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 discover a new generation of Chines films

and David Lynch's movie, Blue Velvet.

The 1980s, greed is good.

Thatcher and Reagan are in power in the west.

Around the world, conservative ideologues tell false stories about life and love.

The most innovative filmmakers speak back at these falsehoods.

This is their story.

The story of '80s protest.

The story of speaking truth to power in the '80s starts here:

China.

Probably the most interesting place on earth at the time.

China looked like this in the '80s.

But it looked like this too.

There was a new openness in China.

It was debating where it stood in the world, how modern and Democratic it wanted to be.

Standing up to the old Maoist repressions.

The fervent was thrilling and moving.

And out of it came the greatest rebirth in filmmaking of the whole decade.

Mao's cultural revolution had stamped out the fire of movie-making in China,

and closed its legendary film school, the Beijing film academy.

Director Tian Zhuangzhuang.

The so-called, 5th Generation, who graduated from it in 1982,

would be the most distinguished ever to spill out of a film school.

They made some of the best films of the '80s.

Tian's film, The Horse Thief, [Dao ma zei]

spoke truth to power because it focused on a very un-Maoist subject.

We're at a traditional burial.

A horse thief's young son has died.

Tian films Buddhist monks in subtle slow motion.

And these vultures who eat the corpse, a horrifying idea to westerners

but a sacred sky burial for the horse thief and his family.

Tian was interested in the mystical traditions

of his characters, themes that were banned under Mao.

The themes of Sergei Parajanov in the Ukraine.

Having eaten the body, the vultures take its spirit into the sky.

And Tian's films looked different.

He framed like this and treated color like this.

Martin Scorsese called The Horse Thief

the best film of the decade.

Whereas Maoist films were about patriotic and exemplary types,

the 5th Generation were challenging their times

by making movies about individual psychology.

The greatest village film made in China in the '80s was this one, Yellow Earth. [Huang tu di]

Again, we're far away from modernity and big cities.

Static shots, a sense of the scale of the landscape.

Muted yellows and Greens.

Communist soldiers collecting folksongs.

He writes the ones he hears, here, in this notebook.

Then the soldier meets this 14-year-old girl

and the film becomes about her gentle, but confident femininity.

She's sewing.

Her head's down-turned.

The frame's static.

She questions the soldier but doesn't look at him.

Women in Maoist cinema were supposed to be strutting and heroic.

Director, Chen Kaige, and cinematographer, Zhang Yimou,

who had himself became a successful director, framed the imagery like Chinese painting.

Instead of being here, the horizon would be here.

Or here.

Male and female stood together in Yellow Earth's

remarkably framed landscapes.

The film wasn't Maoist because it had little action or conflict.

But nor was it traditionally male and Confucian.

The girl wants to join the army, to strike out at life

rather than to stay home.

Instead, it used emptiness within the frame

as a compositional element, and saw maleness within femaleness,

and good within bad.

Ideas more associated with another great Asian philosophy: Taoism.

All this was deeply challenging.

The legacy of Chinese film of the '80s was complex.

Tian worked consistently until 1993, when his film about the cultural revolution,

The blue Kite, [Lan feng zheng] was banned and he was forbidden to work

for nearly a decade.

Yellow Earth's cinematographer, Zhang Yimou,

went on to direct some of the most rigorously beautiful movies of the '90s.

His film, Raise the red Lantern, was boldly symmetrical

and had a striking orange-red color palette.

But even it didn't prepare us for his mastery of digital cinema.

We're in a richly decorated poony pavilion.

Zhang studied Chinese painting and uses its ultra-widescreen compositions.

Slow motion and a gravity defying Buddhist sense of the grace of movement.

A pictorial master class.

The imagery in Chinese cinema was becoming as beautiful as anywhere in the world.

All that was in the future.

But back in the '80s, five years after the release of Yellow Earth,

the sun went down on China's moving and exciting decade of self-discovery.

Thousands of pro-democracy protestors were killed by their own government

in Tiananmen square.

One of the greatest images ever of speaking truth to power.

In another communist sphere, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the '80s,

the powerful communist authorities were starting to lose their grip.

Life was tough but people persevered and society began to open up.

Filmmakers told stories about taboo subjects,

the resulting movies literally changed the world in some cases,

and are some of the most troubling films ever made.

This film, Repentance, [Monanieba] created a sensation.

It tells, in an almost comic book manner, of this dictator.

He has a Hitler moustache but, like Stalin, is Georgian.

A woman imagines that she and her man are buried.

An echo of this much earlier Soviet film, Arsenal.

A haunting static shot of a smiling dead soldier.

The Stalin-like dictator eventually dies but, astonishingly, a woman digs up his body

and stands it here, in the garden of his morally corrupt son.

The corpse looks unremarkable, like it's just relaxing against a tree.

Director Abuladze had it filmed from far away, in daylight.

A symbol of course, of the fact that atrocity cannot be buried.

That the Stalinist genocide stinks of death.

The president of Georgia and the new modernizing boss

of the Soviet Union in the '80s, Mikhail Gorbachev, saw the film

and approved it for release.

It was seen by millions and helped spark glasnost,

the period of new openness in the Soviet union.

A rare example of film actually changing the world.

Repentance was premiered here, the film union building Dom Kino, in Moscow.

As was this astonishing Soviet film from the mid '80s, Come and See. [Idi i smotri]

We're in Belarus in 1943.

Nazi bombs have just exploded.

Into the frame comes the teenage boy of the story.

He's fighting the Nazis.

The camera moves up a bit, to adult height.

The boy seems to get smaller because of the wide angle lens.

The peak of his cap seems to reach out to us.

The bomb has given him tinnitus.

Whistle.

Roar.

He meets a girl, they go to his village.

He can't find his family.

They run to look for them.

Then the girl looks back, and sees them.

He doesn't.

The wide angle camera tracking them, as if it's the awful thing she's just seen.

In their flight, they come across this bog.

This is acting at the limit of endurance.

The roar of fear.

We hardly hear their screams.

The absurdity of a Viennese Waltz on the sound track.

No film is more physical.

Another Soviet film about a near burial.

Come and See's acting, sound design, staring wide angle camerawork,

and moral seriousness made it the greatest war film ever made.

The director of Come and See, Elem Klimov,

became head of the Soviet film union in '80s.

In this very room in the union building, he and politicians discussed censorship,

the digging up of the past, and films that had been banned

because they were anti-Soviet, because they spoke truths other than the sanctioned ones.

One such film was this one, Long Goodbyes, [Dolgie provody] directed by the brilliant Kira Muratova.

We see a middle aged woman.

Cut to a train.

Looking outside first, then zoom out to show that the mother is talking to her son.

Jump cut.

He's trying to sleep.

She talks.

The strange high-pitched voice on the sound track.

No sound of the train itself.

Throughout the film, Muratova has the mother and son

look away from each other.

She nags him.

The music erupts.

Match cut to a man.

Then to the son.

A strange jump cut on his hands.

The man has been replaced by an older man.

More splintered cuts from different angles.

Then we're outside the train and then we seem to be in an airplane.

What was all this about?

This earlier scene helps us see.

The mom and son again.

Not looking at each other again.

Filmed in a long lens again.

A lens so long that the space seems paper thin.

Muratova's theme here was the way people can suffocate each other.

Soviet films of the '70s and '80s were supposed to be about social themes

but this one's about psychological bondage.

They couldn't accuse Muratova of being anti-Soviet

but the archives say that the authorities were

"terribly unnerved by the form" of this film.

And so, like the films of Sergei Paradjanov,

whom Muratova adored, Long Goodbyes was banned.

Maybe they thought Muratova's long lenses and almost hidden camera positions

were commenting on Soviet surveillance?

Whatever.

One official wrote: "How can you allow such an outrage?"

Written on chalk on the film's canister was: "Not to be given out."

But back in this smoke-filled room in the late '80s,

a decade after it was made, Muratova's beautiful film

was unbanned and released to acclaim.

It had come back from the dead to speak a truth to power.

She's one of the most underrated director's in the whole story of film.

By the '80s, large chunks of the eastern block looked like this.

But what if you did this to it?

And what if you shifted its color to this?

These are the questions that the Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, asked.

His answers were about love and death.

Meet Yacek, this 20-year-old, in an '80s Polish city.

Kieslowski pictures him in yellow-green imagery.

The shots are hooded, jaundiced.

He sees a rock.

He decides to do harm with the rock.

If he can do this, he can do anything.

This makes us scared of him.

An old Hitchcock trick.

What'll he do next?

This is what he does next.

He gets in a taxi.

He's going to kill the taxi driver, but the driver doesn't know this.

He stops to let kids cross the road.

An echo of the scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, where Janet Leigh,

who doesn't know she's about to die, let's people cross the road.

But where Hitchcock's film was fear as entertainment,

Kieslowski's film is about the dirt and sickness of fear.

Yacek strangles the man.

We see the man's foot come out of his sock, he takes forever to die.

The scene lasts 3 minutes, 45 seconds.

35 shots.

Real time.

The man's saliva.

The masking of the imagery is so heavy that, at times, it looks like night.

The man's false teeth.

The murder reduced to a sock, spit, and dentures.

Extraordinary innovation.

Then we jump a year and Yacek is sentenced to death for his crime.

Green light and hooded imagery again.

The ugly fury of death.

He's gone in a moment.

And then the shit drips from his body.

Only at the end, in this starburst, after Yacek has died, is the light white.

A Short Film About Killing [Kr�tki film o zabijaniu]

has used physical things to rage against the dying of the light.

Literally, because the greenness and masking

make it look like the light of the world is dying.

A Short Film About Killing has to be seen to be believed.

It changed the death penalty in Poland.

Talking truth to power, indeed.

African cinema in the '80s was not undergoing

such dark days as the films of Eastern Europe.

Although some African countries were forced to mortgage their economies

to the international monetary fund, innovation in African movies soared.

In the '70s, African films had been about society, the here and now,

the immediate post-colonial world.

But in the '80s, directors started to look beyond the present tense,

to the horizon, the past, before colonization.

A rethink of what African cinema was for.

This man, Gaston Kabor�, did this brilliantly.

His movie, Wend Kuuni, was one of the first films to do so.

A landmark in African cinema.

This orphan boy called Wend Kuuni, which means "gift from god",

has been found in the bush, he doesn't speak.

He herds goats.

Director Kabor�'s camera follows him from a distance

and frames him alone, outside the village.

Then we get a flashback to a time when his mom was still alive.

The boy's sick, they're under a tree in the shade.

Then Kabor� makes the time line of his film more complex.

I put in, when Kuuni, a flashback inside another flashback

and I did it without questioning myself and it worked.

Here, the mother has her own flashback to her husband.

A flashback within a flashback.

You see how aesthetic could be invented just because an artist is doing

what he feels or she feels to be good for the story he or she is telling.

Then we return to the first flashback, the boy's memory of his mom.

And soon afterwards, we get back to the present tense.

I believe in mixed instinct in art.

I believe in audacity, you know, in art.

And Africa has a tremendous treasure of stories, tales, mythology, legends.

We need that because it's the food of the souls.

Kabor�'s film speaks truth to the past, you could say.

But then came another African film about the past, the dream time.

In this film, Yeelen, which means "brightness,"

this man, Niankoro, has been tracking down his sorcerer father.

Director Souleymane Ciss� tracks around Niankoro,

like in a Sergio Leone shoot out.

Niankoro has to destroy his father so he's in tears.

He faces him.

A water buffalo in slow motion and a Sci-Fi roar on the sound track.

Ciss� tracks up to Niankoro's stony look.

Then his father becomes a mythic elephant,

and Niankoro is a lion.

And then mystical rods seem to channel the brightness of the cosmos.

Yeelen is as big as Lawrence of Arabia.

As shape-shifting as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A magic realist film, and one of cinema's most complex works of art.

In America in the '80s,

if power was anywhere it was here on Wall Street.

Greed was good here.

Money gushed through this canyon like a torrent.

This man, Ronald Reagan, America's president,

said that the money would trickle down to places like this...

But it didn't.

A new television channel, Music Television,

broadcast its first music video, this one, in 1981.

The song was about video.

The imagery used screens within screens.

Pink light, fast editing and stepped cuts.

All of these things became part of the language

of popular imagery around the world.

A scene like this shows how music video influenced film.

The editing is fast, the angles are numerous and sexy.

The music is the only thing on the sound track,

we don't hear her feet, for example, and the scene has no story element.

It's pure impressionism.

But '80s America was mostly a male Reagan-ite dreamland.

This film was part of the dreamland.

Rich color. A roller coaster in the sky.

Close-ups of pilots, like those in Star Wars.

Tom Cruise is flying over the Persian Gulf.

He encounters Russian mig pilots, so flies upside down,

this close, and gives them the finger.

Greetings.

Watch the birdie.

Jeez, I crack myself up.

Pure cold war, male fantasy.

Many of the shots last just 2 or 3 seconds, the cutting rate of pop promos and adverts.

Edited on computers.

Scenes could be moved around, shorted, lengthened

and reviewed in computer edit suites in seconds.

An advert for the new masculinity the new America,

the new cinema, and the new dreaming.

No American dream was more potent than this one.

We float into David Lynch's Blue Velvet, like a spaceship landing on earth.

We're in an idealized American small town.

The sort of place where firemen wave as they pass.

White picket fence, children go to school in slow motion.

But Lynch's velvety textures usually give way to something more fearful.

He took us to the dark world of Victorian London

in The Elephant Man, for example, and tracked in to a close up

of a doctor who's sympathetic to John Merrick.

Just as the actor, Anthony Hopkins, drops a tear.

Luck and beautiful craftsmanship.

But the movie shows us the surrealism of Lynch's imagination.

As he filmed side on, the bulbous growths on Merrick's skull, here for example,

he was reminded of the explosions of smoke from a recently erupted volcano,

Mount St. Helens.

A deeply original, visual rhyme.

Such connections take us to the crux of Lynch.

His films protest against the rationality and understandability of everyday life.

He worked with unconscious material the way that a carpenter works with wood.

He says that the key scene of many of his films,

the scene that often combines the beauty of life with its terror,

is the "eye of the duck scene."

Because, as he put it, "when you look at a duck,

the eye is always in the right place."

? A candy colored clown ?

? they call the sandman ?

The eye of the duck scene in Blue Velvet is this one.

? Just to sprinkle stardust ?

? and to whisper go to sleep ?

? everything is alright ?

? I close my eyes ?

? then I drift away ?

? into the magic night ?

The beauty of Roy Orbison's song combines with

the intoxication of Dennis Hopper's character.

? Oh smile and pray, ?

? like dreamers do. ?

? Then I fall asleep to dream ??

As if that beauty hurts.

In dreams indeed.

Like Ronald Reagan, David Lynch

had an almost abstract fear of the outside world.

But he didn't try to push that fear away.

He stared at it through a brilliant frame.

Lynch said that as people get older, their window on the world closes.

This is what was happening to his country in the '80s, and its cinema.

After David Lynch, the second great American director

to emerge in the '80s, was Spike Lee.

He thumbed his nose at white America and bourgeois blackness

and was inventive with movie form.

Take his film, Do the Right Thing, which was shot on this block in Brooklyn.

It's set on a single, sweltering day and builds like a pressure cooker

as tensions between local blacks, Latinos, and whites

are sparked by events at a pizzeria.

Lee and his cinematographer, Ernst Dickerson, use heightened colors

to match the film's boiling themes.

They filmed with tilted camera angles to render things off kilter.

Move on. You're blocking my view.

You are ugly enough. Don't stare at me!

The evil eye doesn't work on me. Mother-sister.

A technique borrowed from one of Lee's favorite films,

The Third Man, in which the non-horizontal camera

was used to show the imbalance of the world of the story.

Lee himself plays the character Mookie, in the film's climax,

the most striking moment of protest in '80s American cinema.

Again, saturated color.

Lee picks up a trashcan.

The camera tracks with him.

Hey!

Then it rushes with the can as Lee throws it

through the window of the pizzeria.

At the end, Lee pairs a quotation from Martin Luther King denouncing violence

with one from Malcolm X, advocating it in self-defense.

David Lynch and Spike Lee were high water marks

in the otherwise low tide of American cinema in the '80s.

Neither, however, spoke the truth about modern life and helped create

the radical independent film movement in America in the '80s

as much as this man and woman.

Writer-director John Sayles and producer, Maggie Renzi.

They used a road less travelled to get their movies made,

and became America's state of the nation filmmakers.

When we started we really had no idea of the future.

Yeah, that there was any place for us, we didn't really analyze it a whole lot.

We just started making stories.

We probably knew by that time

that like Lucas and Spielberg had gone to film school,

but they belonged to Hollywood which was a place that we never

thought we would have anything to do with, although,

John had started writing for Hollywood.

So there you were on the periphery of it,

but there was no expectation that

we were building a career when we made "Return of the Secaucus Seven".

It was about the reunion of a group of college friends,

ten years after they'd been arrested on the way to an anti-war demonstration.

The film felt truthful because it wasn't edited in a flashy, MTV, way.

The camera patiently observed intelligent, adult conversations about politics.

- I mean fighting for what you believe in.

- No offense, but your senator is just fighting to keep his job

and his house on Martha's vineyard.

- Do you know that? Do you really know that?

Have you looked at his record?

- Alright, how did he stand on the canal treaty?

- Wait a minute.

When we started making movies, one of the things

I was always interested in was: What do I see in life around me

that I don't see on a big screen?

When I started working for the studios, a lot of those were more heroic movies

and I was aware of, you know, that's movie making.

You know?

There is the hero and the girl and the best friend

and everybody else is an extra.

Whereas the stories I was interested in, and I came out of being a novelist,

on screen, the characters were more complex and they weren't absolutely heroic.

They might be the protagonist but like your friends they might be somebody

you love and care about, but they don't always act in a noble way.

They don't always do what you wish they would do.

I think from the beginning the smartest thing we did

is decide to make the movies in our own way.

That meant casting them in our way and having complete creative control

over the way we made them, and that includes

non-hierarchical and not luxurious.

It was like Hollywood was only there to see if John could get screenwriting work.

I have less and less respect for them.

I think they don't even do what they do very well anymore.

They spend much too much money.

They have lost whole huge sections of the market place.

I was talking before about the adult audience.

It takes them, you know, nine writers to come up with a script

that's no better than the first version.

I used to be afraid of them and intimated by them,

and now I realize that they don't do their jobs very well.

And that's one reason why the dinosaur is dying.

And now you are older than them.

And now I'm older, now I could be their mother heaven for fend.

Our movies do require paying attention, taking time, engaging with characters

and because of that, I mean the legacy is good.

It's tough... Tough to get the money for what we do,

but when I meet the audience I'm always glad

that we have never changed that.

Yeah, and most, you know, mainstream filmmakers that we know

who work within the studio system, haven't done much better than we have.

As far as the number of movies they've gotten to make

and getting to make their dream projects or whatever.

And they're much more likely to end up saying,

"oh you should have seen my cut," which we've never had to do.

Sayles and Rrenzi were the standard bearers for new independent American film.

Much of the do-it-yourself and political cinema of the '90s derives from their approach.

In France in the '80s, movies seemed to want to kick

the protest films of Sayles and Renzi in the teeth.

Influenced by advertising, cinema became shining again.

French philosophy had become interested in popular culture and postmodernism.

This was a protest too.

A reaction against seriousness.

Into all this sped Luc Besson's, Subway.

Besson had excelled at pop promos and had lived in America.

A roller-skater's snatched a handbag.

His flight from the cops filmed like a car chase on skates.

The flow of action.

The camera in his point of view.

Wide angle shots to make the space deeper.

The best new French director of the '80s, Leos Carax,

combined the visual hyperactivity of Besson with a punky sense

of outrage at modern life.

We're on the Pont Neuf in the grand center of Paris, the city of light.

Fireworks.

Public enemy plays.

Juliette Binoche.

This could be a modern dance about high class people,

but in fact these characters are homeless.

They sleep rough on the bridge.

She's going blind, he's a drunk.

Around this gritty truth about modern life, Carax built his gigantic film.

The most expensive ever made in Paris.

He had the entire bridge rebuilt as a set, a "folie de grandeur,"

with sweeping camera moves, glossy and wasteful in a glossy, wasteful age.

The plight of homelessness was treated with the exact same style

as this Hollywood musical.

Grand studio sets of Paris, modern dance, color splashed across the screen.

Romantic ecstasy and agony.

Sashay down to Spain in the '80s and you find that protest had had a sex change.

On the left is Pedro Almod�var in his 1982 film Labyrinth of Passions.

Camp, a touch of goth in his eyeliner and purple drawn-on sideburns.

Purple '80s lighting.

Dictator Franco had died.

Madrid's underground culture was transgressive, anarchic.

And to this, Almod�var lobbed in a dash of the stylistic antics of this Beatles film.

He loved its celebration of pop music, camera work that makes you feel you're there.

It's youthful surface.

A scene like this was so provocative.

It's a porn shoot, which conservative Spain would have hated.

But the porn star is male, even more of a no-no.

And it's making fun of the so called Driller Killer, video nasty.

And the porn star's wearing fur, and the color's bright,

and the style is cheap, not classy.

Almod�var's signature was the comic grotesque.

He challenged old-fashioned Spain with sex and style.

And in complete contrast, to see the range

of Spanish cinema after Franco, look at this film.

The Quince Tree Sun [El sol del membrillo]

directed by Victor Erice.

A man has been painting this quince tree for weeks.

He painted a line on the fruit then drew a line on the canvas,

to get the fruit's position exactly right.

But then, the fruit tree drooped a bit, so he painted another line and another.

Erice uses no camera moves.

Natural light and a gentle pace to capture the passing of time

and the delicacy of the moment.

Spain, under Franco, was all about lies.

The Quince Tree Sun was a return to the truth.

A national detox.

Where politics softened in Spain in the '80s, here in Britain they hardened.

A right-wing government brought protesters to the streets.

The government's view was that culture should reassure

and bolster a traditional sense of national pride.

But the best filmmakers kicked back or focused on other identities.

We're in London.

A high level shot like a musical.

A middle class Pakistani business man is reopening his launderette.

The right-wing government liked entrepreneurs.

Immigrants, less so.

He dances with this white woman.

A Sardu of South London. Yes.

But the film lobbed in more provocations.

In the back room the entrepreneur's nephew is having sex.

With a bloke.

A white bloke.

The guy dribbles champagne, the drink of '80s "nouveau riche" yuppies,

into the mouth of the nephew.

Gay, mixed race sex.

Oh, and the white bloke is a Neo Nazi.

A waltz of multi-cultural Britain.

My Beautiful Laundrette was a knee in the balls to the right-wing government.

As much as a provocation as Bunuel's films were in Franco's Spain.

Shit!

Far more serious but equally bold was this Scottish film.

This boy, wee Jamie, is being brought up in poverty by his granny.

She sits at the fire.

Keeps her back to him.

He's always behind her here, in the cold, watching.

This shot's exactly from Jamie's point of view.

Under the table.

We see the top of it in the image.

The granny sits down as usual, ignoring Jamie.

But then, unusually, she takes a swig of beer.

The beer seems to warm her heart...

Because she reaches back into Jamie's space.

As director Bill Douglas had rigorously filmed the spaces,

we know how unusual this reach is.

A simple scene but one of the great moments of reconciliation in cinema.

Who is it, my darling?

Another Scottish filmmaker, Bill Forsyth, looked at working class life too,

but he was more romantic.

I mean I could just sit in a hole and look at a housing estate

and listen to the ice cream van, you know, for quite a long while, you know,

that would fill me with good feelings.

Do you want to dance?

It's really good.

You just lie flat down and dance.

I'll show you what I mean.

I'll start it off and you just join in when you feel confident enough.

Okay.

Forsyth's movie, Gregory's Girl, looked at young people

and the ordinary places where they fall in love.

For most of the film, the camera's horizontal, as normal,

but then he has it tilted, a touch of poetry.

We are clinging to the surface of this planet while it spins through space

at a 1,000 miles an hour, held only by the mystery force gravity.

Wow.

A lot of people panic when you tell them that and they just fall off.

I see you're not falling off.

That means you've got the hang of it.

You know, people in landscape, I don't mean that in a visual way,

but just someone finding themselves somewhere in that moment of, you know,

apprehension that you are here and this is where you are.

It's a difficult moment to describe.

But it's a moment that is very, very cinematic for me.

This man, Terence Davies, made the greatest British film of the '80s,

Distant Voices, Still Lives.

We're in Davies' own childhood, Liverpool in the 1950s.

A family home terrorized by a brutal father.

We see his mom in the present and then hear the kids in the past.

We're flashed backwards in time without a cut.

So this image is a memory image.

Tony are those two sisters of yours up yet?

Yeah.

They're just coming down.

Hiya mum.

Morning Maisie.

Morning mum.

Morning Eileen.

Nervous, love?

A bit.

Have a cup and a ciggy.

? I get the blues ?

? when it's raining. ?

? The blues I can't lose ?

? when it rains. ?

? Now each little rain drop ?

Davies' camera tracks down the hallway.

? Falls on my window pane ?

? reminds me of the tears I shed ?

? the tears were all in vain ?

? so I sit and wait ?

? for the sun to shine ?

? to shine all my blues away ?

? it rained when I met you ?

? and it rained when I lost you ?

? so I get the blues ?

? when it rains ??

One of Davies' signatures is the very slow dissolve.

? There's a man going 'round ?

? taking names. ?

? There's a man... ??

Davies nearly always frames symmetrically.

I think it's due to Catholicism and because when I was growing up

it was the Tridentine mass and you were...

The altar was there and you were looking at it like this

and it was literally like that.

And everything in the church tended to be like that, symmetrical.

My great love is Vermeer, and I am sure that has had a huge

subconscious effect on me, you know, that stillness that you get,

that everything tends to be symmetrical and beautifully composed.

There's the most wonderful stillness about it.

Davies' love of the slow forward tracking shot

comes from this moment in Intolerance.

And they literally built a crane.

And they haul the camera up this crane and you see it come up like this.

And these elephants and all these people going up these steps.

Absolutely breathtaking.

If you were feeling exactly the same at the beginning and the end of the track,

you're using the track incorrectly.

You've got to feel different towards the subject.

And another influence on Davies was this crane shot,

in the Hollywood musical Young at Heart.

A main character seems to have killed himself,

a painful moment in the story.

But the camera glides beautifully into a perfect world.

And Davies uses this combination of beauty and pain in Distant Voices, Still Lives.

His youth was often painful.

He lines it up and re-enters it through cinema.

? There's a man going 'round taking names ?

In doing so he makes it beautiful and so transcends the pain.

A wholly cinematic way of speaking truth to power.

? Oh death is that man ?

? taking names. ?

? He has taken... ??

And then look at this movie by the Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway.

Like Terence Davies, Greenaway likes his frames to be perfectly symmetrical.

But here he takes symmetry much further.

Why do we have to have two nostrils?

Why do we have to have two of everything?

Symmetry is all.

We're twins.

The two chairs and lamps balance.

The woman's hair is echoed by the gilt mirror.

Everything is symmetrical except that the woman has only one leg.

And so, like the director himself, she wants to make the scene, her world,

symmetrical, so she has the other leg cut off.

Greenaway analyzed imagery more than any other British director.

He says that the story of film is only just beginning.

If British cinema of the '80s was a brilliant tempest,

its god of thunder was Derek Jarman.

A man walks through a bleak, ruined landscape.

It's like we're in an Italian rubble movie after World War II.

This is intercut, fast, '80s style, with men with machine guns,

and Morris dancers, a symbol of genteel village England.

It's like there's been an ideological storm.

Jarman's rage and values could not be clearer.

Here, a male dancer is intercut with a wreath

to remember the war dead of the British empire,

and with a fire, and we hear a Nazi speech.

Video editing meets Leni Riefenstahl,

meets Kenneth Anger's imagery of magic, and dance, and frenzy.

The Last of England was a thunderbolt in '80s cinema.

It's hard to imagine a greater provocation to the establishment.

As was this film, Videodrome.

A man is watching TV alone, late at night, half switched off, half turned on.

The TV throbs.

I want you, Max.

You.

Come on.

Come on.

The idea that a machine can be sensual, something that we can kiss, have sex with.

Writer director David Cronenberg is foreseeing the sexualization

of our solitary relationships with screens.

Please.

Cronenberg continued to be fascinated

by the boundary between hard and soft, skin and metal, in modern life.

Never more so than in this scene from his film Crash.

A car show room as an erotic place.

Almost whispered dialogue.

I'm caught.

No outside traffic noise or music.

Gleaming metal.

Pacing like velvet.

Rosanna Arquette's hair the same color as the leather upholstery.

Cronenberg's using a novel by J.G. Ballard to tell modern, liberal society

that we are all more down and dirty than we pretend.

Canadian directors have been particularly good at blasting hypocrisy.

Norman McLaren won an Oscar for this astonishing stop frame animation,

in which two neighbors fight over a single flower in their garden.

They use an innovative electronic score.

A white picket fence, a symbol of suburbia.

Painter Pablo Picasso called it the best film ever made.

And in French speaking Canada the decade ended

with this brilliant assault on hypocrisy and '80s consensus.

A group of actors stages a passion play as a promenade,

where the audience walks to follow the action.

The brutalization of Christ is very real

but the actors describing historical crucifixions do so coolly,

like a textbook almost.

And they make the audience feel uncomfortable

by pointing out their voyeurism.

Jesus of Montreal, like the best films of the '80s, again speaks truth to power.

This time, the power is us, the audience.

It and Cronenberg's films tell us that we lie to ourselves

about our bodies, our sex, our values.

The bravery of the best '80s films was exciting.

And then came the '90s, the era of digital and the Internet.

When reality started to lose its realness, but cinema entered another golden age.

Synced and corrected by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today