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 Ky�ko Kagawa

who was in perhaps the greatest movie ever made.

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

And in the movies of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film, an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation across twelve decades,

six continents and a thousand films.

In this chapter we look at Bollywood's greatest film, Sholay,

and feel the force of a movie called Star Wars.

Movie fans around the world, most of them will have heard

of the box office smash hits of the '70s: Jaws, Star Wars, The Exorcist.

The Bruce Lee movies from Hong Kong.

And the Indian epic, Sholay.

These films are some of the world's most famous entertainments

but they were also innovative.

Just as in previous decades, so in the '70s and onwards,

the best of the mainstream films did new things.

To see how, let's start here: Hong Kong.

Less than a century previously, Hong Kong looked like this...

Now it's this.

No city, except New York, has been more filmed.

For 40 years, Hong Kong was a kind of refugee camp,

transit lounge, and capitalist catch-all for Chinese filmmakers

fleeing Mao or the Kuomintang's nationalism, or censorship, or seriousness.

Low cost, money-savvy production has ruled here.

The cinema of the migrant maybe.

Movies made by those who know what quickens the pulse of people in other countries.

And who want to make a fast buck.

Maybe this old lady can remember Hong Kong's first movie golden age: the 1950s.

It was a gold rush.

The emperor of those times, Hong Kong's Louis B. Mayer,

was Run Run Shaw.

In 1957, he came here,

bought 46 acres of this land at 45 cents per square foot

and built the largest private film studio in the world.

The Shaw brothers employed 1,400 staff, in 25 departments.

These buildings were Asia's dream factories.

The legends of China's 4,000 years of history were acted out here.

To see the Shaw brother's logo, orange silk pulled into perspective,

fanfare music, was to be transported to another world.

A '50s world like this one.

Feminine, studio set, highly colored, musical, with perfect trees and clothes.

But then this man, in blue, King Hu, became a director

and changed the world of Hong Kong cinema from feminine to this...

Wider screen, more aggressive, faster, swishing camera and swords.

Every move designed.

Graceful. Exquisitely engineered cinema.

If John Ford had been into Buddhism, ballet, and zero gravity,

he might have made films like King Hu.

Styles of fighting called kung fu had taken over Hong Kong cinema.

In 500 A.D., the Bodhi Dharma, a Buddhist monk from India,

is said to have moved to the Shaolin temple in China.

He stared at a wall for 9 years without speaking.

Then taught Buddhist breathing and meditation techniques to the other monks.

This caught on, it became a new martial art,

transmitted from master to pupil.

Loyalty and discipline were key, it spread through Asia.

The Shaolin temple was destroyed in 1674.

The surviving monks formed secret societies.

They became swordsmen, folk tales were told about them.

Fantasies were spun.

Myths became legends, epic, romantic, or supernatural.

It was a no-brainer that such legends would become cinema,

as the myth of the Wild West did in America.

And they did.

And kung fu cinema was born.

But King Hu's, A Touch of Zen [Xia n�], is no ordinary kung fu movie.

It starts as an action movie of sorts, set in a village during the Ming dynasty,

but then turns into a ghost story and then a reverie.

Sunlight cuts like a sword, it sounds like steel.

The Buddhist monks levitate.

A social film turns into a transcendental one.

This was action cinema at its most innovative.

King Hu's daring changed film history.

Most Asian directors revere him.

Taiwanese director Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [Wo hu cang long]

was a homage to him.

It has a bouncing fight in a bamboo forest as stylized and beautiful as this one.

King Hu made Hong Kong cinema of the '60s somewhat more masculine,

but in the '70s came this: the enraged dragon of Hong Kong cinema.

Bruce Lee's fighting had more attack, sweat, and rage.

The rage came from the storylines but also from Lee's private life.

He'd experienced racism and wanted to get even.

There's real anger in Lee's face.

His body, filmed in slow motion had its own kind of muscular hyperrealism.

Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan sees the shift to masculinity

as part of a bigger trend.

But for all the dynamism of the Bruce Lee films,

if we look again at them we see that,

though he was fast and furious, the camera work was anything but.

It patiently recorded the action, it stayed out of the fight.

There wasn't much editing in Hong Kong movies of the '70s.

The imagery was steady and wide.

Then, in 1986, came this.

We're in the world of the Hong Kong triads who run black market businesses.

Eighties clothes, sex, hedonism.

A rowdy lunch.

A story about male bonding, loyalty and betrayal again.

What was really new however, was the style of the movie.

Influenced by Kurosawa and Sam Peckinpah films,

director John Woo filmed shoot outs with several cameras.

Some of them tracking and used slow motion.

Some called it "the aesthetic of the glance."

Scenes were broken down into fragments.

Sequels followed fast.

A cycle about amoral heroic gangsters was born.

Hollywood couldn't fail to notice filmmaking this intense

or box office on this scale,

so Woo was soon in America directing Jean Claude Van Damme movies

and then Mission Impossible 2.

Hong Kong imagery looked different now.

New non-linear editing systems and John Woo's brilliant eye got the credit.

But looking back, there were other reasons

for Hong Kong's new dynamism.

The first is this man:

Master Woo-Ping Yuen, who started making films in the '70s.

Look at this fight scene from the end of The iron Monkey, [Siu nin Wong Fei Hung chi: Tit ma lau]

which he directed and choreographed.

The cutting's as fast as in a John Woo movie, and the camera angles are as numerous.

But what was happening in front of the camera, the fight, was equally choreographed.

Where Bruce Lee's feet were firmly on the ground,

Master Yuen, borrowing from King Hu and Peking opera,

spun his characters into the air.

Master Yuen's innovation impressed Hollywood of course.

This time it was the Wachowski brothers who made the call.

They were planning a film called The Matrix.

And we can see master Yuen's influence in this scene.

I'm going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson.

The gravity defying of Hong Kong cinema, the feet fighting of Bruce Lee,

the fast constant punching of kung fu.

John Woo and master Yuen were key innovators

in Hong Kong cinema after the '70s.

But this man is more central to the story than either of them.

Tsui Hark is the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong.

He produced both A better Tomorrow and Iron Monkey,

and controlled the editing of both and has directed 44 films himself.

Look at this scene from Tsui Hark's Once upon a time in China. [Wong Fei Hung]

This character is a legendary kung fu master.

Europeans and Americans are invading China.

The story needs the guy to clock that the enemy is advancing by sea

and, also, meet the westernized woman who will intrigue him for much of the movie.

It could have been staged simply, but Tsui Hark puts the guy on a roof, mending it.

He sees the woman because he's slipped down the thatch.

His first glimpse of her is a dramatic high angle.

Tsui films him from her low angle point of view.

No ordinary first encounter.

But then the director sets a slapstick rabbit running.

Two buckets of glue or paint begin to tumble.

Lee tumbles too, but, in John Woo or Sam Peckinpah,

slow motion and spinning just for the sake of it.

And he hits the ground in slow-mo too.

And the glue gets its punch-line.

And then another.

There was no rational reason for staging such a small scene

as if it was a gunfight, with more than 25 shots.

Five would have been enough.

And look at this scene from Dragon Inn. [Sun lung moon hak chan]

Maggie Cheung is the owner of an inn in the desert.

She is unsettled by Brigitte Lin.

They fight.

What a fight.

It's like there's a whirlwind in the room.

Dance and erotic�s.

Grace and, of course, spinning.

Tsui Hark produced and strongly influenced this film.

His hyperactivity as a person makes for hyperactive, innovative cinema.

Tsui Hark had made Hong Kong cinema of the '90s spin.

Many of his smash hit movies led to their own spin-offs.

Dragon Inn itself was a remake of a King Hu movie.

Everything went in circles.

A quietly simmering kettle was a key image in the calm Asian films of the 1930s.

In Hong Kong cinema, the kettle boiled over with intensity.

Not since Soviet films of the 1920s, had movie space been so fragmented.

Not since the '50s had emotions been so heightened.

And what about the Shaw brothers where mainstream Hong Kong cinema got going?

This is their vast new studio in the hills above Hong Kong.

It's state of the art and built on rubber to soundproof it.

Hollywood, be afraid, be very afraid.

But this place is nearly empty.

Hong Kongers remember, with envy, the days of Bruce,

when its movies dealt a body blow to world filmmaking.

Where Hong Kong seemed to turn masculine and frenzied in the '70s,

mainstream Indian cinema, what in the west is called Bollywood,

grew in scale but also in inventiveness.

India, in all its photogenic luminosity,

had quietly built the biggest film industry in the world.

Epics from the '60s such as this one Mughal-E-Azam,

took more at the box office than The Sound of Music did in the west.

A dancer enters the royal court, a sparkling scene with mirrored sets.

The crown prince who will marry her.

Director K. Asif wanted to make the film in color but couldn't,

but recently it has been colorized.

A process that's looked down upon, but look at the results.

Pink and pistachio.

Mother of Pearl.

By the '70s, the Bollywood bauble got bigger and shinier.

In 1971 alone, India made 433 films.

At least as many as were made in America the same year.

Mainstream Hindi entertainment cinema was magnetic.

When last we met her, Sharmila Tagore was understated,

using tiny head movements in close up in this fine grain masterpiece by Satyajit Ray.

Look at her now.

Tagore's the queen of Bollywood, in bright red.

It's soign�e, Elizabeth Taylor, in a full throttle musical drama.

The film is Mausam, made by the great director and lyricist Gulzar,

without whom '70s Indian cinema is unthinkable.

Tagore's character is in love with this doctor

played by the legendary Sanjeev Kumar.

Togore's modern look, hair and eyeliner influenced a generation of Indian women.

But life's tragic for Tagore's character

and this is where Gulzar's innovation comes in.

He shows Tagore and Kumar in a romantic moment on a mountainside.

Then over the crest of the mountain walks an older Kumar

looking back at his younger, happier self.

Past and present, the joy of love and its pain, all in the same scene.

Indian cinema was great at such masterstrokes of storytelling.

Our films in Bombay were different.

Like songs for instance, there was a lot of usage of songs to,

which was part of the narrative, so to speak.

And it was always a little bit more "flowery," more...

Not quite reality but slightly more "made up" reality, so to speak.

So, that was quite different and more glamour,

more dressing up, more accent on beauty, more accent on youth.

And not... And very general, there was a lot of generalization.

Not pinpointing where you come from or which time we are talking about.

Like every time I worked in Hindi cinema and if I took a little longer, you know,

to say something or gave a little extra pause.

I was very teasingly told, I remember: "This is not a race cinema, you know.

You have to speed up and speak up a little bit."

And of course in Bengali it would be exactly the opposite

and I would be told, "now, this is not Bollywood.

You have to..."

Of course: Bollywood, it wasn't called "Bollywood" then.

"Hindi cinema."

And you have to pause before you react.

So, yes there was... Both forms were very different.

If Tagore was the queen of Bollywood, there's no doubt who was the king.

Amitabh Bachchan.

Not since the days of silent cinema and Charlie Chaplin

had world movies gilded one human being with such fame.

I love the cinema, that's the only job I know.

I've been in films for 40 years now.

15th of February, 1969, was when I signed my first contract

and entered the film industry in India.

It's been 40 years, over 150 films and I still work.

I have four or five films on the floor, and hopefully there'll be many more.

I enjoy that.

I wanted to express myself through a medium

which was going to project me, put me in different circumstances, situations,

give me different characters to do, dress me up, you know,

in colorful clothes and give me lovely moments and emotions to emote.

I was interested in acting and I found the medium attractive enough

for me to join it, to be able for me to exercise these wonderful desires of mine.

Here's Bachchan as an honest cop in the '70s classic Zanjeer"

Zooms, freezes, close-ups, dramatic fragments of fear

and rage, and realization.

Bells ring, music crashes like waves, a whirlwind of a scene.

I do feel that in the late '60s and early '70s there was...

...a desire to communicate ideas,

spend a lot more time in expressing those ideas.

The written word had a great amount of importance.

Whether it was the lyrics in our songs or whether it was the dialogues of our films.

In the '60s and the '70s, there was

the beginning of a kind of turmoil within the youth in the country.

They were not happy with the way the system was functioning

and they felt that they needed a vigilante or some single force to suddenly come up

and take charge and solve their problems.

And they were all stories of a person that rose virtually from the gutter

and came up fighting against the system single-handedly.

Taking charge of affairs, raising a voice against the system,

and correcting it in his own manner, so to say.

And then, becoming a great hero.

And Bachchan plays the hero in this movie: Sholay.

The innovative colossus of '70s cinema.

Widescreen titles like an epic, landscape like a western,

music like an adventure film. Sholay was all these things.

The greatest Bollywood film of its time and one of the most influential movies

in the story of film.

It was co-written by this man, Javed Akhtar,

the great Urdu poet and screenwriter who tried to capture the spirit

of the times in his screenplay.

As a matter of fact, 70's was in a way, a traumatic time.

The whole psyche after the partition, I mean, after the independence

was changing for the first time.

You know, in '47 India got independence.

We got democracy, an impeccable constitution, secularism,

freedom of expression and so on and so forth.

And we started believing that, I mean, the prosperity is on the next page of the calendar

and all the solutions are around the corner.

But by the time we reached the '70s we realized that it is not so.

And that was the time when everything was, idealism was, shattering.

When idealism shatters, art gets into trouble.

Art gets into a kind of a trauma.

And you see the trauma in poetry, in short stories, in novels, in theatre.

And that's reflected in mainstream commercial cinema also.

And you saw an angry young man emerging.

This man was a vigilante.

This man was a believer that, "I have to look after myself."

And this kind of belief is developed in moments when an average person

feels that perhaps the institutions are not going to help them.

Sholay captured the spirit of its time so much that it was

a huge box office success and played in this cinema for 7 years.

This scene is the dramatic core of the movie.

The family of a policeman is brutally gunned down.

Freeze frames, slow motion.

The squeak of a swing.

This trauma electrifies the film and propels its operatic emotions.

The policeman's need for revenge.

This is the killer, one of cinema's most psychotic characters.

If Sholay looks like The magnificent Seven,

or Sergio Leone's Once upon a Time in the West,

that's because, it's very like both.

It's full of ideas and conventions ripped from other movies.

You must have seen children playing with a string and a pebble.

They tie a string on a pebble and they start swinging over their head.

And slowly they keep leaving the string and it makes bigger and bigger circle.

Now, this pebble is the revolt from the tradition.

It wants to move away, but...

...the string is the tradition, the continuity, it is holding it.

But if you break the string, the pebble will fall.

If you remove the pebble, the string cannot go that far.

This tension of tradition and revolt against the tradition are,

in a way, contradictory but, as a matter of fact, it is a synthesis.

You will always find the synthesis of tradition and revolt

from the tradition together in any good art.

And Sholay's revolt is in its fearlessly inventive shifts in tone.

Bachchan, here in the sidecar, plays a crook who's hired

by the policeman to avenge the murder of his family.

But the movie finds room for this famous musical scene:

Bachchan and his friend, carefree, singing in the sunshine.

The open road, constant movement, friendship celebrated.

One minute it's a light buddy musical.

Then we have what looks like a big Hollywood production number

for the festival of color.

Purple dust in the air, a camera on a Ferris wheel and carousel,

but the rapture of this suddenly is blasted away.

Driving percussion, more frenetic action.

Then, take this scene, near the end.

The killer has the brassy girlfriend of Bachchan's sidekick

dance for the sidekick's life.

To add to the intensity he has broken glass scattered under her feet.

No Hollywood musical, not even the dark ones like Cabaret

or Scorsese's New York, New York, has dared to film a dance scene this grim.

Sholay melds Chaplin and Leone, Cliff Richard musicals

and horror cinema in its furnace.

In Sholay when the cops arrive,

to take charge of everything, was really an afterthought.

Had we gone according to the original idea of the script

there was just Sanjeev Kumar who had lost his hands

and who was the Thakur.

He was going to take his revenge

with the help of these two individuals, and that was the end of the story.

But we had to show in the end, we had to show in the end that,

you know, the law is supreme and it has to come in.

So, a lot of the films restructured the way they made their stories

or added this little bit in the end, where you found

the cops landing up after the whole thing is over.

After three hours of drama and emotion, to come and take over and say:

"Okay, now you are in the hands of the law."

Sholay has become some kind of a watershed, some kind of a milestone in Indian cinema.

But let me tell you, I tried to remember, think of a film in the world,

that has so many unforgettable characters.

Well there are, like, in Godfather, you remember many characters,

you remember in Star Wars.

You remember certain characters of Gone with the Wind.

But not to the extent of Sholay.

Sholay was released in 1975, it is 34 years.

And the big players, the big characters, who appeared in one scene,

those characters are caricatured and used in advertisements after 34 years.

"Sholay" can boast of at least 10 unforgettable characters.

In a way Sholay is Bollywood because as Bachchan says:

I used to ask my father, who is no longer alive now,

but, a great poet and a literator in his own right:

"what is it about Indian cinema that makes it so interesting and so exciting?"

And he said, "the most exciting thing about Indian cinema is

that you get poetic justice in 3 hours."

You don't get poetic justice in a lifetime sometimes.

That is the most attractive portion.

We give... Indian cinema gives poetic justice in 3 hours.

Bollywood was hugely popular in the Middle East and North Africa too,

but Arab filmmakers themselves didn't shy away from epic, popular cinema of the '70s.

Far from it.

Take this movie: Mohammad: Messenger of God. [The Message]

Perhaps seen by as many people as have seen any film in cinema history.

It looks like a conventional biblical epic and in some ways it is.

It took 4 months to build the sets, crowd scenes, period costumes and the like.

But look at this wide screen shot for example.

We have to defend ourselves.

You are the messenger of God.

Yet they mock, abuse, and plunder us. And we do nothing.

In the baggage of war, we are pathetic.

American actor, Anthony Quinn, is talking to the camera.

We are led by God, and you.

Now, I know how you hate the sword.

But we have to fight them.

Then he walks away.

They have stolen our property.

We expect a reverse angle to the person he's been talking to but it doesn't come.

I say, by God, get it back!

Instead, the camera raises up and walks towards him.

We don't see or hear the person because Quinn's character

is talking to the prophet Muhammad, his nephew,

not after the prophet has ascended to paradise but whilst he's still here on earth.

Islam doesn't allow the depiction of the prophet,

and so this most visual of mediums, cinema, refuses to picture him.

Fight them.

Filmmaker Moustapha Akkad even leaves gaps in the soundtrack

where Muhammad's voice would be.

Akkad shot the film in Arabic too, with Abdullah Gaith playing the uncle.

Akkad could have simply dubbed the film into Arabic,

for the vast Arab audience but he didn't.

He felt that Western and Arab acting styles

are so different that he should make two versions.

Here director Akkad walks from the English language editing suite

to the Arab one.

The documentary footage shows that he was a calm, hard worker

in the '70s juggling tasks.

Akkad went on to produce the famous Halloween horror films.

He and his daughter were killed by an Al Qaeda suicide bomb

in a hotel in Jordan in 2005.

In Egypt, pioneering director, Youssef Chahine, was both populist and angry in the '70s.

- I'm the third world?

- Are you?

- No, you are.

The "third world," Jesus Christ!

We've been around 7,000 years

and we've proven that we were civilized 7,000 years ago.

Are we so underdeveloped?

That's not civilization.

Civilization is how you contact the other people.

Do you know how to love?

Do you know how to care?

This is civilization.

If you go to a very poor man here and he has nothing to give you,

he would go and borrow from his neighbors, a loaf of bread,

and then he'd offer it to you.

In Europe, you may faint, and drop dead in the street,

and people will just walk away from you, and they don't give a shit.

We have to know what the word "civilization" means,

and then we could say, "first world, third world."

Then, if you're still a savage,

I'm not talking about you personally, I like Irish people.

Chahine's film, The Sparrow, [Al-asfour] is a stunning account

of a terrible moment in Arab history.

The Egyptian president Nasser announces on TV

that Egypt has lost territory to Israel in the six days war.

Chahine films his actors watching the broadcast. Dismay!

He dollies in to capture the emotion, the shock.

This is Bahiya who owns the house, where people have gathered to watch.

In Chahine's famous ending, Bahiya runs out onto the streets.

Chahine tracks in front of her, windows open.

Despair spills out and becomes a collective feeling.

One of the most famous moments in Arab filmmaking.

And we still wanted to make it look as if it was a victory.

So I wanted to show the real people.

The people who went down into the streets.

This interview was done five years before the revolution in Egypt

that threw Hosni Mubarak out of office.

But Chahine seemed to foresee it.

I hate the word.

Not to prophesize but you must predict

what is going to happen in view of all the factors

that you see around you.

Especially economically right now.

It's really bad.

And the authority is always very violent.

So, I decided I would buy some very hard sticks,

preferably in Iran, and give them as a gift to the university.

I mean, the students just go out with nothing, so they get beaten each time.

You have to say no to somebody otherwise they become big headed,

and they become demi-gods like Mugabe, or Kazacky, or our own people.

Hong Kong, Indian, and Arab movies wowed cinema audiences in the '70s and since

but something happened in American cinema which changed everything.

A movie about a shark took $260 million dollars at the U.S. box office.

A scary film about a girl possessed by the devil took $200 million at the box office.

A Sci-Fi movie about the good force and the evil Darth Vader

demolished all records by taking nearly $500 million.

Cinema was on a roller coaster.

There had never been figures like this before.

The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars changed American, and then, world cinema.

Producers started to make films

about things that people fantasized about seeing.

The devil, a monster shark, spaceships, dinosaurs, the sinking of the Titanic.

Like very early cinema, the promise of thrill, of sensation,

lured people back to the cinema.

This came to be known in Hollywood as "want see".

What the culture wants to see.

New movie theaters called, multiplexes were built.

The era of the blockbuster had begun.

Here's The Exorcist.

A believable middle-class home.

Mom's all dolled up.

Is it coming out, Lily?

Yes, I think so.

A maid.

Then, the scream of evil.

A handheld wide angle shot captures the rush of fear.

And then this.

Director William Friedkin's innovation was to slap horror cinema

in the face with realism.

The Exorcist tells the story of a teenage girl possessed by the devil.

The devil's voice was throaty, cigarettey, phlegmy.

Friedkin hired the brilliant actress Mercedes McCambridge to do it.

I'm Damien Karras.

And I'm the devil!

Now kindly undo these straps!

I had a feeling that if I could become an entity, not a voice.

That drives me crazy when people say, "you were the voice in the exorcist." No.

I tried very hard to create a character, a demon, Lucifer.

To increase the realism of the sound, McCambridge swallowed raw eggs,

smoked cigarettes, and got drunk to make her bronchial voice gurgle and emotional.

They tore a sheet up and they restrained me, my hands, my knees, my feet, my neck...

Look what happens to your voice

It has to happen when you have no freedom.

The only way I can do it now is by clutching my hands behind me.

You son of a bitch!

One of the most innovative vocal performances in movie history.

But Friedkin pushed other actors hard too.

He slapped this one, who's playing a good priest,

on the face, then immediately filmed his trembling response.

But Friedkin's techniques were traditional too.

He said, "I just want to tell a straight story from beginning to end,

with no craperoo".

He got this no nonsense approach from, of all people,

veteran director Howard Hawks.

He was going out with Hawks' daughter.

People queued around the block to see the film

to test their stamina as they would on a roller coaster.

Tremendous film.

Just turned my mind.

I thought it was pretty disgusting.

Well, I wouldn't take my wife to go and see it, anyway.

I just found it really horrible. I just had to come out,

I couldn't take anymore.

The reaction in America, from all reports, has been hysterical.

Audiences are reported to have been fainting,

to have been vomiting themselves.

Screaming, in the tradition really of those great horror films,

where you get your money back if you don't last the course.

An American documentary was made about this audience reaction to The Exorcist.

It wasn't glossy like entertainment TV.

It was rough and handheld like The Exorcist itself,

and caught the panic of people actually fainting.

"I have my finger on the pulse of America," said Friedkin.

These nine words killed the complexity of new Hollywood.

They could also have been spoken by this man, who, Time Magazine called,

"the most influential director in cinema history."

Steven Spielberg had been making amateur films since boyhood.

He was more influenced by this film, than European movies.

There he is, Dorinda.

Go on.

I'm setting you free, Dorinda.

I'm moving out of your heart.

Goodbye.

Goodbye, darling.

The pilot says goodbye to the woman he loves

because he's been killed in the war.

He must watch her fall in love with another man.

A famous Hollywood romance, soft black and white, other-worldly,

bighearted, unashamed emotions that touched the young Spielberg.

"I was truly a child of the establishment," he said later.

Jaws was both an establishment film and an innovative one.

We're out to sea, trying to catch a killer shark.

The camera is close to the water capturing the swell of the sea.

A nerdy scientist on the left.

A salty, seen-it-all fisherman in the middle,

a green-around-the-gills police chief on the right.

Who's drivin' this boat? Nobody, the tide.

Three very different men filmed in three-shot,

like Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.

It would have been easier to shoot in a studio tank

but Spielberg, like Friedkin, wanted realism.

He had the scientist crush a polystyrene cup

in mockery of the macho crushing of a beer can.

In interviews, Spielberg speaks as vividly as Alfred Hitchcock

about the point of view of his shots in Jaws, and their unity.

He captures the sense that a visual idea comes to mind, then you work on it,

making it better using color and lenses.

The death of the Kintner boy and all the paranoia

and the tension and suspense leading up to the actual attack

when he's out on the raft, I, in my mind, wanted to do it in one shot.

And in trying to figure out, you know, in a perfect world:

"How could I have done that in one sustained shot?"

I came up with the idea to have bathers, with different colored bathing suits,

walking in front of the camera that would wipe off Roy Scheider.

And the same color in the reverse, moving in, certainly, the other direction,

would wipe on what he's looking at, which, even though it wouldn't be one shot,

would give more of a seamless feeling, and much more of a clear point of view

that you knew who was looking at who.

That all this must be from the police chief's point of view.

The scene is about him, it's about his reaction.

It's not about the Kintner boy being killed.

It's about the chief of police, his fear of the water,

his chief responsibility to protect the public.

His fear that there is a shark out there and he knows it's out there

and these people are going swimming anyway.

He dollied in and zoomed out, to create this queasy scene

of change of visual perspective,

as Hitchcock did in Vertigo.

And this scene in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind,

shows his filmic signature: the awe and revelation scene.

Wide shot, then the camera dollies to people looking at something through a screen.

We want to see what they see but Spielberg doesn't cut to it.

Instead, the scene builds.

They get out, we track and rise.

And the music rises.

And here's the one in Jurassic Park.

Looking again. Removing glasses to see better.

Alan, this species of vermiform was been extinct since the cretaceous period.

I mean, this thing is...

This thing... What?

And again.

Then getting out of the car to see better still.

Then the camera rises and the music does too.

Master classes in point of view, in the desire to see.

Spielberg wasn't so interested in what urban elites dreamt of.

His was a world of the suburbs, absent fathers and underdogs,

who encountered the sublime.

At his best, he burnished mainstream cinema

and became the most successful romantic director in the story of film.

Less than 30 months after Jaws, Star Wars almost doubled its box office takings.

The film starts like a fairy tale, "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."

The words drive backwards into deep space.

The sound track recorded in the relatively new format

of Dolby stereo, seems to take place in deep space too.

It felt as if the cinema shook.

And then models of spaceships glided past such wide angle lenses

that they plunged into perspective too, and looked enormous.

The camera moves were programmed by computers.

Then the film introduces us to Luke, who will become a knight

and save the universe.

We're in the realm of myth and the film's design conjures the myth.

Interiors look like caves or kitchens or spaceships.

There's talk of a mystical force.

Luke dresses like a samurai.

We meet two robots, little and large, a metallic odd couple.

And we see, optically projected, a message from a Princess asking for help.

We hear of an evil emperor, who director George Lucas,

saw as the shamed American president, Richard Nixon.

Oh, he says it's nothing, sir. Merely a malfunction, old data.

This is the most absurd plot we've yet heard in the story of film,

and yet, the movie charms, in part because it draws richly from film history.

The robotic comic duo was based on two funny characters

in Akira Kurosawa's The hidden Fortress.

As were Star Wars' soft edge screen wipes.

And the spears in Kurosawa's film became light sabers in Lucas'.

The evil characters were filmed in a way that was reminiscent

of German director Leni Riefenstahl's, The Triumph of the Will.

In the climax of Star Wars, Luke is attacking the death star.

Lucas has the camera plunge forward, like a phantom ride from silent cinema.

Fast cutting.

The music crashes like waves.

Luke uses a computer to find his target.

But then Luke hears the voice of his guru, Ben Kenobi.

He tells Luke to use his intuition.

Use the force Luke.

Let go, Luke.

The force is strong with this one.

Luke, trust me.

So Luke puts away the computer,

the very thing that Star Wars helped to bring to cinema.

In this moment, the knight, the hero learns to feel, rather than think,

which, in a way, is what happened to American cinema in general in the '70s.

Maybe baby boomers had tired of activism, of change,

of new types of art and wanted to switch off for a bit.

Maybe they wanted to be blasted away by light sabers, the force and spaceships.

Bruce Lee fans, Indian movie lovers, and Arab audiences in the '70s and since,

fell in love with the cinema of sensation, rather than contemplation too.

At the end of the decade, Americans voted for an actor

called Ronald Reagan to be the President of the United States,

but Chinese people in the '80s, protested in Tiananmen square.

What followed was exciting.

Movie makers got their banners out.

The '80s were the movie years of protest.

Corrected and synced by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today