The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 7 - European New Wave - 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 brilliant Federico Fellini

and discover the explosion
of the French New Wave.

If the mid-1950s were a tense time,

in the late '50s and early '60s,
life got even more so in Europe.

Life got more sexual.

East Germany built the Berlin wall.

The nuclear nightmare grew.

Movie-makers had to take
all this on board



and, also, the fact
that it was now 60 years

since the first ever film
had been screened here.

Movies were no longer
the bright, young, new art form.

In the cafes of Paris...

..this film studio in Rome...

..and on the streets of Stockholm,

filmmakers planned a revolution.

They changed the movies for good.

Made them more personal.

Made them more self-aware.

The shock of the new.

Four legendary European directors,

Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson,

Jacques Tati and Federico Fellini

led the way
in making movies personal.

Here in Stockholm in the '50s

the curtain went up
on the profoundly personal films

of a director for whom cinema
was like theatre.

This man, Ingmar Bergman.

Danish director, Lars von Trier...

I have seen all of Bergman's films.

'Through a Glass Darkly',
one of my favourite films,

I don't know what it has to do with
Antichrist, probably, but then...

Bergman has had
a great influence on me,

especially he's very good
with words.

I just thought his last film
was called 'Saraband',

or something like that,

which is maybe not a great a film,

but it is, of course, a good film
because he made it,

but the words are so good.

In the Swedish Film Archive

there's a drawing that Bergman did
of his family when he was a boy.

And the brother as well.

And this is Ingmar with his books?
Yeah, learning the...

The caption says that his dad
is impossibly authoritative.

Bergman shows himself
surrounded by books.

And look at this drawing.

In his early teens,

Bergman claims to have been locked
in this building,

a hospital mortuary.

He saw the dead body
of a beautiful, young woman,

pulled back the sheet covering it,

almost touched her genitals.

Touch and death,

the two great themes in his work.

One of Bergman's great early films,
'Summer with Monika',

was amongst the most sensuous
of its time.

And not only was
the sexuality modern,

Bergman allowed actress
Harriet Andersson

to look straight into the camera.

Film historian, Stig Bjorkman...

What struck Godard

and some of his comrades
from the New Wave generation

was the freshness in which
Bergman had filmed the story

and this daring moment, of course,

when Harriet Andersson
looks intensely into the camera

and the camera is drawn towards her

and Bergman darkens
the background behind her.

So it was a kind of cinematic trick

which hasn't been tried before.

This scene, from Bergman's
best-known '50s film,

'The Seventh Seal',

shows the evolution in his thinking.

During the Middle Ages,
when the Black Death is rampant,

a knight who has returned
from the Crusades

agonises about mortality.

It's as if the knight
has seen 'Summer with Monika'

and realises that the senses
are amongst the best things we have

and so uses them to question God.

Five years later, in 'Winter Light',

Bergman seems to have concluded

that God is finally dead.

The central figure is,
like his father was, a clergyman.

Death would spread through
Bergman's cinema like a cancer.

First God died, then people.

'Winter Light' was also a reminder

of how autobiographical
his films were,

how boldly personal.

Bergman's wife, Ellen Lundstrom,
had skin eczema.

When they argued, he'd sometimes
complain about her eczema.

Now look at this scene
between the clergyman

and a school teacher
who's in love with him.

This is Bergman confessing his guilt
about how he treated his wife,

and showing how people
humiliate each other.

Bergman's film 'Persona'

shows that not only did he use film
as a confessional,

he used it as a self-aware medium,

just as modern artists
had made painting self-aware.

Towards the end of 'Persona',
the film breaks down

and seems to release a series of
images which it had been repressing.

Charlie Chaplin,

a nail through a hand,

an eye.

(DIALOGUE PLAYS BACKWARDS)

(WAILING)

It's as if the filmstrip

had so far been
a pure surface of consciousness

through which
the farcical, violent

and disturbing subconscious
images erupt.

Film didn't only tell the story,
it was the story.

The big theme in the story
of innovative cinema in these years.

By the 1970s, Bergman had been
making films for 30 years.

He continued to refine his ideas.

For decades, he'd been filming
beautiful faces

and seeing pain in them,

ugliness,

something about Sweden
or life in general.

Its loneliness, mortality
and despair.

Faces were symbols for Bergman,

on stage or projected,
as if by a magic lantern.

He wrote each of his films
in a notebook like this.

These ones are blank.

They're kept by
the Swedish Film Institute,

a symbol of his unmade films.

Where Bergman's central metaphor
was the theatre,

the second outstanding
art film director of the time,

Robert Bresson,

thought of human life as a prison
from which we must break out.

This is where Bresson lived,
the Ile de la Cite in Paris.

Between 1950 and 1961

he made four films
about imprisonment.

One of them was 'Pickpocket'.

Look at this scene

where the pickpocket goes into the
Gare de Lyon in Paris to steal.

It's not exactly
the searing colourful melodrama

of 'All that Heaven Allows'
or 'Mother India',

both made in the same year.

Are there plainer,
less adorned images in film history?

The lens is 50mm.

The lighting's flat.

The clothes are what
ordinary people wear.

There's no expression
on the man's face.

The composition
isn't unusual in any way.

Welcome to the world
of Robert Bresson.

He wrote, "One does not create
by adding, but by taking away,"

and he follows this law
to the letter.

Everything expressive
is taken away here.

Like Ozu, his films are expressive
of no inner chaos or fire.

He wrote,
"No actors. No parts. No staging."

Stardom, that thing
that began 50 years earlier

with Florence Lawrence,
was nowhere in his work.

A total rejection of gloss,
MGM, razzamatazz, the bauble.

Like Dreyer,
he sandblasted film history.

Why?

Take this beautiful, unsettling
film, 'Au Hasard Balthazar',

about a donkey which, throughout
its life, is treated cruelly.

Bresson films it in close-up.
Simple framing.

The donkey, of course,
has no expression.

We can't read its feelings.

The pickpocket is blank
like the donkey.

By stripping out material things,

by stripping movies of
their 60 years of excess style...

..Bresson wanted to hint
at what he called

the invisible hand
directing what happens.

The hand of God.

His films are about
the route to God.

Cinema was, for him,
a path to grace.

This is the church
where he worshipped.

Once, walking in these gardens
beside this church, Notre Dame,

he saw something.

He writes, "I saw, approaching,

"a man whose eyes caught something
behind me which I could not see.

"At once they lit up.

"The same moment as I saw the man,

"I had perceived
the young woman and child

"towards whom he now began running.

"That happy face of his
would not have struck me so.

"Indeed, I would not
have noticed it."

This is the root of Bresson.

In his films,
he tries to show the invisible,

the ineffable, the transcendent.

And at the end of 'Pickpocket',

the thief has been imprisoned
for his crimes.

His girlfriend arrives.

He's finally found grace.

This is where the prison metaphor in
Bresson reveals its full richness.

People are imprisoned
in their own bodies.

They have to escape from them
to apprehend the divine.

Paul Schrader...

I think Freud had a phrase for it -

the representation of a thing
by its opposite.

If you push away far enough
you'll get there,

you'll get to the thing
you're pushing away from.

One thing that I did
in 'Taxi Driver',

we did in 'Taxi Driver',

which is by doing what
I call the monocular film,

which is having the same character
in every single scene,

which was kinda cribbed
from 'Pickpocket' and Bresson,

and never letting the audience
be privy to any other reality,

any intercutting.

You know, the only world you know
is through your protagonist.

If he doesn't see it,
you don't see it.

And then by using
interior monologue,

you can...if you can hold
the audience long enough,

which is probably about 45 minutes,

you can make them empathise

with someone they do not feel
is worthy of empathy

and then you're in a very
interesting place as a creator.

And it wasn't only Schrader
who was influenced by Bresson.

Here in India,

he had a deep impact on the work
of '70s directors,

like this man, Mani Kaul.

In Poland, Krzysztof Kieslowski
saw Bresson's films

and they shaped his 'Decalogue'.

And the Scottish director
Lynne Ramsay's film 'Ratcatcher'

is hauntingly attached to objects
and the physical world,

like Bresson.

Still in France,

the third great, unclassifiable
director of the late '40s and '50s

was Jacques Tati.

As we've seen,
his comic character Monsieur Hulot

was a response to Charlie Chaplin.

Hulot leant forward
and wore trousers too short

whereas Chaplin's character leant
back and wore his trousers too long.

Tati knew a hairdresser
called Lalouette,

a happy bungler,
a bull in a china shop, a holy fool,

and based Hulot on him.

Like Bresson and Ozu,
Tati disliked strong storytelling.

He preferred little incidents,
details.

Scottish director Bill Forsyth...

I think a lot of filmmakers think
a story is the purpose of the film

and that the characters
and the actors

really have just got
to service the story

and take it to where it's going,

and that seems to me
to be the complete opposite

of what should be happening,
because there should be no story.

I mean, we...we spend our lives
inventing stories,

but story actually
doesn't exist, you know?

We exist and our apprehension
of a story

is how we explain the kind of
meanderings that we take,

so there's no such thing
as the empirical story, you know,

it's just what happens to people.

Tati's film 'Mon Oncle'

shows his and Hulot's feelings
about modern life.

Hulot lives in an old-fashioned,
typically French part of town,

onions round the door,
charcuterie shops.

Tati films the old world
in warm sunlight.

Hulot's nephew lives
in a brand-spanking-new,

ultra modernist house
in another bit of town.

Tati films this in flat light.

The new world's pretentious.

Hulot's sister-in-law
only turns on her fish fountain

when important guests arrive.

Oh, what a surprise!
I was just passing and I...

The buildings of modern architect
Le Corbusier

were very fashionable in the '50s.

Tati filmed the old world

in part here, Saint-Maur,
a traditional part of Paris.

Modernity was coming here
like an express train.

Tati found the conflict
delicious, hilarious.

He made cinema laugh at modernity.

And, like Bresson,
he filmed with incredible rigour.

He never used close-ups.

He wanted to show the whole picture
of a society,

its comedy of manners.

Sometimes key details appeared
in a tiny part of the frame.

In this famous scene in 'Mon Oncle'

the frame doesn't move,
but our eyes do.

They follow Tati around the frame
as he appears at each window.

Hulot often looked lonely
in Tati's frame.

Tati found it harder and harder

to get his unique, reserved
comic cinema funded,

and so ran this cinema in Paris.

The name of this cinema,
'The Harlequin',

introduces the world of the fourth
great personal, modernist director

of the 1950s.

Where Bergman's world was a theatre
and Bresson's was a prison

and Tati's an intricate jigsaw
of scenes and moments,

Federico Fellini's was a circus.

He ran away to one in 1927
when he was seven.

He loved the colour of the circus.

He loved its constructed world.

The circus world
was larger than life.

He took this love
of the circus here, to Cinecitta,

Rome's legendary film studio.

This is a baroque scene from
'Casanova' which he made here.

To Cinecitta, which became his home,

he brought things from
the real world, his childhood,

neo-realism even.

But then he drew other worlds.

Fellini was a cartoonist.

And he had those worlds built here.

This is maestro De Angelis.

He made some of the props
for Fellini's films.

One the first films that shows
how modern Fellini was

was this one,
the 'Nights of Cabiria'.

Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina,
plays a prostitute.

She lives by night, wears feathers,
dances with the boys.

This shot makes you feel
Fellini's love for her.

In the second half of the film,

Fellini's greatness
becomes apparent.

Masina goes to a Catholic shrine.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

She asks for the Virgin Mary's
grace, but nothing happens.

In Bergman's 'The Seventh Seal',
God was missing.

In 'Nights of Cabiria',
God is long gone

and kitsch is all that remains.

After this spiritual disappointment,
Masina meets a man.

He takes her to a cliff top.

There, Fellini elevates his film
once more.

The crisp, bright Roman light
becomes Scandinavian,

like an early movie
by Victor Sjostrom.

Beads of sweat appear
on the man's head.

Does he want to push her off?

He takes her money and runs.

(CRIES OUT IN ITALIAN)

Back on the road and alone again,

mascara runs down her cheek.

Out of nowhere,
teenage musicians appear.

She smiles slightly.

Feelings in these late scenes
cascade.

The 'Nights of Cabiria' kept
outdoing itself, changing style.

In the '60s, Claudia Cardinale
was Fellini's muse.

You know, with Luchino Visconti,

nobody, you know,
you couldn't speak,

no smile, nothing, silence.

With Federico,
everybody was shouting, singing,

the telephone, everything,

because for him,

the noise gave him inspiration.

Just the opposite.

In Fellini's film '8½',

Marcello Mastroianni plays
a director wanting to make a film.

Cardinale plays the director's muse.

I mean, I was very young
when I did the movie

and to be the muse
of Federico Fellini,

it was incredible.

The one when I'm the muse
all in white,

and I'm running

and it's like I'm flying.

It's incredible the way he could,
you know, change the image.

He just...
'transformait tout, quoi'.

It's incredible.

And I bring the water to Marcello.

Signore...

It was decided at the last minute,
everything.

Because no script, everything was,
you know, improvisation.

And I remember one scene,
also incredible,

because I'm a terrible driver.

And I said to Marcello,
"Marcello, I'm not driving.

"I'm terrible."

And when we are doing the scene,

Federico was sitting next to me

and he was always asking me,

"You are in love with you?"

(LAUGHS) Always the one you love.

And after, Marcello has to say it

and you repeat what Federico said,

because no script,
it was just improvisation.

I remember when he was on the
set, he was always sitting there...

..looking at you like...

With all the actors
he was like this.

He loved the actors.

Yes, totally free and it was
a marvellous atmosphere on the set,

really.

Fantasies mix with memories
mix with imagined conversations.

The precedent was
the stream of consciousness writing

of James Joyce,

but also the impressionist films
of Abel Gance.

David Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese,

the Serb director Kusturica,

and David Lynch

have all been influenced
by Fellini.

It's hard to think
of any filmmaker

apart from Charlie Chaplin
and Alfred Hitchcock

who's been more influential.

This is the opening scene of
Woody Allen's 'Stardust Memories'.

Like the opening of '8½',

the main character seems to have
stepped out of his own life

and is looking at it,

like there's a pane of glass
between him and it,

like it's a party
to which he hasn't been invited.

No-one, not even Melies or Cocteau,

could wave a magic wand
like Fellini.

He tuned a radio signal into
the frequencies of myth and sex,

memory and rapture.

Bergman, Bresson, Tati and Fellini

did so much to open up
the form of cinema in Europe

in the '50s and '60s.

But then it was carpet-bombed
by French filmmakers.

The story of film
had been up-ended before in the '20s

and, again, with Italian neorealism
in the mid '40s,

but this time was the biggie.

The bombers,
the French New Wave directors,

saw great films here
in the Cinematheque Francaise.

This was their rocket fuel.

They'd sit in cafes like this

and mix their passion for cinema

with the new ideas
about existentialism.

An explosive combination.

Paul Schrader...

Movies were becoming an intellectual
enterprise more and more.

You were looking at the first...
the film school generation.

The first generation of filmmakers

that are coming at film
from college.

Before that
you came from newspapers,

you came from theatre,
you came from TV, you know,

but now you started to come
as film buffs,

and therefore
the average film director

is more intellectual
and more self-aware.

As a result, you know,
he starts looking at Europe

because, you know, that tradition

was already alive and well
at that time,

the idea of the intellectual cinema

and the...the camera-stylo
and all of that.

The first great New Wave director,
Agnes Varda, made this film,

which perfectly captures
the spirit of the New Wave,

its sense of drifting
through modern-day cities.

'Cleo from 5 to 7' starts
in black and white and colour,

when a woman's told by a tarot
reader that she's got cancer.

The woman's shocked
and heads out onto the streets.

Shots from her point of view.

Real streets, real people.

She gets lost in her own thoughts.

The woman goes to a park.

She's gradually less weighed down
by her apparent diagnosis.

She seems almost carefree.

(SINGS IN FRENCH)

Then she meets a man.

They get lost
in each other's worlds.

The woman starts to feel
something like joy.

Varda captured the flow of thought,
its unpredictability.

Putting thought on film was fresh,
modern, all the rage in those years.

Director Alain Resnais also made
a film about a couple drifting.

In this haunting scene
in 'Last Year at Marienbad'

a man seems to be remembering
looking at a woman.

But the film actually questions
what's real.

The camera cranes up to a statue

which is in a garden
with a balcony in front of it.

But then we see
the exact same statue

and there's now water
in front of it.

As these two shots are memories
of the man, has he misremembered?

Or is director Resnais
on purpose making us question

the very building blocks
of film storytelling -

continuity, memory and truth?

No previous film had been
more about uncertainty,

a key theme in modern life.

Varda and Resnais were left-wing,

but this self-taught young critic,
Francois Truffaut,

felt that conventional movies
were too left-wing, too social.

He wanted films to be fresher,

more of the moment,

more a celebration
of the medium itself.

In this scene in his first film,
'Les Quatre Cents Coups',

a 12-year-old boy is at a fun fair.

It's like he's in a zoetrope,

one of those precursors of cinema
where an image was spun in a box.

The boy's got neglectful parents,

escapes a children's home,

and goes on the run.

But unlike neo-realist films
like the 'Bicycle Thieves',

'Les Quatre Cents Coups' is not
so much about social problems,

as the feeling of being alive,
like 'Cleo'.

(SPEAKS FRENCH)

Look at the spontaneity
of this screen test of the boy,

which made its way into the film.

The sound's a bit hissy,

but Truffaut loved the boy's
cocky freshness.

He's like the boys in Jean Vigo's
'Zero de Conduite'.

So modern European cinema
in the late '50s and '60s

was becoming personal, self-aware,

about fleeting moments
and ambiguity.

A revolution, indeed.

But then came this man.

Jean-Luc Godard.

The most fascinating character
in the French New Wave.

The greatest movie terrorist.

In his youth he sat in this cafe,

holding a rose,
imagining that he was Jean Cocteau.

He saw Bresson's film 'Pickpocket'
10 times.

He once called his approach to life

'right-wing anarchism'.

Godard said that the story of film
is about boys filming girls,

and about men
worrying about mortality

and women not doing so.

As we've seen,

the great Catholic French critic
Andre Bazin

said that cinema is best
when the shot's wide,

when our eyes can wander within it,

but Godard was such a loner,

someone said that he had
a "frenzied individuality",

that he preferred close-ups

which isolated people
from the world.

And so when Godard eventually came
to make his first film,

what did it look like?

This.

A car thief with
an American girlfriend.

Close-ups filmed by cameraman
Raoul Coutard

using short rolls of film

sold for stills cameras.

The back of her head,

then cut.

The same angle, same girl,
same hair, same speed.

Then cut again.

As we've seen, from the days
of Edwin S. Porter's

the 'Life of an American Fireman'
onwards,

a cut almost always took place
to show something else.

But Godard uses cuts
to show the same thing,

but with the sunlight
from a different direction,

or a slightly different background.

There'd been jump cuts
before in movies.

In this Soviet film, for example,

they're used to show
a man's mental agitation.

But in 'A Bout de Souffle',

they aren't trying to express the
woman's mental state, for example.

They're there because
they're beautiful in themselves,

because they emphasise
that this is cinema,

just as Picasso and Braque
used cubism

to emphasise the surface
of a painting.

How modern.

Godard and Francois Truffaut
saw cinema

not as something that simply
captures real life,

but that's part of it,
like love or cafes.

Movies were part
of the sensory experience

of, say, sitting in a cafe,
watching the world go by.

Again, back to Jean Seberg's neck.

These shots didn't say,

"Here's a woman in a car
which is part of the film's story."

They said, "I think this moment
is beautiful, this moment is true."

In other words, "I think".

A shot is a thought.

A director's thought.

This was the ultimate bomb

that the New Wave planted
under cinema,

but not everything they did
was revolutionary.

Looking back, it's clear
that in their love of old movies

and in their traditional views
of women,

much of the New Wave
was almost classical,

not a million miles away
from the Hollywood bauble.

Australian director Baz Luhrmann...

If you've been used to the cinema
only being about beautiful sets,

wonderful costumes,
sweeping shots, big emotions,

and someone comes along and says,

"It's a girl in jeans

"with a white T-shirt that says
'The Herald Tribune' on it

"and the camera is going to move

"and it's going to feel like
a news report,"

you're gonna go like,

"Yeah, man, that's like life."

Well, no, actually.
It's just another cinematic device.

And let me say,
as a kind of reinterpretation

of lovely costumes, big gestures,
you know, is alive in cinema now.

I mean, you know,
and it's a new permutation of that.

Again, we'll see
another rejection of that.

I mean, the language...
Language...

Good language is a living thing.

It changes, it evolves.

What you're saying never changes.

People still say, "I love you."

People still say, "I will kill you."

How they say, "I love you,"

how they say, "I will kill you,"
it's fashion.

But whether the New Wave
was really new,

it was incredibly influential across
Europe and the rest of the world.

To see how obsessive Godard's
followers were, for example,

look at this sex scene

from Jean-Luc Godard's
'Une Femme Mariee'.

And then Paul Schrader's
an 'American Gigolo'.

The same framing, body parts,

camera angles, blank background.

In a European art film, Godard
breaks the space up into pieces

and the body into parts.

In a mainstream American film,
Schrader does the same.

But this was only the beginning.

The New Wave of modern cinema

swept across the whole of Europe.

In Italy in the '60s, movies became
more exciting than ever before.

Society was changing fast.

Very fast.

Workers and peasants
were moving into the cities,

into apartment blocks like this,

which Mussolini had built
way back in the '30s.

Whilst filming here, this man,
Raffaele Feccia, comes up to us,

and asks what we're doing.

He's polite, with old-style manners.

When we say we're making a film
about cinema

he says he knew a man, a famous man,

a director with whom
he once played football as a boy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Pasolini was a lightning rod
in Italian cinema in the '60s.

He'd experienced fascism
at first hand,

so wrote for
this communist newspaper.

He was a Marxist and Catholic,

who was in his way
against both these things,

the state on the left,
the Church on the right.

He was a poet, he was gay

and he used the word 'stupendous'
a lot.

His life and work were stupendous.

He was born in the north,
but hung out here

where the people weren't rich,

where the guys were young,

where '60s consumerism
hadn't yet corrupted.

'Accattone',
Pasolini's first film as director,

passionately captured
his life experiences.

(CHORAL MUSIC)

It was about a pimp
in dirt-poor Rome.

Pasolini saw him
almost like a saint.

He used religious music to make
everyday struggles spiritual.

Director Bernardo Bertolucci was
Pasolini's assistant on 'Accattone'.

He wanted to do close-ups,

still shot

and still shot of...medium shot,

but the camera wasn't on wheels

like, um...like, my camera...

..my camera is always
moving on wheels.

Pier Paolo was thinking much about

the primitive Tuscan paintings.

They always have these close-ups
of saints

and Pier Paolo was influenced
by that.

And, in fact, in everything,

in the novels,
in the poems, in the movies,

a kind of strong sense
of the sacred,

so that even the face of a pimp

would become a saint
from the painting.

He was, in fact,
a fantastically religious person,

not a religion
that takes you to church,

but he was religious
in front of life,

in front of the mystery of life.

In a secular and consumerist age,
this was daring.

It was the spareness and seriousness
of 'Accattone' that made it modern.

On its release, 'Accattone'
was picketed by fascists.

Two years later

Pasolini made a film
that boldly challenged

the otherworldly way that
the Virgin Mary is usually shown

in Catholic art.

Pasolini's 'The Gospel
According to St Matthew'

pictured the Madonna like this,
unadorned, back to basics, spare.

In order to show his cinematographer
what he had in mind

he took him to see this film

by the great paint-stripper in film
history, Carl Theodor Dreyer.

The simplicity of the filming
of this pious woman

influenced the filming
of this pious woman.

And Pasolini wanted to strip
the paint not only from cinema,

but from life.

He felt that consumerism
was taking over.

That people like this...

..were turning into
people like this.

Pasolini's sometime assistant
Bernardo Bertolucci,

worked with another of the great
innovative personalities

in Italian cinema in the '60s,

Sergio Leone.

Leone was one of the best
Italian directors

in the sense that
Italian directors were always...

..were doing, all of them,
they were doing Italian comedy.

I hated it. I didn't like it at all.

Leone resisted the allure
of comedies

and instead opted for a genre

that was dying out in America
in the '60s, the Western.

In 'A Fistful of Dollars',

Clint Eastwood's character
was lonely and mysterious

because Leone
loved Kurosawa's films.

Eastwood as the nameless samurai,
reluctant to trust,

squared up to by others.

Hey.

But what was really innovative
was the visual style.

In this scene, for example,

the foreground and background
are far apart,

but sort of in focus.

This was rare in widescreen
cinematography.

Usually shallow staging was used.

Leone could do deep staging

because the Italians invented
something called Techniscope

in 1960.

Leone was the first director
to exploit this to the full.

It gave his imagery
a dramatic, epic quality.

Imagine that these two poles are,
say, Sergio Leone gun fighters.

In conventional widescreen
shallow focus

one of them
would always be out of focus.

Techniscope allowed Leone
to have both in focus.

Leone's great, epic Western,
'Once Upon a Time in The West',

took these innovations and applied
them to a mythic screenplay,

co-written by Bertolucci.

It was great because also
it was my only way,

through a Western,

to smell a bit of what I liked

which was very much the Hollywood
movies of those years.

'Once Upon a Time in the West's
famous opening sequence

shows gunmen waiting for a train

that's bringing the man
they're to kill.

Time has stood still.

Leone is channelling
the Italian neo-realist idea

that time in cinema should be real,
like life.

Screenwriter Bertolucci and Leone

had seen Nicholas Ray's film
'Johnny Guitar',

the classic Western in which
Joan Crawford prowls like a cat

as she waits for the railroad
to come,

to bring modern life to the West.

They loved this idea
of waiting for the future

and used it here.

In 'Once Upon a Time in the West',

the train also brings
Claudia Cardinale,

a widow who inherits a homestead.

I mean, I'm the only woman there.
I'm surrounded by men.

We start on the train,
it was in Spain.

And then the camera goes up...

(SOARING MUSIC)

..and I am in America.

Leone has this shot rise up,

as if to view
the whole of human history.

He invented this slow motion
on your body

and you know what he did also,
something, the first one,

before we start the scene

he put the music of the film.

Then, you know,
you become immediately

the part you are doing.

And it's the only director
who did that.

And also the way he was, you know,

shooting with the camera
on your body,

on your face, on the eyes.

Like 'A Bout de Souffle',

this climactic gunfight in
'Once upon a Time in the West'

is about films themselves,

the pleasure of watching them
for their own sake.

Its crane shot is more beautiful,
its music more operatic,

its conflict more elemental
than any previous Western.

Leone's work cast a long shadow.

The best Western director
of the '70s, Sam Peckinpah,

said that he'd be nothing
without Leone.

Stanley Kubrick said that Leone
influenced 'A Clockwork Orange'.

Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet'
has several Leone sequences

and Martin Scorsese
and John Milius learnt from him.

But there was still more to
the Italian New Wave in the 1960s.

Count Don Luchino Visconti
di Modrone,

one of the country's
leading aristocrats,

was born and brought up
in this palazzo.

About as unmodern a place
as you could find.

In the '30s, he escaped fascist
Italy and became a communist.

In the '50s,
he directed opera in Milan.

The scale and emotions of opera
entered his film work.

This is the opening scene
of his film 'Senso'.

The colour, lighting and costumes
are so sumptuous

that you'd think that
this is a celebration

of such aristocratic life.

But it's not.

Its heart is with the ordinary
people and the gods.

They're protesting.

They look down on the aristocrats.

This says so much
about Visconti's films.

He was a master of the crane shot,

but instead of using it to celebrate
the aristocratic world,

he used it to float through
that world, look down on it,

fascinated, attracted and repelled.

As a Marxist like Pasolini,

he thought that workers
and peasants

had the greatest moral authority
in society.

And in this film,
'Rocco and His Brothers',

we can again see Visconti's
sympathies for the poor.

Alain Delon, on the left here,

is from a poor family that has moved
north to Milan to find work.

The story shows the hard
social detail of such lives.

But look at the bruised beauty
of the people

and the cinematography.

Visconti films from the top
of the Milan cathedral.

Another crane's-eye view,
you could say.

And he films some scenes
in a moving tram,

a kind of working-class
crane shot.

Society and beauty.

It's as if Marxism itself
was a crane shot.

Where Visconti pictured people

in a kind of historical opera
of social class,

the next great Italian director of
the '60s, Michelangelo Antonioni,

saw life more abstractly

and framed it like this,
on the edge.

In his 1962 film 'L'Eclisse',

Alain Delon is a Roman stockbroker.

(BELLS RING INSISTENTLY)

He starts a relationship with
a woman played by Monica Vitti.

Psst.

Almost at once we see that Antonioni
frames his people unconventionally,

immoderately, on the edge
of the screen, or half hidden.

Antonioni had studied
American abstract painting

and his films looked like
canvases of modern life

in which people
only partially appear.

Antonioni seems to see an emptiness
in the relationship

between Vitti and Delon,
the void of modern life.

(BELLS CONTINUE TO RING)

In the famous ending of 'L'Eclisse',

Vitti walks out of the film...

..never to reappear.

Instead, we see the places,

street corners
where she and Delon once were.

The void seems to take over.

The world seems empty...

..as if everyone is indoors or dead.

We see this woman and think it's
Vitti, our main character, returned.

But it's not.

It's just another anxious passer-by.

As we've seen,
the people in the films

of the great masters
of '50s art cinema,

Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini
and Ingmar Bergman,

are at the centre of the movies.

And the films themselves
are based on closed worlds,

prisons, circuses, the theatre.

Antonioni's people,
on the edge of the frame,

are as unhappy
as Bergman's or Bresson's,

but they live in spaces so open

that they, the spaces,

seem to take over.

Look at this ending of Antonioni's
'The Passenger', for example.

Jack Nicholson's character
is here lying on his bed.

The camera leaves him,
as it left Vitti in 'L'Eclisse',

and seems to go for a walk.

The film becomes this walk.

The shot doesn't cut as it goes
through the window grille.

When the camera finally returns
to Nicholson,

he's dead.

Whereas Bergman's characters
seem to spiral inwards,

Antonioni's spiral outwards.

They disperse.

This is the first time
in the story of film

that characters have dissolved
into space.

Antonioni's sense
of what a human being is,

a figure that can disperse,
was almost Buddhist or Socratic.

His long, slow, semi-abstract shots

paved the way for three great
European directors of the future -

Hungary's Miklos Jancso
and Bela Tarr

and Greece's Theo Angelopoulos.

This is the second shot
in Angelopoulos's film

'The Travelling Players'.

The camera slowly withdraws.

The shot's about the street
as much as the people.

In conventional cinema, this would
establish the location,

then we'd cut to a close-up.

Angelopoulos doesn't give us
the close-up.

Antonioni's films weren't exactly
a bundle of laughs,

but in Italy's fellow southern
European country, Spain,

the New Wave sweeping through
world cinema in the '60s

manifested itself in comedy.

Take this film, 'The Wheelchair'.

The man standing in the middle
is Don Anselmo.

His wife has died and he's bored.

There's nothing wrong with his legs,
but he wants a motorised wheelchair

because all his friends have one
and it seems fun.

You can meet in the park.

What was new here was the edgy,
non-conformist tone.

Spain was still governed by its
right-wing dictator General Franco,

so filmmakers weren't free
to experiment openly.

But the wheelchair
took a social problem -

the living conditions
of an old man -

and mocked it.

The film opens with men marching

with toilets on their head...

..making fun of Franco's
military marches.

In the end, frustrated,

Don Anselmo ends up
poisoning his family.

This combination of realism and
irony in Spanish culture at the time

was called 'esperpento',

the 'grotesque'.

Spain's most famous post-Franco
filmmaker, Pedro Almodovar,

said of this grotesque,

"In the '50s and '60s,

"Spain experienced
a kind of neo-realism

"which was ferocious and amusing.

"I'm talking about
'The Wheelchair'."

Almodovar's 1984 film,
'What Have I Done to Deserve This?'

features the same kind
of dysfunctional family

as 'The Wheelchair'.

The tone -
heartfelt, funny, absurd -

is just like 'The Wheelchair'.

The grandmother detests city life

and just wants to go back
to her village.

And if Spain's take on the '60s
New Wave was mocking,

then it's no surprise that
the patron saint of movie mockery,

Luis Bunuel, was there.

This film, 'Viridiana',

was made 30 years after
Bunuel's 'L'Age d'Or'.

It would become
his most banned film ever

and was a knee in the balls
to Franco.

A man approaches a woman on a bed
and kisses her.

Nothing too risque in that.

But he's her uncle.

And she's a nun.

And he's drugged her.

And earlier, we've seen him try on
her white high heels and basque.

And a young girl's watching.

Bunuel sees the uncle
as symbolising Franco.

Shock after shock.

And finally, in Sweden in the '60s,

the modernist New Wave surged.

This notorious Swedish film, Vilgot
Sjoman's 'I am Curious, (Yellow)',

was about a young woman
who confronts life head on.

In this scene, her burning belief in
social justice starts to come apart

because of a bad experience
in her personal life.

To cut the scene as if she's talking
to Martin Luther King

is daring indeed.

Politics as fantasy.

Luther King was still alive
when the film was released.

The scene's
ethically disturbing now.

The revolution in cinema
in the late '50s and '60s

was as groundbreaking
as that in the '20s or '40s.

Filmmakers sat in this cafe
and places like it,

and dreamt of making cinema
more personal, self-aware,

ambiguous, enraged and ironic.

They achieved these things

and, as we'll see,

influenced movie-making
around the world.

But nothing lasts forever,

and the idealism
of the French New Wave

eventually had the stuffing
knocked out of it.

A film shot in this very cafe
deals with that defeat.

'La Maman et la Putain'
is about this man and three women,

in cafes and in bedrooms.

Jean-Pierre Leaud,

the lively boy in Truffaut's
'Les Quatre Cents Coups',

is now a man

and shows his despair,
straight to camera.

He covers his eyes.

The dreams of European
cinema of the '60s were dead,

but elsewhere
they were just being born.