The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 3 - Episode #1.3 - full transcript
NARRATOR: At the end of the 1800s,
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multibillion dollar
global entertainment industry now.
But what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz -
it's passion, innovation.
So, let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain',
and in Jane Campion in Australia,
and in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who is in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made...
..and in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world,
and in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story Of Film -
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter,
we meet the dazzling film-maker
Sergei Eisenstein
and discover the glories
of Japanese film in the 1930s.
(ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC)
What great years for cinema
were the 1920s and early '30s.
Entertainment cinema
was at its most glittering.
Yet rebellious directors
around the world
challenged its glitter.
This battle for the soul of cinema
made it splendid.
In entertainment romantic cinema
of the '20s,
people looked like this...
Soft lighting, shallow focus,
make-up, dream-like.
But as we've seen,
some of the first rebels
were the great realist directors
who, in a scene like this,
scrubbed mainstream cinema
of its fantasy,
its gloss, even its make-up.
But this was only the beginning of
the revolution against
romantic cinema in these years.
Around the world,
seven further sets of rebels
saw in film new 20th-century ways
of getting beneath the surface of
what it's like to be alive.
Film was their laboratory.
The glory of '20s
and early '30s cinema
was the result of their obsessions,
ideas and societies.
After the realists,
the second challenge
to conventional cinema in the '20s
came from this man, Ernst Lubitsch.
At first, he acted in movies.
He's like an inept seducer -
overacting, an adolescent, almost.
In the films he directed,
he mocked the heavy-handed,
almost Victorian way
that sex and love
were shown in movies,
and came up with a style
that was all his own.
(COMICAL MUSIC)
This scene from his early film
'The Oyster Princess'
shows Lubitsch's mocking,
subversive tone.
A capitalist smokes
a ridiculously fat cigar.
He has an army of stenographers
and his assistants, of course,
are all black.
(COMICAL MUSIC CONTINUES)
And few directors
anywhere in the world
were as visually daring as Lubitsch.
In this film, 'The Mountain Cat',
a girl falls in love
with a lieutenant,
so he gives her his heart.
She eats it.
(ELEGANT MUSIC)
Snowmen come to life and play music.
The film's a riot of
surreal production design.
Its screen masking
is even more daring.
Such virtuosity was noticed
by Hollywood, of course,
and 'The Mountain Cat'
was Lubitsch's last film
before moving there.
American censorship meant
that Lubitsch had to be inventive
in how he portrayed sexuality there.
Look at this scene
in his hugely successful
American film 'The Marriage Circle'.
A psychiatrist and his wife
are at breakfast.
We see a close-up of an egg,
then of a coffee cup.
She stirs her coffee,
then his hand disappears, then hers.
The breakfast is pushed aside.
A more urgent urge than that to eat
has overtaken them.
Lubitsch films nothing of
their love-making, of course.
But his use of objects
is the cinematic equivalent
of a raised eyebrow -
far more daring
in his suggestion of sexuality
than Chaplin or Keaton or Lloyd.
Lubitsch went on to make
more sparkling comedies
in America in the '30s and '40s,
and ran the Paramount Studio.
Billy Wilder, who made 'Double
Indemnity' and 'Some Like It Hot'
had this sign on his office wall -
"How would Lubitsch do it?"
Where Lubitsch was innovative
with film comedy,
the third assault
on the conventions of '20s cinema
came from this city - Paris.
The pioneering Lumiere brothers
had been influenced
by impressionist painters,
and now film-makers
like Germaine Dulac,
Abel Gance and Marcel L'Herbier
used cinema
in an impressionist way too.
Like this - our restless eyes
darting around,
scanning, not cutting.
This showed how people
actually see things
and how mental images
repeat and flicker.
This film, 'La Roue',
is a grand work of impressionism.
It strangely begins with images
of its writer/producer/director
Abel Gance,
then tells the story of
a complex love triangle.
One of the men in the triangle
falls off a cliff.
The woman he loves runs to save him.
We feel fear for him.
But then his own fear
makes images of his beloved
flash in his inner eye.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
We're inside his head.
The movie screen becomes
his inner eye.
Romantic cinema had many
cliff-hangers, of course,
but its images
always had to be readable.
Here, some of Gance's shots
last just one frame -
far too fast for us
to take them in one by one.
They flash past,
giving us an impression
of his final moments.
The poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau
later said,
"There's cinema
before and after 'La Roue'
"just as there's painting before
and after Picasso."
Soviet directors Pudovkin,
Eisenstein and Dovzhenko
studied it in Moscow.
But Gance hadn't yet peaked.
In the following four years,
he wrote, directed and edited
a four-hour impressionist film
about the early life
of Napoleon Bonaparte,
the French revolutionary,
national leader and militarist,
portraying its main character
as a tragic hero
and making mainstream romantic
cinema look static in comparison.
To capture the dynamism of the man,
his fist fights and horse rides
and battle charges
and storms at sea,
Gance rethought the camera's
relationship to movement.
Gance had a fur-covered sponge
mounted around the lens
so that the boys could punch
right up to it and not get hurt.
In the first scenes of Napoleon
as a young man in Corsica,
Gance attached
a compressed-air-powered camera
to the saddle of a horse,
to capture Bonaparte's
kinetic energy.
How would Gance top such dynamism
at the climax of the movie,
when Napoleon enters Italy -
a land grab which the film
fails to condemn?
How would he outdo the epic imagery
and grand sets
of Pastrone's 'Cabiria'
and D.W. Griffith's 'Intolerance'
which had come before?
Here's the answer.
He filmed with three cameras
mounted on top of each other,
each pointing in
a slightly different direction.
Audiences had to turn their heads
to see the whole spectacle.
(MILITARISTIC MUSIC)
'Napoleon' had its world premiere
here at the Paris Opera.
The 'Los Angeles Times' called it
"the measure
for all other films ever."
But despite such a claim,
it was shown infrequently.
In 1979, after a mammoth restoration
of the negative,
by British historian Kevin Brownlow,
'Napoleon' was triumphantly
screened here,
at the Telluride Film Festival
in Colorado.
Gance, then aged 89,
travelled to the screening
and watched the film
from his hotel room
across the street
from the outdoor cinema...
..the last time he saw
his masterpiece
of impressionist film-making.
In Germany
in the late 1910s and '20s,
the fourth innovative challenge to
mainstream romantic cinema emerged.
Directors wanted to show
deeper aspects of the human mind
than the French impressionism
of Abel Gance.
Influenced by the so-called
expressionist painters
and theatre designers,
whose work was jagged
like a broken mirror,
they began making
expressionist films.
Less than 30 were made,
but they were exported
all around the world.
Germany had just been defeated
in an appalling war,
but because it closed its borders
to foreign films in 1916,
its home-grown film industry
was stimulated.
The most influential of the
expressionist movies was this one -
'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari',
directed by Robert Wiene,
which was made before
Chaplin's first feature
or the accession of Emperor Hirohito
in Japan.
It was full of fear,
haunting murders, graphic rooms.
(EERIE DRONING)
Where studio film-makers
filmed indoors,
excluding daylight,
and Scandinavians did the opposite,
director Wiene and his chief
designer Herman Warm
found an apparently
revolutionary third way.
They flooded their set
with flat light
and then painted shadows
directly onto the walls and floor
Cesare, a sleepwalker
on show at fairgrounds,
murders the enemies of his master,
Dr Caligari, at night.
This story had a political edge.
Caligari represented
the controlling German state.
Cesare represented ordinary people
manipulated by it.
But director Wiene
and his producer, Erich Pommer,
removed the film's political bite
by adding this ending
that showed that the whole thing
was the dream of a madman, Feher,
and that Dr Caligari's
not evil after all
and the German state
doesn't control its people.
Filming took place here,
at the Babelsberg Studio,
near Berlin.
The film's bizarre imagery took the
question of point of view in cinema
further even than
the French impressionists.
The film's spaces sliced like shards
of glass, its jagged lighting,
showed the extreme mental state
of Feher.
Caligari has echoed down the years.
This film, Charles Klein's
'Tell Tale Heart',
shows its direct influence.
The seminal British director
Alfred Hitchcock,
who'd worked in Germany,
made his first important film,
'The Lodger'
with some of the shadowing
and hysteria of 'Caligari'.
But the most astonishing outgrowth
of 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'
came in Japan in the early '20s.
Former actor Teinosuke Kinugasa
saw it and Abel Gance's 'La Roue',
and then made this film,
'A Page of Madness'.
This is the opening scene,
a tempest, an asylum,
visual overlays,
fast cutting as in 'La Roue'.
(EERIE MUSIC)
A woman dancing
in an Art Deco setting.
The woman's in the asylum.
In complex flashbacks, we find out
that she's tried to drown her child.
Her husband takes a job
in the asylum
to try to help her.
But then his mental state
deteriorates too.
'A Page of Madness'
goes further than Caligari
because it's not just the central
character who's psychotic.
The film itself,
its editing and imagery,
seem psychotic too.
'A Page of Madness' combined the
fleeting techniques of impressionism
with the deep unease
of expressionism,
and is the second great
Japanese film that exists
after 'Souls on the Road'.
Back in Germany, Fritz Lang,
the Viennese son of an architect,
started making films about
the deep structure of society
rather than the surface claims
it makes for itself.
Lang made the most iconic film of
the silent era,
a movie that might have been made
by an architect.
'Metropolis', set in the year 2000,
tells the story of clashes
between workers
and an authoritarian industrialist
in a giant city -
like a fantasy New York,
roads and railways in the sky,
brilliant model shots.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
A young woman, Maria, inspires the
workers and is almost Christ-like,
but the industrialist builds a robot
that looks like her
to manipulate the masses.
The robot is a Deco mannequin,
lit with flashing lights,
symmetrically framed,
the astonishing opening eyes
of the woman enhanced by make-up.
But in the end, Maria and the
industrialist's son save the city,
and workers and owners are united
in a scene that seems to take place
on the steps of a cathedral.
Lang's cityscapes and robotics,
exploitation and urban paradise
were profoundly influential.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
The Hollywood director King Vidor
loved 'Metropolis'
and, as a result, there are
expressionist echoes of it
in his city film, 'The Crowd'.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Adolf Hitler liked 'Metropolis'
and the inmates of the Nazi
concentration camp Mauthausen
compared the huge ramp
that they had to build
to this one from 'Metropolis'.
'Metropolis' was shot here,
over a year and a half,
using two million feet of film
and 36,000 extras.
Cities were scary things
in the '20s,
but poetic too.
In this expressionist masterpiece
'Sunrise',
a man and wife walk through
the world together,
so wrapped up in each other,
they don't notice
the traffic around them.
The city becomes nature.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
And then city again.
But then joy becomes tragedy.
On the way back from the city,
the wife seems to drown in a lake.
Grief-stricken,
the man blames the city
and a woman from it...
..a woman who tried to seduce him.
She showed him visions
of bright light, of dancing.
She's a symbol of greed and speed.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
'Sunrise' was made by
the German director F.W. Murnau,
one of the greatest directors
who ever lived.
This is him, the tall man
on the extreme right,
dancing in 'Sunrise'...
..looking a bit awkward and shy,
as he did in real life.
This is where he lived.
Although Murnau actually
made the film in Hollywood,
unusually, he was offered
total freedom to do so.
He had this gigantic
city set built...
..and made the most of
the subtle lighting effects
available in Hollywood.
In the end, the city woman,
the symbol of modernity
and avarice, leaves,
and the life of the man and the wife
becomes like
a German romantic painting.
(TRIUMPHANT MUSIC)
'Sunrise' was voted the best film
of all time by French critics.
The French poetic realists
of the 1930s
considered Murnau their master.
He seemed to see into
the human heart
more than other directors,
and make haunting visuals.
Murnau died in a car crash
in California in 1931.
This is his death mask.
In both Germany and France
in the '20s,
movies had become
intellectually fashionable.
They were all the rage
in art schools.
And, so, it's no surprise
that experimental artists
and film-makers pushed movies
even further away from the Hollywood
norms than German expressionism.
They were the fifth set of rebels
to challenge conventional cinema
in the '20s and '30s.
Walter Ruttmann's 'Opus 1'
looked like biology.
He painted on glass,
filmed the result,
wiped the wet paint,
added more and filmed again -
one of the first
abstract animations.
(GRACEFUL MUSIC)
Dada was an art movement of mockery,
anarchy, comedy.
In 1924, the dadaist Francis Picabia
commissioned this film, 'Entr'act',
to play in the interval in a ballet.
Rene Clair, the former journalist
who made it,
put the camera in places
that a conventional ballet
could only dream of -
right underneath the dancer
or at the barrel
of a dancing cannon.
Said Picabia of the result,
"It respects nothing but the desire
to burst out laughing."
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Also in France,
the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti
made this haunting
experimental film.
It was about seeing a city,
its ordinary life -
the power of imagery
to reveal and evoke.
Nearly 20 years later,
the surrealist Salvador Dali
used its imagery of multiple eyes
in a dream sequence he designed
for Alfred Hitchcock's film
'Spellbound'.
MAN: It seemed to be
a gambling house.
But there weren't any walls -
just a lot of curtains
with eyes painted on them.
Back in 1926,
Dali had spent three years
talking about dreams and desires
with Luis Bunuel,
a Spanish son of landowners.
Inspired by this conversation,
they wrote a screenplay
for this film,
'Un Chien Andalou',
directed by Bunuel.
It starts with an image
of Bunuel smoking.
He has a cut-throat razor.
He sees a cloud
going across the moon
and either he or the film
imagines it as something else -
the razor cutting a woman's eye.
(CHILLING MUSIC)
A shocking free association -
an attempt to show
how the unconscious works.
Then a man dressed as a woman
falls off his bike.
He's been carrying a box.
This is the box.
(EERIE MUSIC)
The man appears to the woman
whose eye has been sliced.
Ants are coming out of his hand.
Dissolve to a woman's armpit
and then a sea urchin.
These last three shots
are, again, free associations -
holes, hair, maybe excitement
and fear about sex.
This was a wildly innovative way
of editing.
'Un Chien Andalou'
was a direct influence
in several later films, including
David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet',
especially this strange,
erotic discovery
of an ant-covered ear.
Bunuel's next film,
the feature-length 'L'Age d'or',
is still shocking.
A man and a woman
are trying to make love in the mud.
A crowd of bourgeois people
and clergy stops them.
(CROWD SHOUTS)
Then the man seems to have an image
of the woman on a toilet.
The toilet roll seems to burn.
Dissolve to lava.
(TOILET FLUSHES)
(ELEGANT MUSIC)
Back to the man.
The film was premiered here,
on 3 December 1930.
Members of the fascist
League of Patriots
hurled ink at the screen
and attacked the audience.
A Spanish newspaper called it
"the new poison which Judaism
and Masonry want to use
"in order to corrupt the people."
It was out of distribution
for 50 years.
If Bunuel and 'L'Age d'or'
completely rejected
the content of romantic cinema,
our sixth set of dissidents
completely rejected its form.
They were the most manic
of them all.
In two revolutions, Russia dashed
to what it thought was modernity,
tried to make society more equal,
and violently removed
its old ruling class.
It set life in a spin.
One of the children
of the revolution,
an early whiz-kid, Dziga Vertov,
whose name means 'spinning top',
made this newsreel.
The camera attached to a train
worshipping the work of peasants.
The new boss of the Soviet Union,
V.I. Lenin, said,
"Of all the arts, for us,
cinema is the most important."
Take a bow, Sergei Eisenstein,
that art's most brilliant innovator.
This is his first film.
Actors perform, mug for the camera.
(DRAMATIC PERCUSSION)
Eisenstein was one of the most
complex people in the story of film.
He was a Marxist on the outside
and an engineer too.
And perhaps a Christian inside that.
And Jewish and bisexual.
He made this film
about a mutiny on a battleship.
The mutineers' supporters on land
come to pay their respects.
Then the military opens fire.
Eisenstein asked himself
how he should show
the horror of the murder.
It's said that he was eating
a cherry and threw away the stone.
Its bouncing down steps
gave him an idea.
"Steps," he thought,
"are like the world tilted forwards
to form a stage."
Eisenstein decided to film
the murder on such a stage.
He'd cascade the murdered people
down steps.
He'd studied landmine technology
and, so, said that he needed
a moment to detonate the murder.
This is what he came up with.
A huge caption...
..three fast shots
of a woman's head ricocheting...
(CHAOTIC MUSIC)
..an umbrella...
..a fall shot
with a hand-held camera...
..a camera on a dolly
beside the steps.
Shots lasting, on an average,
just three seconds.
In American cinema of the '20s,
shots averaged five seconds,
in Germany, nine seconds.
Eisenstein cast this boy,
asked him to fall.
In real life, the boy was a
goal-keeper, so was good at falling.
His mother realises.
Her delayed reaction of the horror.
Her face is a myth, a mask, primal.
(CHAOTIC MUSIC CONTINUES)
And then this horrific moment.
And then this strange shot.
She walks in a corridor of light.
The camera's mostly been on the
left, near the bottom of the steps.
But then it's here, top right.
A mother out of D.W. Griffith.
Eisenstein adored Griffith.
Her pram teeters,
her dying body pushes it.
It becomes like the cherry stone -
falls through the killing field.
It's hard to stop your heart racing
at the Odessa step sequence.
It's panic,
which is what Eisenstein wanted.
(CHAOTIC MUSIC CONTINUES)
He called what we've just seen
'The Montage of Attractions'.
When we look at the Odessa steps
sequence on screen,
the army stepping on the boy
moves us.
It leaps from the screen, to us.
Seeing the pram moves us.
The emotions come from the screen,
to us.
In our heads, the two things collide
and create the idea of innocence
slaughtered by the state.
Bizarre.
One plus one equals three.
Eisenstein says that he ploughed
the mind of the audience.
'Battleship Potemkin' premiered
in this cinema, built in 1909 -
one of the oldest in the world.
The film took the world by storm.
Charlie Chaplin loved it.
This is Eisenstein's stuff.
Walt Disney admired Eisenstein.
62 years later, Brian De Palma paid
homage to the Odessa steps sequence
in his violent American film
'The Untouchables' -
the same pram, a distraught mother.
We don't hear her screams,
as if the film's silent.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Splintered editing.
Shots only a few seconds long,
like Eisenstein.
Peril - shooting
down a grand staircase.
Some say that Eisenstein's movies
justify violence.
But the keeper of his flame,
historian Naum Kleiman,
surrounded by Eisenstein's books,
disagrees.
What Eisenstein did
also in 'Potemkin'
is not a kind of, uh,
school for revolutionaries.
It was a very vulgar interpretation
in the '30s -
that Eisenstein teaches
how to make revolution.
Just opposite for him.
"Brother" was the...
Brotherhood as a law for existence.
And this film is a result of...
..this, um...idea of...
(SIGHS) ..happiness on the earth
and also peaceful life.
End of the violence.
This is actually...the film
is against violence in any form.
And if propaganda, then for
brotherhood, but not for hate.
The humanism of Eisenstein...
..a humanism
that's hard to miss, really.
Eisenstein spotted humanism
in another great Soviet director
of the '20s.
One night, he went to the premiere
of a film by this Ukrainian,
Alexander Dovzhenko.
As the film finished,
Eisenstein said,
"Mama, what goes on here?"
Here's what goes
in Dovzhenko's film 'Arsenal'.
It's set at a complex time
in Ukrainian political history.
There's a war - women stand
motionless in the sunshine,
in dead villages.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
It's like the women can hear the
song of the war inside their heads.
A German goes mad with laughing gas.
An astonishing image
of a soldier dead, half-buried,
but smiling.
(CHAOTIC MUSIC)
Here's the greatest modern Russian
director, Alexander Sokurov,
on Dovzhenko.
Here's the original screenplay
of Dovzhenko's film 'Arsenal'.
It's still housed in VGIK,
the film school
where Eisenstein taught...
..in this very room.
Lenin died, of course,
and Stalin came along,
and the spinning, winning brilliance
of Soviet editing died too.
Eisenstein went on to create
more masterpieces.
Then he died in 1948.
(TRAIN HORN BLARES)
The seventh challenge
to the Hollywood bauble,
to romantic entertainment cinema
in the '20s and early '30s,
comes from
a completely different world -
the floating world, Japan.
(SWEEPING MUSIC)
Japan fought most of the world
in the 1930s and '40s,
and, in its arrogance,
killed millions.
As if to compensate,
as if in horror,
its movie-makers made the most
humanistic films of their times.
The most challenging of the films
were made by the gentle rebel
who's buried in this grave
outside Tokyo.
People cross the globe,
as we did, to get here.
As you can see,
they leave whiskey and wine
because the person who lies here
was a drunk.
There's no name on the grave,
no date of birth or death.
Just the Japansese character 'mu' -
'nothingness', 'the void'.
The man who's buried here,
Yasujiro Ozu,
was a kind of philosopher,
but, more importantly,
perhaps the greatest director
who ever lived.
No interview footage of Ozu exists.
He didn't marry,
never worked in a factory
and didn't go to university,
yet for 30 years, made films
about the calm lives
of married people, factory workers
and students.
He's thought of as
a very serious director,
yet the first movie in which
his mature style emerged -
this one, 'I Was Born, But...' -
is an exquisite zingy comedy
about two boys, brothers.
Naturalistic performances filmed on
a low tripod at the boys' height.
They move to a new suburb.
An existing gang of boys
squares up to them -
a battle of wills
in their boyhood universe.
(PLAYFUL MUSIC)
The brothers think that
their dad's a great man.
Then they see him in an amateur
film, goofing for his boss -
an ordinary joe, humiliated.
This turns their lives upside down.
They go on hunger strike.
Legendary critic and film-maker
Donald Richie...
'I Was Born, But...' is a 1932 film,
and it's a silent film,
and they're very...extremely rare.
Almost all the proto...
I would say about 90%
of all silent film
has been destroyed in Japan,
by natural causes - the earthquake -
or by unnatural causes,
like the bombing of Tokyo.
Ozu himself said that, uh...
.."It was supposed to be a comedy,
but it came out sort of dark."
Says Ozu.
And, so, this extraordinarily
honest film
which tells a lot about society,
a lot about kids,
a lot about fathers...
..uh, is something where
the balance is so...is so right.
Of course. It's a masterpiece.
And that's one of the many ironies
of the film -
the boys have adjusted,
the boys could adjust to anything.
They adjusted to
their empty stomachs,
and they ate their breakfasts.
Uh, they adjusted to their father
being an idiot.
They've adjusted to that.
They are starting to adjust to
the ways of the adult world,
which their father has told them
is a false world to live in.
They'll probably
never question it again.
What we saw was the last
of their innocence.
They've become equipped
for society now.
NARRATOR: Which is heartbreaking?
Yeah, because society
isn't worth all that.
And Ozu seems to be telling us
that this kind of innocence,
exemplified by the boys,
is precious,
and that would be one of the reasons
it doesn't...it doesn't last.
The boys discover what Japan itself
was about to discover
in World War II -
that the Emperor
is just an ordinary man.
Ozu was the great dethroner.
Unlike Akira Kurosawa,
he didn't believe in heroes.
Very un-Hollywood.
The boys see that people
are mainly decent,
resignation and disappointment
are a part of growing up.
Ozu's brilliant at
what it feels like to grow up -
what the Japanese call
'mano no aware',
'the sadness of time passing'.
Here's Kyoko Kagawa,
Japan's legendary actress,
who worked for Kurosawa,
Mizoguchi, Naruse
and Ozu, who famously
framed her in mid-shot,
almost looking at the camera.
(SPEAKS JAPANESE)
Kagawa played the youngest daughter
in Ozu's most acclaimed film,
'Tokyo Story'.
Late in the film,
the mother takes ill
and the daughter fans her
to cool her body.
KAGAWA:
Kagawa's story
gets to the crux of Ozu.
He used film like no other director
before or since.
It was the norm in the '30s
to have a camera at this height,
filming from hip height
rather than shoulder height,
with the camera at
the body's centre of gravity
and, therefore, give the image
a better feeling of balance.
This seldom happened in cinema.
In the '70s, Chantal Akerman's
groundbreaking film Jeanne Dielman
was one of the few movies
which used Ozu's camera height.
And this was only the start of
Ozu's innovations.
As we've seen, actors' eyelines
in mainstream cinema
were usually like this.
But in Ozu movies,
they were often here.
(SPEAKS JAPANESE)
In conventional films,
when actors talk to each other,
the camera would usually be at this
angle to them, about 45 degrees.
This, as we've seen,
was to make it look
as if the actors' eyes connected
across the cut.
Ozu brought his camera right round
between the actors,
into the scene, at 90 degrees.
The actors didn't seem to
quite look at each other,
but the composition of the images
matched each other visually.
(SPEAKS JAPANESE)
Ozu was very interested in
matching his shots,
whether they were of human beings
or, say, interiors in a house,
looking down a corridor.
The more you watch,
the more you feel
the order of the space
in his movies.
His frames were windows
on very balanced pictorial worlds.
It follows that Ozu hated
the human body to break the frame
and, so, he filmed
from far enough back
to ensure that if someone stood up,
their head didn't disappear
like this.
And he used lenses of about 50mm
so that faces or spaces
weren't overly bulging,
as happens on a 20mm or 30mm lens.
(CLOCK CHIMES)
And he added pauses in his films.
This boiling kettle doesn't
just give the story a breather.
It gives the space a breather too.
It adds a moment
of compositional emptiness -
'mu', the void,
just as it says on his grave.
Ozu, like the Renaissance artists,
was interested in centring
the human body
and, like, the Buddhists,
in decentring the human ego.
And, as a result, his movies
are far away from
the straining emotional romanticism
of Hollywood.
They're the most balanced
in movie history.
It's hard to imagine
any American director
getting away with breaking the rules
of film-making so completely.
So, how does Ozu get away with it?
Part of the answer lies in the fact
that the Japanese studio system
was, in the 1920s and '30s,
director- rather than producer-led.
These are the very rooms
in Toho Studio
where a future director,
Akira Kurosawa,
planned his seminal film
'The Seven Samurai' in the 1950s.
This man built some of his sets.
Studios like these
were what Orson Welles called
"the biggest train set
in the world".
Ozu, not a producer,
would have called the shots
in such spaces too.
Another of Japan's
great innovative directors
who worked at the same time as Ozu,
and whose best work comes
from the '30s and onwards,
was Kenzi Mizoguchi.
Mizoguchi's attitude
was bang up-to-date, modern.
He attacked the arrogance of Japan,
especially the noble pretensions
of the Samurai,
and focused instead
on Japanese women
whose lives were made a misery.
This film, for example,
is about Ayako,
a telephone operator
who, for money reasons,
is forced into prostitution
and is employed as a geisha.
The topic was very personal
for Mizoguchi.
He grew up in real poverty
and his sister was sold
to a geisha house.
What's striking here is the boldness
of the staging of the scene.
Ayako is in the extreme foreground,
yet there's action
in the far background.
Such staging was very rare
at the time
and comes five years before
Orson Welles's similar staging
in 'Citizen Kane'.
The boy Kane in the far background,
but still in focus,
is having an idyllic
childhood experience in the snow,
that he'll remember on his deathbed.
The latter's visual boldness
is rightly praised,
but Mizoguchi got there first.
Kyoko Kagawa worked with Mizoguchi
much later, in the 1950s.
In this film, 'Chikamatsu's Story',
she plays Osan, who's married to
a pompous husband.
In this scene, he thinks
she's having an affair,
so says that she should
commit suicide,
a devastating moment.
In romantic cinema,
it would have been shot close up
and brightly lit,
but Mizoguchi cuts away from
the expressed emotion,
behind Kagawa.
So, we can't see
her distraught face.
Instead of weeping with her,
we feel moral indignation
at her plight.
Kagawa's husband in
'Chikamatsu's Story' is so horrible
that her character, Osan,
flees with another man, Mohei.
(SOBS) Mohei!
Mizoguchi was known as
a woman's director
and Kagawa feels that
she learnt much from him,
especially in this scene.
(SHOUTS IN JAPANESE)
(KAGAWA SPEAKS JAPANESE)
Back in the '30s, Mizoguchi ended
the story of telephonist Ayako
with her on a bridge,
contemplating suicide
because she's been labelled
a delinquent woman.
It's a key moment
in the story of film.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
(EMOTIVE MUSIC)
Nearly a decade later,
in an American film
called 'Mildred Pierce',
Joan Crawford finds herself
on a similar bridge,
contemplating a similar fate.
Because this was Hollywood
romantic cinema, of course,
the attempted suicide
is depicted beautifully,
her face sculpted in light,
shallow focus, emphasising her eyes.
It would take well-nigh two decades
before the achievements of Mizoguchi
and those of Ozu
would be discovered, so to speak,
by the romantic cinema of the West.
One of the greatest oversights
in movie history.
The eighth and final alternative
to Western mainstream cinema
in the late '20s and '30s
comes from here, China.
(CHILDREN LAUGH AND SHOUT)
In 1931, Japan brutally
invaded China.
Life was already difficult
for most Chinese,
but the ensuing war
would see 13 million die.
And at this very moment,
Chinese cinema enters
the story of film.
There have been Chinese movies
since the 1910s.
This is typical - period costumes
and an iris used,
as in Hollywood,
to point at the suitor
coming over the roof.
But in the early '30s,
China evolved a kind of
leftist, realist cinema
that challenged Hollywood fantasy
and in a scene like this,
used inventive camera angles
and symbolism
to show how some men
really seduce women.
This city, Shanghai,
the Paris of the East,
one of the most cosmopolitan cities
in the world at the time,
created that challenge.
Film studios sprang up,
great directors came to the fore
and movie stars were made.
The greatest of them all
was this woman,
Ruan Lingyu, often called
the Chinese Greta Garbo.
Here, she's a single mother
at her son's school performance.
Money's so tight that Ruan
has been forced to sell her body
to pay for her son's education.
A lovely tracking shot
shows the whispers of disapproval.
When the school hears of
her prostitution,
it shuns her and she's imprisoned.
Women in particular
identified with Ruan.
Ruan's movies were often set in
Shanghai back streets like this...
..though those shots
were usually re-created
on Shanghai movie sets like this.
People say that realistic acting
began with Marlon Brando in America.
But look at Ruan here -
the weariness,
her understated gestures,
her body language.
This is decades before Brando.
When Maggie Cheung played Ruan
in the film 'Centre Stage',
director Stanley Kwan
had her repeat this famous scene.
(MAN CHUCKLES)
In this film, 'New Women',
Ruan played a real-life actress
who committed suicide
after being hounded by the press.
And here's the kick to this story.
The prurient Shanghai tabloids
trashed Ruan's name
because she was modern and realistic
in a city of sparkle and cheap sex.
In response, Ruan took an overdose,
like the character she played,
and died in 1935, aged just 25.
Her funeral procession
was three miles long.
Three women committed suicide at it.
The 'New York Times' front page
called it,
"the most spectacular funeral
of the century".
Today, Ruan appears in
almost no film encyclopaedias.
In the coming decades, Shanghai,
the city of sex and cinema,
would build on top of its past,
and the alleyway settings
of its great '30s films
would become a Disneyland
of capitalist consumption.
It became something
like a movie set.
And by the '40s, a small promontory
on the south-eastern coast
of the mainland
had become the new centre of
Chinese film-making in the south.
That promontory
was called Hong Kong.
And, so, we get to the end of
an era in film.
Looking back on the years between
the late 1910s and the early '30s,
it's clear that they were dazzling -
maybe the greatest period in
the whole of the story of film.
It was a time of fantasy cinema
and its brilliant alternatives.
Movies were on a high.
This sublime tension
should have lasted forever.
But there's something obvious
that we haven't yet mentioned.
We didn't hear Doug's shout.
We didn't hear Falconetti's voice.
(SILENCE)
We didn't hear Cesare's
night-time victims screaming.
(SILENCE)
The energy or tenderness of these
made a huge impression on us,
but not as things
in the real world do...
..because they were silent...
..what, in France,
is called 'deaf cinema'.
(CACOPHONY OF SOUND)
Supertext Captions by
Red Bee Media Australia
Captions copyright SBS 2013
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multibillion dollar
global entertainment industry now.
But what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz -
it's passion, innovation.
So, let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain',
and in Jane Campion in Australia,
and in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who is in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made...
..and in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world,
and in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story Of Film -
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter,
we meet the dazzling film-maker
Sergei Eisenstein
and discover the glories
of Japanese film in the 1930s.
(ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC)
What great years for cinema
were the 1920s and early '30s.
Entertainment cinema
was at its most glittering.
Yet rebellious directors
around the world
challenged its glitter.
This battle for the soul of cinema
made it splendid.
In entertainment romantic cinema
of the '20s,
people looked like this...
Soft lighting, shallow focus,
make-up, dream-like.
But as we've seen,
some of the first rebels
were the great realist directors
who, in a scene like this,
scrubbed mainstream cinema
of its fantasy,
its gloss, even its make-up.
But this was only the beginning of
the revolution against
romantic cinema in these years.
Around the world,
seven further sets of rebels
saw in film new 20th-century ways
of getting beneath the surface of
what it's like to be alive.
Film was their laboratory.
The glory of '20s
and early '30s cinema
was the result of their obsessions,
ideas and societies.
After the realists,
the second challenge
to conventional cinema in the '20s
came from this man, Ernst Lubitsch.
At first, he acted in movies.
He's like an inept seducer -
overacting, an adolescent, almost.
In the films he directed,
he mocked the heavy-handed,
almost Victorian way
that sex and love
were shown in movies,
and came up with a style
that was all his own.
(COMICAL MUSIC)
This scene from his early film
'The Oyster Princess'
shows Lubitsch's mocking,
subversive tone.
A capitalist smokes
a ridiculously fat cigar.
He has an army of stenographers
and his assistants, of course,
are all black.
(COMICAL MUSIC CONTINUES)
And few directors
anywhere in the world
were as visually daring as Lubitsch.
In this film, 'The Mountain Cat',
a girl falls in love
with a lieutenant,
so he gives her his heart.
She eats it.
(ELEGANT MUSIC)
Snowmen come to life and play music.
The film's a riot of
surreal production design.
Its screen masking
is even more daring.
Such virtuosity was noticed
by Hollywood, of course,
and 'The Mountain Cat'
was Lubitsch's last film
before moving there.
American censorship meant
that Lubitsch had to be inventive
in how he portrayed sexuality there.
Look at this scene
in his hugely successful
American film 'The Marriage Circle'.
A psychiatrist and his wife
are at breakfast.
We see a close-up of an egg,
then of a coffee cup.
She stirs her coffee,
then his hand disappears, then hers.
The breakfast is pushed aside.
A more urgent urge than that to eat
has overtaken them.
Lubitsch films nothing of
their love-making, of course.
But his use of objects
is the cinematic equivalent
of a raised eyebrow -
far more daring
in his suggestion of sexuality
than Chaplin or Keaton or Lloyd.
Lubitsch went on to make
more sparkling comedies
in America in the '30s and '40s,
and ran the Paramount Studio.
Billy Wilder, who made 'Double
Indemnity' and 'Some Like It Hot'
had this sign on his office wall -
"How would Lubitsch do it?"
Where Lubitsch was innovative
with film comedy,
the third assault
on the conventions of '20s cinema
came from this city - Paris.
The pioneering Lumiere brothers
had been influenced
by impressionist painters,
and now film-makers
like Germaine Dulac,
Abel Gance and Marcel L'Herbier
used cinema
in an impressionist way too.
Like this - our restless eyes
darting around,
scanning, not cutting.
This showed how people
actually see things
and how mental images
repeat and flicker.
This film, 'La Roue',
is a grand work of impressionism.
It strangely begins with images
of its writer/producer/director
Abel Gance,
then tells the story of
a complex love triangle.
One of the men in the triangle
falls off a cliff.
The woman he loves runs to save him.
We feel fear for him.
But then his own fear
makes images of his beloved
flash in his inner eye.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
We're inside his head.
The movie screen becomes
his inner eye.
Romantic cinema had many
cliff-hangers, of course,
but its images
always had to be readable.
Here, some of Gance's shots
last just one frame -
far too fast for us
to take them in one by one.
They flash past,
giving us an impression
of his final moments.
The poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau
later said,
"There's cinema
before and after 'La Roue'
"just as there's painting before
and after Picasso."
Soviet directors Pudovkin,
Eisenstein and Dovzhenko
studied it in Moscow.
But Gance hadn't yet peaked.
In the following four years,
he wrote, directed and edited
a four-hour impressionist film
about the early life
of Napoleon Bonaparte,
the French revolutionary,
national leader and militarist,
portraying its main character
as a tragic hero
and making mainstream romantic
cinema look static in comparison.
To capture the dynamism of the man,
his fist fights and horse rides
and battle charges
and storms at sea,
Gance rethought the camera's
relationship to movement.
Gance had a fur-covered sponge
mounted around the lens
so that the boys could punch
right up to it and not get hurt.
In the first scenes of Napoleon
as a young man in Corsica,
Gance attached
a compressed-air-powered camera
to the saddle of a horse,
to capture Bonaparte's
kinetic energy.
How would Gance top such dynamism
at the climax of the movie,
when Napoleon enters Italy -
a land grab which the film
fails to condemn?
How would he outdo the epic imagery
and grand sets
of Pastrone's 'Cabiria'
and D.W. Griffith's 'Intolerance'
which had come before?
Here's the answer.
He filmed with three cameras
mounted on top of each other,
each pointing in
a slightly different direction.
Audiences had to turn their heads
to see the whole spectacle.
(MILITARISTIC MUSIC)
'Napoleon' had its world premiere
here at the Paris Opera.
The 'Los Angeles Times' called it
"the measure
for all other films ever."
But despite such a claim,
it was shown infrequently.
In 1979, after a mammoth restoration
of the negative,
by British historian Kevin Brownlow,
'Napoleon' was triumphantly
screened here,
at the Telluride Film Festival
in Colorado.
Gance, then aged 89,
travelled to the screening
and watched the film
from his hotel room
across the street
from the outdoor cinema...
..the last time he saw
his masterpiece
of impressionist film-making.
In Germany
in the late 1910s and '20s,
the fourth innovative challenge to
mainstream romantic cinema emerged.
Directors wanted to show
deeper aspects of the human mind
than the French impressionism
of Abel Gance.
Influenced by the so-called
expressionist painters
and theatre designers,
whose work was jagged
like a broken mirror,
they began making
expressionist films.
Less than 30 were made,
but they were exported
all around the world.
Germany had just been defeated
in an appalling war,
but because it closed its borders
to foreign films in 1916,
its home-grown film industry
was stimulated.
The most influential of the
expressionist movies was this one -
'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari',
directed by Robert Wiene,
which was made before
Chaplin's first feature
or the accession of Emperor Hirohito
in Japan.
It was full of fear,
haunting murders, graphic rooms.
(EERIE DRONING)
Where studio film-makers
filmed indoors,
excluding daylight,
and Scandinavians did the opposite,
director Wiene and his chief
designer Herman Warm
found an apparently
revolutionary third way.
They flooded their set
with flat light
and then painted shadows
directly onto the walls and floor
Cesare, a sleepwalker
on show at fairgrounds,
murders the enemies of his master,
Dr Caligari, at night.
This story had a political edge.
Caligari represented
the controlling German state.
Cesare represented ordinary people
manipulated by it.
But director Wiene
and his producer, Erich Pommer,
removed the film's political bite
by adding this ending
that showed that the whole thing
was the dream of a madman, Feher,
and that Dr Caligari's
not evil after all
and the German state
doesn't control its people.
Filming took place here,
at the Babelsberg Studio,
near Berlin.
The film's bizarre imagery took the
question of point of view in cinema
further even than
the French impressionists.
The film's spaces sliced like shards
of glass, its jagged lighting,
showed the extreme mental state
of Feher.
Caligari has echoed down the years.
This film, Charles Klein's
'Tell Tale Heart',
shows its direct influence.
The seminal British director
Alfred Hitchcock,
who'd worked in Germany,
made his first important film,
'The Lodger'
with some of the shadowing
and hysteria of 'Caligari'.
But the most astonishing outgrowth
of 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'
came in Japan in the early '20s.
Former actor Teinosuke Kinugasa
saw it and Abel Gance's 'La Roue',
and then made this film,
'A Page of Madness'.
This is the opening scene,
a tempest, an asylum,
visual overlays,
fast cutting as in 'La Roue'.
(EERIE MUSIC)
A woman dancing
in an Art Deco setting.
The woman's in the asylum.
In complex flashbacks, we find out
that she's tried to drown her child.
Her husband takes a job
in the asylum
to try to help her.
But then his mental state
deteriorates too.
'A Page of Madness'
goes further than Caligari
because it's not just the central
character who's psychotic.
The film itself,
its editing and imagery,
seem psychotic too.
'A Page of Madness' combined the
fleeting techniques of impressionism
with the deep unease
of expressionism,
and is the second great
Japanese film that exists
after 'Souls on the Road'.
Back in Germany, Fritz Lang,
the Viennese son of an architect,
started making films about
the deep structure of society
rather than the surface claims
it makes for itself.
Lang made the most iconic film of
the silent era,
a movie that might have been made
by an architect.
'Metropolis', set in the year 2000,
tells the story of clashes
between workers
and an authoritarian industrialist
in a giant city -
like a fantasy New York,
roads and railways in the sky,
brilliant model shots.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
A young woman, Maria, inspires the
workers and is almost Christ-like,
but the industrialist builds a robot
that looks like her
to manipulate the masses.
The robot is a Deco mannequin,
lit with flashing lights,
symmetrically framed,
the astonishing opening eyes
of the woman enhanced by make-up.
But in the end, Maria and the
industrialist's son save the city,
and workers and owners are united
in a scene that seems to take place
on the steps of a cathedral.
Lang's cityscapes and robotics,
exploitation and urban paradise
were profoundly influential.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
The Hollywood director King Vidor
loved 'Metropolis'
and, as a result, there are
expressionist echoes of it
in his city film, 'The Crowd'.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Adolf Hitler liked 'Metropolis'
and the inmates of the Nazi
concentration camp Mauthausen
compared the huge ramp
that they had to build
to this one from 'Metropolis'.
'Metropolis' was shot here,
over a year and a half,
using two million feet of film
and 36,000 extras.
Cities were scary things
in the '20s,
but poetic too.
In this expressionist masterpiece
'Sunrise',
a man and wife walk through
the world together,
so wrapped up in each other,
they don't notice
the traffic around them.
The city becomes nature.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
And then city again.
But then joy becomes tragedy.
On the way back from the city,
the wife seems to drown in a lake.
Grief-stricken,
the man blames the city
and a woman from it...
..a woman who tried to seduce him.
She showed him visions
of bright light, of dancing.
She's a symbol of greed and speed.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
'Sunrise' was made by
the German director F.W. Murnau,
one of the greatest directors
who ever lived.
This is him, the tall man
on the extreme right,
dancing in 'Sunrise'...
..looking a bit awkward and shy,
as he did in real life.
This is where he lived.
Although Murnau actually
made the film in Hollywood,
unusually, he was offered
total freedom to do so.
He had this gigantic
city set built...
..and made the most of
the subtle lighting effects
available in Hollywood.
In the end, the city woman,
the symbol of modernity
and avarice, leaves,
and the life of the man and the wife
becomes like
a German romantic painting.
(TRIUMPHANT MUSIC)
'Sunrise' was voted the best film
of all time by French critics.
The French poetic realists
of the 1930s
considered Murnau their master.
He seemed to see into
the human heart
more than other directors,
and make haunting visuals.
Murnau died in a car crash
in California in 1931.
This is his death mask.
In both Germany and France
in the '20s,
movies had become
intellectually fashionable.
They were all the rage
in art schools.
And, so, it's no surprise
that experimental artists
and film-makers pushed movies
even further away from the Hollywood
norms than German expressionism.
They were the fifth set of rebels
to challenge conventional cinema
in the '20s and '30s.
Walter Ruttmann's 'Opus 1'
looked like biology.
He painted on glass,
filmed the result,
wiped the wet paint,
added more and filmed again -
one of the first
abstract animations.
(GRACEFUL MUSIC)
Dada was an art movement of mockery,
anarchy, comedy.
In 1924, the dadaist Francis Picabia
commissioned this film, 'Entr'act',
to play in the interval in a ballet.
Rene Clair, the former journalist
who made it,
put the camera in places
that a conventional ballet
could only dream of -
right underneath the dancer
or at the barrel
of a dancing cannon.
Said Picabia of the result,
"It respects nothing but the desire
to burst out laughing."
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Also in France,
the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti
made this haunting
experimental film.
It was about seeing a city,
its ordinary life -
the power of imagery
to reveal and evoke.
Nearly 20 years later,
the surrealist Salvador Dali
used its imagery of multiple eyes
in a dream sequence he designed
for Alfred Hitchcock's film
'Spellbound'.
MAN: It seemed to be
a gambling house.
But there weren't any walls -
just a lot of curtains
with eyes painted on them.
Back in 1926,
Dali had spent three years
talking about dreams and desires
with Luis Bunuel,
a Spanish son of landowners.
Inspired by this conversation,
they wrote a screenplay
for this film,
'Un Chien Andalou',
directed by Bunuel.
It starts with an image
of Bunuel smoking.
He has a cut-throat razor.
He sees a cloud
going across the moon
and either he or the film
imagines it as something else -
the razor cutting a woman's eye.
(CHILLING MUSIC)
A shocking free association -
an attempt to show
how the unconscious works.
Then a man dressed as a woman
falls off his bike.
He's been carrying a box.
This is the box.
(EERIE MUSIC)
The man appears to the woman
whose eye has been sliced.
Ants are coming out of his hand.
Dissolve to a woman's armpit
and then a sea urchin.
These last three shots
are, again, free associations -
holes, hair, maybe excitement
and fear about sex.
This was a wildly innovative way
of editing.
'Un Chien Andalou'
was a direct influence
in several later films, including
David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet',
especially this strange,
erotic discovery
of an ant-covered ear.
Bunuel's next film,
the feature-length 'L'Age d'or',
is still shocking.
A man and a woman
are trying to make love in the mud.
A crowd of bourgeois people
and clergy stops them.
(CROWD SHOUTS)
Then the man seems to have an image
of the woman on a toilet.
The toilet roll seems to burn.
Dissolve to lava.
(TOILET FLUSHES)
(ELEGANT MUSIC)
Back to the man.
The film was premiered here,
on 3 December 1930.
Members of the fascist
League of Patriots
hurled ink at the screen
and attacked the audience.
A Spanish newspaper called it
"the new poison which Judaism
and Masonry want to use
"in order to corrupt the people."
It was out of distribution
for 50 years.
If Bunuel and 'L'Age d'or'
completely rejected
the content of romantic cinema,
our sixth set of dissidents
completely rejected its form.
They were the most manic
of them all.
In two revolutions, Russia dashed
to what it thought was modernity,
tried to make society more equal,
and violently removed
its old ruling class.
It set life in a spin.
One of the children
of the revolution,
an early whiz-kid, Dziga Vertov,
whose name means 'spinning top',
made this newsreel.
The camera attached to a train
worshipping the work of peasants.
The new boss of the Soviet Union,
V.I. Lenin, said,
"Of all the arts, for us,
cinema is the most important."
Take a bow, Sergei Eisenstein,
that art's most brilliant innovator.
This is his first film.
Actors perform, mug for the camera.
(DRAMATIC PERCUSSION)
Eisenstein was one of the most
complex people in the story of film.
He was a Marxist on the outside
and an engineer too.
And perhaps a Christian inside that.
And Jewish and bisexual.
He made this film
about a mutiny on a battleship.
The mutineers' supporters on land
come to pay their respects.
Then the military opens fire.
Eisenstein asked himself
how he should show
the horror of the murder.
It's said that he was eating
a cherry and threw away the stone.
Its bouncing down steps
gave him an idea.
"Steps," he thought,
"are like the world tilted forwards
to form a stage."
Eisenstein decided to film
the murder on such a stage.
He'd cascade the murdered people
down steps.
He'd studied landmine technology
and, so, said that he needed
a moment to detonate the murder.
This is what he came up with.
A huge caption...
..three fast shots
of a woman's head ricocheting...
(CHAOTIC MUSIC)
..an umbrella...
..a fall shot
with a hand-held camera...
..a camera on a dolly
beside the steps.
Shots lasting, on an average,
just three seconds.
In American cinema of the '20s,
shots averaged five seconds,
in Germany, nine seconds.
Eisenstein cast this boy,
asked him to fall.
In real life, the boy was a
goal-keeper, so was good at falling.
His mother realises.
Her delayed reaction of the horror.
Her face is a myth, a mask, primal.
(CHAOTIC MUSIC CONTINUES)
And then this horrific moment.
And then this strange shot.
She walks in a corridor of light.
The camera's mostly been on the
left, near the bottom of the steps.
But then it's here, top right.
A mother out of D.W. Griffith.
Eisenstein adored Griffith.
Her pram teeters,
her dying body pushes it.
It becomes like the cherry stone -
falls through the killing field.
It's hard to stop your heart racing
at the Odessa step sequence.
It's panic,
which is what Eisenstein wanted.
(CHAOTIC MUSIC CONTINUES)
He called what we've just seen
'The Montage of Attractions'.
When we look at the Odessa steps
sequence on screen,
the army stepping on the boy
moves us.
It leaps from the screen, to us.
Seeing the pram moves us.
The emotions come from the screen,
to us.
In our heads, the two things collide
and create the idea of innocence
slaughtered by the state.
Bizarre.
One plus one equals three.
Eisenstein says that he ploughed
the mind of the audience.
'Battleship Potemkin' premiered
in this cinema, built in 1909 -
one of the oldest in the world.
The film took the world by storm.
Charlie Chaplin loved it.
This is Eisenstein's stuff.
Walt Disney admired Eisenstein.
62 years later, Brian De Palma paid
homage to the Odessa steps sequence
in his violent American film
'The Untouchables' -
the same pram, a distraught mother.
We don't hear her screams,
as if the film's silent.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Splintered editing.
Shots only a few seconds long,
like Eisenstein.
Peril - shooting
down a grand staircase.
Some say that Eisenstein's movies
justify violence.
But the keeper of his flame,
historian Naum Kleiman,
surrounded by Eisenstein's books,
disagrees.
What Eisenstein did
also in 'Potemkin'
is not a kind of, uh,
school for revolutionaries.
It was a very vulgar interpretation
in the '30s -
that Eisenstein teaches
how to make revolution.
Just opposite for him.
"Brother" was the...
Brotherhood as a law for existence.
And this film is a result of...
..this, um...idea of...
(SIGHS) ..happiness on the earth
and also peaceful life.
End of the violence.
This is actually...the film
is against violence in any form.
And if propaganda, then for
brotherhood, but not for hate.
The humanism of Eisenstein...
..a humanism
that's hard to miss, really.
Eisenstein spotted humanism
in another great Soviet director
of the '20s.
One night, he went to the premiere
of a film by this Ukrainian,
Alexander Dovzhenko.
As the film finished,
Eisenstein said,
"Mama, what goes on here?"
Here's what goes
in Dovzhenko's film 'Arsenal'.
It's set at a complex time
in Ukrainian political history.
There's a war - women stand
motionless in the sunshine,
in dead villages.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
It's like the women can hear the
song of the war inside their heads.
A German goes mad with laughing gas.
An astonishing image
of a soldier dead, half-buried,
but smiling.
(CHAOTIC MUSIC)
Here's the greatest modern Russian
director, Alexander Sokurov,
on Dovzhenko.
Here's the original screenplay
of Dovzhenko's film 'Arsenal'.
It's still housed in VGIK,
the film school
where Eisenstein taught...
..in this very room.
Lenin died, of course,
and Stalin came along,
and the spinning, winning brilliance
of Soviet editing died too.
Eisenstein went on to create
more masterpieces.
Then he died in 1948.
(TRAIN HORN BLARES)
The seventh challenge
to the Hollywood bauble,
to romantic entertainment cinema
in the '20s and early '30s,
comes from
a completely different world -
the floating world, Japan.
(SWEEPING MUSIC)
Japan fought most of the world
in the 1930s and '40s,
and, in its arrogance,
killed millions.
As if to compensate,
as if in horror,
its movie-makers made the most
humanistic films of their times.
The most challenging of the films
were made by the gentle rebel
who's buried in this grave
outside Tokyo.
People cross the globe,
as we did, to get here.
As you can see,
they leave whiskey and wine
because the person who lies here
was a drunk.
There's no name on the grave,
no date of birth or death.
Just the Japansese character 'mu' -
'nothingness', 'the void'.
The man who's buried here,
Yasujiro Ozu,
was a kind of philosopher,
but, more importantly,
perhaps the greatest director
who ever lived.
No interview footage of Ozu exists.
He didn't marry,
never worked in a factory
and didn't go to university,
yet for 30 years, made films
about the calm lives
of married people, factory workers
and students.
He's thought of as
a very serious director,
yet the first movie in which
his mature style emerged -
this one, 'I Was Born, But...' -
is an exquisite zingy comedy
about two boys, brothers.
Naturalistic performances filmed on
a low tripod at the boys' height.
They move to a new suburb.
An existing gang of boys
squares up to them -
a battle of wills
in their boyhood universe.
(PLAYFUL MUSIC)
The brothers think that
their dad's a great man.
Then they see him in an amateur
film, goofing for his boss -
an ordinary joe, humiliated.
This turns their lives upside down.
They go on hunger strike.
Legendary critic and film-maker
Donald Richie...
'I Was Born, But...' is a 1932 film,
and it's a silent film,
and they're very...extremely rare.
Almost all the proto...
I would say about 90%
of all silent film
has been destroyed in Japan,
by natural causes - the earthquake -
or by unnatural causes,
like the bombing of Tokyo.
Ozu himself said that, uh...
.."It was supposed to be a comedy,
but it came out sort of dark."
Says Ozu.
And, so, this extraordinarily
honest film
which tells a lot about society,
a lot about kids,
a lot about fathers...
..uh, is something where
the balance is so...is so right.
Of course. It's a masterpiece.
And that's one of the many ironies
of the film -
the boys have adjusted,
the boys could adjust to anything.
They adjusted to
their empty stomachs,
and they ate their breakfasts.
Uh, they adjusted to their father
being an idiot.
They've adjusted to that.
They are starting to adjust to
the ways of the adult world,
which their father has told them
is a false world to live in.
They'll probably
never question it again.
What we saw was the last
of their innocence.
They've become equipped
for society now.
NARRATOR: Which is heartbreaking?
Yeah, because society
isn't worth all that.
And Ozu seems to be telling us
that this kind of innocence,
exemplified by the boys,
is precious,
and that would be one of the reasons
it doesn't...it doesn't last.
The boys discover what Japan itself
was about to discover
in World War II -
that the Emperor
is just an ordinary man.
Ozu was the great dethroner.
Unlike Akira Kurosawa,
he didn't believe in heroes.
Very un-Hollywood.
The boys see that people
are mainly decent,
resignation and disappointment
are a part of growing up.
Ozu's brilliant at
what it feels like to grow up -
what the Japanese call
'mano no aware',
'the sadness of time passing'.
Here's Kyoko Kagawa,
Japan's legendary actress,
who worked for Kurosawa,
Mizoguchi, Naruse
and Ozu, who famously
framed her in mid-shot,
almost looking at the camera.
(SPEAKS JAPANESE)
Kagawa played the youngest daughter
in Ozu's most acclaimed film,
'Tokyo Story'.
Late in the film,
the mother takes ill
and the daughter fans her
to cool her body.
KAGAWA:
Kagawa's story
gets to the crux of Ozu.
He used film like no other director
before or since.
It was the norm in the '30s
to have a camera at this height,
filming from hip height
rather than shoulder height,
with the camera at
the body's centre of gravity
and, therefore, give the image
a better feeling of balance.
This seldom happened in cinema.
In the '70s, Chantal Akerman's
groundbreaking film Jeanne Dielman
was one of the few movies
which used Ozu's camera height.
And this was only the start of
Ozu's innovations.
As we've seen, actors' eyelines
in mainstream cinema
were usually like this.
But in Ozu movies,
they were often here.
(SPEAKS JAPANESE)
In conventional films,
when actors talk to each other,
the camera would usually be at this
angle to them, about 45 degrees.
This, as we've seen,
was to make it look
as if the actors' eyes connected
across the cut.
Ozu brought his camera right round
between the actors,
into the scene, at 90 degrees.
The actors didn't seem to
quite look at each other,
but the composition of the images
matched each other visually.
(SPEAKS JAPANESE)
Ozu was very interested in
matching his shots,
whether they were of human beings
or, say, interiors in a house,
looking down a corridor.
The more you watch,
the more you feel
the order of the space
in his movies.
His frames were windows
on very balanced pictorial worlds.
It follows that Ozu hated
the human body to break the frame
and, so, he filmed
from far enough back
to ensure that if someone stood up,
their head didn't disappear
like this.
And he used lenses of about 50mm
so that faces or spaces
weren't overly bulging,
as happens on a 20mm or 30mm lens.
(CLOCK CHIMES)
And he added pauses in his films.
This boiling kettle doesn't
just give the story a breather.
It gives the space a breather too.
It adds a moment
of compositional emptiness -
'mu', the void,
just as it says on his grave.
Ozu, like the Renaissance artists,
was interested in centring
the human body
and, like, the Buddhists,
in decentring the human ego.
And, as a result, his movies
are far away from
the straining emotional romanticism
of Hollywood.
They're the most balanced
in movie history.
It's hard to imagine
any American director
getting away with breaking the rules
of film-making so completely.
So, how does Ozu get away with it?
Part of the answer lies in the fact
that the Japanese studio system
was, in the 1920s and '30s,
director- rather than producer-led.
These are the very rooms
in Toho Studio
where a future director,
Akira Kurosawa,
planned his seminal film
'The Seven Samurai' in the 1950s.
This man built some of his sets.
Studios like these
were what Orson Welles called
"the biggest train set
in the world".
Ozu, not a producer,
would have called the shots
in such spaces too.
Another of Japan's
great innovative directors
who worked at the same time as Ozu,
and whose best work comes
from the '30s and onwards,
was Kenzi Mizoguchi.
Mizoguchi's attitude
was bang up-to-date, modern.
He attacked the arrogance of Japan,
especially the noble pretensions
of the Samurai,
and focused instead
on Japanese women
whose lives were made a misery.
This film, for example,
is about Ayako,
a telephone operator
who, for money reasons,
is forced into prostitution
and is employed as a geisha.
The topic was very personal
for Mizoguchi.
He grew up in real poverty
and his sister was sold
to a geisha house.
What's striking here is the boldness
of the staging of the scene.
Ayako is in the extreme foreground,
yet there's action
in the far background.
Such staging was very rare
at the time
and comes five years before
Orson Welles's similar staging
in 'Citizen Kane'.
The boy Kane in the far background,
but still in focus,
is having an idyllic
childhood experience in the snow,
that he'll remember on his deathbed.
The latter's visual boldness
is rightly praised,
but Mizoguchi got there first.
Kyoko Kagawa worked with Mizoguchi
much later, in the 1950s.
In this film, 'Chikamatsu's Story',
she plays Osan, who's married to
a pompous husband.
In this scene, he thinks
she's having an affair,
so says that she should
commit suicide,
a devastating moment.
In romantic cinema,
it would have been shot close up
and brightly lit,
but Mizoguchi cuts away from
the expressed emotion,
behind Kagawa.
So, we can't see
her distraught face.
Instead of weeping with her,
we feel moral indignation
at her plight.
Kagawa's husband in
'Chikamatsu's Story' is so horrible
that her character, Osan,
flees with another man, Mohei.
(SOBS) Mohei!
Mizoguchi was known as
a woman's director
and Kagawa feels that
she learnt much from him,
especially in this scene.
(SHOUTS IN JAPANESE)
(KAGAWA SPEAKS JAPANESE)
Back in the '30s, Mizoguchi ended
the story of telephonist Ayako
with her on a bridge,
contemplating suicide
because she's been labelled
a delinquent woman.
It's a key moment
in the story of film.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
(EMOTIVE MUSIC)
Nearly a decade later,
in an American film
called 'Mildred Pierce',
Joan Crawford finds herself
on a similar bridge,
contemplating a similar fate.
Because this was Hollywood
romantic cinema, of course,
the attempted suicide
is depicted beautifully,
her face sculpted in light,
shallow focus, emphasising her eyes.
It would take well-nigh two decades
before the achievements of Mizoguchi
and those of Ozu
would be discovered, so to speak,
by the romantic cinema of the West.
One of the greatest oversights
in movie history.
The eighth and final alternative
to Western mainstream cinema
in the late '20s and '30s
comes from here, China.
(CHILDREN LAUGH AND SHOUT)
In 1931, Japan brutally
invaded China.
Life was already difficult
for most Chinese,
but the ensuing war
would see 13 million die.
And at this very moment,
Chinese cinema enters
the story of film.
There have been Chinese movies
since the 1910s.
This is typical - period costumes
and an iris used,
as in Hollywood,
to point at the suitor
coming over the roof.
But in the early '30s,
China evolved a kind of
leftist, realist cinema
that challenged Hollywood fantasy
and in a scene like this,
used inventive camera angles
and symbolism
to show how some men
really seduce women.
This city, Shanghai,
the Paris of the East,
one of the most cosmopolitan cities
in the world at the time,
created that challenge.
Film studios sprang up,
great directors came to the fore
and movie stars were made.
The greatest of them all
was this woman,
Ruan Lingyu, often called
the Chinese Greta Garbo.
Here, she's a single mother
at her son's school performance.
Money's so tight that Ruan
has been forced to sell her body
to pay for her son's education.
A lovely tracking shot
shows the whispers of disapproval.
When the school hears of
her prostitution,
it shuns her and she's imprisoned.
Women in particular
identified with Ruan.
Ruan's movies were often set in
Shanghai back streets like this...
..though those shots
were usually re-created
on Shanghai movie sets like this.
People say that realistic acting
began with Marlon Brando in America.
But look at Ruan here -
the weariness,
her understated gestures,
her body language.
This is decades before Brando.
When Maggie Cheung played Ruan
in the film 'Centre Stage',
director Stanley Kwan
had her repeat this famous scene.
(MAN CHUCKLES)
In this film, 'New Women',
Ruan played a real-life actress
who committed suicide
after being hounded by the press.
And here's the kick to this story.
The prurient Shanghai tabloids
trashed Ruan's name
because she was modern and realistic
in a city of sparkle and cheap sex.
In response, Ruan took an overdose,
like the character she played,
and died in 1935, aged just 25.
Her funeral procession
was three miles long.
Three women committed suicide at it.
The 'New York Times' front page
called it,
"the most spectacular funeral
of the century".
Today, Ruan appears in
almost no film encyclopaedias.
In the coming decades, Shanghai,
the city of sex and cinema,
would build on top of its past,
and the alleyway settings
of its great '30s films
would become a Disneyland
of capitalist consumption.
It became something
like a movie set.
And by the '40s, a small promontory
on the south-eastern coast
of the mainland
had become the new centre of
Chinese film-making in the south.
That promontory
was called Hong Kong.
And, so, we get to the end of
an era in film.
Looking back on the years between
the late 1910s and the early '30s,
it's clear that they were dazzling -
maybe the greatest period in
the whole of the story of film.
It was a time of fantasy cinema
and its brilliant alternatives.
Movies were on a high.
This sublime tension
should have lasted forever.
But there's something obvious
that we haven't yet mentioned.
We didn't hear Doug's shout.
We didn't hear Falconetti's voice.
(SILENCE)
We didn't hear Cesare's
night-time victims screaming.
(SILENCE)
The energy or tenderness of these
made a huge impression on us,
but not as things
in the real world do...
..because they were silent...
..what, in France,
is called 'deaf cinema'.
(CACOPHONY OF SOUND)
Supertext Captions by
Red Bee Media Australia
Captions copyright SBS 2013