaplin lent backwards
and wore long ones.

In Italy, Toto became a huge star

wearing Chaplin's
trademark bowler hat

and with Chaplin's jabby,
confident manner.

And in the massive
film industry of India,

this man,
megastar and director Raj Kapoor,

modelled his screen character,
the Tramp,

on Chaplin's streetwise plucky,

tipping his hat,
stealing from the rich.

And in America itself,

the great director Billy Wilder
saw Chaplin as his master.

Gloria Swanson
explicitly impersonates him

in 'Sunset Boulevard'.

But even a moment like this
in Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator'...

..was reworked in this scene
in Wilder's 'Some Like It Hot'.

Look at that. Look how she moves.

Chaplin co-founded United Artists,

the studio that made
'Some Like It Hot'.

The studio was one of the great
foundation stones of Hollywood.

Chaplin was in
American cinema's bloodstream.

But to the country's shame,
it kicked him out in the '50s

because he was a leftist.

When you work with a man like
Chaplin or Renoir...

..you assimilate,
you hope, their greatness.

That is to say,
you become part of their world

and you try to not only work
on that level, but you...

..absorb something from them

and you begin to have
the points of view that they have.

Not that you've disregarded
your own,

but what you bring...

..is the ability to...

..assimilate what they do.

The comedian who was most influenced
by Chaplin in the '20s

was the Nebraskan son of
a photographer, Harold Lloyd.

At first,
Lloyd was too like Chaplin.

Here, he shrugs, wears a frock coat
and sports a moustache,

but then he and his producer tried
him in big, black-rimmed glasses.

In those days,
this was a nerdy look,

but add in Lloyd's athleticism and
the flinty courage that we see here

and you get a ballsy dreamer
both aggressive and lyrical -

a jock nerd.

Lloyd's most influential film,

'Safety Last', ends with one of
the most famous sequences

in '20s cinema.

He plays a hick
who pretends to his girlfriend

that he's manager of a store.

In the climax of the film,
as a publicity stunt for the store,

Lloyd, who had vertigo

and a missing thumb and forefinger
on one hand in real life,

climbs the building.

The sequence is
a vertical obstacle race.

A bird, a net, a plank, a clock,
a rope, a dog, a mouse, a gun

and a wind gauge get in Lloyd's way.

When he finally reaches
the top of the building,

the action reaches a crescendo

and he swoops in an arc
into the arms of his sweetheart.

The climb is
a beautiful idea on film.

On the other side of the world,
Japan's great director,

Yasujiro Ozu was influenced by
the ballsy dreamer.

The students in this film have been
working out how to cheat at exams.

They have Harold Lloyd's
confident silliness,

his man-boyishness.

The comedies were the brightest,
most entertaining

and innovative things to come out
of Hollywood in the '20s.

They and the extravagant romance
of films like 'The Thief of Bagdad'

in all its splendour,
its special effects and sweep,

made Hollywood a major
export industry for America.

But something in
its very flickering,

the fact that the bauble was
a fantasy, made it vulnerable.

This architectural dream of Baghdad
isn't the real Baghdad, of course.

This is the real Baghdad.

To say so can shatter the bauble.

Reality can break fantasy

and in the '20s, several filmmakers
already realised this.

They wanted to show this -

real life without
the costumes and glitter.

Nonfiction.

In 1921, an Irish-American explorer,
Robert Flaherty,

made the longest nonfiction film
so far in this story of film -

'Nanook of the North'.

It's set in Alaska

and has beautiful but conventional
scenic shots like this.

But then it focuses on
one real Itivinuit man,

Nanook and his family.

'Nanook of the North'
was no travelogue.

It stared into Nanook's face.

It was about his psychology,

his mythic struggle
against the elements.

Like Chaplin and D.W. Griffith,
Flaherty was a romantic.

But by using non-actors, non-stars -

no Douglas Fairbanks
or Garbo here...

..he made the audience
look more ethically.

As it happens, Flaherty staged
this scene and others.

But 'Nanook of the North'
was a huge hit around the world.

People had seen a real man,

a playful father with
a sense of humour, on screen.

You could buy Nanook ice-cream bars.

Nanook's death two years later
of starvation made headlines.

And so, documentary as an art form,
as a viable genre, was born.

Documentaries are often thought of
as merely information,

but in fact, nonfiction cinema
is amongst the most innovative

in the story of film.

Forough Farrokhzad's Iranian film,
'The House Is Black',

used beautiful tracking shots

to turn a home for people
with leprosy into a film poem.

(SINGS)

In this film essay, 'Sans Soleil',

Chris Marker filmed real places
in Japan and elsewhere

then wrote a fictional commentary
in which an imaginary woman

quotes from made-up letters
from the filmmaker.

WOMAN: He wrote,
"I'm just back from Hokkaido,

"the northern island.

"Rich and hurried Japanese
take the plane.

"Others take the ferry.

"Waiting, immobility,
snatches of sleep.

"Curiously, all of that makes me
think of a past or future war."

Imagined words on top of
nonfiction pictures.

I think that's why I...

I've only said so much for war
when I got back...

..'cause I was in the mindframe of,

well, just come back from a place
where everyone wants me dead.

And director Brian Hill
and poet Simon Armitage

interviewed this man
about his war experiences

then turned his words into poems

and had him speak the poems
to make his memories magical.

Or burns to the face,
you're just soft in the head.

The British army is in the place
for a lying bastard or basket case.

In the '60s, Jorgen Leth
made this short documentary,

'The Perfect Human'.

In a documentary made
nearly 40 years later,

director Lars von Trier asked Leth
to remake the original five times,

each time with
a startling new challenge.

All these are innovative high points
in the story of film

and show that documentary directors

from Flaherty onwards
were really co-directors.

The other half of the directing team
was real life itself.

Back in LA in the '20s,

maybe it was seeing documentaries
like 'Nanook of the North'

that led our next filmmaker
to use realism

to undermine the Hollywood fantasy.

A director called Erich von Stroheim
took on the establishment.

Here, he filmed himself square on,
looming out of the dark,

grinning, scarred.

WOMAN: Erich von Stroheim was
one of the few legitimate geniuses

of the early silent days.

He was a man of such vision

and he was so great a poet
and an artist...

..that he found nothing but trouble
in Hollywood.

Stroheim's drive to realism
was more obsessive than Flaherty's.

Here, he even shows an actress
how to do a simple thing

like comb her hair -
a small detail in the scene.

This is his gigantic fifth film,
'Greed'.

The man on the right is a dentist.
His wife wins the lottery.

In the original prints,
the money was hand-tinted yellow.

As she gets obsessively greedy

so her husband becomes
drunken and penniless.

He beats her.

Stroheim showed her agony,
her smallness.

Eventually, the man murders his wife
and in this famous climax,

shot in Death Valley, also kills
a rival who put him out of business.

By now, the yellow -
the colour of money -

has flooded the whole world
of the story.

And as the man's handcuffed
to the body,

so he himself must perish.

The story alone shows Stroheim's
contempt for Hollywood romance,

for the bauble.

As did his techniques.

He shot every scene of the novel
by Frank Norris

on which the film was based -
nine months of shooting...

..sometimes, as here in baking heat,
actors pushed to their limits,

a budget of $1.5 million.

The finished movie ran seven hours.

Stroheim was the Emile Zola
or Dostoevsky of cinema.

Cinematographer Carl.

MAN: Early in his life,

he was visited by
such very great humiliation,

such deep, inward psychic wounds

that there came in him
an insane desire

to use his genius as a weapon.

MGM hated the results.

Stroheim's ultra realism
became a stigma.

He didn't get to direct
many more films.

Here, in 1948,

he returns to his home city
of Vienna to direct a film,

but nothing came of it.

In 1950, he saw the cut version of
'Greed' and cried.

He said that the film was dead.

In the same year, Stroheim played
the protective butler

in Billy Wilder's
'Sunset Boulevard'.

The musicians mustn't know
what happened.

In this famous scene,

Wilder shows fictional movie star
Norma Desmond

watching one of her old movies.

The clip is from a sublime,

extravagant real movie
from the 1920s 'Queen Kelly'.

It was directed way back then
by none other than the sublime,

extravagant Erich von Stroheim.

For complicated reasons,

the movie never saw
the light of day.

Three years after
von Stroheim's 'Greed',

another MGM film
tried to portray '20s America

with far more realism
than romantic cinema.

It became the greatest
pre-Wall Street crash

social problem picture of its time.

'The Crowd' tells the story
of an ordinary New York couple.

They have a child but she dies.

In this heartbreaking scene,

the father thinks
his dead daughter's merely sleeping

and so tries to hush
the street noise

so that it won't disturb
her slumber.

'The Crowd's director, King Vidor,
met James Joyce in Paris.

He adored D.W. Griffith's
ideasy epic 'Intolerance'.

He was that rare Hollywood beast -
an intellectual.

His films almost never
feature villains

and were written mostly by women.

Vidor pushed realism and acting
beyond the Hollywood norm.

Here, he films the leading actress
in a crowd in static shot -

a lunge take.

No fancy clothes or set.
Just her growing despair.

'The Crowd' was the first movie

to use New York extensively
as a location.

Vidor used hidden cameras.

He cast an unknown actor,
James Murray, instead of a star.

To show the scale of the office
where the husband worked,

he designed
this magnificent sequence -

an overhead studio crane shot
finds John

among the other identical desks.

Billy Wilder repeated it in
'The Apartment',

a bittersweet reworking
of Vidor's film.

We dissolve through
to Wilder's everyman,

played by Jack Lemmon,
at the very centre of the frame.

And Orson Welles used the same
visual idea in 'The Trial',

exaggerating it by craning upwards

and using small people
and even dolls and smaller desks

in the background
to force the perspective.

MGM was uneasy about
'The Crowd's refusal

to romanticise
ordinary New York life.

They made Vidor shoot
seven different endings

in various shades of optimism.

VIDOR: You see, for a studio
tuned to glamour pictures

and happy endings,

which it was for then
and many years afterwards,

to have a realistic picture...

..which put the spotlight
on marriage

and on any kind of American life

and then you can't have
a happy ending on that.

It just wouldn't fit.
But the studio didn't know.

It lost sight of how
to end this picture happily.

So, we made, actually,
seven endings and tried it out -

seven previews
with the various endings

and finally,
I came up with the ending

where he's lost again in the crowd

and the camera moves back
and back and back.

'The Crowd' sums up a lot
about cinema of the '20s and '30s.

It showed mass society emerging.

It focused on the everyman
as French films would do.

It showed the kinetic energy
of cities themselves,

their rhythms and compositions.

Like the German movies of Fritz Lang
and Walter Ruttmann...

..and the Soviet films
of Dziga Vertov.

In the Soviet Union itself
in the '20s,

this wonderful film
played with the rebellious idea

of realism and cities.

We're on Mars.

It's all angles, diagonals,
modernist costumes.

This is Queen Aelita.

She's shown Earth for the first time
and sees a city...

..a battleship...

..then a focus pull
to a balcony in Moscow.

The queen has glimpsed
something real -

Earth - and she wants it.

We'll get to the famous
Soviet films of the '20s soon,

but those by this director,

Yakov Protazanov,
are quite unlike them.

Protazanov worked at the same time
as the director of this film,

Yevgeni Bauer.

A scholar studies in his room.
Handsome side lighting.

The scholar's aunt arrives.

Bauer uses an open door
to create a slit on screen,

like a Vermeer painting.

Later, we're in the scholar's study.

Daringly for the time,

a main source light is in the shot
here in the foreground.

Bravely natural.

Later, the scholar sees
a beautiful actress on stage,

then, astonishingly, gets a letter
from her asking to meet.

He waits for her in the snow.

She arrives in the background
of this shot -

a daring composition
filmed in natural light.

And then the actress dies

and the scholar begins
to dream of her.

Here, in a field, she walks into
a beam of intense light.

At the end of the film,
on his deathbed,

exhausted with lamenting,
the scholar's aunt consoles him.

Then Bauer dissolves from
night-time blue to black-and-white.

The ghost of the actress
is in the room too

and so the scholar stirs once more.

His aunt can't see the actress,
of course, and becomes upset.

Where romantic cinema
was usually optimistic,

these early Russian films
were laments,

pessimistic in a way,

about the realism of grief
and loss and longing.

You'd think that films like
'Nanook of the North'

and 'Greed' and 'The Crowd'

and those of Yevgeni Bauer
would be the last word in realism

in cinema of this time, but no.

One profoundly serious
Danish filmmaker

challenged romantic
and fantasy cinema

with such deeply-felt realism that
he was almost a one-man reformation,

undercutting the emotionalism
of mainstream cinema

with a spiritual spareness.

Look at this scene from
'The Passion of Joan of Arc'.

Joan, the 15th-century
French Catholic girl

who was accused of witchcraft
has just signed a statement

denying God to save her life.

The actress, Marie Falconetti,
had never been in a movie before,

nor would she again.

She's filmed only in close-up,
wears almost no make-up.

You can see her freckles.
Her eyelashes are matted with tears.

Falconetti's hair was cropped
just before this scene was shot.

The filming was done in silence.

Such an atmosphere on the set that
even some of the electricians cried.

Look at the lighting and focus.

No depth to the image.
Nothing in the background.

No set or shadows.

The walls were painted pink
to remove their glare

so as not to detract
from Falconetti's face.

The set designer, Hermann Warm,
painted the shadows on 'Caligari'.

The film was directed in France
by a Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer.

He was brought up
in a strict Protestant family.

Falconetti and the others
are speaking.

Dreyer had them say the actual words
that were spoken at the trial

nearly 500 years earlier.

He thought that
this gave the scene conviction.

The '90s maverick Lars von Trier.

Dreyer is fantastic.

Why he...

Yeah, the same thing
that he did with the decor,

he also did with the scripts,
you know.

He started with a basic script and
then he kind of reduced and reduced.

I don't know what he did,
but it had this monumental feeling,

of course,
after reducing for many years.

It's like a very good soup,
you know,

that's been reducing
for a long time.

I don't know why he's great,
but you know,

I think that goes for everybody.

Why is Tarkovsky great?

It's really difficult to say,
but it was, for me,

just to see his films was kind of
a revelation so it's really...

You should be thankful

that it's difficult to say
why people are great

because it's just something
that you feel very strongly

and if you don't feel it strongly,
then they're not great.

Dreyer was born out of wedlock,
adopted and brought up a Lutheran.

He lived here
and went to churches like this.

Though he didn't believe in God,

the purity and plainness
of Lutheran churches

seem to have formed
Dreyer's inner eye.

He's the master of pared-down decor.

Even in his first film,
'The President',

he seems to want to simplify
and purify his images

in a Protestant way.

Sets at the time were usually
cluttered like this.

Soon, he started to film
on misty days or into the light

to soften his imagery.

His shots became paler, whiter.

His haunting vampire movie,
'Vampyr',

features shadows
against a white wall.

They have a life of their own.

And in its famous ending,

a vampire's accomplice dies
by suffocating in white flour.

Dreyer's utterly spare use
of whiteness was wildly rebellious.

Hollywood romantic cinema
was supposed to be decorative,

full of detail, not blank.

No other director
in the story of film

cared so much about whiteness -
its simplicity, its spirituality.

At the end of his film 'Ordet' -
'The Word',

a woman comes to life in a white,
entirely undecorated room.

In Dreyer's last film
many years later,

a woman beliefs so completely
in the power of love

that he films her
as if through a white scrim,

as if in heaven and she says this.

Dreyer's seriousness
was deeply unfashionable

and so, in the '50s,

not getting his films made,
he managed this cinema.

The Danish Film Institute now has a
study centre dedicated to his work.

It's hard not to see Dreyer's
radical reduction of set and decor

in Lars von Trier's
completely set-less film 'Dogville'.

MAN: Hey, Martha.
WOMAN: Hello, Tom.

Listen, I'll come...

This was the opposite
of romantic Hollywood cinema.

A million miles away
from the decorative splendour

of 'The Thief of Bagdad'.

Special permission from
the regional director, Tom.

May I repeat,
we don't need the organ.

We can be spiritual without
singing or reading from the Bible.

It's almost seven.
Don't forget your bell, now.

This is the original screenplay
from Dreyer's film 'Joan of Arc'.

He sketched an idea for an image
in the film in the margin.

Dreyer had purged silent cinema

of its spectacle, its decoration,

its action, its bauble.

What was left was
a girl facing her God,

facing the camera.

Years later,
France's great maverick director,

Jean-Luc Godard,
had his lover and muse, Anna Karina,

go to the cinema in his film
'Vivre Sa Vie'.

The film she saw was
'The Passion of Joan of Arc'.

Dreyer's Scandinavian
spiritualism and fatalism

was a universe away
from this place - Hollywood.

Escapist romantic movies
were what most people saw

in movie palaces like these.

Places you'd go
after a hard day's work

to forget your troubles,
to see what utopia might feel like.

The realist directors of the '20s
hardly got a look in

in these places,

but they'd seen something brilliant
in the movies -

the ability to capture reality
and make it splendid and moving

and this was just the start.

Filmmakers in Germany,
France, Russia, Japan and China

would see other great things
in the film strip.

Their discoveries
would make the 1920s

the greatest decade
in the story of film.