The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 6 - Episode #1.6 - 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 discover
the emotional Hollywood films
of Douglas Sirk
and explore melodrama
around the world.
(CHUCKLES) Go ahead.
The 1950s. Widescreen. Colour.
A young American actor, James Dean,
head hung, crippled with rage,
kicks and punches a desk.
His emotions are bursting
at the seams.
One of the key images of the '50s
and the passionate theme
of this part of The Story of Film.
To get to the heart
of these emotional times
you have to start, not in America,
but here - Egypt.
The youth rebellion of James Dean
was taking place here too,
where there was even more
to kick out against.
As usual, the movies,
the great mirror of their times,
reflected the strain.
The '50s became
the era of the melodrama.
There had been formulaic filmmaking
here in Egypt since the 1920s.
Until, that is, this rebel,
the real James Dean
of the '50s cinema came along.
He's the founding father
of creative African cinema.
In 1958, Youssef Chahine
changed film history.
Until then, Africa had played
no significant part
in the story of film,
but in that year
he wrote, directed
and starred in the complex melodrama
'Cairo Station' -
the first great African film,
the first great Arab film.
Scenes like this
had a sweaty intensity.
Chahine films himself alone
with his erotic imagination.
Chahine was a born boundary pusher
and that's what 'Cairo Station' did.
More than anything it captured
the tension of its times.
The sexual repression.
The buried rage.
It was very daring.
I was talking about
a sexual pervert...
..and they spat in my face
on opening night.
Nobody talked about real things.
90% of the young people in Egypt
were frustrated
because of the taboos,
because of the religion,
because of idiotic parents
who were not open enough,
who were not civilised enough.
Chahine plays
a crippled newspaper seller
obsessed by Hind Rostom
who plays a voluptuous
cold drinks seller.
He films himself staring at her,
close to the camera,
outside, looking in.
Look at this scene
in which he listens
as she has sex with another man.
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS)
(TRAIN CLATTERS NOISILY)
Dolly.
Cut.
Dolly.
Cut.
Then the tracks taking the strain
of the weight of the train,
a symbol of Chahine's
emotional strain.
No other African or Arab
had thought
so cinematically before.
'Cairo Station' was a masterpiece.
It was melodramatic,
sexual and about social justice.
Like the best films of the '50s.
So where did the film and Chahine
get the balls to be so innovative?
In part,
from this world-changing conference.
In 1955, the leaders
of 29 Asian and African countries
met in Bandung in Indonesia to
forge economic and cultural links.
They were allied neither
to the first capitalist world,
nor the second communist world
of the Soviet Union.
They were a self-styled Third World.
'Cairo Station' came out of this
new, non-aligned sensibility.
But this new anger and confidence
could be seen in many places
around the world,
nowhere more so
than this vast country, India.
The story of Indian film
is as vast as the country.
India knew as much, if not more,
about devastation
as Europe in the '50s.
Decolonialisation, partition,
famine and the caste system
had traumatised it.
In all this turmoil,
you'd think that the country
would have no time for cinema.
But you'd be wrong.
By the 1950s,
India seemed made for cinema.
(GENTLE SITAR AND INDIAN FLUTE)
Its colours seem to have the hand
of a production designer about them.
Its luminosity has the feel
of a studio arc light.
Look at this scene from one of the
great Indian films, 'Paper Flowers'.
A beam of light opens up
in a film studio.
The camera tracks around it,
towards a man, the film's director,
Guru Dutt,
the country's Orson Welles.
He plays a director who looks at a
woman he wants to cast in the film.
She's lit from below, no hair light,
the opposite of Hollywood lighting.
(WOMAN SINGS INDIAN SONG)
Back on India's streets,
you have the feeling that a movie
director has designed the action.
Worshipping movie stars
wasn't a stretch for Indians.
The country is photogenic,
like Marilyn Monroe is photogenic.
The first movies made by Indians
were about the lives of saints...
..or what were called mythologicals,
like this one.
Superimpositions,
like early Melies' films,
show a mythic king being tested.
Then, in the '30s,
India's film industry
wired for sound.
Immediately
it drew on the traditions
of musical theatre in the country.
As a result, India's became
the only national cinema
where musical interludes
became the norm.
And the seeds of what would become
known as Bollywood were sown.
Colour, display, theatricality.
This sounds familiar.
Like Hollywood.
Cinema as bauble.
But the less told story
of Indian cinema
is how it turned its face
towards reality.
What became known as "socials" -
reforming films
challenging the caste system
or materialism or poverty,
emerged in the 1930s.
The realism of such scenes
predates Italian neorealism.
The tidal wave of
post World War II realism
that swept across the world
in the late '40s and early '50s
reached its greatest heights
here in Kolkata,
in the work of a man who lived
in this house - Satyajit Ray.
Ray's father and grandfather
were famous publishers
and illustrators here.
Bollywood films,
like Hollywood films,
were usually set in a fantasy
everywhere land,
but Satyajit Ray
wanted to make his film
about a very specific place.
So he and his cinematographer
Subrata Mitra
and his non-professional actors
went somewhere very specific.
They drove 30 minutes from Kolkata
to this small Bengali village,
Boral,
to make their first film
'Pather Panchali'.
Most of them had never shot
a foot of film before,
yet the imagery they made here
changed film history.
Its cinematography had texture,
lustre, tenderness.
It's like we were opening our eyes
to India for the first time.
'Pather Panchali' was a portrait
of the life of Apu,
the son of a priest,
and his relationship with
his sister, mother and old aunt
who was brilliantly played
by Chunibala Devi.
Her amazingly lined face
was the opposite of the smooth
faces in glossy cinema.
This was new.
She was living in a brothel
when Ray found her
and needed a dose of morphine
every day to keep her going.
What was so new
was that we were seeing
a real Indian village on screen
for the first time.
The movie dispelled ignorance
about village life.
Real, not idealised kids.
Domestic details,
cooking, drying clothes.
But what was so '50s
was that Ray was also a modernist.
He believed in Prime Minister
Nehru's plans to industrialise India
so the arrival of the train
is treated here
as an event
of great wonder and hope.
The train's plume of smoke
is beautiful,
like the plumes of pampas grass.
The camera swishes with excitement.
Apu runs with excitement.
This man, Soumendu Roy, was camera
assistant on 'Pather Panchali'
and went on to be Ray's DP.
Roy still handles the original
camera that they used
with great pride.
It looks like a tank compared to
the small cameras today.
It's amazing that they captured
so many intimate scenes
with such an unwieldy thing.
Though most of the filming
was on location,
key scenes were shot
in this studio, Tollygunge,
in the south of Kolkata,
where many of the great
Bengali films were made.
This is the actual sound stage
where some of 'Pather Panchali's
sets were built.
The great actress Sharmila Tagore
worked with Ray many times.
She was just 14
when he cast her in the lead
in his masterpiece 'Devi'
about a girl whose father-in-law
dreams that she's a goddess.
She was filmed as if
by candle light, eyes lowering.
Like, I was an amateur
when I worked in 'Devi'.
That was my second film with him,
after 'Apur Sansar'
and I was very young, I was just 14.
As you know,
he was a very tall person,
so he sat down on a stool
and made eye contact with the child,
just read out the scene once...
..and with...sort of animatedly,
like, you know, with a lot
of expression he would read out,
with his, as you know, he had a very
expressive, well modulated voice.
So he'd make it very exciting,
and just hold the child's attention.
And somehow he communicated
and the child was able
to replicate it almost exactly.
He knew exactly what kind of a face
he wanted.
Of course,
there was a lot of stress on eyes...
..and also the framing.
I think he believed,
like 'Devi', as you know,
especially my role was treated
in very big close-up
and after the film is over
the face really haunts you
and that shot where I'm sitting
in the puja place
and the husband comes
and that little exchange
between the husband and Doyamoyee,
I thought that was wonderful
because that little shake
of the head that I'm...
..it's not what it seems.
You know, the helplessness of her
and that slowly...
..you know, her getting confused.
I mean, she's just a village girl
and very young.
You know, all that confusion
in a little...
..you know, somebody who's not
quite finished growing up yet,
I think that is so tragic, you know,
how she becomes victim of, uh...
..of this regressive mindset,
orthodox mindset.
Manik-Da, as you know,
Ray we called Manik-Da,
he knew a lot about painting
and, uh...
..and...and that control,
you know, he had tremendous control.
Everything...there was not an extra
note, it was so well orchestrated.
So I think that's the kind of
search for truth,
through his own work
and through his own...
You know, he wanted to evolve
through the film, you know?
And he was this eternal quest.
So, you know,
he had all that element.
He had imbibed all that
within him and music.
And he used this beautiful medium
to express himself.
Crumbling buildings, long shadows,
playing kids.
The world of 'Pather Panchali'
made it a huge hit.
It played for six months
in New York City alone.
Its landscapes, shaded pathways
and natural soundscapes
made India central to
the story of film for a moment.
It and two follow-up films,
the 'Apu Trilogy',
are sometimes called the best
Asian films ever made.
But Satyajit Ray's films weren't
bursting at the seams with emotion,
like '50s melodramas were.
They were too quiet for that.
But then came an Indian film
that certainly was
bursting at the seams.
'Mother India' is about this woman,
Radha.
She's getting married.
Cerise red. Veils.
Close-ups of hands and feet,
a couple gently stepping
into the world.
Here's the world she discovers.
Hard work. Mud. Sweat.
(SINGS INDIAN SONG)
An independent worker's India,
labouring to be modern
and socialist.
Filmed in much more earthy colours.
The combination
of romance and struggle
made many call the film
the Indian 'Gone with the Wind'.
In this extraordinary scene
peasants stand on the map of India
in a way that echoes
Hollywood musicals,
but also Soviet propaganda.
The main character and the whole of
India are strong, but fated to fail.
Mother India was
a state of the nation film
and a landmark in world cinema.
This vast country
to the north of India, China,
had its own unique
social pressures in the 1950s.
As we've seen, the country had
a movie golden age in the 1930s.
Chairman Mao took control
of the country in the late '40s
and filmmaking
came under state control.
Few people would know more
about this
than this remarkable man,
director Xie Jin.
Xie was reportedly born in 1923
to a family so wealthy
that his mother's dowry
was delivered on 20 boats.
He made his first films in the '50s
and then became the greatest
Chinese filmmaker of the day,
a major stylist, a star director
and a winner of scores of awards.
Xie feels that Chinese film culture
is unique.
Chinese film was produced
in unique circumstances,
but look at Xie's greatest film,
'Two Stage Sisters'.
A woman in tears.
Highlights in her eyes.
The camera moves in to get
a closer look at her emotion.
We recognise this type
of filmmaking.
Like the '50s films
we've looked at in Egypt and India,
it's a brilliant melodrama.
The woman and her sister
join a Chinese opera troupe.
Look at Xie's shot here.
The camera rushes left,
ravishing colour,
then a look behind the curtain.
Then the emergence of the actresses.
Everything beautifully placed
in the moving frame.
The first sister
becomes a revolutionary.
The second is seduced
by fame and fortune.
A painful human drama
viewed through a gorgeous lens.
What a lens!
Xie's camera tilts down
into the world of the story
and then we notice
that it's also craning down.
The roof of the stage seems to rise.
From a god's-eye view
to a peasant's.
Very Chinese, very melodrama,
very '50s.
Mao's Cultural Revolution
devastated Xie's career.
Both Xie's parents killed themselves
in its aftermath
and 'Two Stage Sisters' was accused
of "cinematic Confucianism".
He himself was given a job
cleaning the toilets
of the movie studio where
he was once a leading director.
Few lives in movie history,
not even Roman Polanski's,
have such amplitude.
Further east in the 1950s
Japan was recovering from its
disastrous wartime experiences.
Legendary actress Kyoko Kagawa,
who worked with Ozu, Mizoguchi
and then Kurosawa.
As we've seen, the country
had already, in the 1930s,
experienced a cinematic golden age.
But the 1950s heralded another.
Central to this golden age
was Akira Kurosawa.
Akira Kurosawa did indeed look at
individuals with a long lens.
Look at this scene
from his film 'Ikiru'.
A bureaucrat has just learnt
that he's got cancer.
The weight of the world
on his shoulders.
Downcast eyes.
He grew up under the feudal emperor.
This taught him to be passive,
trudge along.
But then he was hit
by the juggernaut of modern life.
Japan lost the war.
He has to start thinking
for himself.
Kurosawa's shot pulls back
to show the breadth of life.
Where does he fit in?
Most of the movies of Kurosawa
are about this emerging
of the individual.
How someone distinguishes themselves
from others without being selfish.
A very '50s tension.
Filmmaker and critic Donald Richie.
The hero in a Kurosawa film
is notable for his staying power.
Even though it won't work
he does it over and over
and over again.
All of the Kurosawa heroes
keep at it, until finally...
Once I was with Kurosawa
and I saw an example of this.
He had a pen that didn't work -
you know, a ballpoint.
And it wouldn't work and most people
would say bring me another ballpen.
He didn't,
he started working that ballpen
and finally, after about ten
minutes of manipulation, it worked.
And I thought
this is sort of a...what...
..a metaphor for Kurosawa himself
and for the way that he thinks
about his people.
The detective in 'Stray Dog'
doesn't have a one chance in hell
of ever getting that gun back again
but he tries and he tries and
he tries and he tries and he does.
In Kurosawa's epic film
the 'Seven Samurai',
a group of swordsmen
defend a village.
This man on the right
with the black hair, Katsushiro,
has become the greatest
swordsman of them all.
It's the end of an epic battle.
Katsushiro thinks
it's still winnable.
He walks around in a circle,
then throws the sword away.
He's been shot.
(GUNSHOTS)
The era of the sword is over.
The era of the gun has begun.
The film's set in the past,
but it echoes in the '50s
because it's about the beginning
of a new era.
John Ford would have filmed
such a scene simply, purely.
Yet look at the rain in Kurosawa's
film and the mud and the grey.
Kurosawa was far more interested
than Ford, or most directors,
in atmospheric effects,
the poetic rush of imagery.
In 'Throne of Blood',
one of his Shakespeare adaptations,
look how he films
the Lady Macbeth character,
like a ghost,
gliding through a room,
her kimono squeaking.
(KIMONO SQUEAKS)
And in the same film,
look how he shows Birnam Wood
advancing like in a nightmare,
like waves.
It's like the trees have fingers.
Look how Macbeth dies,
his body pierced a hundred times.
It's clear where this scene
from 'The Godfather' came from.
Another human body jerking,
shaking, staccato, as it dies.
Kurosawa's work became, in effect,
a style book for cinema.
He was like a one-man film school.
The 'Seven Samurai' was remade
as 'The Magnificent Seven',
with James Coburn
playing the Katsushiro part.
Widescreen, colour, bright sunlight
rather than Kurosawa's
square, charcoal downpour.
The symbolic knife is even seen
in close-up this time.
The Western world in the '50s knew
about Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa and Ozu
but move, say, to Latin America
and it drew a blank,
which was the Western world's loss
because filmmaking in Brazil
and Mexico was revving up.
As we've seen, Brazil had taken
the lead in Latin American cinema.
One of its first innovative films
was this was this one, 'Limite',
made in 1930,
its soaring camera
expressing a woman's liberty.
25 years later, this film,
'Rio 40 Degrees',
brought Brazilian cinema
back to the spotlight.
It starts with the aerial shots and
big-band sounds of a tourist film.
But soon it's on the ground
with boys from poor backgrounds.
They sell nuts and papers.
The camera tracks back.
A boy walks into the foreground.
Bold use of deep staging.
The director of this film,
Nelson Pereira dos Santos,
was influenced by neorealism
and became the most influential
Brazilian filmmaker of the 1950s.
Santos filmed in slum locations,
but used advanced visual techniques.
'Rio 40 Degrees'
had multiple storylines.
Here, Santos tracks from the boys
who feature throughout
to two men
who talk about adult problems.
An innovative shift in story
without a cut.
The realism and energy
of 'Rio 40 Degrees'
was like Youssef Chahine's
'Cairo Station'.
Travel north-west from Brazil
in the '50s
and we find that Mexico's
film industry
is more advanced than Brazil's.
Movies in Mexico had been
intertwined with life
since the 1910s.
The revolutionary Pancho Villa
held off an assault on Ojinaga
until an American company
got its cameras in position to film
and Villa got paid the tidy sum
of $25,000 for doing so.
Come the '30s,
Mexican cinema had great directors.
Fernando de Fuentes,
who made this film, 'Dona Barbara',
was perhaps the best.
He virtually invented
Mexican national cinema...
..and its themes of rich and poor...
..feminine suffering and display.
Brilliantly controlled melodrama.
Here, De Fuentes films
the greatest star of Mexican cinema,
Maria Felix, on a boat as her
character is about to be raped.
De Fuentes had his DP film
from Dona Barbara's point of view,
low down.
As in many Mexican films, the men
are photographed against the sky.
Dona Barbara is hardened
by the assault.
She becomes a landowner
and rules with an iron fist.
Gringo, you fight with Mapache?
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
Even more influential
on Mexican cinema than De Fuentes
was this man on the left.
Emilio 'El Indio' Fernandez,
actor and director.
This is him in Sam Peckinpah's
'The Wild Bunch'.
He was macho and cocky
and Peckinpah cast him as such.
And in films that he directed
like this one, 'The Pearl',
he was great
at muscular storytelling.
Here, the main character is
a poor Mexican Indian fisherman.
Fernandez himself was half Indian
and often portrayed
mixed race characters.
The fisherman finds a pearl.
His life can at last
change for the better.
But people become jealous
of him and his wife
and they can't sell the pearl.
It becomes a cancer in their lives,
poisoning everything.
The film was shot
by Gabriel Figueroa,
one of the greatest cinematographers
of his day, who studied with
Orson Welles' favourite director
of cinematography, Gregg Toland.
The Fernandez Figueroa films
were luminous,
the space deep and rounded by light,
like Michelangelo's sculptures.
But they also showed life
to be doomed, fated to fail.
An innovative combination
of gleaming light
and dark human themes.
A kind of landscape,
Mexican film noir.
By the late 1940s,
Mexican cinema was on a roll.
But then came Luis Bunuel,
guns blazing.
The last time we met him was here
at the premiere of his surrealist
film 'L'Age d'Or'.
By the '50s, his wanderlust
had taken him to Mexico
and this film 'Los Olvidados'.
He walked around the slums
of Mexico City for a month
to see the reality of the lives
of the young and poor.
He filmed street gangs,
physically disabled people,
in scorching daylight
with high-contrast film stocks.
But realism wasn't enough
for Bunuel.
He found it too earthbound
and conventional.
So he added a sequence like this.
One of the hungry boy's dreams.
Slow motion.
Wind in the bedroom.
Meat as a thing to hunger for,
to fear.
Mexico is rightly proud of the films
Bunuel made here
between 1946 and 1965,
though his mockery of its religion,
its fetishism of motherhood
and suffering,
and of middle-class life
was very much of its time
and created mixed feelings.
And in this journey around
the movie world in the '50s,
we then come
to the land of the free -
America.
An idealised America.
Eisenhower became president
in 1953.
Where the political
leaders of Egypt, India
China and Mexico
aimed for socialism,
Eisenhower's vision
was rather different.
Christian, middle-class,
decent and suburban.
And at first glance,
the best and most popular
American movies of their day
seemed to reflect this.
Here, in 'All That Heaven Allows',
is Eisenhower America
at its most lush.
White picket fence.
Beautiful autumn day.
Perfectly clean car.
The swish of an A-line skirt.
And a craning camera.
But 'All That Heaven Allows'
is far more innovative
and subversive than it seems.
Oh, I can't take credit for that!
Martin always made the arrangements
with the nursery
and after his death, the service
just automatically continued.
Cary Scott, here on the right,
has been widowed.
..except for the weekends
I've got nothing but time.
Polite society expects her
to settle down
to a life of coffee mornings
and charity work.
When she doesn't, and starts
an affair with Rock Hudson,
her gardener, much younger than
she is, and of a much lower class,
and filmed in darker settings
and more moody lighting,
she's shunned by her friends.
Director Douglas Sirk,
who fled the Nazis,
exposed the conformity
and viciousness
of the '50s American dream.
Society can't cope with Cary's
continuing sexual desire.
And nor can her children.
In this devastating scene,
they buy her that most '50s
of consumer goods, a TV set,
to keep her company at night
and distract her from the gardener.
Merry Christmas!
Sirk's camera tracks in
to one of the most potent
filmic metaphors of the '50s.
Cary not watching the TV,
but imprisoned by its rectangle.
All the company you want
right there on the screen.
Drama. Comedy.
Life's parade at your fingertips.
The film used the gloss of Hollywood
to attack gloss,
surface niceties
and '50s sexual sublimation.
Exactly the same approach
as Youssef Chahine
in 'Cairo Station'.
Social pressure in very different
societies around the world
was building.
Psychoanalysis,
the study of the unconscious,
and its disruptive desires
had gone mainstream in the '50s.
And movies loved this.
Every genre was swelling with
Freudian feeling in those days.
Director Nicholas Ray brought
the sexuality of '50s America
to that most traditional genre,
the Western.
He was a passionate drunk.
Here he is filmed later in life,
hand-held on a student production.
enraged and arguing with an actress.
Not at all.
Not at all, at all, at all!
In his Western, 'Johnny Guitar',
Ray argued with '30s movie star
Joan Crawford.
She strides into a world of outlaws,
builds this highly decorated saloon
with its back wall like a cave...
You wanted the dancing kid,
Marshall.
..and is waiting for the railroad
to bring customers.
The straitlaced locals hate this.
They form a lynch mob.
Here's someone from that lynch mob.
Emma, who's dressed in black,
the colour of villainy,
spits almost fascist fury.
Bringing thousands
of new people from the east.
Farmers. Dirt Farmers.
Squatters.
They'll push us out!
Emma's line about people from the
east is code for modern people,
communists.
Director Ray saw Emma and the mob
as the House Un-American Activities
Committee bullies,
thus adding to the film's
subversion, its political anger.
So you better wake up.
Crawford's body language makes her
the strongest man in the film.
She looks down on the other men and
is hated for her sexual deviance.
Never seen a woman
who was more a man.
She thinks like one, acts like one
and sometimes makes me feel
like I'm not.
Eddie, that's last month's paper.
How many times
do you have to read it?
'Johnny Guitar' was released in
America to pretty terrible reviews.
But this French director and critic
Francois Truffaut wrote that,
"Anyone who rejects it
should never go to see movies again.
"Such people will never recognise
inspiration, a shot, an idea,
"a good film or even cinema itself."
The camp of 'Johnny Guitar',
its Freudian sexuality
showed that the lid
could not be kept
on the pressure cooker
of sex in movies in the 1950s.
In the films of underground maestro,
Kenneth Anger, the lid blew off.
In this scene in his 1947 film,
'Fireworks',
Anger himself is stripped
and beaten by sailors.
It was shot silent, lit from below.
A dream about pain and sex.
The French director Jean Cocteau,
whose film 'The Blood of a Poet'
helped found poetic
underground cinema,
saw 'Fireworks' and wrote
a fan letter to Anger about it.
17 years later, his 'Scorpio Rising'
once again combined masculine
costumes with bodily close-ups,
low-level lighting and fetishism,
but this time added rock'n'roll
songs to the soundtrack.
This was the first time
this had been done in this way.
Highly innovative.
A technique that would be copied
by Martin Scorsese in 'Mean Streets'
and David Lynch in 'Blue Velvet'.
SONG: Precious and warm
the memory
# Through the years... #
The magic techniques
of Georges Melies
begat Cocteau, begat Anger,
begat Scorsese and Lynch.
Quite a chain of command.
# Blue velvet through my tears. #
Kenneth Anger, Douglas Sirk and Nick
Ray were all working in California,
but perhaps even a bigger challenge
to the Eisenhowerian idea
that '50s America was heaven
came from this city, New York.
Suspicious of all that sun and sky
and all those palm trees
New York had its own ideas
about imagery and reality,
acting and landscape and sex.
TV was made here.
Its low-resolution
black and white imagery was plain
compared to Hollywood spectacle.
But a TV drama like this, 'Marty',
about this lonely butcher
was a sensation.
He phones a girl, asks her out.
But his confidence is low.
He's had many knock-backs
from women.
What are you doing
the Saturday after that?
Yeah. Yeah, I understand.
Sure.
This was live TV.
The camera's right next to actor
Rod Steiger who played the butcher.
Character rather than gloss.
'Marty' led to more
character-based films
like 'On the Waterfront'
and even 'Taxi Driver'.
Steiger trained here.
The Actors Studio.
Some of the teaching here said
that actors should access
their inner fears and desires,
then suppress them.
Access, then suppress.
Acting as a pressure cooker.
Identity as a melodrama.
A new performance technique
called "the Method" resulted.
One of the great Method films,
'On the Waterfront',
was shot here,
across the water from Manhattan.
It was directed by Elia Kazan.
Marlon Brando, who'd also studied
in the Actors Studio,
confronts a union boss
who'd been responsible
for a murder.
Hey, Friendly!
John Friendly, come outta there!
Friendly!
Come on outta there.
Brando's character
doesn't think much of himself.
He's inarticulate and slow to anger,
but his fury, long suppressed,
finally explodes.
Don't push your luck.
Wait a minute, you!
You take them heaters away from you
and you're nothing! You know that?
You'll talk yourself in the river.
You take the good goods away
and the kickbacks
and a shakedown cabbage and them
pistoleros and you're nothing!
Your guts is all in your wallet and
your trigger finger, you know that?
As he was taught,
to prepare for the scene,
Brando will have remembered
some fury in his personal life,
then tried to hide it,
then let it all come out.
You give it to Joey,
you give it to Dugan,
you give it to Charley,
who was one of your own.
In this famous scene,
Rod Steiger plays Brando's brother.
He works for the union boss.
Has the cashmere coat to show it.
Before we get to where?
Listen to me, Terry!
Take the job, just take it.
No questions. Take it.
Steiger pulls a gun on his brother.
You'd think that Brando
would get enraged by this,
but the opposite happens.
He pushes the gun away, tenderly.
Oh, Charley.
The emotion that has been
suppressed, hidden, is not rage,
but disappointment
and, even, brotherly love.
Look, kid...
There'd been many types of realism
in acting before it,
but now actors no longer displayed
their characters,
but tried to hide them.
As Freud had taught,
the surface is a lie, a mask.
Modern Western, inchoate masculinity
came out of moments
like the back of the taxi scene.
He brought you along too fast.
In this scene in Howard Hawks'
Western 'Red River',
old and new cinema fought it out.
You're soft.
Won't anything make a man
out of you?
You once told me never to
take your gun away from you.
You yellow-bellied...
John Wayne, an old-style action man,
squared up to the actor who,
at The Actors Studio,
was even more troubled than Brando -
Montgomery Clift.
Alright!
For 14 years I've been scared,
but it's going to be alright.
But Clift fights back.
Get up. Come on, get up!
The 1950s
standing up to the '30s and '40s.
Judy Balaban was engaged
to Montgomery Clift.
Monty was sort of
the forerunner of...
..the sensitive man, if you will.
You know?
He was the sort of beginning
of accepting the notion
that guys were just not
these cut-out masculine figures
of masculine traits, or whatever.
And I think he was the precursor of,
you know, Marlon and Jimmy Dean.
He was just at the edge of that,
coming into that.
James Dean,
in 'Rebel Without a Cause',
was the icon of these modern men.
He's the son of a rich family.
Dad, stand up for me.
Director Nicholas Ray's wide screen
shows the posh family home.
But then Dean, like cinema
itself in the 50s, explodes.
Stand up!
Tilted camera.
He attacks his father.
You're killing him!
Do you want to kill your own father?
He puts the boot
into all that good taste.
There was no social reason
for his rebellion.
It was personal, existential.
Dean died aged 24 in 1955,
just as teenagers and rage
had really got going.
Suddenly American cinema
was all about
young, angry, East Coast,
inarticulate men.
They knew that '50s America
wasn't all Doris Day and Disney.
It was rife with tensions
between parents and kids,
management and workers,
white and black.
And back here in California
the tension in '50s cinema
gets even more intriguing.
As if to prove that it wasn't only
the trendy young American directors
who were making swollen movies
in the '50s,
let's look at what four of
the American master directors,
Orson Welles, John Ford,
Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks
were up to.
Each of them made a masterpiece
in those years.
Welles filmed his movie 'Touch of
Evil' in Venice, California.
He plays Hank Quinlan, a corrupt
lawman bulging at the waist.
Welles filmed with wide-angle lenses
to make the imagery bulge.
Even the building here
seems to curve around the man.
(OLD-TIME PIANO MUSIC)
Hank's desperately lonely
and obsessed by a woman.
I don't know what Quinlan thinks
she's got to do with it.
Oh, maybe she'll cook chilli
for him
or bring out the crystal ball.
John Ford's greatest film
of the '50s, 'The Searchers',
is also about a lonely man
obsessed by a woman -
his niece, who's been abducted.
When he finds her
he holds her up to the sky
not sure whether to hug or harm her.
The abductors were Native Americans.
Edwards' rage is racist -
in '50s America,
the biggest drama of them all.
Scottie, in Alfred Hitchcock's
'Vertigo',
is as obsessed as Ethan and Hank,
but with an apparently dead woman.
He follows her look-alike,
his eyes burning blue.
Hitchcock films his point of view,
putting us in his driving seat.
Scottie slips into
an erotic dream state.
In an era when families
were the social norm,
none of these men is in one.
And neither is this man, John Wayne,
in Howard Hawks's 'Rio Bravo'.
He plays a sheriff
who's assembled this motley posse
to defend a town against bandits.
The men sit around,
joke, talk and sing.
# That's where I long to be... #
In the era of Chahine's sexual
frustration, of Sirk's conformity,
of Mehboob's symbolic women,
of James Dean and Marlon Brando's
unravelling men,
this posse,
filmed in warm colours,
smoking, strumming
and drinking coffee,
were the closest
mature American cinema got
to showing
an ordinary family at all.
# ..Of a tree
# Coming home
# Sweetheart, darling
# Just my rifle, pony and me. #
In Britain in the '50s,
tensions about sex and society
were more hidden
beneath the surface.
The films of this man, David Lean,
didn't scream like the melodramas
of Egypt, India, Mexico and America.
But still waters run deep.
Lean's films contain the emotions
of Britain in the '50s,
its empire in decline.
Like Akira Kurosawa in Japan,
Lean's black and white films
of the '40s
were taut stories of his nation,
England, on a human scale.
In this scene in his adaptation
of Charles Dickens'
'Great Expectations',
the young Pip,
who comes from a humble background,
encounters another class, which is
haughty and stopped in time.
Your clock's stopped, Miss.
It should say a quarter past three.
Don't loiter, boy.
Gothic and erotic.
And then, like Kurosawa's,
Lean's films seem to become
as much about landscape,
how it dwarfs people.
In this scene from
'Lawrence of Arabia',
Lawrence imagines
going to the desert.
In the burning match
he sees the heat of the Arab sun.
Then the famous cut
that seems to picture
T.E. Lawrence's colonial dream
of elsewhere.
What makes the film very '50s
is that it hints
that Lawrence's attraction to Arabia
was sexual too.
SONG: # I believe that somewhere
is the darkest night... #
..in line position on the track.
You'll see the most amazing show
of events...
The director who made this film
held David Lean in total contempt.
Working class people
at an amusement park having fun,
believing in life, optimism.
The film's interested
in these people
but its director Lindsay Anderson
who was bookish and caustic,
didn't believe.
He thought that human beings
were selfish, especially posh ones.
So 'O Dreamland' is a hot subject
filmed coolly.
Anderson was a leftist,
but 'O Dreamland's irony
is far from this,
the most famous leftist film
in movie history,
'Battleship Potemkin'.
In 'Potemkin', the working classes
were pictured as noble types.
A caring mother,
children of the revolution.
'O Dreamland's people or,
rather, its stare at them,
was not simple at all.
It was full of pity and admiration
but also disappointment
and maybe even contempt.
Highly conflicted and class-ridden.
Just like Britain itself
in the '50s.
And finally in our travel
around the world in the 1950s,
if we move to France
not long after 'O Dreamland',
we find this 22-year-old
ballet dancer and model,
Brigitte Bardot.
She had the kind of beauty that made
the box office go 'kerching'.
There was nothing ambiguous
about this stare.
Bardot's hair was unkempt,
she refused to dress
like a posh Parisian woman.
Eventually she brought more money
to the French economy
than the motorcar manufacturer
Renault.
Sex was coming out in the open
in the movies.
The 1950s were the pressure cooker
years in the movies.
The non-Western world decolonised,
got confidence
and you could see this
in its movies.
The Western world had sex
and power on its mind,
and you could see this
in its movies.
Audiences got hot under the collar.
They were swollen with
the desires of their times.
The language of the movies
was straining at the seams.
Something had to give.
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 discover
the emotional Hollywood films
of Douglas Sirk
and explore melodrama
around the world.
(CHUCKLES) Go ahead.
The 1950s. Widescreen. Colour.
A young American actor, James Dean,
head hung, crippled with rage,
kicks and punches a desk.
His emotions are bursting
at the seams.
One of the key images of the '50s
and the passionate theme
of this part of The Story of Film.
To get to the heart
of these emotional times
you have to start, not in America,
but here - Egypt.
The youth rebellion of James Dean
was taking place here too,
where there was even more
to kick out against.
As usual, the movies,
the great mirror of their times,
reflected the strain.
The '50s became
the era of the melodrama.
There had been formulaic filmmaking
here in Egypt since the 1920s.
Until, that is, this rebel,
the real James Dean
of the '50s cinema came along.
He's the founding father
of creative African cinema.
In 1958, Youssef Chahine
changed film history.
Until then, Africa had played
no significant part
in the story of film,
but in that year
he wrote, directed
and starred in the complex melodrama
'Cairo Station' -
the first great African film,
the first great Arab film.
Scenes like this
had a sweaty intensity.
Chahine films himself alone
with his erotic imagination.
Chahine was a born boundary pusher
and that's what 'Cairo Station' did.
More than anything it captured
the tension of its times.
The sexual repression.
The buried rage.
It was very daring.
I was talking about
a sexual pervert...
..and they spat in my face
on opening night.
Nobody talked about real things.
90% of the young people in Egypt
were frustrated
because of the taboos,
because of the religion,
because of idiotic parents
who were not open enough,
who were not civilised enough.
Chahine plays
a crippled newspaper seller
obsessed by Hind Rostom
who plays a voluptuous
cold drinks seller.
He films himself staring at her,
close to the camera,
outside, looking in.
Look at this scene
in which he listens
as she has sex with another man.
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS)
(TRAIN CLATTERS NOISILY)
Dolly.
Cut.
Dolly.
Cut.
Then the tracks taking the strain
of the weight of the train,
a symbol of Chahine's
emotional strain.
No other African or Arab
had thought
so cinematically before.
'Cairo Station' was a masterpiece.
It was melodramatic,
sexual and about social justice.
Like the best films of the '50s.
So where did the film and Chahine
get the balls to be so innovative?
In part,
from this world-changing conference.
In 1955, the leaders
of 29 Asian and African countries
met in Bandung in Indonesia to
forge economic and cultural links.
They were allied neither
to the first capitalist world,
nor the second communist world
of the Soviet Union.
They were a self-styled Third World.
'Cairo Station' came out of this
new, non-aligned sensibility.
But this new anger and confidence
could be seen in many places
around the world,
nowhere more so
than this vast country, India.
The story of Indian film
is as vast as the country.
India knew as much, if not more,
about devastation
as Europe in the '50s.
Decolonialisation, partition,
famine and the caste system
had traumatised it.
In all this turmoil,
you'd think that the country
would have no time for cinema.
But you'd be wrong.
By the 1950s,
India seemed made for cinema.
(GENTLE SITAR AND INDIAN FLUTE)
Its colours seem to have the hand
of a production designer about them.
Its luminosity has the feel
of a studio arc light.
Look at this scene from one of the
great Indian films, 'Paper Flowers'.
A beam of light opens up
in a film studio.
The camera tracks around it,
towards a man, the film's director,
Guru Dutt,
the country's Orson Welles.
He plays a director who looks at a
woman he wants to cast in the film.
She's lit from below, no hair light,
the opposite of Hollywood lighting.
(WOMAN SINGS INDIAN SONG)
Back on India's streets,
you have the feeling that a movie
director has designed the action.
Worshipping movie stars
wasn't a stretch for Indians.
The country is photogenic,
like Marilyn Monroe is photogenic.
The first movies made by Indians
were about the lives of saints...
..or what were called mythologicals,
like this one.
Superimpositions,
like early Melies' films,
show a mythic king being tested.
Then, in the '30s,
India's film industry
wired for sound.
Immediately
it drew on the traditions
of musical theatre in the country.
As a result, India's became
the only national cinema
where musical interludes
became the norm.
And the seeds of what would become
known as Bollywood were sown.
Colour, display, theatricality.
This sounds familiar.
Like Hollywood.
Cinema as bauble.
But the less told story
of Indian cinema
is how it turned its face
towards reality.
What became known as "socials" -
reforming films
challenging the caste system
or materialism or poverty,
emerged in the 1930s.
The realism of such scenes
predates Italian neorealism.
The tidal wave of
post World War II realism
that swept across the world
in the late '40s and early '50s
reached its greatest heights
here in Kolkata,
in the work of a man who lived
in this house - Satyajit Ray.
Ray's father and grandfather
were famous publishers
and illustrators here.
Bollywood films,
like Hollywood films,
were usually set in a fantasy
everywhere land,
but Satyajit Ray
wanted to make his film
about a very specific place.
So he and his cinematographer
Subrata Mitra
and his non-professional actors
went somewhere very specific.
They drove 30 minutes from Kolkata
to this small Bengali village,
Boral,
to make their first film
'Pather Panchali'.
Most of them had never shot
a foot of film before,
yet the imagery they made here
changed film history.
Its cinematography had texture,
lustre, tenderness.
It's like we were opening our eyes
to India for the first time.
'Pather Panchali' was a portrait
of the life of Apu,
the son of a priest,
and his relationship with
his sister, mother and old aunt
who was brilliantly played
by Chunibala Devi.
Her amazingly lined face
was the opposite of the smooth
faces in glossy cinema.
This was new.
She was living in a brothel
when Ray found her
and needed a dose of morphine
every day to keep her going.
What was so new
was that we were seeing
a real Indian village on screen
for the first time.
The movie dispelled ignorance
about village life.
Real, not idealised kids.
Domestic details,
cooking, drying clothes.
But what was so '50s
was that Ray was also a modernist.
He believed in Prime Minister
Nehru's plans to industrialise India
so the arrival of the train
is treated here
as an event
of great wonder and hope.
The train's plume of smoke
is beautiful,
like the plumes of pampas grass.
The camera swishes with excitement.
Apu runs with excitement.
This man, Soumendu Roy, was camera
assistant on 'Pather Panchali'
and went on to be Ray's DP.
Roy still handles the original
camera that they used
with great pride.
It looks like a tank compared to
the small cameras today.
It's amazing that they captured
so many intimate scenes
with such an unwieldy thing.
Though most of the filming
was on location,
key scenes were shot
in this studio, Tollygunge,
in the south of Kolkata,
where many of the great
Bengali films were made.
This is the actual sound stage
where some of 'Pather Panchali's
sets were built.
The great actress Sharmila Tagore
worked with Ray many times.
She was just 14
when he cast her in the lead
in his masterpiece 'Devi'
about a girl whose father-in-law
dreams that she's a goddess.
She was filmed as if
by candle light, eyes lowering.
Like, I was an amateur
when I worked in 'Devi'.
That was my second film with him,
after 'Apur Sansar'
and I was very young, I was just 14.
As you know,
he was a very tall person,
so he sat down on a stool
and made eye contact with the child,
just read out the scene once...
..and with...sort of animatedly,
like, you know, with a lot
of expression he would read out,
with his, as you know, he had a very
expressive, well modulated voice.
So he'd make it very exciting,
and just hold the child's attention.
And somehow he communicated
and the child was able
to replicate it almost exactly.
He knew exactly what kind of a face
he wanted.
Of course,
there was a lot of stress on eyes...
..and also the framing.
I think he believed,
like 'Devi', as you know,
especially my role was treated
in very big close-up
and after the film is over
the face really haunts you
and that shot where I'm sitting
in the puja place
and the husband comes
and that little exchange
between the husband and Doyamoyee,
I thought that was wonderful
because that little shake
of the head that I'm...
..it's not what it seems.
You know, the helplessness of her
and that slowly...
..you know, her getting confused.
I mean, she's just a village girl
and very young.
You know, all that confusion
in a little...
..you know, somebody who's not
quite finished growing up yet,
I think that is so tragic, you know,
how she becomes victim of, uh...
..of this regressive mindset,
orthodox mindset.
Manik-Da, as you know,
Ray we called Manik-Da,
he knew a lot about painting
and, uh...
..and...and that control,
you know, he had tremendous control.
Everything...there was not an extra
note, it was so well orchestrated.
So I think that's the kind of
search for truth,
through his own work
and through his own...
You know, he wanted to evolve
through the film, you know?
And he was this eternal quest.
So, you know,
he had all that element.
He had imbibed all that
within him and music.
And he used this beautiful medium
to express himself.
Crumbling buildings, long shadows,
playing kids.
The world of 'Pather Panchali'
made it a huge hit.
It played for six months
in New York City alone.
Its landscapes, shaded pathways
and natural soundscapes
made India central to
the story of film for a moment.
It and two follow-up films,
the 'Apu Trilogy',
are sometimes called the best
Asian films ever made.
But Satyajit Ray's films weren't
bursting at the seams with emotion,
like '50s melodramas were.
They were too quiet for that.
But then came an Indian film
that certainly was
bursting at the seams.
'Mother India' is about this woman,
Radha.
She's getting married.
Cerise red. Veils.
Close-ups of hands and feet,
a couple gently stepping
into the world.
Here's the world she discovers.
Hard work. Mud. Sweat.
(SINGS INDIAN SONG)
An independent worker's India,
labouring to be modern
and socialist.
Filmed in much more earthy colours.
The combination
of romance and struggle
made many call the film
the Indian 'Gone with the Wind'.
In this extraordinary scene
peasants stand on the map of India
in a way that echoes
Hollywood musicals,
but also Soviet propaganda.
The main character and the whole of
India are strong, but fated to fail.
Mother India was
a state of the nation film
and a landmark in world cinema.
This vast country
to the north of India, China,
had its own unique
social pressures in the 1950s.
As we've seen, the country had
a movie golden age in the 1930s.
Chairman Mao took control
of the country in the late '40s
and filmmaking
came under state control.
Few people would know more
about this
than this remarkable man,
director Xie Jin.
Xie was reportedly born in 1923
to a family so wealthy
that his mother's dowry
was delivered on 20 boats.
He made his first films in the '50s
and then became the greatest
Chinese filmmaker of the day,
a major stylist, a star director
and a winner of scores of awards.
Xie feels that Chinese film culture
is unique.
Chinese film was produced
in unique circumstances,
but look at Xie's greatest film,
'Two Stage Sisters'.
A woman in tears.
Highlights in her eyes.
The camera moves in to get
a closer look at her emotion.
We recognise this type
of filmmaking.
Like the '50s films
we've looked at in Egypt and India,
it's a brilliant melodrama.
The woman and her sister
join a Chinese opera troupe.
Look at Xie's shot here.
The camera rushes left,
ravishing colour,
then a look behind the curtain.
Then the emergence of the actresses.
Everything beautifully placed
in the moving frame.
The first sister
becomes a revolutionary.
The second is seduced
by fame and fortune.
A painful human drama
viewed through a gorgeous lens.
What a lens!
Xie's camera tilts down
into the world of the story
and then we notice
that it's also craning down.
The roof of the stage seems to rise.
From a god's-eye view
to a peasant's.
Very Chinese, very melodrama,
very '50s.
Mao's Cultural Revolution
devastated Xie's career.
Both Xie's parents killed themselves
in its aftermath
and 'Two Stage Sisters' was accused
of "cinematic Confucianism".
He himself was given a job
cleaning the toilets
of the movie studio where
he was once a leading director.
Few lives in movie history,
not even Roman Polanski's,
have such amplitude.
Further east in the 1950s
Japan was recovering from its
disastrous wartime experiences.
Legendary actress Kyoko Kagawa,
who worked with Ozu, Mizoguchi
and then Kurosawa.
As we've seen, the country
had already, in the 1930s,
experienced a cinematic golden age.
But the 1950s heralded another.
Central to this golden age
was Akira Kurosawa.
Akira Kurosawa did indeed look at
individuals with a long lens.
Look at this scene
from his film 'Ikiru'.
A bureaucrat has just learnt
that he's got cancer.
The weight of the world
on his shoulders.
Downcast eyes.
He grew up under the feudal emperor.
This taught him to be passive,
trudge along.
But then he was hit
by the juggernaut of modern life.
Japan lost the war.
He has to start thinking
for himself.
Kurosawa's shot pulls back
to show the breadth of life.
Where does he fit in?
Most of the movies of Kurosawa
are about this emerging
of the individual.
How someone distinguishes themselves
from others without being selfish.
A very '50s tension.
Filmmaker and critic Donald Richie.
The hero in a Kurosawa film
is notable for his staying power.
Even though it won't work
he does it over and over
and over again.
All of the Kurosawa heroes
keep at it, until finally...
Once I was with Kurosawa
and I saw an example of this.
He had a pen that didn't work -
you know, a ballpoint.
And it wouldn't work and most people
would say bring me another ballpen.
He didn't,
he started working that ballpen
and finally, after about ten
minutes of manipulation, it worked.
And I thought
this is sort of a...what...
..a metaphor for Kurosawa himself
and for the way that he thinks
about his people.
The detective in 'Stray Dog'
doesn't have a one chance in hell
of ever getting that gun back again
but he tries and he tries and
he tries and he tries and he does.
In Kurosawa's epic film
the 'Seven Samurai',
a group of swordsmen
defend a village.
This man on the right
with the black hair, Katsushiro,
has become the greatest
swordsman of them all.
It's the end of an epic battle.
Katsushiro thinks
it's still winnable.
He walks around in a circle,
then throws the sword away.
He's been shot.
(GUNSHOTS)
The era of the sword is over.
The era of the gun has begun.
The film's set in the past,
but it echoes in the '50s
because it's about the beginning
of a new era.
John Ford would have filmed
such a scene simply, purely.
Yet look at the rain in Kurosawa's
film and the mud and the grey.
Kurosawa was far more interested
than Ford, or most directors,
in atmospheric effects,
the poetic rush of imagery.
In 'Throne of Blood',
one of his Shakespeare adaptations,
look how he films
the Lady Macbeth character,
like a ghost,
gliding through a room,
her kimono squeaking.
(KIMONO SQUEAKS)
And in the same film,
look how he shows Birnam Wood
advancing like in a nightmare,
like waves.
It's like the trees have fingers.
Look how Macbeth dies,
his body pierced a hundred times.
It's clear where this scene
from 'The Godfather' came from.
Another human body jerking,
shaking, staccato, as it dies.
Kurosawa's work became, in effect,
a style book for cinema.
He was like a one-man film school.
The 'Seven Samurai' was remade
as 'The Magnificent Seven',
with James Coburn
playing the Katsushiro part.
Widescreen, colour, bright sunlight
rather than Kurosawa's
square, charcoal downpour.
The symbolic knife is even seen
in close-up this time.
The Western world in the '50s knew
about Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa and Ozu
but move, say, to Latin America
and it drew a blank,
which was the Western world's loss
because filmmaking in Brazil
and Mexico was revving up.
As we've seen, Brazil had taken
the lead in Latin American cinema.
One of its first innovative films
was this was this one, 'Limite',
made in 1930,
its soaring camera
expressing a woman's liberty.
25 years later, this film,
'Rio 40 Degrees',
brought Brazilian cinema
back to the spotlight.
It starts with the aerial shots and
big-band sounds of a tourist film.
But soon it's on the ground
with boys from poor backgrounds.
They sell nuts and papers.
The camera tracks back.
A boy walks into the foreground.
Bold use of deep staging.
The director of this film,
Nelson Pereira dos Santos,
was influenced by neorealism
and became the most influential
Brazilian filmmaker of the 1950s.
Santos filmed in slum locations,
but used advanced visual techniques.
'Rio 40 Degrees'
had multiple storylines.
Here, Santos tracks from the boys
who feature throughout
to two men
who talk about adult problems.
An innovative shift in story
without a cut.
The realism and energy
of 'Rio 40 Degrees'
was like Youssef Chahine's
'Cairo Station'.
Travel north-west from Brazil
in the '50s
and we find that Mexico's
film industry
is more advanced than Brazil's.
Movies in Mexico had been
intertwined with life
since the 1910s.
The revolutionary Pancho Villa
held off an assault on Ojinaga
until an American company
got its cameras in position to film
and Villa got paid the tidy sum
of $25,000 for doing so.
Come the '30s,
Mexican cinema had great directors.
Fernando de Fuentes,
who made this film, 'Dona Barbara',
was perhaps the best.
He virtually invented
Mexican national cinema...
..and its themes of rich and poor...
..feminine suffering and display.
Brilliantly controlled melodrama.
Here, De Fuentes films
the greatest star of Mexican cinema,
Maria Felix, on a boat as her
character is about to be raped.
De Fuentes had his DP film
from Dona Barbara's point of view,
low down.
As in many Mexican films, the men
are photographed against the sky.
Dona Barbara is hardened
by the assault.
She becomes a landowner
and rules with an iron fist.
Gringo, you fight with Mapache?
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
Even more influential
on Mexican cinema than De Fuentes
was this man on the left.
Emilio 'El Indio' Fernandez,
actor and director.
This is him in Sam Peckinpah's
'The Wild Bunch'.
He was macho and cocky
and Peckinpah cast him as such.
And in films that he directed
like this one, 'The Pearl',
he was great
at muscular storytelling.
Here, the main character is
a poor Mexican Indian fisherman.
Fernandez himself was half Indian
and often portrayed
mixed race characters.
The fisherman finds a pearl.
His life can at last
change for the better.
But people become jealous
of him and his wife
and they can't sell the pearl.
It becomes a cancer in their lives,
poisoning everything.
The film was shot
by Gabriel Figueroa,
one of the greatest cinematographers
of his day, who studied with
Orson Welles' favourite director
of cinematography, Gregg Toland.
The Fernandez Figueroa films
were luminous,
the space deep and rounded by light,
like Michelangelo's sculptures.
But they also showed life
to be doomed, fated to fail.
An innovative combination
of gleaming light
and dark human themes.
A kind of landscape,
Mexican film noir.
By the late 1940s,
Mexican cinema was on a roll.
But then came Luis Bunuel,
guns blazing.
The last time we met him was here
at the premiere of his surrealist
film 'L'Age d'Or'.
By the '50s, his wanderlust
had taken him to Mexico
and this film 'Los Olvidados'.
He walked around the slums
of Mexico City for a month
to see the reality of the lives
of the young and poor.
He filmed street gangs,
physically disabled people,
in scorching daylight
with high-contrast film stocks.
But realism wasn't enough
for Bunuel.
He found it too earthbound
and conventional.
So he added a sequence like this.
One of the hungry boy's dreams.
Slow motion.
Wind in the bedroom.
Meat as a thing to hunger for,
to fear.
Mexico is rightly proud of the films
Bunuel made here
between 1946 and 1965,
though his mockery of its religion,
its fetishism of motherhood
and suffering,
and of middle-class life
was very much of its time
and created mixed feelings.
And in this journey around
the movie world in the '50s,
we then come
to the land of the free -
America.
An idealised America.
Eisenhower became president
in 1953.
Where the political
leaders of Egypt, India
China and Mexico
aimed for socialism,
Eisenhower's vision
was rather different.
Christian, middle-class,
decent and suburban.
And at first glance,
the best and most popular
American movies of their day
seemed to reflect this.
Here, in 'All That Heaven Allows',
is Eisenhower America
at its most lush.
White picket fence.
Beautiful autumn day.
Perfectly clean car.
The swish of an A-line skirt.
And a craning camera.
But 'All That Heaven Allows'
is far more innovative
and subversive than it seems.
Oh, I can't take credit for that!
Martin always made the arrangements
with the nursery
and after his death, the service
just automatically continued.
Cary Scott, here on the right,
has been widowed.
..except for the weekends
I've got nothing but time.
Polite society expects her
to settle down
to a life of coffee mornings
and charity work.
When she doesn't, and starts
an affair with Rock Hudson,
her gardener, much younger than
she is, and of a much lower class,
and filmed in darker settings
and more moody lighting,
she's shunned by her friends.
Director Douglas Sirk,
who fled the Nazis,
exposed the conformity
and viciousness
of the '50s American dream.
Society can't cope with Cary's
continuing sexual desire.
And nor can her children.
In this devastating scene,
they buy her that most '50s
of consumer goods, a TV set,
to keep her company at night
and distract her from the gardener.
Merry Christmas!
Sirk's camera tracks in
to one of the most potent
filmic metaphors of the '50s.
Cary not watching the TV,
but imprisoned by its rectangle.
All the company you want
right there on the screen.
Drama. Comedy.
Life's parade at your fingertips.
The film used the gloss of Hollywood
to attack gloss,
surface niceties
and '50s sexual sublimation.
Exactly the same approach
as Youssef Chahine
in 'Cairo Station'.
Social pressure in very different
societies around the world
was building.
Psychoanalysis,
the study of the unconscious,
and its disruptive desires
had gone mainstream in the '50s.
And movies loved this.
Every genre was swelling with
Freudian feeling in those days.
Director Nicholas Ray brought
the sexuality of '50s America
to that most traditional genre,
the Western.
He was a passionate drunk.
Here he is filmed later in life,
hand-held on a student production.
enraged and arguing with an actress.
Not at all.
Not at all, at all, at all!
In his Western, 'Johnny Guitar',
Ray argued with '30s movie star
Joan Crawford.
She strides into a world of outlaws,
builds this highly decorated saloon
with its back wall like a cave...
You wanted the dancing kid,
Marshall.
..and is waiting for the railroad
to bring customers.
The straitlaced locals hate this.
They form a lynch mob.
Here's someone from that lynch mob.
Emma, who's dressed in black,
the colour of villainy,
spits almost fascist fury.
Bringing thousands
of new people from the east.
Farmers. Dirt Farmers.
Squatters.
They'll push us out!
Emma's line about people from the
east is code for modern people,
communists.
Director Ray saw Emma and the mob
as the House Un-American Activities
Committee bullies,
thus adding to the film's
subversion, its political anger.
So you better wake up.
Crawford's body language makes her
the strongest man in the film.
She looks down on the other men and
is hated for her sexual deviance.
Never seen a woman
who was more a man.
She thinks like one, acts like one
and sometimes makes me feel
like I'm not.
Eddie, that's last month's paper.
How many times
do you have to read it?
'Johnny Guitar' was released in
America to pretty terrible reviews.
But this French director and critic
Francois Truffaut wrote that,
"Anyone who rejects it
should never go to see movies again.
"Such people will never recognise
inspiration, a shot, an idea,
"a good film or even cinema itself."
The camp of 'Johnny Guitar',
its Freudian sexuality
showed that the lid
could not be kept
on the pressure cooker
of sex in movies in the 1950s.
In the films of underground maestro,
Kenneth Anger, the lid blew off.
In this scene in his 1947 film,
'Fireworks',
Anger himself is stripped
and beaten by sailors.
It was shot silent, lit from below.
A dream about pain and sex.
The French director Jean Cocteau,
whose film 'The Blood of a Poet'
helped found poetic
underground cinema,
saw 'Fireworks' and wrote
a fan letter to Anger about it.
17 years later, his 'Scorpio Rising'
once again combined masculine
costumes with bodily close-ups,
low-level lighting and fetishism,
but this time added rock'n'roll
songs to the soundtrack.
This was the first time
this had been done in this way.
Highly innovative.
A technique that would be copied
by Martin Scorsese in 'Mean Streets'
and David Lynch in 'Blue Velvet'.
SONG: Precious and warm
the memory
# Through the years... #
The magic techniques
of Georges Melies
begat Cocteau, begat Anger,
begat Scorsese and Lynch.
Quite a chain of command.
# Blue velvet through my tears. #
Kenneth Anger, Douglas Sirk and Nick
Ray were all working in California,
but perhaps even a bigger challenge
to the Eisenhowerian idea
that '50s America was heaven
came from this city, New York.
Suspicious of all that sun and sky
and all those palm trees
New York had its own ideas
about imagery and reality,
acting and landscape and sex.
TV was made here.
Its low-resolution
black and white imagery was plain
compared to Hollywood spectacle.
But a TV drama like this, 'Marty',
about this lonely butcher
was a sensation.
He phones a girl, asks her out.
But his confidence is low.
He's had many knock-backs
from women.
What are you doing
the Saturday after that?
Yeah. Yeah, I understand.
Sure.
This was live TV.
The camera's right next to actor
Rod Steiger who played the butcher.
Character rather than gloss.
'Marty' led to more
character-based films
like 'On the Waterfront'
and even 'Taxi Driver'.
Steiger trained here.
The Actors Studio.
Some of the teaching here said
that actors should access
their inner fears and desires,
then suppress them.
Access, then suppress.
Acting as a pressure cooker.
Identity as a melodrama.
A new performance technique
called "the Method" resulted.
One of the great Method films,
'On the Waterfront',
was shot here,
across the water from Manhattan.
It was directed by Elia Kazan.
Marlon Brando, who'd also studied
in the Actors Studio,
confronts a union boss
who'd been responsible
for a murder.
Hey, Friendly!
John Friendly, come outta there!
Friendly!
Come on outta there.
Brando's character
doesn't think much of himself.
He's inarticulate and slow to anger,
but his fury, long suppressed,
finally explodes.
Don't push your luck.
Wait a minute, you!
You take them heaters away from you
and you're nothing! You know that?
You'll talk yourself in the river.
You take the good goods away
and the kickbacks
and a shakedown cabbage and them
pistoleros and you're nothing!
Your guts is all in your wallet and
your trigger finger, you know that?
As he was taught,
to prepare for the scene,
Brando will have remembered
some fury in his personal life,
then tried to hide it,
then let it all come out.
You give it to Joey,
you give it to Dugan,
you give it to Charley,
who was one of your own.
In this famous scene,
Rod Steiger plays Brando's brother.
He works for the union boss.
Has the cashmere coat to show it.
Before we get to where?
Listen to me, Terry!
Take the job, just take it.
No questions. Take it.
Steiger pulls a gun on his brother.
You'd think that Brando
would get enraged by this,
but the opposite happens.
He pushes the gun away, tenderly.
Oh, Charley.
The emotion that has been
suppressed, hidden, is not rage,
but disappointment
and, even, brotherly love.
Look, kid...
There'd been many types of realism
in acting before it,
but now actors no longer displayed
their characters,
but tried to hide them.
As Freud had taught,
the surface is a lie, a mask.
Modern Western, inchoate masculinity
came out of moments
like the back of the taxi scene.
He brought you along too fast.
In this scene in Howard Hawks'
Western 'Red River',
old and new cinema fought it out.
You're soft.
Won't anything make a man
out of you?
You once told me never to
take your gun away from you.
You yellow-bellied...
John Wayne, an old-style action man,
squared up to the actor who,
at The Actors Studio,
was even more troubled than Brando -
Montgomery Clift.
Alright!
For 14 years I've been scared,
but it's going to be alright.
But Clift fights back.
Get up. Come on, get up!
The 1950s
standing up to the '30s and '40s.
Judy Balaban was engaged
to Montgomery Clift.
Monty was sort of
the forerunner of...
..the sensitive man, if you will.
You know?
He was the sort of beginning
of accepting the notion
that guys were just not
these cut-out masculine figures
of masculine traits, or whatever.
And I think he was the precursor of,
you know, Marlon and Jimmy Dean.
He was just at the edge of that,
coming into that.
James Dean,
in 'Rebel Without a Cause',
was the icon of these modern men.
He's the son of a rich family.
Dad, stand up for me.
Director Nicholas Ray's wide screen
shows the posh family home.
But then Dean, like cinema
itself in the 50s, explodes.
Stand up!
Tilted camera.
He attacks his father.
You're killing him!
Do you want to kill your own father?
He puts the boot
into all that good taste.
There was no social reason
for his rebellion.
It was personal, existential.
Dean died aged 24 in 1955,
just as teenagers and rage
had really got going.
Suddenly American cinema
was all about
young, angry, East Coast,
inarticulate men.
They knew that '50s America
wasn't all Doris Day and Disney.
It was rife with tensions
between parents and kids,
management and workers,
white and black.
And back here in California
the tension in '50s cinema
gets even more intriguing.
As if to prove that it wasn't only
the trendy young American directors
who were making swollen movies
in the '50s,
let's look at what four of
the American master directors,
Orson Welles, John Ford,
Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks
were up to.
Each of them made a masterpiece
in those years.
Welles filmed his movie 'Touch of
Evil' in Venice, California.
He plays Hank Quinlan, a corrupt
lawman bulging at the waist.
Welles filmed with wide-angle lenses
to make the imagery bulge.
Even the building here
seems to curve around the man.
(OLD-TIME PIANO MUSIC)
Hank's desperately lonely
and obsessed by a woman.
I don't know what Quinlan thinks
she's got to do with it.
Oh, maybe she'll cook chilli
for him
or bring out the crystal ball.
John Ford's greatest film
of the '50s, 'The Searchers',
is also about a lonely man
obsessed by a woman -
his niece, who's been abducted.
When he finds her
he holds her up to the sky
not sure whether to hug or harm her.
The abductors were Native Americans.
Edwards' rage is racist -
in '50s America,
the biggest drama of them all.
Scottie, in Alfred Hitchcock's
'Vertigo',
is as obsessed as Ethan and Hank,
but with an apparently dead woman.
He follows her look-alike,
his eyes burning blue.
Hitchcock films his point of view,
putting us in his driving seat.
Scottie slips into
an erotic dream state.
In an era when families
were the social norm,
none of these men is in one.
And neither is this man, John Wayne,
in Howard Hawks's 'Rio Bravo'.
He plays a sheriff
who's assembled this motley posse
to defend a town against bandits.
The men sit around,
joke, talk and sing.
# That's where I long to be... #
In the era of Chahine's sexual
frustration, of Sirk's conformity,
of Mehboob's symbolic women,
of James Dean and Marlon Brando's
unravelling men,
this posse,
filmed in warm colours,
smoking, strumming
and drinking coffee,
were the closest
mature American cinema got
to showing
an ordinary family at all.
# ..Of a tree
# Coming home
# Sweetheart, darling
# Just my rifle, pony and me. #
In Britain in the '50s,
tensions about sex and society
were more hidden
beneath the surface.
The films of this man, David Lean,
didn't scream like the melodramas
of Egypt, India, Mexico and America.
But still waters run deep.
Lean's films contain the emotions
of Britain in the '50s,
its empire in decline.
Like Akira Kurosawa in Japan,
Lean's black and white films
of the '40s
were taut stories of his nation,
England, on a human scale.
In this scene in his adaptation
of Charles Dickens'
'Great Expectations',
the young Pip,
who comes from a humble background,
encounters another class, which is
haughty and stopped in time.
Your clock's stopped, Miss.
It should say a quarter past three.
Don't loiter, boy.
Gothic and erotic.
And then, like Kurosawa's,
Lean's films seem to become
as much about landscape,
how it dwarfs people.
In this scene from
'Lawrence of Arabia',
Lawrence imagines
going to the desert.
In the burning match
he sees the heat of the Arab sun.
Then the famous cut
that seems to picture
T.E. Lawrence's colonial dream
of elsewhere.
What makes the film very '50s
is that it hints
that Lawrence's attraction to Arabia
was sexual too.
SONG: # I believe that somewhere
is the darkest night... #
..in line position on the track.
You'll see the most amazing show
of events...
The director who made this film
held David Lean in total contempt.
Working class people
at an amusement park having fun,
believing in life, optimism.
The film's interested
in these people
but its director Lindsay Anderson
who was bookish and caustic,
didn't believe.
He thought that human beings
were selfish, especially posh ones.
So 'O Dreamland' is a hot subject
filmed coolly.
Anderson was a leftist,
but 'O Dreamland's irony
is far from this,
the most famous leftist film
in movie history,
'Battleship Potemkin'.
In 'Potemkin', the working classes
were pictured as noble types.
A caring mother,
children of the revolution.
'O Dreamland's people or,
rather, its stare at them,
was not simple at all.
It was full of pity and admiration
but also disappointment
and maybe even contempt.
Highly conflicted and class-ridden.
Just like Britain itself
in the '50s.
And finally in our travel
around the world in the 1950s,
if we move to France
not long after 'O Dreamland',
we find this 22-year-old
ballet dancer and model,
Brigitte Bardot.
She had the kind of beauty that made
the box office go 'kerching'.
There was nothing ambiguous
about this stare.
Bardot's hair was unkempt,
she refused to dress
like a posh Parisian woman.
Eventually she brought more money
to the French economy
than the motorcar manufacturer
Renault.
Sex was coming out in the open
in the movies.
The 1950s were the pressure cooker
years in the movies.
The non-Western world decolonised,
got confidence
and you could see this
in its movies.
The Western world had sex
and power on its mind,
and you could see this
in its movies.
Audiences got hot under the collar.
They were swollen with
the desires of their times.
The language of the movies
was straining at the seams.
Something had to give.
Supertext Captions by
Red Bee Media Australia
Captions copyright SBS 2013