Original subtitles

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 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 explore the films of Martin Scorcese,

Francis Coppola and Terence Malik.

The '60s in America had been a day in the sun, but then night came.

The decade ended with the deaths of Malcolm X, Jimi Hendrix,

Janis Joplin and Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, and their friends.

Four hundred colleges protested against the Vietnam war.

In cinema the Hollywood studio system came to an end.

So come the new dawn: The '70s.

You'd think that movies in America would be slumped in the corner,

but you'd be wrong.

The rising sun of the new decade brought fresher air and new honesty.

The explicitly personal filmmaking of the '60s and a "film school" awareness

of European cinema and film history gathered momentum and gained confidence.

The garden started to bloom again.

The new American cinema, as it came to be called,

fell into three separate types:

Satirical movies made by people like this man, Buck Henry,

that mocked society and their times.

Dissident films made by people like Charles Burnett

that challenged the conventional style in cinema.

And assimilationist movies, made by Robert Towne and others,

in which old studio genres were reworked, with new techniques.

First, the mockery.

Many in the counter culture in America in the '60s and '70s thought:

"It's too late to salvage society, so let's satirize it."

And so they did.

American movies had satirized society for decades.

Here, in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup, made in the 1933,

people wait for Rufus T. Firefly, the president of Freedonia,

to arrive at the top of the stairway...

But he comes in from the bottom.

You expecting somebody? Yes.

Hail, hail, Freedonia Land of the brave

A topsy-turvy world.

Come the '60s, psychologist R.D. Laing's suggestion

that sanity itself is a bit insane, and vice versa,

made the world feel even more like a Marx brothers movie.

So it's no surprise to find that Frank Tashlin, Buck Henry,

Robert Altman and Milos Foreman brought new satirical bite to American film.

Tashlin found consumerism vulgar and offensive to his gentle eye

so made lurid films like this one which looked like a cartoon.

Its color, style and happiness were meant to show

that society is fake and manic and infantile.

We're just demonstrating the new sign.

Mr. Kelly! Watch it!

He made a brilliant kids' book that tells of a happy possum

that's hanging in a tree.

Passersby see the possum but they mistake his smile

for a frown, because he's hanging upside down.

They take him on a tour, into the city, through the air,

to make him happy, to give him an adventure.

He sees the world and doesn't like it.

It's scary and crumbling.

Eventually the people return him to his tree.

They're pleased.

He looks to them like he's smiling but, of course,

as he's upside down, he's really frowning.

A lovely parable about upsidedownness.

The great French playwright Feydeau said that in order to be funny,

you need to, "think sad first."

Buck Henry is one of American cinema's masters

of the upside down, of satire.

Henry's adaptation of Joseph Heller's novel, Catch 22,

directed by Mike Nichols, is one of the great movie satires.

It's World War II, bomber pilot Yossarian, on the right here,

tries to get out of flying.

This scene, which gives the film and novel its title, explains why:

That's all he's got to do to be grounded?

That's all.

And then you can ground him?

No! Then I cannot ground him.

There's a catch.

A catch?

Sure, catch 22.

Anyone who wants to get out of combat, isn't really crazy so I can't ground them.

Okay.

Let me see if I got this straight.

In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy,

and I must be crazy to keep flying.

But if I ask to be grounded that means I'm not crazy anymore,

and I have to keep flying.

You've got it, that's catch 22.

That's some catch, that catch 22.

Yossarian's world is upside down.

Like you.

Like us!

You'll be surprised how easy it is to like us once you begin.

You see Yossarian, we're going to put you on easy street.

We're gonna promote you to major.

We're gonna give you another medal.

We're gonna glorify your exploits, send you home a hero.

You'll have parades in your honor.

You can make speeches, raise money for war bonds.

And all you have to do is be our pal.

Say nice things about us.

Tell the folks at home what a good job we're doing.

Henry not only wrote the film but, here, acted in it too.

Take our offer, Yossarian.

That brilliant exchange, which is Joe Heller's, of:

"We want you to like us," is one of the, I think,

great pieces of American character.

"We're going to chop your children into little bits and feed them to the fish,

but basically what we want is for you to like us."

It's very, very... It's the reason a lot of people didn't like the movie.

They perceived it as being anti-American or un-American.

Orson Welles plays General Dreedle.

If you've got any sense and you hire Orson

to play a part in your movie, you have already determined

that he will be the center of something.

And not necessarily good, or detrimental, but he will be a force field.

Orson did something I've never seen an actor do.

We're out there doing the long scene where Yosarrian gets naked,

Yossarian gets the medal from the general for doing everything wrong.

Orson says to Nichols,

"you know something? In this exchange, Mike,

I know you hear it exactly the way you want it.

Why don't you just stand where you are

and give me each line as it comes up,

and I will do it exactly the way you give it to me."

So that whole exchange, it's Orson copying exactly

what Mike says for every line.

I mean that's so fabulous.

Well, one: I know he was up all night drinking cognac.

So, there wasn't a lot of time for memorizing lines.

I don't think he ever did.

Except maybe one line at a time. They were all wonderful.

If he wants to receive a medal without any clothes on,

what the hell business is it of yours?

That's my sentiments exactly, sir.

Here's your medal, captain.

You're a very weird person, Yossarian.

Thank you, sir.

An actor will do anything to avoid seeming to copy anyone else.

"Don't give me that line! Just give me the sense of what you..." You know.

And in this turnabout I thought, "well, that's great."

He's saving time and he's doing it exactly the way Mike hears it.

Catch 22 came out at the same time as Robert Altman's film Mash.

Another war.

Army surgeons operating on appalling injuries.

But Altman's approach is innovative.

He fills the screen with actors, mix them all up.

Records all their dialogue at the same time.

Then mixes a complicated sound track of overlapping dialogue.

The fact that they're wearing masks here

means we can't see their lips so he has even more freedom.

And though the situation is tragic, the attitude is light hearted,

mocking even.

An upside down world.

Huxley, move out the way because I'm looking around over there.

Baby we're going to see some stitches like you've never saw before.

Attention, attention.

Okay, here she goes.

This is from colonel Blake's office.

The American medical association has just declared marijuana

a dangerous drug.

Despite earlier claims by some physicians that it is no more harmful than alcohol,

this is not found to be the case.

That is all.

And because Altman used zooms and long lenses,

actors weren't even sure if they were on camera or not.

The satirical tone for such films was set by buck Henry's adaptation

of the novel The Graduate.

It was a massive hit around the world.

This student, Benjamin, floats in the California blue swimming pool

of his bourgeois L.A. Parents.

A world of beer and boredom. He's expressionless, inert.

Benjamin has an affair with one of his parent's friends.

Well, my theory is that what the great audience

of younger people recognized in the film was:

Our generation's sense of not being part of the generation

older than we were, and a little bit lost,

which was... just about everyone who didn't know

they were going to become a doctor and hoped they weren't going to Vietnam.

We all were Benjamin.

Turman said, "I bought this book because I am Benjamin,"

and Nichols said, "i am making this film because I am Benjamin."

Dustin Hoffman's performance played on this everyman quality of Benjamin.

He walks like a robot. Dresses anonymously.

Drinks beer and slumps in front of the TV.

A blank sheet that Buck Henry's generation would understand.

My generation would understand it.

My generation and my, yes, I'll use the word, my class.

But it managed to go far beyond that, I think.

He says, "what did you study?" And she says, after a pause, "art."

Which is, of course, a stunner to him as it should be to us.

That: "Oh my god, there was an aesthetic here?

An intellectual side? A creative bone in this graveyard?"

It's really interesting.

What was your major?

Benjamin, why are you asking me all these questions?

Because I'm interested, Mrs. Robinson!

Now what was your major subject at college?

Art. Art?

But I thought...

I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years then.

That whole sequence of them in bed together

is virtually lifted from the book.

And it's an interesting exercise in the difference between reading something

and looking at something, because in the middle of it Mike said:

"Well, you know it's fine, but they're just lying there talking.

We've got to do something."

So, Sam O'Steen, the editor, came up with the idea

of turning the lights off and on

to give a kind of pacing to the scene that wasn't there just in the dialogue.

And it was very nice.

That's just a little lesson in filmmaking that I hope will profit you

and all the rest of us.

Will you wait a minute please?

Mrs. Robinson.

Do you think we could say a few words to each other first this time.

I don't think we have much to say to each other.

As we've seen, Milos Forman started making films

in communist Czechoslovakia, like this one, The Fireman's Ball.

Dead pan, documentary-like, making these fireman look clueless and funny.

In America in the '70s, Forman had to adjust

his approach remarkably little.

We're in a mental institution.

Forman again shoots with naturalistic light,

close-ups to see the actors' faces.

It's just that I don't want anyone to try and slip me saltpeter,

do you know what I mean?

It's alright, nurse Pilbow.

If Mr. McMurphy doesn't want to take his medication orally,

I'm sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way.

Jack Nicholson isn't mentally ill, he's just pretending to be.

Another film where the world of the story is upside down.

After the satirists came the dissident American filmmakers

of the '70s who challenged film style.

The first of these radicals is Dennis Hopper.

His film, The last movie, was Hopper's follow up

to the massive success of Easy rider.

We're in Peru.

An America film crew is making a western.

Hopper films this as a making-of documentary,

but this is the actual movie story.

Hopper, dressed in denim here, plays a production manager on the film.

The shoot finishes, the crew leaves but Hopper stays on.

Then remarkable things happen.

The locals make icons of the film equipment out of bamboo

and treat these like they're real.

It's as if the film was a kind of god that visited them.

And because they didn't understand that the punch-ups on set were fake,

they recreate them with real violence.

Anarchy ensues.

Hopper was drunk for much of the shoot.

The last movie was a brilliant, daring hate letter

to American film and movie exploitation.

But the stupid critics called it a fiasco, and it bombed.

Hopper said to have cried every night.

Robert Altman was as radical as Hopper and, a year after Mash,

he released this film McCabe and Mrs. Miller,

another anti-western.

As in Mash, Altman's camera roams, the lenses are long.

The colors are muted.

Julie Christie is a savvy madame who helps a naïve, opportunist man to run a brothel.

But they ultimately fail in their aims.

Unlike the John Ford films, there are no heroes here.

Just characters lost in the snow, in Altman's low contrast imagery.

Out of their depth and uncertain about the world.

Visual uncertainty to match a '70s uncertainty

about what American history even means.

This man, Francis Copolla, started as a dissident.

There was something of Orson Welles about him.

His film The godfather is an assimilationist one,

but its success allowed him to direct something more radical.

His film The conversation was about this: The new type of sound equipment.

A professional surveillance expert is in his lair, surrounded by the new equipment,

that allows him to eavesdrop on things far away.

He accidentally records a conversation between apparent lovers.

He can't see them but Copolla shows us them,

filmed in long lens, the visual equivalent of the man's distance microphone.

The man becomes obsessed with a mystery on the tape.

In doing so he almost has a breakdown.

He'd kill us if he got the chance.

Coppola's film was about getting so lost in the fragments

of other people's behaviors that your own life dissolves.

In 1970, Coppola met a passionate, nervy young filmmaker

at the Sorrento film festival in Italy.

Not nearly as radical as Hopper or Altman, nor as Wellesian as Copolla.

Martin Scorsese, our fourth '70s dissident, became the most respected of them all.

In a single phrase, he expressed more clearly than anyone

the aims of new Hollywood.

He said: "We were fighting to open up the form."

Scorsese was brought up on these streets in New York City's little Italy.

He was often unwell as a child so found himself observing

the life of the streets rather than participating in them.

His first great film Mean Streets, is about those streets.

Scorsese said of a scene like this, filmed in a church with a tracking camera:

"The whole idea was to make a story of a modern Saint

in his own society, but his society happens to be gangsters."

It's all bullshit except the pain, right?

As if to prove his desire for sainthood, its main character holds his finger in a flame.

Confessing his sins.

In 1976, Scorsese filmed a screenplay about a Vietnam veteran

driving around New York in a taxi.

Filmed in slow motion, the taxi glided through the steamy night,

like an iron coffin.

The world of the story was New York's hell's kitchen.

Junkies, porno theatres.

This world disgusted the taxi driver.

The film was written by Paul Schrader who drank heavily

like his main character Travis Bickle, who lived in his car,

whose self-obsession was festering like Bickle's.

The motivator behind Taxi Driver was existentialism.

So the two things that I re-read just before writing

it were "Nausea" by Sartre and "L'étranger" by Camus.

And that's what I was trying to do.

I was trying to do that character in an American context.

Bickle's world is one of booze and porn.

He walks around in the blue light of dawn.

He finds it painful to be alive.

Here, Bickle is making a phone call to a woman he's obsessed by.

Scorsese has the camera track away from Bickle, almost in embarrassment.

He later explained that it was too painful to watch the scene.

This is wholly modern.

Its emotional wisdom is close to the way that Mizoguchi

kept his camera away from raw emotion, not showing his characters' faces.

Taxi driver was a huge success.

The new directors' storming of the Hollywood citadel seemed to be easy.

They were pushing on an open door.

And so Scorsese, De Niro, and Schrader pushed harder.

At this table in Musso and Frank's restaurant in Hollywood,

where Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks used to eat,

De Niro told Scorsese that he'd be interested

in acting in a film about a boxer called Jake Lamotta.

The resulting film, Raging Bull, written by Schrader,

was about this self-destructive man.

A catholic boxer on a downward slope who reaches rock bottom

before finding redemption.

This scene was shot documentary style, long lenses, flat lighting and staging.

It was visually influenced by the documentary

Scorsese had made about his parents, Italianamerican.

The same type of shot, sofa, table lamps, and domesticity.

The boxing scenes were from another stylistic universe.

Slow motion shots, like bloody statutes of Christ in a baroque cathedral one minute.

Then fast cutting, wide angle lenses and tracking like Orson Welles the next.

Tell me why.

I could have been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.

Let's face it.

It was you, Charlie

At the end, the boxer recites Marlon Brando's lines

in On the waterfront, the most reflective moment in the film.

You got about five minutes.

Okay.

Do you need anything?

Nah.

Are you sure?

I'm sure.

Never before had such explicit Italian Catholicism

been the theme of an American film.

Ethnicity and the specifics of ghetto life

were one of the things that romantic cinema had screened out.

You could feel Scorsese's very nervous system in his films

and his city's metabolic rate.

The existential dilemma, you know: "Should I exist?"

And, you know, the post-modern answer is, you know...

to put quotes around "exist" and the meaning of that. You know what I mean?

And as a result, you know, we've lived in a kind of mash-up world, progressively,

where a lot of things that we've thought were...

Were the standards, the artistic standards.

A certain kind of harmony a certain kind of balance,

a certain kind of beauty, you know, the concept of beauty.

And once you get in that post-modern frame of mind,

once you start talking about meta-cinema there really is no inner...

there is no center anymore.

And so, it's just a collection. A pastiche.

When Paul Schrader came to direct, he was a dissident too,

but his particular rebellion took the form of, of all things,

a fascination with religious grace.

Schrader's film American gigolo, is about a male prostitute,

floating through the world, '80s red lighting.

His masterpiece Light sleeper is about a drug dealer,

also floating, peeping at the world in night-time blue.

Each man is spiritually empty.

In both films, Schrader wanted to show their rescue from this emptiness.

How did he do this? His solution was astonishing.

He borrowed this great ending, from Robert Bresson's film Pickpocket,

where a man in prison is visited by a woman, and somehow,

her touch represents the incursion of heavenly grace into the world.

It's taken me so long to come to you.

In American gigolo the male prostitute is also in prison,

and again finds grace through a woman in exactly the same way.

And in the ending of Light sleeper, the drug dealer has a similar revelation.

Again shot with the exact same camera angles.

American gigolo was a very dissimilar film to Pickpocket.

This was all a film about a superficial person

and surfaces and glamour.

And, you know, kind of perversely I took the ending of Pickpocket

and put it on "American gigolo" even though I didn't think it was that kind of film.

And so it's really a kind of a perverse, almost an in-joke kind...

And because, you know, the reference doesn't really mean anything.

Really.

And so then, some years later I was writing another one of these one-character stories

and this one was about a middle-aged drug dealer, "Light sleeper."

And I was writing that and I said, "now this is the one

I should have put the Pickpocket ending on!

I put it on the wrong film!

So, I'll put it on this one, this is where it belongs."

I did four films that are sort of alike and then they're double bookends.

So there's Taxi driver, which is bookended by Light sleeper,

And American gigolo, which is bookended by The Walker.

"Taxi driver" and "Light sleeper" is you have:

one's in the front seat, one's in the back seat.

And Gigolo and Walker is:

one's in the closet and one's not.

You know, frankly I kind of miss, you know, the existential cinema

and I wish there could be more of it.

On the other hand, sometimes you look at it and you say,

"Oh god, this feels old." You know? "God, this feels old."

Hopper, Altman, Copolla, Scorsese, Schrader.

Five brilliant, white, male dissidents of Christian heritage,

trying to open up the form of American film

in the heyday of the 1970s.

The story of the movies in the '70s was full of rebels,

but then came this man: Charles Burnett, a different kind of outsider.

Burnett made one of the greatest films of the '70s, Killer of sheep,

but even how he got into movies is revealing.

There were part of us who got into films as a reaction

to some of what Hollywood was making, all the stereo types

and things like that, you know?

We had debates about that all the time, we had discussions all the time

about what is a black film and what is our responsibility

and things like that.

One of the founding films in America was this famously racist one,

The birth of a nation, here black senators

were portrayed as drunks.

It took nearly 60 years before black filmmakers like Gordon Parks

and Charles Burnett got to make good feature films.

The delay was shameful.

Even liberal places like this, UCLA's film school,

played an ambiguous role in the emergence of black cinema in America.

UCLA in the film department didn't show any black films at all.

Any African films or anything like that, they were all American films

and European films and things like that, you know?

Not even from North Africa or any place.

It was only until this person by the name of...

a teacher by the name of Elyseo Taylor came in,

and Elyseo Taylor was the first black teacher, I think,

at the film department at UCLA.

And he was very radical and outspoken.

And he introduced third world cinema at UCLA and, you know,

Latin American cinema, all this kind of stuff, you know.

And then he brought in Ousmane Sembene and people like that, you know?

And so we had to see in person and then we’ve seen him screen African films, you know?

That was the first time and it was a mind-blowing experience, you know?

And things... And so at that point it was very, you know, in early '70s,

that I got a chance to experience, you know, African film.

"Why was it mind-blowing?"

It's like, all those films, like, third world cinema,

and everything, because they spoke to us. You know?

It wasn't... I mean... It was like the same thing when I saw Ozu

and people like that, you know, Kurosawa?

You saw this all this propaganda about people. You know?

And this myth that was created about, as though they weren't human.

And, you know, it wasn't until I saw these films that, you know,

it's like you realize that your neighbor exists.

That there's a person, you know?

That, you know, like, you've been robbed of a reality.

Part of your reality had been distorted and compromised.

You'd been brainwashed.

People telling their stories outside this formula. You know?

And like, they were real people, live people and stories that were,

you know, about how do you live in post-colonial society?

And on the basis of stuff like that, you know?

Which in a way we were suffering under, you know, in a certain way. You know?

And just daily life of a person, like in Ozu and things like that, you know?

And just make drama out of that.

In 1977, here in Watts and Compton in L.A., Charles Burnett took these ideas

and made a masterpiece, Killer of sheep.

I had looked at a lot of photographic books and paintings and stuff like that.

And I was really aware of compositions from a lot of these photo-journalist things,

but I wanted to tell it from the kids point of view mostly,

because I didn't want it to look Hollywood at all, you know?

Burnett filmed in black and white, often shooting details of kids play,

and used great black music, like Paul Robeson here.

As a kid I saw things that I wasn't satisfied with

and putting in the school system and things like that

because I thought it just killed a lot of kids, you know?

The whole system, and I wanted to write about it and make films about it.

So the only thing I'd do, I would put a narrative together

from all these incidences that I have seen and experienced.

And let it comment on itself, you know?

But I was looking at the poetic part of what I saw,

the oddities and the absurdities and things like that.

But there were a lot of poetic moments in the community where I grew up in.

Where black consciousness was a belated, exciting new dissident force

in American film of the '70s,

another innovation came from a more surprising direction.

As the first movie moguls were Jewish, and as some of the greatest directors,

like Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder were Jewish,

you'd think that Jewishness would be central to American film.

But Jewish characters and situations were more likely to be found

around the edges of stories.

Like here in The shop around the corner.

The woman is a central character, charming, white Anglo Saxon protestant.

Felix Bressart on the left, who fled the Nazis,

is not the hero of the piece, but his logic and humor

provide the film's beauty.

Oh, then let's drop the whole thing.

You see, I thought of giving it to my wife's uncle for Christmas.

Oh, I'm so sorry, can't you give him something else?

It's not so easy.

You see, I don't like him.

I hate to spend a nickel on him, and still I must give him a present.

So I thought, if I have to give him a present, at least give him

something he won't enjoy.

The box costs $2.29, that's a lot of money,

but it's worth it to ruin my wife's uncle's Christmas.

But then this man came along: Woody Allen!

Here he's Alvie in Annie Hall.

He's an intellectual, explicitly Jewish character

at the center of the frame, at the center of the film,

talking directly to camera.

He's an Ingmar Bergman fan and about as far away

from Hollywood beefcake as you can get,

yet he falls in love with a mid-western girl, Diane Keaton's Annie hall.

I can't put it in the pot!

I can't put a live thing in hot water!

Let me do it.

What did you think we were gonna do?

Take him to the movies?

Oh good, Alvie, oh thank you! Okay, it's in.

The joke was that New York Jewishness is alien to just about everywhere

except New York itself.

I can't get it out.

This thing's heavy

In this scene Annie and Alvie are trying to cook lobsters.

Cooking isn't very New York and boiling lobsters certainly isn't.

We should have gotten steaks 'cause they don't have legs.

They don't run around.

Great, great, god! Jesus!

Alright, alright

The scene's a single shot, there's no cut.

The kitchen light is hit by mistake.

One of the funniest moment in American cinema.

One more, Alvie, please? One more.

Chaplin played the lead role in his films too, and Annie Hall

is the offspring of Charlie Chaplin's film City Lights.

Chaplin is the butt of his own jokes too, but makes a blind girl see.

Allen makes the woman believe in herself.

He does this montage to show her magic moments.

Both are Pygmalion myths.

Brilliant films that nonetheless reminded us

of how few women were themselves making films in America.

In the late '70s, Allen went from the freeform shooting of Annie Hall

to the compositional rigor of films like this one, Manhattan.

A city symphony if ever there was one.

Widescreen images in love with the built world.

Again Allen's Jewish character is at the center of the story.

Hopper, Altman, Copolla, Scorsese, Schrader, Parks, Burnett,

and Allen were all, in some way, against old style Hollywood.

They were about the modern truths.

About people and places.

An article in the New Yorker magazine said,

"our recent films have been about self-hatred.

There's been no room for decency or nobility."

But a third set of American filmmakers were less against nobility,

or Hollywood, or romance.

These were the assimilationists.

Take this man, Peter Bogdanovich.

Passionate film historian.

Friend of Orson Welles and John Ford.

There's no way he could be totally against the old guard.

This movie shows how he mixed old and new.

We're in an old Texan town. Young people are driving at night.

Bogdanovich uses old movie style.

Black and white, conventional reverse angle editing.

They meet Ben Johnson, a regular actor in old John Ford movies,

who plays Sam the Lion, a decent, heroic man.

Country music plays.

Need any money? No, we've got plenty.

Well you better take some for some insurance.

Take money below that border, it sort of melts sometimes.

Thanks Sam.

And try not to drink too much of that bogey water.

At first look this could be a John Ford western like My darling Clementine"

But then look what happens.

This woman, played by Cloris Leachman, is agonizingly lonely.

She's been having an affair with Timothy Bottoms, but here,

at the end of the film, has found out that

he's dumped her for the local beauty.

He's too inarticulate even to apologize.

Never you mind, honey. Never you mind.

Bogdanovich and his creative partner Polly Platt have Leachman do the forgiving.

Then, a slow 16 second dissolve, as long as the longest dissolve

that Orson Welles ever used.

And we're tracking and panning in the town.

A ghost town with all idealism gone.

A rotten place to live.

The camera pans round to show a closed-down movie theatre,

where romantic films once were shown.

The American assimilationists

weren't as interested in opening up the form,

as restoring its power by applying it

to edgier, more thoughtful content.

They worked in the clear light of the new day of '70s cinema.

Their films were spatially clear but tense.

Almost all their central characters were male,

never more so than in the films of the assimilationist director

of this scene from The wild bunch, Sam Peckinpah.

Peckinpah took and stretched Sergio Leone's Neo-realist idea

of extending time, to slow down a scene.

Doing so revealed the scene's constituent agony and beauty.

His beautiful widescreen film Pat Garret and Billy the kid,"

shows how torn Peckinpah was, by the mid-'70s, about American history.

The film's set at the end of the 1800s.

The Wild West has been commercialized.

Idealism has long flowed down the river.

Here, outlaw-turned-sheriff, Pat Garrett, sees a family drifting by.

Pointlessly, inevitably, the father and Garrett end up

pointing their guns at each other.

The macho west, the beautiful west.

Cattle barons have hired Pat Garrett to kill his former friend,

the outlaw Billy the kid.

Both are part of the past, ghosts.

When Garret finally kills Billy,

he quickly shoots himself in the mirror.

Something Peckinpah once did.

It's as if Garrett couldn't face himself.

The void within, the shame.

Just before Garrett kills Billy, he meets this coffin maker,

who's played by Peckinpah himself, in half-light,

as if he's been there all the time, like Garret's conscience.

Go on, get it over with.

Peckinpah hated producers and was as temperamentally against the system

as Erich Von Stroheim was in silent days.

Peckinpah was too romantic to detest the myth of the west,

and the assimilationist director of our next film, Badlands,

was too romantic to detest the myth of the outsider.

A young man with James Dean hair and '50s denims.

His young girlfriend.

Asleep like a child.

He climbs a tree, drops her an egg.

They're like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.

But they play war games.

It's like he's in Vietnam.

He gave me lectures on how a gun works, how to take it apart...

This actor, Martin Sheen, would later star

in the most operatic Vietnam film, Apocalypse now.

These characters are even more damaged than James Dean.

They're so needy, they're almost mentally ill.

The film was made by one of the most reclusive figures

in film history, Terrence Malick.

Malick studied philosophy and it shows.

His follow up to Badlands was this one, Days of heaven.

We're on a Texan estate, a golden world.

The camera flows.

What are you talking about? That's not fair!

Then leave, you're fired.

Cinematographer Néstor Almendros attached the camera to his own body

with a cantilevered brace called a panaglide.

This was the first time this was done.

Panaglides would soon evolve into steadicams

which gave a floating feeling to much of cinema of the '80s and since.

One of the main characters is this migrant worker.

Malick cuts between him and landscape shots.

He's trying somehow to apprehend the infinite.

Almendros, who had worked with François Truffaut,

tried to capture the beautiful natural light

of D.W. Griffiths' films.

Malick had key scenes shot after the sun has dipped below the horizon

but before its glowing light has died from the sky.

This magic hour lasts only twenty minutes, so there's always a panic to capture it.

To simulate a locust swarm, Malick and his D.P.

dropped peanut shells from a helicopter

whose rotor blades made them into a whirl, then reversed the shot

so that the locusts appeared to be swarm upwards.

Actors and extras in such scenes had to walk backwards

so that when the film was reversed their action would appear normal.

At the climax of the film, wheat fields go on fire.

Only the light from the flames was used.

The resulting images have amongst

the shallowest focus of any in cinema history.

The delicacy of this, the cave-like darkness

worked brilliantly with the film's mythic ambitions.

It's only been recently revealed that Haskell Wexler

shot much of Days of heaven."

Actually in the final film about 46 minutes are my shooting.

Terry is just a special, far out, or far in person

and certain aspects that I note

he has a certain intimate contact with nature.

That life concept of connection to the earth, and to people as well,

and that's the way he writes and that's the way he thinks.

And he seems to think like D.W. Griffith too.

Griffith said that cinema is the wind in the trees

and Mallick loves to film wind too,

Its poetic properties.

And in this film from Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky,

whose work has so much in common with Malick,

wind seems to be nature coming alive, part of the story.

Malick has only made a handful of films, but they are love letters to life,

as if their screenplays were by philosophers like David Hume, or Martin Heidegger.

One of greatest American films of the '70s

to mix old techniques with new style was this movie: Cabaret.

A clean-cut young man singing a melodic song.

Could be an old style Hollywood musical.

Except musicals weren't usually shot in close-ups.

And there are lots of them here.

? Now fatherland, fatherland ?

? show us the sign ?

? your children ?

? have waited to see ?

? the morning will come ?

? when the world... ?

They tilt up as people stand.

Because we're in Nazi Germany.

The faces become more impassioned.

A shiver runs down our spine.

? Tomorrow belongs to me ?

? now fatherland, fatherland ?

? show us the sign ??

The film showed the life and loves of Christopher Isherwood's character,

Sally Bowles, in decadent Berlin of the 1930s.

Cabaret's director, Bob Fosse, was old Hollywood,

born of musical theatre parents and steeped in Broadway.

He choreographed and directed using the best of the old techniques.

This song is about living for the moment.

Its performer, Liza Minelli, daughter of Judy Garland,

is a direct link to old school Hollywood.

But the political messages and celebration of non-conformist sexuality are very '70s.

? Life is a cabaret, old chum ? ? come to the cabaret ??

That I cannot do.

Another assimilationist film from 1972 was even more amoral.

Francis Ford Copolla's, The godfather, was the most successful upgrading

of another '30s American genre: the gangster movie.

Coppola had it shot like a Rembrandt painting.

No trendy '70s long lenses, no helicopter shots.

Gordon Willis, his cinematographer, lit Marlon Brando from overhead

to create shadows in his eye sockets.

Audiences couldn't see clearly the eyes of the don.

I understand.

This so-called north lighting was rare in American cinema,

and had not been used well since the days of Marlene Dietrich.

You had a good trade, made a good living.

Police protected you in the courts of law.

You didn't need a friend like me.

But now you come to me and you say, "Don Corleone, give me justice."

The low lighting levels also meant that focus was shallow,

constraining actors to minimal movements, internalizing their performance.

Gangster pictures of the '30s were about the rise and fall of individuals,

but The godfather showed a network of relationships.

Robert Towne contributed to its screenplay.

Francis called me one day and said,

"Jeez, I don't have the scene between the two leads in my movie."

Then it fell to me to decide what the nature of that scene would or should be.

So, I had something structural to do... I mean...

in the sense of the way that I placed it and what it was about.

When it was your time that you would be the one to hold the strings.

Senator Corleone, governor Corleone or something.

Another pezzonovante.

Well, there wasn't enough time, Michael. Wasn't enough time.

We'll get there, pop. We'll get there.

Now listen, whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting,

he's the traitor. Don't forget that.

Over dinner one day, during the shooting of The godfather,

its producer, Robert Evans, commissioned another film

about the lust for power.

Our final assimilationist movie of the '70s.

Its style was old Hollywood, a film noir almost,

but somehow baking in the clear light of the '70s day.

It would be based on the true story of how the head of Los Angeles's department

of water and power, William Mulholland, redirected water from the Owens valley,

depriving farmers of water in order to expand L.A.

And fill its swimming pools.

A rape of the land.

Los Angeles has a kind of, and particularly in those days,

a lazy, sense out, dreamy quality to it, you know?

And that, for him, to discover the dark shadows in this sunny place.

And the crime was right in front of his, eyes every time he turned on his spigot.

Robert Towne's screenplay became Chinatown.

It was shot widescreen, had muted '30s color,

and starred Jack Nicholson as a puzzled private eye,

driving around L.A.

Who unknowingly stumbles into the appalling story

of the theft of the water.

I think that the sunny quality there is because the corruption

is just so pervasive, so all encompassing.

It's not just one criminal, it's not just one Maltese falcon.

It's everyone.

Every really good detective story, that you find satisfying,

always has that element in it.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy in "The Maltese falcon."

Let's just say, "I'm desperate and I need your help,"

but the killer is right in front of his eyes from the very beginning.

It's her.

But it takes him the entire exploration for him to discover what he knew all along,

which was the killer.

He can't see that, in the case of this, it's literal.

Help me Mr. Spade, I need help so badly.

I have no right to ask you, I know I haven't but I do ask you.

Help me!

You won't need much of anybody's help, you're good.

It's chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get in your voice

when you say things like: "Be generous, Mr. Spade."

I deserve that.

But the lie was in the way I said it.

Not at all in what I said.

It's my own fault if you can't believe me now.

Now you are dangerous.

The director of The Maltese falcon, John Huston, played the business man

who steals the water and rapes his daughter in Townes' screenplay.

It was a time before World War II.

It was a time when the full extent of the possibilities of human evil

hadn't occurred to him.

Most of them follow along the lines of the usual graft and corruption.

A man who would be willing to violate his daughter.

That's just not a nice thing to do.

The presence of evil is kind of brilliantly rendered by both,

Roman and John, who's that kind of false bonhomie and pleasantness.

Yeah, he says, "I've still got a few teeth in my head

and a few friends in town" he says.

My daughter is a very jealous woman.

I didn't want her to find out about the girl.

How did you find out?

I still got a few teeth left in my head, and a few friends in town.

Okay.

Because it goes beyond mere greed.

What do you hope to get that you don't already have?

And his answer to that is, "the future, Mr. Gittes. The future."

I just want to know what you're worth? Over 10 million?

Oh my, yes.

Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat?

What can you buy that you can't already afford?

The future Mr. Gittes, the future!

Now where's the girl?

I want the only daughter I got left.

As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.

Who do you blame for that? Her?

The film was directed by Roman Polanski.

Three years earlier, Polanski's wife and unborn child and friends

had been horrifically murdered by Charles Manson's gang of deluded hippies.

Polanski's early life had been tragic, but the murders seemed to strip him

of any lingering delusions about people.

Polanski's life had had far too great an amplitude to even countenance

the shallow pleasures of escapist romantic cinema.

Nor had he any time for the fleeting, impressionistic lightness

of Jules et Jim by Truffaut, for example.

He had Chinatown filmed with wide angle lenses,

bright lights and precise framing, like an MGM musical almost,

except that the movie was about rape, incest, power and greed.

Towne wrote an ending with some hope, but Polanski made it much darker.

In his version, Huston's daughter who had a child by him

is shot through the eye.

We're in proper film noir territory in this ending.

A car horn creates a sense of panic.

A hand held swish pan to reveal the scene of the atrocity.

Towne called this tragic ending "the tunnel at the end of the light."

Chinatown was a high point in American film of its time.

New American cinema was full of mockery and stylistically bold.

It was old school, laced with new truths.

It felt like the best movie party to be at in the '70s.

But there are other parties around the world

that were just as exciting, radical, and self-possessed.

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