Original subtitles

At the end of the 1800s a new artform 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 Kyôko 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 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.

Moviemakers 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 cafés 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" [Såsom i en spegel],

one of my favorite films.

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

Bergman has had a great influence on me, especially he is very good with words.

I just thought his last film was called "Saraband," or something like that,

which is maybe not a great 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, [Sommaren med Monika]

was amongst the most sensuous of its time.

And not only was the sexuality modern,

Bergman allowed actress Hariett Andersson to look straight into the camera.

Film historian Stig Björkman:

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 Anderson 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, [Det sjunde inseglet]

shows the evolution of his thinking.

During the middle ages, when the black death is rampant,

a knight who has returned from the crusades,

agonizes about mortality.

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

and realizes that the senses are amongst the best things we have,

and so uses them to question god.

Five years later, in Winter Light, [Nattvardsgästerna]

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 Lundstrum, 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 has been repressing: Charlie Chaplin, a nail through the hand,

an eye.

It's as if the filmstrip had so far been a pure surface of consciousness

through which the farcical, violent and disturbing sub-conscious 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 Isle de la Cité 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 colorful 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 50 millimeters, 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, razzmatazz, 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.

If at 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.

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 Schräder:

'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 inter-cutting, 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 about 45 minutes,

you can make them empathize with someone

they do not feel is worthy of empathy

and then you are in a very interesting place as a creator.

And it wasn't only Schräder 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 Dekalog.

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 'cause there should be no story.

I mean, 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 is no such thing as the empirical story,

it's just what happens to people.

Tati's film Mon Oncle, show 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.

Yoo-hoo!

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, St. 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 rigor.

He never used close-ups, he wanted to show

the whole picture of 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.

People often look 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 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 color 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 di Angelis, who 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. [Le notti di Cabiria]

Fellini's wife, Giulietta Massina, 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.

Massina goes to a catholic shrine,

she asks for the virgin Mary's grace, but nothing happens.

In Bergman's The seventh seal, god was missing.

In The Nights of Cabiria, god is long gone

and kitsch is all that remains.

After this spiritual disappointment Massina 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 Sjöstrom.

Beads of sweat appear on the man's head, does he want to push her off?

He takes her money and runs.

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 couldn't speak, no smile, nothing, silence.

With Frederico everybody was shouting, singing, the telephone, everything.

Because for him, the noise give him inspiration, just the opposite.

In Fellini's film, 8 1/2, 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 Frederico Fellini, it was incredible.

The one where I am the muse all in white, and I am running and it is like I am flying.

It's incredible the way he could 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 there was no script,

everything was 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, Frederico was sitting next to me

and he was always asking me, "you are in love with you,

always the one you love."

And after, Marcello has to say it and you repeat what Frederico said,

because no script, it was just improvisation.

I remember when you were 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 marvelous atmosphere on the set, really.

Fantasies, mixed with memories, mixed 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 8 1/2,

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 Méliès 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 upended before, in the '20s and, again,

with Italian neorealism in the mid-'40s.

But this time was a 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 cafés like this and mix their passion for cinema

with the new ideas about existentialism,

an explosive combination.

Paul Schräder:

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 out of film from college.

Before that you came from newspapers, you came from theatre, you came from TV.

But now they started to come as film buffs,

and therefore the average film director is more intellectual and more self-aware.

As a result, 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 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 [Cléo de 5 à 7] starts,

in black and white and color, when a woman is told by a tarot reader

that she's got cancer.

The woman is 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.

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 in 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, François 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 Quatres Cents Coups,

a 12 year old boy is at a funfair.

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 Bicycle Thieves,

Les quatre cents Coups is not so much about social problems,

as the feeling of being alive, like Cleo.

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 Zéro 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 café,

holding a rose, imagining that he was Jean Cocteau.

He saw Bresson's film, Pickpocket, ten 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 emphasize that this is cinema,

just as Picasso and Braque used Cubism to emphasize the surface of a painting.

How modern.

Godard and François Truffaut saw cinema not as something

that simply captures real life but that's part of it, like love or cafés.

Movies were part of the sensory experience of, say,

sitting in a café 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 this 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 is 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,

it's alive in cinema now, and it's a new permutation of that.

Again we'll see another rejection of that, I mean the...

The 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 mariée

and then Paul Schräader's 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, Schräder does the same.

But this is 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 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 us 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 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 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.

Accatone, Pasolini's first film as director passionately captured his life experiences.

It was about a pimp in dirt poor Rome, Pasolini saw him almost like a Saint.

He used religious music to make every day 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 my camera,

my camera is always moving on wheels.

Pier Paulo was thinking much about the primitive... and paintings.

They always have this close-ups of saints and Pier Paulo 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 the 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.

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 are to kill.

Time has stood still.

Leone is channeling 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...

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 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 have been 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 learned 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 un-modern 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 color, 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 in the gods, they're protesting.

They look down on the aristocrats.

This says so much about Visconti's films.

He was the 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 is 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.

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

Almost at once we see that Antonioni frames his people

unconventionally and 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.

In the famous ending of L'éclisse, 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 passerby.

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 center 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, [Professione: reporter] for example.

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

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

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 Miklós Jancsó and Béla Tarr and Greece's, Theo Angelopoulos.

This is the second shot in Angelopoulos' film The travelling Players.

The camera slowly withdraws,

the shot is about the street as much as people.

In conventional cinema this would establish the location,

then we'd cut to a close up.

Angelopoulus 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. [El cochecito]

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 motorized 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 heads,

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 Buñuel, was there.

This film, Viridiana, was made 30 years after Buñuel'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 risqué in that.

But, he's her uncle and she's a nun and he has drugged her.

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

And a young girl is watching.

Bunuel sees the uncle as symbolizing Franco, shock after shock.

And finally, in Sweden in the '60s, the modernist new wave surged.

This notorious Swedish film, Vilgot Sjöman's, I am curious Yellow [Jag är nyfiken - en film i gult],

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 ethically disturbing now.

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

was as ground-breaking as that in the '20s or '40s.

Filmmakers sat in this café 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 café deals with that defeat.

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

in cafés and in bedrooms.

Jean Pierre Léaud, the lively boy in Truffaut's Les quatres 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.

Synced and corrected by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today