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 encounter the wild cinema

of Werner Herzog and Nicolas Roeg and discover how movie making in the 70's

asked big questions about identity and sex.

When most people think of '70s movies, they think of Scorsese and Coppola,

Spielberg and Lucas, but beyond the heat shimmer of L.A.

and the urban canyons of New York, a world of exciting new cinema

opened up in the '70s.

As Willy Brandt became chancellor in Germany, as Iran got rich,

as decolonized Africa worked out what it wanted to be,

as Japan got even more radical.

Movie makers in Germany, Iran, Britain, Africa, Asia, and Italy

asked big, brilliant questions about themselves and their countries.

German cinema conquered the world in the 1910s and '20s,

and Leni Riefenstahl had been brilliant but misguided in the '30s and '40s.

After the war, and the division of Germany, a great studio, DEFA,

started making films in the east.

Then the Berlin wall was built.

Come the '70s, there was so much to deplore and rethink

that it's no surprise that German cinema

at the time, was about identity and history.

This man, Wim Wenders, was one of a generation of young filmmakers

who wanted "to create a new German film."

They did so through common cause.

The new German cinema was nothing but that.

That sort of solidarity of 15 powerless people

to become a powerful union.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder stated the aims clearly to interviewers.

The basic idea of the new German cinema is to make films again

which are important and have something to say.

Films born out of our own life and experience.

A massive generation gap had opened up between baby boomers

and their parents who either voted for Adolf Hitler or endured him.

An economic boom in West Germany had begun to numb

the guilt about the holocaust.

New right-wing tabloid newspapers pasted contentment over everything.

The new German filmmakers knew that they wanted none of this,

but what did they want?

Who were they?

What made their hearts beat fast?

Here is the most prolific of them: Fassbinder.

Naked in front of his own camera, displaying his personal life on the big screen.

He said, "the ideal is to make films as beautiful as America's,

but to move the content to other areas."

So he took this beautiful, romantic American film,

with sweet, orchestral music, All that heaven allows,

about this woman who's shunned because she has a romance

with her younger, working class gardener.

And remade it as this far less glossy, less beautiful movie, Fear eats the soul [Angst essen Seele auf].

Fassbinder uses this very Hollywood tracking shot to show

the prejudice of the woman's family and here he plays a part in the film.

In the remake, the woman is shunned by society not because her lover

is working class, but because he's black.

Fear eats the soul was about the darkness of human identity,

as was this film that Fassbinder made two years previously.

The bitter tears of Petra Von Kant, Fassbinder's 13th film,

told the story of a famous clothes designer who lives with her assistant, Marlene,

who is really her slave.

Fassbinder has his actors move slowly, inexpressively,

as if they are haunted or exhausted.

The part of Marlene was partly based on Irm Hermann,

who plays her, herself, in the movie, always in this same black dress.

She was Fassbinder's secretary and lover in real life and he treated her appallingly,

sometimes beating her in public.

Body language in the film expresses its tragedy.

Wigs and make-up conjure its cruel artifice.

Fassbinder had in mind this classic American movie: All about Eve.

Another film about two women controlling each other,

fueled by alcohol and all dolled up.

Tuck me in, turn off the lights and tip-toe out.

Eve would, wouldn't you Eve?

If you'd like.

I wouldn't like.

But as he always did, Fassbinder took the American story much further.

Petra falls in love with this woman in brown, Karin,

and becomes her slave.

The poussin painting in the background is also about abjection.

Midas begs Bacchus to rid him of the power to turn things into gold.

Eventually, the agonies of love ruin Petra.

Spit drips from her mouth.

She's alone in an empty room waiting for the phone to ring.

The new German cinema had stolen an American story

then rubbed its nose in the dirt.

It loved Hollywood but sneered at its lies about identity and love.

Where Fassbinder's films were often about women

in confined spaces, those of Wim Wenders were about men in open spaces.

And where it was the style of the American films

that influenced Fassbinder, it was America itself,

and its utopianism, that was Wenders' jumping off point.

In his unforgettable road movie, Alice in the cities,

the camera cranes down under a boardwalk to find Rüdiger Vogler, a journalist,

who's drifting and numb.

Wenders saw himself in him.

This is Wenders' notebook and storyboard for this boardwalk scene.

Later, Wenders has Vogler arrange to meet a woman

at the top of the Empire State building.

Again, he's using an iconic American location.

He shoots in natural light. Vogler's drifting, melancholic music.

Seventeen years earlier, about a world away,

Hollywood director Leo Mccarey, had Cary Grant arrange

to meet Deborah Kerr there.

This scene was shot in a studio, visually precise, crisp, colored, controlled.

Whereas Wenders eye roams, long lens.

Unsure of what it's looking for.

It's as if Wenders is saying: "Remember what it is like to feel?"

Where Wenders defined modern German identity

in relationship to America,

our next director was more interested in gender.

Margarethe Von Trotta started as an actress.

This is her in a Fassbinder film, insolent, like a German Julie Christie.

Then she made her solo directorial debut with

The second awakening of Christa Klages.

The title character Christa, robs a bank,

but Von Trotta's robbery is one of the least tense or macho ever filmed.

There's no shouting or sync sound.

Just mellow music.

Von Trotta focuses instead on the relationship

between Christa and this bank clerk who Christa, at first, takes hostage.

In the film's climax, Christa is caught by the police and confronted by the clerk.

The clerk's been hunting her throughout the movie,

but then this happens.

Von Trotta uses close-ups, almost direct to camera eye lines.

This creates intimacy and equality between the two women.

Where Leni Riefenstahl's films were expressionist and about men,

Von Trotta's were impressionist portraits of women's intimacy in violent times.

The next German filmmaker of the '70s went to the end of the earth to find himself.

He's German cinemas' wild man, its explorer.

At the age of 18, Werner Herzog ventured across the Sudan.

He walked from Munich to Paris.

In 1982, to make his film Fitzcarraldo, Herzog and his crew

hauled a full sized ship, this is a model of it,

up and over a hilly jungle, Isthmus, in Peru.

A dangerous idea that people tried to make safer.

But as this location filming,

with Herzog speaking passionately in Spanish, shows,

he saw the haul not only as a physical feat, but in symbolic terms.

And look at this key moment in the film.

The boat is being hauled. The crew seems to move it.

The documentary camera is far back from the action but captures the rejoicing.

But then one of the ropes breaks.

All these dreams are yours as well

and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them.

And that is what poetry, or painting, or literature, or filmmaking is all about.

It's as simple as that.

Herzog's eyes in this interview show his exhaustion.

He's talking about universal things but he's almost crying.

And I know I can do it to a certain degree.

Like Pasolini, Herzog was a romantic.

He wasn't much interested in the feminism of Von Trotta or the americana of Wenders.

He was far more taken by primeval life.

After John Ford, he is the most important landscape filmmaker

to appear so far in our story.

The geographical, historical, class, gender, sexual, and spiritual diversity

of the new German cinema directors, made their innovative movies wildly different.

But one thing's clear, the films all ask the question:

"If I don't want to be what my parents are, then what am I?"

We definitely changed the way German's looked at each other.

Germans had not looked at German history any more.

Fassbinder, more than any of us,

confronted them with their own image, their own history.

Italy in the '70s had industrialized and was haunted by its fascist past too.

But its great '70s films asked questions not about identity and history,

but identity and sex.

The boldest Italian depicter of sex in the '70s

was that '60s radical: Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Italy had become so commercialized, said Pasolini, that,

"enjoying life and the body means precisely enjoying a life that historically no longer exists."

In other words, you can't be who you are.

And so he set his so called "trilogy of life" films in the past.

This is the ending of the last of the trilogy, the Arabian nights.

Nur Ed Din, a young man, has been looking everywhere

for his beloved maidservant, Zummurud.

Pasolini filmed in Iranian mirrored rooms.

Instead, Nur Ed Din finds himself in front of this king, who wears a golden beard.

The young man reluctantly submits to sex with the king,

not realizing that the king is zumurrud in disguise.

Zumurrud can't contain her giggles.

In contemporary Italy, said Pasolini,

such fun was not possible, consumerism had ruined everything.

He was murdered by a male prostitute in 1975.

Bernardo Bertolucci, who started as Pasolini's assistant,

became the greatest European filmmaker of his time.

In 1970, he made this film.

The camera tracks right to reveal a piazza and a man standing in it.

Then he walks and we see a statue.

His father.

An anti-fascist hero in the village.

Then the camera is again moving right.

This time the man's visiting an old girlfriend of his father.

She's standing still too and then she starts to walk also,

as if she's been static for decades and is suddenly swept into movement

by the camera's tracking.

And as the film sweeps into the past, the man finds that his father wasn't a hero.

He collaborated with the fascists.

What sort of identity does that give the son?

But what made The spider's stratagem [Strategia del ragno]

different from most '70s films about identity

was its concern for visual beauty, as well as it's gliding camera work.

Look at this shot: blue dusk light in the sky

and the yellow white petroleum light of the lamp in the same magic moment.

Bertolucci and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro,

loved the haunting dusk lighting in the surreal paintings

of Rene Magritte and tried to capture it.

And then, Bertolucci upped the beauty even further.

In the same year, 1970, aged just 30,

he released a second masterpiece, The conformist [Il conformista].

It was also about fascism and identity and, it too, was determinedly beautiful.

Look at this bold composition with its plunging perspective.

And look at this shot, the camera sweeps and the leaves do too,

as if they're both blown by the same wind, like a Gene Kelly musical.

In the radical '60s, visual beauty had been seen

as too Hollywood, too shallow.

But here Bertolucci was bringing beauty back to Italian cinema.

That most hardcore '60s director, Jean-Luc Godard,

saw The conformist's beauty as a betrayal of radicalism.

He met Bertolucci at a café.

I was waiting for Godard and finally Jean-Luc

appears next to me with these dark sunglasses.

He doesn't say anything but he gives me a note.

And then he leaves.

And his comments on "The conformist":

"One has to fight against imperialism and capitalism."

All that written on a portrait of chairman Mao.

I was so upset that I tore it up in thousands of pieces, that note.

And I am very sorry today.

I would like to see it and to look at that again.

Godard notwithstanding, The conformist

was one of the most influential movies of the '70s, especially in America.

Francis Ford Coppola poached cinematographer Storaro for Apocalypse now.

And the beauty of this scene, in Taxi driver,

derives from The conformist.

It would be easy to film this violent moment

with a wobbly handheld camera.

But Martin Scorsese goes high and has the shot glide across the ceiling.

An ugly event turned into gorgeous form.

Innovative British movies in the '70s were about identity too.

Like Italian films of the time, sexual identity was a key theme

but so was the idea that identity is fragmented.

Ken Russell served in the air force, then became a ballet dancer,

a rare career move, then became Britain's Federico Fellini.

In this scene in Women in love, he films a sex scene as a slow motion,

long lens, outdoor dance.

And puts the camera on its side, making the action vertical.

Defying gravity, as had hardly ever been done before,

and its strangeness, reminds us how horizontal cinema normally is.

More daring still was this film Performance, by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell.

It's about this London gangster: Chaz.

He keeps checking himself in the mirror.

His hair, nails, waistline.

This scene in Martin Scorsese's Mean streets, made 3 years later

is about another narcissist getting all dolled up.

Again, a mirror scene.

Again, clothes are the gangsters uniform.

Movie gangsters have often been about display.

Chaz, in Performance, comes to this place in London to hide out,

because he's shot another gangster and the mobsters will be after him.

He holds up in the house of a fading pop star, Turner,

played by Mick Jagger.

As bohemian as Chaz is clean cut.

Van Gogh, eh?

Oh no, this is the normal.

The normal?

Yeah.

I was just having a laugh.

And then this happens.

Here, Chaz is talking to Turner.

The camera moves behind Turner's head, then dissolves through it,

to Chaz, who sounds more echo-y now and looks straight at us.

The two men's faces dissolve into each other.

Chaz is changing.

His identity is merging with Turner's.

An idea taken from this strikingly similar scene

in one of Ingmar Bergman's greatest films, Persona.

In the end, the mobsters come for Chaz.

His last act before he's taken away is to shoot Turner,

maybe because he's shown him too much of himself.

His bullet travels through Turner's brain and a picture of the Argentine writer

about dreams and labyrinths, Borges, and crashes through a mirror,

then back to London.

The most imaginative shooting in the story of film

Then Chaz is led away by the gangsters.

But things are not what they seem.

A child toddles backwards.

And as Chaz heads off to his likely death, we glimpse him in close-up and he's Turner.

Performance was not only the greatest '70s film about identity.

If any movie in the whole story of film

should be compulsory viewing for filmmakers, maybe, this is it.

Australian film in the '70s gathered momentum

and Nicolas Roeg fueled it.

This is Roeg's film, Walkabout.

A white city-girl and her brother head out into the outback.

Their father has just shot himself and tried to shoot them.

They're scared.

Roeg films with a wide angle lenses to stretch the space before them.

Roeg's film is about the contrast you see all over Australia between nature and city.

The sea and swimming pools.

Raw and the cooked.

Years later, we're in a white world of tower blocks

and chlorinated swimming pools.

The girl's married now.

She's in her clean, middle class kitchen.

She wears make-up, like a mask.

She's with her husband but thinks back to a half imagined free moment

when she swam naked in the outback with an aboriginal lad.

A life less ordinary.

...Which means old mayor looks like being out of a job.

Still, it's his own fault. If you're going to compete on...

She's like Chaz in Performance, shedding her clean cut self

when she meets a more vital human being.

It's like she's remembering what aboriginals call "the dream time."

Her sense of loss is overwhelming.

Plus with all this changing around, there's bound to be good news

as far as salary's concerned.

I tell you though, in 2 years we'll be holidaying on the gold coast...

In modern day Australia, people swim in manmade pools.

The dreams and fears of Roeg's film are still here.

The raw and the cooked became a staple of aussie cinema.

The films were about what sort of person you are.

One who swims in a chlorinated pool or the open sea.

What sort of person's this girl?

She and her friends are wearing long, white, victorian dresses

in the sultry heat of the Australian outback.

I feel awful.

Really awful.

They're fish out of water.

Miranda, I feel perfectly awful.

The film is Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Director Peter Weir films the girls in slight slow motion

to create a sense of mystery.

The girls are about to disappear.

Miranda?

Miranda?

Miranda!

Miranda, don't go up there! Come back!

Weir's plan was to explain this disappearance at the end of the film.

They were to be discovered and brought home on stretchers,

but his editor, Max Lemon, instead did this:

he repeated earlier picnic scenes in step motion,

the camera roaming, no sync sound.

As if the girls are ghosts.

White Australian identity evaporating in the heat.

Gillian Armstrong's debut feature is set in victorian times too.

But My brilliant Career isn't about a woman's relationship

with nature, but with men.

Her main character here has theoverview.

Do you, um, need a hand? No, thank you.

Sam Neill is glamorized and filmed in dappled light, not her.

Do you work in the kitchen?

I'd be obliged to you sir, if you'd take yourself out of the way.

Unless you want me foot in your big fat face.

The female point of view of the film

hinted at how gendered aussie cinema would become in the '90s,

with the films of Jane Campion and Baz Luhrmann.

How about a reward? Let me go.

Sam Neil was in more women's films than most actors.

Being in women's films makes as much sense to me as being in a bloke's film.

And... there's a certain sensibility that these things...

these films have in common, I think, that I find agreeable.

Australia and New Zealand are both post-colonial societies

where it's taken us a while to wake up to women's issues.

Probably a little bit longer than elsewhere.

Move from Australia to Japan in the '70s and you find

some of the most radical filmmakers of the decade,

who took a hammer rather than a mirror to the real world

and tried to shape Japanese identity with ground-breaking documentaries.

This is the climax of one of the greatest documentaries ever made

which was filmed over 17 years.

We're at the packed annual general meeting of Japanese chemical company, Chisso.

Over many years it dumped methyl Mercury into the fishing waters

causing hundreds of deaths and bio-deformities.

The company denied all responsibility.

Its bosses sit at long tables on the stage.

The families of the dead and the severely disabled are here.

They bought shares in Chisso to force its board of directors

to take responsibility for their appalling actions.

Director Noriaki Tsuchimoto knew the protestors,

and so, got close to them.

His small 16-millimeter camera

allowed him to be at the center of such explosive moments.

He uses little sync sound.

The jostled handheld camera and torrent of words

make fiction film look staid.

In Japan, where identity is not traditionally asserted,

such scenes were shocking.

Claude Lanzmann, who made the holocaust documentary, Shoah,

called Tsuchimoto, "a great artist with a profound vision as a fighter.

A marvelous filmmaker and a rigorous creator of sublime work."

This man, Kazuo Hara, made a documentary masterpiece

of the Japanese assertiveness at its most shocking.

It's about an ex-soldier called Mr. Okuzaki.

This is Mr. okuzaki.

He's meeting the brother and sister of a friend of his who disappeared.

A soldier with whom he fought in World War II.

Hara films with handheld camera.

He follows as they go to this house.

An old commander lives here.

Together, they want to find out what happened to the soldier.

But this visit doesn't dig up the truth

and the two siblings drop out of the investigation.

And so, astonishingly, Okuzaki hires these two actors

walking dolefully behind him to pretend to be the siblings.

He'll tell the next commanders that the actors are the real siblings,

using emotional blackmail, to try to get to the truth of what happened.

As the filming continued, Okuzaki discovered

that his friends were probably cannibalized by the commanders.

Okuzaki's in this commander's house now, just to the right of this close-up,

again filmed by Hara's handheld camera.

Okuzaki's angry now.

We hold our breath.

Okuzaki attacks the commander.

Hara uses slow motion.

The fraught experience of making the film,

gave Hara a sense that unpalatable truth in life is buried under layers of lies.

As we've seen, filmmaking in Germany, Italy, Britain, Australia, and Japan

in the '70s was radical and about identity.

Jump to here, Senegal in West Africa in the '70s, however,

and a whole new world of radical movie making opens up.

A manifesto called "Towards a third cinema: Notes and experiences for the development

of a cinema of liberation in the third world"

by South Americans, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,

angrily criticized cinema for always having been a commodity.

They argued that this great collective medium should fight poverty and oppression.

The manifesto had a huge impact.

This is a cinema in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world.

But painted on it is:

"a cinema can be the heart of the community "

and "cinema is a dream."

The manifesto said that there are three types of film.

The first, made mostly in Hollywood, is the commercial, entertainment: the bauble.

The second type of cinema is the modernist art movie genre

made by individual directors like Godard, Antonioni, Bergman, and Fellini.

Third cinema, opposed to both industrial and autobiographical art cinema, is political.

About post-colonial identity and made in the non-western world after 1969.

These ideals were the rocket fuel of '70s cinema here in Africa,

in south America, and in the middle east.

In Burkina Faso today for example, these people aren't going to a football match.

They're going to the opening of a film festival,

in their tens of thousands.

Burkinabe filmmaker, Gaston Kaboré, believes that making films

is crucial to people's identities.

If we continue consuming the images coming from abroad,

telling the stories of other people, it might be interesting at the beginning, but

slowly we are going to lose our own way of looking the reality.

As we've seen, there'd been Arab filmmaking in Egypt since the '30s.

And this famous moment in The Black Girl,

a boy removes a mask and looks hauntingly into the eyes of the audience,

was the bold start of black feature film making in Africa in the '60s.

But scenes like this,

Tarzan's scrubbed clean, white family, having breakfast in a fantasy jungle,

were, still, the most popular movie images of Africa.

But here's a more realistic African man. He's Algerian.

There's no sync sound, arabic music.

The film's been poorly preserved but it's dreamlike.

The camera tracks backward.

Director Assia Djebar's main character sees her man on his horse.

She towers over him.

He falls.

Then he's in a wheelchair.

Djebar's is no fantasy Africa.

She looks at Algeria through a feminist lens.

In West Africa in the '70s,

third cinema movies about identity were on a roll too.

Where Scorsese, and Coppola, and the rest

were kicking down the doors of Hollywood,

in this city, Dakar, tens of thousands of miles away from the pool parties

and Oscar ceremonies of Los Angeles,

film was buzzing and cameras were on the streets.

Ousmane Sembéne was still leading the way.

His follow up to The black Girl, Xala, was funny and rude.

It was about the move from colonial to post-colonial identity.

It starts here, the chamber of commerce in Dakar.

It's the end of colonial rule.

Senegalese triumphantly kick out the symbols of the French state,

including Jack Boots and a gendarme cap.

They look forlorn, their time has gone.

But in the very next scene the new businessmen

are aping their colonizers.

Sembéne mocks their new trophy briefcases.

One of the businessmen has his car washed in "Evian,"

Sembéne's tart way of showing the decadence of the new regime.

Sembéne was against religion and wanted Africa to undergo a radical enlightenment.

This is his house: Calle Ceddo.

Means home of the unbeliever.

From the front, it's on the left of this image,

you can see that it's just meters away from a mosque.

Sembéne planted his tripod on the soil of Senegal

and created a new, radical type of African cinema: Third cinema.

This man, Djibril Diop Mambéty, seemed to love cinema even more.

He spoke slowly, in an almost dreamlike way as this interview shows.

Sembéne's point of view was ideologically certain,

but Mambéty chopped up such certainty into fragments.

Mambéty's films helped create African modernism.

Look at this scene in his caustic, second short film, Badou Boy.

A man and a boy saddle up a horse. Very simple.

But the repetition of "ça va?"

and the standing up and hunkering down of the two people,

gives it an abstract rhythm and jagginess.

Mambéty said, "you either engage in stylistic research

or just record reality."

Mambéty lived here.

He struggled to get financing for his films.

His punkiness found little favor.

In 1992, he made this masterpiece: Hyenas.

This woman is half made of gold.

She's returned to the village where she fell in love

with this man who then spurned her.

She's as rich as the world bank now.

This is director Mambéty himself on the left.

She treats the villagers to luxuries, consumer goods.

The villagers love these.

They become greedy.

They want more.

The village becomes like a shopping channel.

A fun fair to celebrate the joys of capitalism.

Then, devastatingly, the woman says that they can have more luxuries,

but there's a price to pay.

They must kill the man who spurned her.

They're so hooked now on capitalism that they do kill him.

Mambéty films the lynching where he himself grew up.

The mob closes in, murmuring.

Mambéty had become as angry at consumerism, as Pasolini in Italy.

Sembéne and Mambéty showed that African filmmakers

were making cinema say what they wanted it to say

about who modern West Africans were.

The result was exciting.

The joy of discovery.

New types of African symbolism and storytelling.

And other directors emerged.

Safi Faye, Africa's first important female director,

made this film, Peasant Letter, in 1974.

She shows her village at dawn, the beauty of the smoke,

mid-sized framings.

Everyday scenes.

Off screen and in a gentle voice she describes what we see.

The film is a show and tell to the outside world.

An Ethiopian, Haile Gerima, made this remarkable film,

Harvest: 3,000 years. [Mirt Sost Shi Amit]

Its story stretches over 3 millennia.

It starts at dawn, as if all of history has been just one day.

Low contrast, black and white.

Extremely long lenses to telescope the land and eternity.

This makes us feel distant, but Gerima is passionate.

He shows farmers treated like shit by a trilby hatted armchair tyrant.

Again shot long lens, barking orders.

Then comes this old, mad man, Kebebe.

Kebebe tells a story about the Queen of England.

Colonial power told almost like a myth to everyone and no one.

Two hours into the film, Kebebe batters the landlord with a stick.

Voices begin to flood the sound track.

People are beginning to talk to each other.

A key idea in third cinema.

The popular radicalism of third cinema made movies

innovatived across the globe.

In the Middle East, the great films of the '70s

were about identity and national liberation.

The most notorious middle eastern filmmaker of the '70s

was this Kurdish man, Yilmaz Güney.

This is him acting in the film, Hope [Umut ].

His ripped clothing shows how poor he is.

He's a scruffy, masculine hero, like a Kurdish Sean Connery.

He plays, here, an illiterate man who's been searching for treasure

to feed his family and has almost gone mad.

Spinning in space, let down by life.

Then Güney started directing.

Here's a film he wrote and co-directed: "Yol."

A man has been released from prison for five days.

He's happy, free, running with his dog.

Wide open spaces, long lens filming, wind in the grass.

He comes to his village and smiles, looks to camera,

but then the smile dies on his face.

The village is cowering.

The music dies.

The state military are here.

Still-life shots of confrontation.

No words needed.

People look imprisoned in their own windows and doorways.

Güney is credited as co-director of the film with Serif Gören,

because remarkably he was in prison for the whole shoot

but escaped in time for the post-production.

He sent out explicit notes on how shots should be filmed.

He was accused of killing an anti-communist judge in a restaurant,

though it was probably Güney's nephew that did it.

This character in Yol was typical of Güney's men:

Old fashioned, proud but powerless.

Their hopes dashed, banging their heads against the wall of life.

Güney was a communist, a spokesperson for ordinary people, and adored.

Yol won the main prize at the Cannes film festival.

Back in south America, where the third cinema ideas were born,

this, one of the most compelling third cinema films, was made.

It was about identity and betrayal.

Filmmaking that makes you feel in the center of the action.

Marxist, Salvador Allende, was democratically elected president of Chili in 1970.

On September the 11th, 1973,

Allende gives what will be his last radio broadcast.

Then the military, led by general Pinochet, moves in.

Director Patrizio Guzman and his team filmed from rooftops,

with handheld cameras, zoomed in to see soldiers running like ants.

They'd been shooting for months before the violent coup,

which was supported by the CIA.

History dramatically unfolded in front of them.

They were sometimes hiding,

so walls and railings would half-obscure their view.

They used direct sound.

No gloss, no distance.

The battle of Chile said:

"Here's what we are. Here's what we're losing."

And we end our tour of identity movies around the world in the '70s

with this unforgettable, outrageous film.

It was made by a Chilean born director too,

but it's far more about identity and psychedelics than betrayal.

A near naked thief climbs a vast tower.

Below him is a mad world of fascists and religious obsessives,

who have used his body as a mold to make images of Christ.

A very third cinema set up.

But when the thief gets to the top of the tower

the film becomes something like The wizard of Oz.

A strange corridor, like a rainbow.

The thief advances.

He meets a man dressed in white, flanked by goats,

a naked woman and a camel.

It's the director, Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Jodorowsky studied mime in Paris.

He believed in zen buddhism.

The idea that people should dethrone themselves.

And he studied Carl Jung, so this scene, in a way,

is a man climbing into the maze of his own mind

where he discovers strange images and archetypes

that he shares with all human beings.

Indian music plays.

Jodorowsky's man in white is an alchemist.

He asks the thief if he wants gold.

He does, of course.

But the manner of its making is extraordinary.

The thief must defecate and give the alchemist his own sweat.

The thief's spiritual awakening begins.

Eventually, his own excrement becomes gold.

Jodorowsky certainly had a sense of humor.

But his journey to the holy mountain of self-discovery, and self-loss

is only just beginning.

Primary colors, egg shapes, a pelican, nudity, a very '70s production design.

You are excrement.

You can change yourself into gold.

The thief's journey of self-discovery mirrored that of '70s cinema itself.

Its political, innovative filmmakers had stripped cinema naked,

loaded it with symbolism about selfhood, and turned it into gold.

And above and beyond these things, they used movies to ask:

"Who are we, as modern Europeans, Asians, Africans, South Americans?"

But movies in the '70s weren't only innovative

when they were political or about identity.

Mainstream and entertainment directors

in Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood in the '70s

were about to change the story of film.

Forever.

Synced and corrected by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today