The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 8 - New Directors, New Form - full transcript

At the end of the 1800s a new art form
flickered into live.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them
isn't box-office or showbiz.

It's passion, innovation!

So let's travel the world
to find this innovation for ourselves.

To discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Ky?ko Kagawa

who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.



And Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world.

And in the movies
of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film,
an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation
across twelve decades,

six continents
and a thousand films.

In this chapter we
travel around the world,

discover the beauty
of Andrei Tarkovsky's movies

and the daring new American films
Psycho and Easy Rider.

In Paris, in the '50s and '60s,
movie lovers sat in caf?s like these

and rethought cinema.

They felt at the center
of the movie world,

but they weren't.

Film making went global
in the '60s for the first time,



its energy was exhilarating.

To tell its story,
we have to travel around the world.

Let's start here, in eastern Europe,
behind the Berlin wall.

Movie-makers here had far more
about which to be defiant

than their Parisian colleagues.

In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and the Soviet Union,

directors bravely made
modern, personal films,

that drove the medium forward
and stood up to their governments.

As a result, some of the movie-makers
were stopped in their tracks, or imprisoned

and many
of the films were banned.

The story starts in Poland.

Take this scene
in Andrzej Wajda's, Ashes and Diamonds
[Popi?l i diament]."

A young man and a woman flirt.

It's the first day
of peace after World War II,

Poland has been torn apart.

The man, Maciek, has been
in the Warsaw uprising

against the Nazis,
but now the communists are coming

and he hates them too.

He wears dark glasses, not,
like James Dean, because they're cool,

but because he spent ages underground,
in the sewers of Warsaw.

He's a rebel with a cause.

Like the great British film The third man,
partially set in sewers,

Ashes and Diamonds,
is Wellesian, expressionist.

Full of symbols
of the world turned upside down.

Andrzej Wajda's films are distinctive
because, in a very Polish way,

he disguises meaning
by encoding it in symbols.

Wajda was a shrinking violet

compared to this Polish director
Roman Polanski,

who became one of the most
famous filmmakers in the world.

He cuts fast, to the jazzy,
double-bass drumming.

He played a small part in the short
film Two Men and a Wardrobe.

Fresh faced, cocky,
beating up on a decent guy.

Polanski was Jewish.

During the war, he saw Poles
defecate on German soldiers,

his mother was murdered
in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

As a child he loved not color films
or escapist musicals,

but this British film,
Laurence Olivier's Hamlet.

He loved the way
the camera tracked

through the mysterious spaces
of the castle, and its claustrophobia.

Castles would recur
in his own work.

Polanski's first feature film,
Knife in the Water
[N?z w wodzie],

is one of the most
claustrophobic ever made.

We're on a small boat,
on the right is a husband,

who owns the boat,
swimming in the distance is his wife.

Very deep focus photography.

On the left is a student
they've invited onto their boat,

the wife fancies the student,
a love triangle.

The husband's arm
literally forms a triangle.

The husband resents the student,
the student knows this

and plays power games,
the humiliation of getting too close.

Unlike most Polish films of the time,
Knife in the Water

didn't deal with war,
a sign that society and history

would be less interesting for Polanski
than, in this case, the human triangle.

Knife in the Water
was called "art for art's sake."

The very definition of modernism

and was condemned by the authorities
because it wasn't social enough.

And so Polanski left social realist Poland
and took his modernism with him.

In 1967, Polanski released this gorgeous
spoof horror movie, one of his best films.

As you can see, it's set
in a winter wonderland, shot in a studio.

Again, cut off from society.

A beautiful widescreen vision
of Jewish, middle Europe.

Like a Mark Chagall painting.
Polanski here plays a dopey apprentice.

Opposite him, his producer cast
a beautiful young actress, Sharon Tate.

She and Polanski took LSD together,
fell in love, and conceived a child.

They set up home in Hollywood,
Polanski's dream would soon end.

His wife, unborn child, and friends
were murdered by the Manson family.

If Polanski had taken a train

south from Poland to Czechoslavakia
in the late '50s and '60s,

he'd have come across a movie world
not a million miles away from his own.

Czechoslovakian cinema was, in these days,
specializing in animation and puppetry.

Jiri Trnka was its figurehead.

Trnka's famous 1965 film,
The Hand [Ruka],

is one of the most hauntingly
symbolic movies in the story of film.

A fun loving little man
is disturbed in his home by a hand,

Trnka uses live action for the hand
but stop motion for the man.

The hand sends him a TV set,

a reminder of Douglas Sirk's film
All that heaven allows.

The TV shows him images of power,
Trnka uses paper cut outs.

The hand indoctrinates the man,
makes him sculpt a giant effigy.

But then he tries
to resist the indoctrination,

but his attempts prove fatal.

A sound like a bomb and suddenly
we're outside the puppet theatre.

Where Trnka's film was
about a haunted life,

his fellow Czech, Milos Forman,
saw life as comic, almost absurd.

Forman's start in life
was similar to Polanski's.

He was Jewish, both parents
were killed by the Nazis,

and he was
a film school graduate.

Firemen were supposed to be portrayed

as heroic public servants
in the communist world,

but in Forman's very funny film,
The fireman's Ball,

they're incompetent and immature,
clueless like Laurel and Hardy.

They're staging a beauty contest,
but they couldn't organize

a piss up in a brewery.

Foreman has his movie filmed without gloss,
almost like a documentary,

a Cassavetes film.

The most innovative director in
Czechoslovakia at the time

was Vera Chytilov?.

This is the first scene
in her film Daisies.
[Sedmikr?sky]

Two women, Marie one and Marie
two, squeak like dolls.

It's as if they're puppets being worked
by the hand from Trnka's film.

There are astonishing sequences
like this.

Trippy, like the Lumi?re brothers
on acid.

And then, in a sequence
like this...

We're in the world of pop art,
of Andy Warhol.

The authorities hated
Daisies of course and,

after the Soviet Union
clamped down on Czechoslovakia in 1968,

Chytilov?, because of her modernism,
was banned from working for six years.

In Czechoslovakia's
neighboring country, Hungary,

movie making entered its innovative
golden age in the '60s.

Take this early scene in Mikl?s Jancs?'s,
The red and the white.

We're in Russia in 1918,
revolutionaries, reds,

clash with
counter-revolutionaries, whites.

A red soldier hides
behind a bush

as white guards on horseback
capture his friend.

Jancs? shows this in a single,
roving 3-minute shot,

ten camera moves
without a single cut.

Whereas '60s Czech cinema
was interested in lightness and mockery,

Jancs? used the highly planned tracking
shots favored by Mizoguchi in Japan,

or Hitchcock in America, to create tension,
a sense of breath being held.

Like Mizoguchi, he doesn't get close
to his characters' faces.

The detached control
of Jancs?'s camera

is like the detached control
of the white infantrymen.

Form echoing content,
a very modern idea.

At the end of the film,
this happens.

Finally, a near close-up,
a soldier looks to camera.

Humanity at last crashes into Jancs?'s
icy universe of control and despair.

No one in the story of film used
long takes better to evoke suffering.

The influence of Jancs?
on the '90s Hungarian director,

Bela Tarr, was profound.

And then we get
to the Soviet Union itself in the '60s.

Its socialist dreams
had been calcified or turned to kitsch.

But even here, filmmakers managed
to be highly personal

and push the boundaries
of the medium.

This is the greatest Soviet director
of these times, Andrei Tarkovsky.

Loving the moment
of lining up a shot,

filmed with the sort of tracking camera
that he himself often used.

He taught this man,
Alexandr Sokurov,

the greatest Russian director
of modern times.

The essence of Tarkovsky's innovation

is that in a materialist
society like the Soviet Union,

he made films
about non-material things.

The elevation of the human soul,
transcendence.

Look at the very opening of his early
film, Andrei Rublev, the year 1400.

We're in a bell tower,
a peasant ties himself to something.

Crisp black and white
photography.

A balloon made of skins.

It takes off and we look down.

The wide angle lens makes
the perspective plunge,

ballooning space.

Tarkovsky's cinema
has taken off.

The film was banned for 6 years
because it was religious.

This is the camera
that Andrei Rublev was shot with.

Tarkovsky's movies would be
about the human spirit soaring from now on.

In The Mirror [Zerkalo], as a man dies,
a bird flies from his hand,

like the Christian idea
of the holy ghost.

The astonishing endings
of his films show

that they are what he called:
"Directors of the absolute."

Have you ever seen
anything like this ending

of Tarkovsky's film Stalker?

For more than two hours we've followed
three men to a numinous place: The zone.

Then we meet this girl,
the daughter of one of the men.

There's steam
from hot water in a glass.

The camera creeps backwards,
the colors are muted sepia.

Dandelion seeds float
in the air.

We hear a train...

and then suddenly this.

A kind of miracle.

An off-screen dog yelps

as if it's been scared
by the ghostly event.

Is the girl moving the glass
with her mind?

If so, the train's vibrations
shake the glass too.

So the physical and the metaphysical
combine, an exaltation.

And then there's the ending
of Tarkovsky's film Nostalghia.

We've followed
this man and his dog

throughout the film
and seen his house,

which is in the background.

The camera pulls out
and we see reflections

in the pool in the foreground.

Only gradually do we see
what is reflected.

A ruined cathedral.

The whole world of the story
seems to be contained in it.

And then it snows.
Rapture.

Not so much modern as ancient,
but startlingly new in cinema.

Tarkovsky wrote
that imagery contains

"an awareness of the infinite,
the spiritual within matter."

Carl Theodore Dryer and Robert Bresson
would have agreed,

but neither
produced imagery this remarkable.

Another Soviet director,
even more against his times suffered

more than any other filmmaker
in the story of film so far.

Sergei Parajanov loved the
music, painting, and folklore

of the times
before the Soviet Union.

His sixth film
Shadows of our forgotten Ancestors
[Tini zabutykh predkiv]

shows that Parajanov also adored

the poetic cinema of '20s master
Alexander Dovzhenko.

The film begins with this breathtaking
point of view shot of a falling tree.

Later, there's this shot
from under a Daisy, looking up.

Paradajanov's camera
is seldom at eye level.

No filmmaker since Orson Welles
used foreground more.

The story of the film
is like Romeo and Juliet.

Here Parajanov films
the lovers from under water.

Then we go
to this amazing dream sequence.

The girl seems to have died.
We're in this silver forest.

The lovers are searching
for each other.

They float as if they're mounted
on the camera.

Their faces painted the color of the trees,
like they're spirits of the forest.

Not since Fellini
or even Jean Cocteau

has such a magical and personal visual world
been created in cinema.

"After I made this film,
tragedy struck," said Parajanov.

Shadows of our forgotten Ancestors was
everything the Soviet realists hated.

Personal, sexual, in their word:
decadent.

Parajanov, who's directing on set here
like he's conducting an orchestra,

was imprisoned on charges of incitement
to suicide and homosexuality.

Filmmakers around the world protested
and he was released 4 years later.

It's already clear then that the new waves,
modern cinema in the '60s, took many forms.

Personal, self-aware, comic,
spiritual.

Here in Japan in the '60s,
modernism was in angry mode,

furious, in fact.

Since the defeat in World War II,
Japanese movies had been mostly sociological.

About trauma and humiliation.

But then came this man,
Nagisa ?shima.

This is ?shima's film, Boy.
[Sh?nen]

A composition
using the full widescreen.

On the extreme left
stands a 10-year-old boy.

On the right in blue,
is his stepmother.

She seems worried
that he'll get hurt crossing the road.

But she's not worried,
because they're about to fake an accident.

The boy pretends
to get run over.

His step-mum
blackmails the driver.

Oshima's showing
us the cynicism of modern Japan, its greed.

Despite its bleak view of life,
Boy was a hit,

and the profits funded
another even more bitter ?shima film,

this one,
In the Realm of the Senses.
[Ai no kor?da]

The film, based on a true story,
starts gently,

almost like a Mizoguchi movie.

It's about a geisha
and is set in the 1930s.

But within minutes this happens,
an old man humiliated by kids,

poked at intimately
with the Japanese flag.

A provocation against
Japanese propriety, modesty,

what's left of its nationalism
and respect for elders.

The geisha becomes obsessed by a client,
and, finally, castrates and strangles him.

Blood red imagery and near silence
make the strangulation haunting.

In real life, the woman served
just 5 years for second-degree murder.

This is her, Abe Sade,
nodding respectfully in the Japanese way.

Conservatively dressed.

Oshima saw her
not so much as a feminist martyr

as someone whose unglamorous story
blew apart

the mystique of geishas,
and of Japan.

But this man was even bolder
in his portrayal of women and modern Japan.

Sh?hei Imamura worked
with the world's most serene filmmaker,

Yasujiro Ozu,

but came out of that apprenticeship
like a bullet out of a gun.

This documentary frames him,
as he often framed his films,

in a window,
without a focus edges.

A woman cuts his hair,
his films are often about women.

In this opening scene
from one of Imamura's early masterpieces,

The insect woman [Nippon konch?k],
he films this insect

as a no nonsense metaphor for human beings,
struggling over life's rough terrain.

Then he cuts to a woman, Tome,
in Japan in the 1910s, struggling too.

She's raped, and has a daughter,
works on the farm with her father.

Even, in this scene,
suckles the father.

Imamura the rebel
would have loved the shock of this moment.

Tome leaves the child with her father,
then goes to work in a factory.

Imamura and the cameraman, Shinsaku Himeda,
used this widescreen space exquisitely.

Look at this scene.

The foreground out of focus looms,
create a deep space in focus window.

An image as confident, as dynamic, as this
one in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.

Again a key character
framed in the far distance.

Then, Tome becomes housemaid
for a Japanese woman

who's had a child
with an American GI.

In this scene, the child's
in the background, out of focus,

Tome's in focus.

We hear the woman
and the American making love.

Tome's distracted by this.

But look at the child.

She suddenly spills boiling food
over herself.

Imamura stages the scene
in just two shots.

The second is even better
than the first.

The flame in the foreground,
its heat shimmer.

Parts of the scalded child.

Economic storytelling,
brilliant use of widescreen.

But if you think Tome is tough as old boots,
meet this woman, madame Omboro.

She's a bar hostess.

Imamura made
this brilliant documentary about her.

Here he interviews her in an airport
as she's about to fly to America

with her new GI husband
and child.

She's astonishingly frank.

And then we realize that her
husband's just over her shoulder,

sitting at the bar.

Imamura loved women like Omboro.

He said that the gutsy themes
of his films are,

"the lower part of the human body
and the lower part of the social structure,"

i.e. sex and class.

If madame Omboro had taken
her plane to India in the '60s,

rather than America, she would have found
filmmakers as radical as ?shima

and Imamura, but even more
modern and determined

to challenge film language.

The greatest Indian director of the late
'50s and '60s was this man, Ritwik Ghatak.

Passionate, drunken,
wildly talented.

He inspired a generation of filmmakers,
including this one, Mani Kaul.

This scene in Ghatak's, Ajantrik, shows
the first thing we notice about his movies.

Their heightened emotions,
a little boy playing with a car horn.

Lovely framing, natural light.

Cut to a man in close up,

moved to tears because the horn
is all that's left of his beloved old car,

his taxi, his income
that he had for decades.

We see the realization
on the man's face

that life goes on and at least
the child is getting pleasure

from the fragment of his car.

A classic Indian melodrama.

Well, I couldn't reconcile
with the melodrama of his work.

Only slowly I understood, you know,
like, at the end of his life

I think I began to understand.

What he did,
and people don't realize that, you know,

I think, is that he opened
that idea of melodrama

to the pain of history, you know?

Kaul means that Ghatak's melodramas
weren't just about personal emotions.

They were about the emotions
of history.

For Ghatak, the great emotion
in recent Indian history

was the partition of the country
in which 1/2 million died

and 15 million
were forced to move.

He called it India's original sin.

This film was
about that original sin.

We start with this splendid shot
of a majestic Avenue of trees,

as old as history,
filmed at dawn.

Our lead character, Nita,
walks from them to us.

She's from a refugee Bengali family,
forced by partition,

to live on the outskirts
of Calcutta.

She tries to hold
her family together.

Cut to this shot.

This is her ineffectual brother
who just sits around and sings.

But in the background
of this brilliant widescreen composition

a train passes, as misty as the tree,
beautiful in its way,

but slicing through
the horizon like a knife.

Ghatak's visionary film showed
the family sliced by history.

And Ghatak wasn't only daring
with the story,

he was wildly experimental
in his use of sound.

Here he acts in Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo,
and distorts the sound

as if the film is
a Sci-Fi movie.

He was very impressed by the statement
on sound made by...

and who's the third one?

...that the counter point...
with sound, you know,

the counter point, you know?

As much as he was, you know,
in calculating a new kind of cinema,

he was also very forcefully condemning,
you know, the commercial work here.

The kind of work which is just
very disinterested and decadent for him.

In the mid-'60s, Mani Kaul himself
became a modernist filmmaker.

This is his great experimental film,
Uski Roti.

The man is about to throw
a stone at a guava in a tree

to make it fall,
so that he can give it to his woman.

But look at the way Mani Kaul
paces the action.

He throws.

One, two, three.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

Not exactly the rapid fall
of Isaac Newton's apple.

I always felt like Godard
was making films

that are like faster than I am experiencing
in normal life

and I needed to go slower
than that, you know?

I just needed to go slower.

I suppose I set a static goer

on a static table,
and the camera is static

and the only thing
that is functioning there is time.

The moment there is a movement,
the idea of time is alienated.

So this whole idea of long take,
or evoking time,

disjointed and everything,
coincides with the idea of waiting.

And in waiting, of course,
the whole world is created mentally,

you know, like as you wait,
you create a whole world.

What is known
as self in our philosophy, in a way,

not as self as understood in psychology,

it's something
that the mind cannot perceive, you know.

And the Upanishads in all, ...,
in a different way.

There is... The self is described
as indescribable, unreachable, unknowable.

Unavailable defenses.

So it was never experienced,
but it's always there.

This affects very deeply
the question of art, you know.

That you really cannot make that self
as a subject, you know, of filmmaking.

It is in fact, the one
who's making the film, you know.

And Kaul's Indian idea
that the person making the film

is the subject of the film,
is the very definition of modernism.

And like the turning of the earth,
the modern new waves kept on coming.

In Brazil in the '60s,
film was at its most inventive yet.

The most innovative movie
in what became known as "cinema novo"

was directed by the writer and theoretician,
Glauber Rocha, when he was just 25.

Here's the climax of the film,

this cowboy has killed
his greedy, exploitative boss.

As a result,
he's become an outlaw.

Rocha filmed in the intense heat
of the pure, northeast of Brazil,

where he was born.

This is the cowboy's wife,
she turns in bewilderment and despair.

The opposite of the happy
dancing characters in the musical carnival films

of Brazil's commercial
movie industry.

The cowboy and his woman follow
a strange, black Christian preacher

who preaches revolution.

They follow the preacher,
praising the promised land.

Suddenly, the preacher's
followers are shot.

The scene's edited
like an Eisenstein movie.

The killer is Antonio das Mortes,
a symbol of vengeance.

And at the end, a troubadour sings:
a world badly divided cannot produce good.

The earth belongs to man,
not god or devil.

Rocha wrote that, "violence is normal
when people are starving."

He'd find a way of combining
innovative film style

with fiercely,
anti-colonialist ideas.

Cinema novo inspired filmmakers
throughout the third world.

One of those places
was the island of Cuba.

It had a revolution in 1959, after which,
its films hummed with fervor and form.

This is the film I am Cuba,
and was actually rejected

by many Cuban filmmakers.

A student revolutionary has been
killed by the right-wing authorities.

The camera seems to levitate.

Wide angle lens, handheld,
beautiful exposure, slow motion.

It's a prayer
for the dead student.

The camera climbs a building,
a crane shot so beautiful,

that in the '90s, after years
of I am Cuba being forgotten in America,

it was shown
at the Telluride film festival,

impressed Martin Scorsese
and Francis Coppola,

and was re-released.

But then the camera crosses the street,
still no cut.

It moves to the end
of this room.

A flag's unfurled
and we glimpse two wires in the sky.

The camera is attached to those wires,
then floats out, over the funeral,

down the canyon
of a Havana street.

Where Brazilian films of the '60s
often used pared down minimalism

to express their anger in politics,
this Russian Cuban film believes

that the beauty of a shot like this,
a camera on wings,

the soul of a dead student,
will make the idea

of the revolution, itself,
beautiful.

And if we now move
to the middle east,

we find that '60s modern cinema
became richer still.

In Iran, revolution wouldn't come
until 1979, and then problematically.

But in 1962, its first great film was made,
and its director was a woman.

Iran's the only country in the world where
the founding film-make father is a mother.

We're in a colony
of people with leprosy.

Director Forugh Farrokhzad,
who was 27 when she made the film,

shot in black and white.

What still amazes
is the film's sincerity.

Its attempt to move
beyond simple description.

The people in the film
are thankful for their lives.

And look at Farrokhzad's
filmmaking techniques.

The little girl's wheelbarrow ride
is intercut with scenes

from the lives of the people.

Then the squeak of the wheel
seems to compel the editing to speed up.

This isn't impressionism
or expressionism or Soviet, 1+1=3.

It's a shot as a unit of poetry
rhyming with another shot.

The movement of the wheelbarrow
rhymes with the apparent movement

of the reflection on water.

Farough died in a car accident
aged just 32.

This glimpse of her captures her flare,
how '60s she was.

As we'll see, her film
was a huge influence

on this great Iranian director of the '90s,
Samira Makhmalbaf.

Four years after
The house is black,

another country started
filming itself innovatively.

Senegal in West Africa
had been colonized by the French.

When it became independent in 1960,
its first president, the poet Leopold Senghor,

funded culture heavily.

Out of this moment came black Africa's
first innovative feature film,

the Black Girl.

It's about a young black woman
who works for this white French family,

looking after their kids.

She gives the family
an African mask as a present.

She's impressed by luxuries
like a sprinkler to water the garden.

Sembene filmed in rich parts of Dakar,
Senegal's capital.

Sembene himself had been a bricklayer,
studied film in Moscow,

joined the communist party.

So his film cares about work,
its dignity.

In France with the family,
the girl's work becomes drudgery.

She's treated as a slave.

Finally, unable to cope,
the girl commits suicide.

The scene is starkly black and white,
almost like '60s pop art.

Shaken and guilty,
the French husband returns the mask

to the poor part of Dakar
where the girl lived.

The girl's younger brother
follows the man.

Sembene films simply,
like a John Ford western.

The boy is haunting.

The mask, a gift in the spirit of hope,
has become a death mask,

a guilt mask, a weapon.

Decolonization asked the question:
What sort of films do we,

black Africans, want to make?

Sembene's answer is this:
Contemporary films, about modern society,

in which Marxism and gender are linked,
and which are laced with symbols.

As we'll see, Sembene,
the founding father

of black African cinema,
inspired the great African films

of the '70s and since.

And even in the English speaking world
in the '60s, revolution was in the air.

In Britain, which last
appeared in the story of film

with the movies of David Lean
and Lindsay Anderson,

films were getting
more aware of social class.

Saturday night and Sunday morning
wasn't set here in London,

but here in the working class
Midlands of England.

Shot in black and white,
on real streets, no exterior lights.

It's about this factory worker.

He still lives in an ordinary
two-up-two-down house

with his mom and dad.

A cramped front room.

Dad's haircut's from the '30s.

Son's got a touch
of rock and roll about him.

He gets a girl pregnant,
she has to have an abortion.

All this seemed
new to audiences.

But British director Ken Loach
didn't feel that such films were really new.

They seemed to us
to be an advance,

but they were basically
taking established...

the established film industry
and the established actors

to the north, and saying,
"these people are a fit subject

for films and for drama,"

but imposing a kind
of a west end pattern onto them.

We hadn't had Thatcher. You know?
We hadn't had that calamity of '79.

And, you know, "there was
no such thing as society."

We still had society.

This film, "Kes," about a bullied boy
who finds solace in training a kestrel

shows how Loach turned
his sense of collective experience

into an honest and
direct film style.

We tried to echo the style
of the Czech films,

which was naturalistic light,
a certain range of lenses

which kept the camera away
from the performers,

the people in the film,
so they weren't inhibited

by an overbearing
camera presence.

And editing, not editing
before a person spoke,

but editing when your eye
would naturally go to that person,

which generally follows
when they speak.

And I remember an old editor saying,
no, you've always got to cut

two or three frames before
they speak

and I thought this is ridiculous, no,
if I'm in a room and they are speaking,

I'll hear you and then I'll look.

Such techniques reveal
a key theme in the story of film:

That there's a connection
between film style and politics.

Because it's your... It's knowing
that you are speaking that makes me look.

The kitchen sink dramas
and the Ken Loach films

were naturalist in style,
but then London

and its Soho district
became sexy.

The music and fashion capital
of Europe.

British cinema became
all about this youth buzz.

This film about the Beatles
starts relatively conventionally.

But then speeds up.

We cut to a shot
from a helicopter.

The Beatles run, dance, goof.

Director Richard Lester wanted to show
how joyous the youth rebellion was,

so he kept in camera shake.

Filmed without sound
so that the camera could be thrown around,

improvised with dancing.

It's like the Beatles are wee boys
or on a stag weekend.

The film is like a stag weekend.

This sort of imagery is commonplace
in music videos now,

but then it was liberating,
funny, fresh,

like Truffaut
or Milos Foreman.

We end this tour of world cinema
in the modernist '60s in America.

Just as the radical filmmakers
of Japan, Brazil, Cuba, Senegal, Iran,

and the UK in the '60s
challenged the fact

that movies were made
by rich people or colonizers,

even in America, radical voices
were being heard.

President John Kennedy
was assassinated in 1963.

Malcolm X was gunned down
in '65.

Protests against a war in Vietnam,
where a million civilians died, grew.

And in cinema, box office
continued to tumble.

People stayed at home
to watch TV.

The biggest movie hits of the time
were Ben Hur and The sound of music.

But the fervent, the innovation came
from filmmakers who were again training

their eyes on the real world.

In 1959, a group of filmmakers
made Primary, a new type of documentary.

Primary got very risky.

But my judgement is I never
would have been nominated

if I hadn't run in primary.

So I'm taking the risk. But I would say

you have to keep
coming up sevens.

The filmmakers didn't stage scenes
as Robert Flaherty did

in Nanook of the North.

Theirs wasn't the poetics
of Humphrey Jennings

or the operatics of
Leni Riefenstahl.

They didn't do interviews
or use hidden camera techniques.

So what was left?

What became known as
"fly on the wall."

Here, Robert Drew follows
John Kennedy where he goes,

regardless of focus
or pretty lighting.

How modern, how free!

It would take nearly three decades
and the invention of small video cameras

before documentary
improved on this freedom.

The influence of films
like Primary was immediate.

In his film, Shadows,
New York director John Cassavetes

followed three fictional
African American siblings

just as Drew
had followed Kennedy:

On the streets,
constant movement.

The influence of Italian Neo-realism
came into play too,

and the new acting methods
of Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.

Hey Benny, you got the loot?
The boys are waiting.

Yeah, I got the money,...

but you ain't coming...

Ah Billy!

Hey baby, I got the money,
I got the bread.

"Shadows" can now be seen
as one of the first films

in a movement that came to be known
as new American cinema.

The imagery of Primary and Shadows
was so new, so direct,

that it made Hollywood cinema
look stale and conservative.

One of Hollywood's greatest directors,
Alfred Hitchcock,

the master of color and sheen,
realized this.

He wanted his next film,
about an ordinary woman who's stabbed

while having a shower, to be as convincing,
as of the moment, as possible

and so he shot the film
in black and white, TV style.

He had actress Janet Leigh
wear plain clothes from ordinary shops.

He said that the film
was an experiment.

It was called Psycho.

The woman has stolen money
but decides to return it.

Relieved, she takes a shower,
to feel clean again,

to wash away the worries
and the moral dirt.

At this moment, what had been a spare,
almost austere film, splinters into shards.

The cutting of Eisenstein

but, also, Abel Gance in La roue.

A horrific experience felt
in expressionist flashes.

Seventy different camera angles
for just forty-five seconds of film.

Still in America, from New York's
art underworld in the early '60s,

this artist emerged.

Andy Warhol pushed the directness
of modern filmmaking as far as it could go.

Here he just eats a hamburger,
no feeling, no emotion, no expression.

Static shot, flat lighting.

The blankness
of the here and now.

He was fascinated
by things like this...

And this...

When Warhol took to cinema in 1963,
his approach was as radical as Bresson's.

He stripped it
of all of its expressive elements.

His early film, Blow job, for example,
is nothing but the close up of a man's face

as, we presume from the title,
he's receiving oral sex.

No dialogue, no sound of any sort,
no camera moves or story.

Bresson minus
any attempt at spirituality.

Blow job, together with the work
of Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger

led the way for what became known
as new queer cinema of the 1990s.

In the '60s, cinematographer

Haskell Wexler helped change
the look of Hollywood studio movies

by filming one of the great stars,
Elizabeth Taylor,

daringly realistically in black and white,
make up smudged, harsh lighting.

When he came to direct,
he made a movie: Medium cool,

which pushed the relationship
between documentary TV

and American fiction cinema,
as far as it could go.

It's about this TV cameraman.

Here he watches
a Martin Luther King speech

and feels fired up.

Jesus, I love to shoot film!

I think he says that because
he has a sensory feeling about images.

But I also think that he says that
because it protects him...

it gives him an idea
of putting things within a frame.

It gives him an idea of being detached,
being an observer.

And then being an observer
absolves him from being a participant.

Those are the...
those are some, some of the gut things,

you may as a camera person been in place
where, say, I have to put the camera down.

Those are critical times
in a person's development

as the relationship
to what we call our "art."

And in trying to analyze
these ethical issues about filming,

Wexler drew on the ideas
of Jean-Luc Godard.

I saw every Goddard film and when...

And I also, when I lived in Hollywood,
he stayed... at my house in Hollywood,

and I don't think he said four words
to me at all, all that time.

In Medium Cool most of the filming ideas
are stolen directly from Godard.

In this ending,
in which the cameraman's killed,

no edit is more than four frames,
inserted black frames.

The camera tossed around.

All along the cameraman has
been the voyeur.

But now he's the center
of the voyeurism.

Wexler turns the camera
directly on the audience.

As if we are being filmed.

To make us think
about how we're represented

and about the politics
of filming itself.

The whole world is watching.

The films made by Wexler and his generation
made old Hollywood look outdated.

And so the studios
were bought or closed.

Warner brothers was bought by a company
that owned car parks and funeral parlors.

This studio, that used to be Columbia,
the studio of Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth,

was bought by Coca Cola.

Amongst all these endings,
new things happened.

No less than 1,500 film courses
were now being taught throughout America.

The film school generation
was on its way.

A lot of the new film people:
Francis Coppola, John Sayles,

Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper,
Brian De Palma, Robert De Niro,

Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme
and Peter Bogdanovich,

cut their teeth on b-movies
produced here by Roger Corman.

They made horror movies,
prison pictures, and biker flicks

with lots of nudity,
politics, and style.

The mother of all the biker flicks of
the time was this one: Easy Rider.

Writer-director-actor Dennis Hopper,
who'd worked for Corman,

made this road movie
that defined its era.

A rock soundtrack, wind in your hair,
cool sunglasses, the open road, long lenses.

He captured the carefreeness
of the hippy days.

Hopper hurled
modern techniques at his film.

He moved from one scene to the next
by cutting to it, then back,

then, to it, then back again.

No mainstream film
had previously mucked around

with the grammar
of editing as much.

Why was Easy Rider
a box office sensation?

Because young people were impatient
with the old style conformist filmmaking.

Because the movie was about endings:
Peter Fonda foresees

that their journey
won't last forever.

They're killed
by conservative duck-hunters.

Middle America
gets its own back.

Liberal moviegoers somehow
saw Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy

and, later, Jimi Hendrix
and Janis Joplin in the tragic ending.

One final film of the '60s was
so astonishing, so ambitious,

that it seemed to try to top
all the stylistic boldness of the age.

2001: A space odyssey was directed
by this man, Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick started in stills photography,

and as this footage shot
on the set of The shining shows,

camera positioning
was central to his art.

He'd often film from below.

Like Orson Welles and Buster Keaton,
he was an inventive, confident realizer

of physical worlds onscreen.

2001 shows this supremely.

Editing in film usually
cuts out time.

This famous cut from pre-human life
to the time of space travel,

cuts out more time than any other edit
in movie history.

In this scene, Kubrick attached the camera
to the set and moved both simultaneously

in a grand rotation
to give a sense that in space

no particular direction
is upside down.

This is what actually
happened on the set.

The actress walks upright, on the spot,
as everything else turns around her.

A space ship is taking astronauts
to investigate a mysterious black monolith.

In doing so they seem
to travel through time

and have
mind-altering experiences.

Kubrick has
these pictured abstractly.

The hallucinated effect of this sequence
resembled the '20s films of Walter Ruttman.

There was nothing political
about this scene

but if modernism was also about self-loss,
ambiguity, the emptiness of lives,

this sequence seemed to be
its greatest movie moment.

Overall, cinema in the '60s felt
like space travel.

Movies were everywhere,
including Africa and Iran.

Large numbers of directors
accepted that film

wasn't just a window through which
you saw characters and stories.

It was a language
and way of thinking in itself.

Related to space, color, shape,
and this was the biggie, time.

Would this be
a permanent change?

Would directors from now on
always think

in terms of time and abstraction
as well as story and character?

The answer, of course, was no.
The '70s were coming.

Old fashioned entertainment,
romantic cinema would soon be back.

Synced and corrected by
[email protected]
tempt at spirituality.

Blow job, together with the work
of Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger

led the way for what became known
as new queer cinema of the 1990s.

In the '60s, cinematographer

Haskell Wexler helped change
the look of Hollywood studio movies

by filming one of the great stars,
Elizabeth Taylor,

daringly realistically in black and white,
make up smudged, harsh lighting.

When he came to direct,
he made a movie: Medium cool,

which pushed the relationship
between documentary TV

and American fiction cinema,
as far as it could go.

It's about this TV cameraman.

Here he watches
a Martin Luther King speech

and feels fired up.

Jesus, I love to shoot film!

I think he says that because
he has a sensory feeling about images.

But I also think that he says that
because it protects him...

it gives him an idea
of putting things within a frame.

It gives him an idea of being detached,
being an observer.

And then being an observer
absolves him from being a participant.

Those are the...
those are some, some of the gut things,

you may as a camera person been in place
where, say, I have to put the camera down.

Those are critical times
in a person's development

as the relationship
to what we call our "art."

And in trying to analyze
these ethical issues about filming,

Wexler drew on the ideas
of Jean-Luc Godard.

I saw every Goddard film and when...

And I also, when I lived in Hollywood,
he stayed... at my house in Hollywood,

and I don't think he said four words
to me at all, all that time.

In Medium Cool mo