All language subtitles for The Story of Film - An Odyssey S01E02

At the end of the 1800s a new artform
flickered into live.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them
isn't box-office or showbiz.

It's passion, innovation!

So let's travel the world
to find this innovation for ourselves.

To discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Kyôko Kagawa

who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.

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

And in the movies of Martin Scorcese
and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and
Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film,
an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation
across twelve decades,

six continents
and a thousand films.

In this chapter we meet

the great film comedian
Charlie Chaplin

and discover the realist directors
who threatened Hollywood.

1918.
World war I had just ended.

Much of Europe was
scorched earth.

The seeds of nazism
had been planted.

A few years later, the
surrealist manifesto said

that art should record dreams.

But what dreams?

In the hills of Los Angeles, the myth
of Hollywood had just been born.

The town had started
to burnish itself.

Starlets with the especial slenderness
of youth were attracted

by the bauble that is Hollywood:
shiny and romantic.

With its escapism
and promise of perfection.

This part of the story of film
is about the strengthening

A factory with which the world
would fall in love.

But, as we'll see,
for all its strength and power,

many inside the factory system
of Hollywood

seemed not to notice
how fragile it was.

How breakable.

Before the 1920s were over, key filmmakers
were trying to break the bauble.

Investment in cinema increased
10-fold in the late teens and 20s.

Hollywood became an industry.

The money often came from the
east coast bankers.

On the west coast it was spent
by a series of production bosses

working class, Jewish businessmen.

Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian
immigrant and fur trader,

set up famous players,
which would become Paramount.

Four Canadian Polish brothers
set up Warner bros.

A brash Russian called
Louis B. Mayer, ran MGM.

They built big boring bunkers
called 'sound stages',

so that filming could move indoors,
into the dark, to control this...

Light!

This scene in Citizen Kane shows
that Hollywood could work wonders with light.

The beams make the library
look like a sepulcher.

The documents gleam.

Hollywood set up
a production line system

the way that the 'Model T'
Ford motor car was assembled.

In Japan, at the time,
directors led the production process,

but in Hollywood it was production bosses
like Zukor and Mayer and Warner.

Below them, in the movie barns,
writers would concoct stories.

Talent scouts would find new starlets
in coffee shops or magazines.

Set designers in the boring buildings
would invent magnificent buildings.

This is what legendary Hollywood designer
William Cameron Menzies

thought Baghdad might look like.

Inhuman in scale.
Elegant and decorative.

Costume designers conjured
lifestyles and selves.

And got to know the bodies
of their stars.

This is one of Marilyn Monroe's dresses.

Make-up artists came up with new types
of foundation and eyelash and look.

This is the room and table where
Marilyn Monroe went blonde.

Engineers devised new technology.
Lights to illuminate hair.

To make eye lashes cast shadows on the
face of Marlene Dietrich in Desire.

Dollies on which to move the camera,
to make the image glide.

The image glided in Gone with the Wind
as if blown by the wind,

away from the lovers and the sunset.

And new cameras themselves.
Beautiful objects.

This one, used in World War II.
Half camera, half gun.

This one, from the 1960s:
portable and nosey.

And then the money-men thought:
'wait a minute!

Why don't we buy the screens as well
so we can control

where the films are shown and when?'

And, so, things that were made
in boring buildings,

were shown in grand ones.

The whole point was to
standardize and control.

Actress Joan Crawford's contract
specified when she should go to bed.

Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan
contract fined him

for every pound he weighed over 190 pounds.

Novelist Henry Miller called
Hollywood's production line,

'a dictatorship in which the artist
is silenced.'

It was a dictatorship, and yet
some say there was genius in it.

A genius of sorts, Busby Berkley,
choreographed this fantasy,

Girls in the Snow making
patterns with their moves.

Increasingly abstract.
Geometric.

Stanley Donen, who made
Singin' in the Rain:

The studio system, in my opinion,
didn't really get into the film.

The "studio system" was the
garden, where we all worked.

I mean, there I was at MGM
with a lot of enormously gifted people

and I often think about that.

That idea of having a company
which brought people together

to make money, it's all they were doing.

They weren't doing it
for any other reason.

What was behind it was
an economic thing.

They were a company making money,
or hoping to make money.'

So the industry was a bauble
but also a garden,

which is what Agnes Demille
called Hollywood a decade earlier.

And what varied flowers grew there!

MGM, for example, which was so
proud of itself

that it filmed
its own Neo-classical buildings,

was said to have
"more stars than there are in heaven."

Its movies had an opulence
and optimism.

In this dance scene in
Singin' in the Rain,

even the shadows
have light in them.

Warner brothers was
more streetwise.

Its stars were angels
with dirty faces.

Scenes like this one from
The Maltese Falcon

had a downtrodden hero.

Harder lighting.

Sharper shadows.

Gangster outfits.

Night-time settings.

Murder.

Melodrama.

Movie journalism.

This scene from The Scarlet Empress
shows Paramount's style.

Sparkling.

Champagney.

Costumes on display.

Feminine.

Romantic.

Wry.

More taken by the "veiled" and the east.

Tell me, Alexei.
Are you still fond of me?

Yes, your imperial majesty,
I love you.

The "studio system" was a
capitalist production line.

It was copied around the world.

In India, Mexico, Italy,
Britain, China, Hong Kong,

Korea, and France.

Each of those industries made
formulaic, copycat movies.

But the system also fostered
expertise and taste.

Extravagance and brilliance.

The ghost in the machine
was art.

By the mid-'20s, the boring buildings
were making 700 films a year.

This is one of them,
The Thief of Bagdad.

It could stand for many of them.

It states its theme up front.

A holy man shows
that happiness must be earned.

A tweak of the American dream.

Then a wide shot
of a street scene.

We hardly notice the man lying
at the head height of the merchants.

But then we dissolve inwards
to see him.

We recognize him.

He's the movie's star,
Douglas Fairbanks.

He's also its producer.

He's asleep at the center
of the action.

Unaware that we're looking
at him.

And we dissolve in again.

Soft lighting.

Shallow focus.

Make-up.

A certain femininity.

But then he steals
a man's wallet.

Our beautiful, dreaming hero
is a thief.

The passer-by exits screen right.

Notices his wallet is missing.

Cut to Doug, who looks
screen right.

The camera doesn't
cross the line.

We know he's looking at his victim.
Smiling.

In just 90 seconds the film
has told us its theme:

Romantic and American.

Introduced us to a society.

Then a scene.

Then an individual.

Seduced us with style:
The poetics of lighting.

Amused us with character.

A likable rogue.

A human being like us,
but more glamorous

and with more exciting life.

It makes the space very clear.

We're not confused
about where we are.

The story kicks in, of course.

The thief has broken
into a palace.

He hears that a Princess
is there.

Glimpses her fairytale bed.

Will he go down to look at her?

No.

No.

Maybe.

No.

Yes.

We can't wait to see her either.

The curl of the fantasy balcony.

The elegant attenuation
of her mosquito net.

His trousers are see through now.

He looks through the net.

His shadow.

Hollywood cinema, the bauble,
is brilliant at the anticipation of seeing.

The desire to see.

The pleasure of seeing.

The thief falls in love, of course.

And his love sets in motion
the rest of the film.

This sort of movie
is usually called classical,

but really it's romantic.

It became Hollywood's claim
to fame in the '20s.

It's what most people mean
when they even say the word "movie."

It's the mainstream, the bauble.

So Hollywood mainstream films
in the '20s

were entertaining and romantic,

but our theme
is innovation in cinema.

Were they innovative?

Some of the most popular films
of the '20s, the comedies,

most certainly were.

Three filmmakers Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd

were the greatest of the
American comedy directors.

Before them there
was mostly slapstick.

This sight gag on a fast moving train
was typical.

A good cheap laugh using a
bucket of water.

But then came Keaton,
obsessed by the camera.

In this scene from his
film The Cameraman,

he shows that fascination.

Keaton became the greatest comic
image-maker the cinema had yet seen.

He thought like an architect.

In this sequence in a short film
he made in 1920,

the house built becomes
a playpen.

It falls around him.

Keaton helped define
silent cinema.

He just got it.

We've already seen
that he got that in editing,

a cut replaces
one space with another.

Here he jokes about it, as if,
as he's walking down a street,

he's suddenly on a cliff top.

But as this scene shows,
he also got that movies

are about looking.

And he got that they're
brilliant at dare-devilling.

He begins this sequence
with an overhead shot,

to make the building
look really high.

In the story, Buster must jump
between the tall buildings.

He had a set built above
this third street tunnel in L.A.

Right at the very top of this
old archive shot of the tunnel.

Keaton's camera position makes him look
far higher up than he was.

There was a net just below,
out of shot.

Just as well because
Keaton didn't make it

and was badly bruised.

Keaton's inventiveness was
often highly planned,

but sometimes spontaneous.

Here, he saw a train arriving
and so improvised a gag

to make it look like he himself
stopped it.

Then started it again.

One of his greatest
movies, The General,

was a comedy epic about a train.

It's set during
the American civil war.

Buster's a Southern train driver.

A bit eccentric,
obsessed by detail.

In the first half of the film,
he travels north

to the captive's lair,
and rescues his sweetheart.

Every visual joke and
setup in the first half,

is repeated and amplified
in the second,

but in reverse order.

We get the pattern.

We see the next joke
coming and we're laughing

before it even starts.

The climax of the film has been called:
The most stunning visual event

ever arranged for a comedy,
perhaps for any kind of film.

The northern enemy's advancing,
so Keaton sets fire to a bridge.

Their train crosses.
The bridge gives way.

This is no trick shot.

The locomotive and the bridge
were real.

The wreck of the train
was visible for years to come.

Such scale, such sublime, was a
key element of silent film.

Labor was cheap.

Wall street hadn't crashed.

Imaginations were extravagant
and uncapped.

Studios were not yet afraid of
the size of director's dreams.

Keaton's dreams outstripped
his box office.

He was eventually sacked by MGM.

He hit the bottle and lived
in a trailer in a car park

beside his former studio.

He was forgotten for years,

but as this rare archive
footage of him shows,

Keaton was joking 'til the end.

This little cigarette routine shows
he still had the urge to improvise.

In 1965, at the Venice film festival,
he got a standing ovation.

He died the next year.

Amongst the scores of filmmakers
who were influenced by Keaton

is Palestine's, Elia Suleiman.

This scene shows that Sulieman,
like Keaton, filmed in deadpan.

He keeps back from the action.
And finds grumpiness funny.

Buster Keaton only
once shared the screen

with our next great silent film
comedian, Charlie Chaplin.

In this scene in Limelight,

Chaplin shows that whilst he was
less into the camera than Keaton,

he was far more into
body movement.

Chaplin thought like a dancer
and a vaudevillian.

Here he rehearses a comic movement
before filming it in costume.

Actor and producer
Norman Lloyd knew Chaplin

and, also, Alfred Hitchcock, who was born
not far from Chaplin in London.

'Hitch came from
a middle class family.

His father was a poultry
dealer, fish and poultry,

and Hitch always had an aspiration
to be part of that world.

Charlie came out of the direst
poverty that you can imagine.

Unbelievable poverty.

I mean, stuff like he
and his brother Sydney,

who was his half-brother,

stealing fruit, rotten fruit.

They would know
where the wagon was

with fruit that was going
to be dumped.

They'd go and get that fruit.
Eat that fruit.

His mother being put
into an asylum and out.

In and out.

I think his father
was a drinker.

Charlie had such an upbringing
that it's in the movies.'

And never more so than
in his picture, The Kid,

which recreated the rooms and
relationships of Chaplin's childhood.

Cold mornings.

Worn out bedding.

Life in a London garret,
with a bath on the wall.

Chaplin plays a version of his
by now famous character,

a penniless tramp, who thinks
he's a gentleman dilettante.

Who finds an orphan boy
and brings him up.

The boy starts to work
for his dad.

He breaks windows
so his dad can fix them.

Shot in America, of course,
but English style windows and doors.

Eventually, the boy's taken
to an orphanage.

Chaplin coaxed a brilliant performance
from Jackie Coogan as he's taken away.

The film humanized comic cinema.

It D.W. Griffith-ized it,
you could say.

It showed Chaplin's
passionate empathy with the poor.

It was a huge hit
around the world.

Chaplin was cinema's
Charles Dickens.

He built his own studio in L.A.
in the English style

and filmed it in time lapse.

A rare thing to do,
which shows his pride in it.

He had final cut on his films.

His premieres were mobbed.

The studio today looks like
a row of English houses,

plunked in a megalopolis.

A deleted scene from his
film City Lights,

that Chaplin made ten years later,
shows how his mind worked.

He's on a street corner.

A piece of wood is stuck
in an air vent.

Chaplin begins to play with it.

To improvise.

The Soviets thought
of him as a marxist,

but Chaplin was
almost a Jungian too.

A believer in play.

Inspiration.

Finding ideas within yourself.

It's like he's strumming
on the table,

letting his unconscious
do its work.

60 years later, the British director,
Nicholas Roeg, also seemed to try

to show the unconscious lives
of his characters.

'You could be right.
Then again, why spoil the mystery?

The people act cool
with each other,

but their hands, filmed in close up,
suggest twitchy mental energy.

Chaplin's deleted scene
is a lovely little poem

about daydreaming
on street corners.

Stanley donen sees ideas
in Chaplin too.

'To be wonderful choreography
it has to have an idea

which overwhelms the
whole production,

or dance, or whatever you'd like
to call it.

And that's what's hard to find.

A great, wonderful, encompassing idea
for the musical number.

Well, the idea of the dictator kicking
the balloon is a great metaphor

because it's Adolf Hitler
making the world his toy

and the image is so spectacular
that that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

If you can come up with
that kind of idea.

But it had to be... First
he was going to...

I don't know how he thought of it,
in what order,

but he was going to make a
film about Adolf Hitler

and he was going to play Hitler.

And how was he going to
make a buffoon of him

but not make him be
the ogre that he was

and that's quite
an accomplishment.

Fascism and ballet.

Who else would have thought
up a scene like this?

No one else in the story of
film combines entertainment,

ideas, movement, improvisation
and politics like Chaplin.

In France in the 1940s Chaplin
inspired Jacques Tati,

but Tati leant forward
and wore short trousers,

where Chaplin leant backwards
and wore long ones.

In Italy, Toto became a huge star,
wearing Chaplin's trademark bowler hat

and with Chaplin's
jabby, confident manner.

And in the massive film industry of
India, this man, megastar and director,

Raj Kapoor, modeled his screen character,
"the tramp", on Chaplin's.

Streetwise.

Plucky.

Tipping his hat.

Stealing from the rich.

And in America itself, the great director
Billy Wilder saw Chaplin as his master.

Gloria Swanson explicitly impersonates him
in Sunset Boulevard.

But even a moment like this in
Chaplin's The Great Dictator...

Was reworked in this scene,
in Wilder's Some like it hot.

Look at that!

Look how she moves!

Chaplin co-founded United Artists,
the studio that made Some like it hot.

The studio was one of the great
foundation stones of Hollywood.

Chaplin was
in American cinema's bloodstream.

But to the country's shame,
it kicked him out in the '50s

because he was a leftist.

'When you work with a man
like Chaplin, or Renoir,

you assimilate.

You hope their greatness.

That is to say,
you become part of their world.

And you try to not only
work on that level

but you absorb
something from them.

And you begin to have the
points of view that they have,

not that you've disregarded
your own, but what you bring

is the ability to assimilate
what they're doing.'

The comedian who was most
influenced by Chaplin in the '20s

was the Nebraskan son
of a photographer, Harold Lloyd.

At first Lloyd was too
like Chaplin.

Here he shrugs, wears a frock coat
and sports a moustache.

But then he and his producer
tried him in big black, rimmed glasses.

In those days this was
a nerdy look.

But add in Lloyd's athleticism,
and the flinty courage

that we see here
and you got a ballsy dreamer.

Both aggressive and lyrical.

A jock-nerd.

Lloyd's most influential film,
Safety Last,

ends with one of the most famous
sequences in '20s cinema.

He plays a hick who
pretends to his girlfriend

that he's manager of a store.

In the climax of the film,
as a publicity stunt for the store,

Lloyd, who had vertigo and a
missing thumb and forefinger

on one hand in real life,
climbs the building.

The sequence is a vertical obstacle
race: a bird, a net, a plank, a clock,

a rope, a dog, a mouse, a gun,
and a wind-gauge get in Lloyd's way.

When he finally reaches
the top of the building

the action reaches a crescendo,
and he swoops in an arc

into the arms of his sweetheart.

The climb is a beautiful idea
on film.

On the other side of the world,
Japan's great director, Yasujirô Ozu,

was influenced
by the ballsy dreamer.

The students in this film have been
working out how to cheat at exams.

They have Harold Lloyd's
confident silliness, his man-boyishness.

The comedies were the brightest, most
entertaining and innovative things

to come out of
Hollywood in the '20s.

They, and the extravagant romance
of films like The Thief of Bagdad

in all its splendor,
its special effects and sweep,

made Hollywood a major
export industry for America.

But something in its very flickering,
the fact that the bauble was a fantasy,

made it vulnerable.

This architectural dream of Baghdad
isn't the real Baghdad of course.

This is the real Baghdad.

To say so can shatter
the bauble.

Reality can break fantasy.

And in the '20s,

several filmmakers
already realized this.

They wanted to show this:
real life.

Without the costumes
and glitter.

Non-fiction.

In 1921, an Irish-American explorer,
Robert Flaherty,

made the longest non-fiction film
so far in the story of film,

Nanook of the North.

It's set in Alaska.

And has beautiful but conventional
scenic shots like this.

But then it focuses on
one real Itivinuit man,

Nanook, and his family.

Nanook of the North
was no travelogue.

It stared into Nanook's face.

It was about his psychology,
his mythic struggle against the elements.

Like Chaplin and D.W. Griffith,
Flaherty was a romantic,

but by using non-actors, non-stars,
no Douglas Fairbanks or Garbo here.

He made the audience
look more ethically.

As it happens, Flaherty
staged this scene and others,

but Nanook of the North
was a huge hit around the world.

People had seen a real
man, a playful father

with a sense of
humor, on screen.

You could buy Nanook
ice cream bars.

Nanook's death, two years later,
of starvation, made headlines.

And so documentary, as an art form,
as a viable genre, was born.

Documentary is often thought
of as merely information

but in fact non-fiction cinema is amongst
the most innovative in the story of film.

Forugh Farrokhzad's Iranian film,
The House is black,

used beautiful tracking
shots to turn a home

for people with leprosy
into a film poem.

In this film essay, Sans soleil,
Chris Marker filmed real places

in Japan and elsewhere.

Then wrote a fictional commentary
in which an imaginary women

quotes from made-up letters
from the filmmaker.

He wrote: I'm just back from
Hikida, the northern island.

Rich and hurried Japanese
take the plane, others take the ferry.

Waiting. Immobility.
Snatches of sleep.

Curiously all of that makes me
think of a past or future war.

Imagined words on top
of non-fiction pictures.

That's why I go into
so much trouble when I got back.

'Cause I was in the mindframe
of well, just come back

from a place where everyone
wants me dead.

And director Brian Hill and
and poet Simon Armitage

interviewed this man about
his war experiences,

then turned his
words into poems,

then had him speak the poems
to make his memories magical.

Exit wounds or burns to the face.
You're just soft in the head.

And the British army isn't the place
for a lying bastard or basket case.

Watch him now.
Watch him all the time.

In the '60s, Jørgen Leth
made this short documentary

The perfect Human.

In a documentary made
nearly 40 years later,

director Lars Von Trier asked
Leth to remake the original

five times, each time
with a startling new challenge.

All these are innovative high
points in the story of film,

and show that documentary
directors, from Flaherty onwards,

were really co-directors.

The other half of the directing team
was real life itself.

Back in L.A. in the '20s,
maybe it was seeing documentaries

like Nanook of the North
that led our next filmmaker

to use realism to undermine
the Hollywood fantasy.

A director called Erich Von Stroheim
took on the establishment.

Here he filmed himself square on,
looming out of the dark.

Grinning.

Scarred.

Eric Von Stroheim was one of
the few legitimate geniuses

of the early silent days.

He was a man of such vision
and he was so great a poet and an artist

that he found nothing
but trouble in Hollywood.

Stroheim's drive to realism
was more obsessive than Flaherty's.

Here he even shows an actress

how to do a simple thing
like comb her hair.

A small detail in the scene.

This is his gigantic fifth film,
Greed.

The man on the right
is a dentist.

His wife wins the lottery.

In the original prints, the money
was hand tinted yellow.

As she gets obsessively greedy,

so her husband becomes
drunken and penniless.

He beats her.

Stroheim shows her agony,
her smallness.

Eventually the man
murders his wife

and, in this famous climax
shot in death valley,

also kills a rival
who put him out of business.

By now the yellow,
the color of money,

has flooded the whole world
of the story.

And, as the man is handcuffed
to the body, so he himself must perish.

The story alone shows Stroheim's contempt
for Hollywood romance, for the bauble.

As did his techniques.

He shot every scene of the
novel by Frank Norris,

on which the film was based.

Nine months of shooting.

Sometimes, as here,
in baking heat.

Actors pushed to their limits.

A budget of $1.5 million.

The finished movie ran 7 hours.

Stroheim was the Emile Zola
or Dostojevski of cinema.

Cinematographer Carl [...] :
'Early in his life he was visited

by such very great humiliation.

Such deep, inward, psychic
wounds that there came in him

an insane desire to use
his genius as a weapon.

MGM hated the results.

Stroheim's ultra-realism became
a stigma.

He didn't get to direct
many more films.

Here, in 1948, he returns to his home
city of Vienna to direct a film,

but nothing came of it.

In 1950, he saw the cut version of
Greed, and cried.

He said that the film was dead.

In the same year, Stroheim
played the protective butler

in Billy Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard.

In this famous scene, Wilder shows
fictional movie star Norma Desmond

watching one of her old movies.

The clip is from a sublime, extravagant
real movie from the 1920s, Queen Kelly.

It was directed, way back then,
by none other

than the sublime, extravagant,
Erich Von Stroheim.

For complicated reasons the movie
never saw the light of day.

Three years after Von Stroheim's
Greed, another MGM film

tried to portray '20s America with far
more realism than romantic cinema.

It became the greatest pre-Wall Street crash

social problem picture of its time.

The Crowd tells the story
of an ordinary New York couple.

They have a child, but she dies.

In this heartbreaking scene,
the father thinks his dead daughter

is merely sleeping, and so
tries to hush street noise

so that it won't
disturb her slumber.

The Crowd's director,
King Vidor, met James Joyce in Paris.

He adored D.W. Griffiths' ideasy
epic Intolerance.

He was that rare Hollywood beast,
an intellectual.

His films almost never feature villains,
and were written mostly by women.

Vidor pushed realism in acting
beyond the Hollywood norm.

Here he films the leading actress
in the crowd in static shot,

a longish take,
no fancy clothes or set.

Just her growing despair.

The Crowd was the first movie
to use New York extensively as a location.

Vidor used hidden cameras.

He cast an unknown actor,
James Murray, instead of a star.

To show the scale of the office
where the husband worked,

he designed this magnificent sequence.

An overhead studio crane shot finds
John among the other identical desks.

Billy Wilder repeated it in The Apartment,
a bitter-sweet reworking of Vidor's film.

We dissolve through
to Wilder's everyman,

played by Jack Lemon
at the very center of the frame.

And Orson Welles used the same
visual idea in The Trial,

exaggerating it by craning
upwards and using small people,

and even dolls, and smaller
desks in the background

to force the perspective.

MGM was uneasy about the crowd's refusal
to romanticize ordinary New York life.

They made Vidor shoot
seven different endings

in various shades of optimism.

'They say for a studio tuned
to glamour pictures and happy endings,

which it was for then,
and many years afterwards.

To have a realistic picture
which put the spotlight

on marriage
and on any kind of American life.

And then, you can't have
a happy ending on that.

It just wouldn't fit.
But the studio didn't know.

They were lost.

What sort of how to end this
picture happily?

So we made actually seven
endings and tried it out.

Seven previews with the various
endings and finally I came up

with the ending where he's
lost again in the crowd

and the camera moves
back, back, back.

The Crowd sums up a lot
about cinema of the '20s and '30s.

It showed mass society emerging,
it focused on the everyman,

as French films would do.

And showed the kinetic energy
of cities themselves.

Their rhythms and compositions,
like the German movies

of Fritz Lang and
Walter Ruttmann.

And the Soviet films
of Dziga Vertov.

In the Soviet Union itself in the '20s,
this wonderful film played

with the rebellious idea
of realism and cities.

We're on Mars. It's all angles,
diagonals, modernist costumes.

This is queen Aelita. She's shown earth
for the first time and sees a city.

A battleship.

Then, a focus pull
to a balcony in Moscow.

The queen has glimpsed something real,
earth, and she wants it.

We'll get to the famous Soviet
films of the '20s soon,

but those by this director,
Yakov Protazanov, are quite unlike them.

Protazanov worked at the same time
as the director of this film,

Yevgeni Bauer.

A scholar studies in his room.
Handsome side lighting.

The scholar's aunt arrives.
Bauer uses an open door

to create a slit on screen,
like a Vermeer painting.

Later, we're in the scholar's study.

Daringly for the time,
a main source light

is in the shot, here
in the foreground.

Bravely natural.

Later, the scholar sees a
beautiful actress on stage,

then, astonishingly, gets
a letter from her, asking to meet.

He waits for her in the snow.

She arrives in the background of
this shot: a daring composition.

Filmed in natural light.

And then the actress dies
and the scholar begins to dream of her.

Here, in a field, she walks
into a beam of intense light.

At the end of the film,
on his deathbed,

exhausted with lamenting,
the scholar's aunt consoles him.

Then Bauer dissolves
from nighttime blue to black and white.

The ghost of the actress
is in the room too.

And so the scholar stirs
once more.

His aunt can't see the actress
of course and becomes upset.

Where romantic cinema
was usually optimistic,

these early Russian films
were laments.

Pessimistic in a way,
about the realism of grief

and loss and longing.

You'd think that films like
Nanook of the North

and Greed and The crowd

and those of Yevgeni Bauer would
be the last word in realism

in cinema at this time, but no.

One profoundly serious Danish filmmaker
challenged romantic and fantasy cinema

with such deeply felt
realism that he was

a one man reformation.

Undercutting the emotionalism
of mainstream cinema

with a spiritual spareness.

Look at this scene from
The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Joan, the 15th century French catholic girl,
who was accused of witchcraft,

has just signed a
statement denying God,

to save her life.

The actress, Marie Falconetti, had
never been in a movie before,

nor would she again.

She's filmed only in close up.

Wears almost no make-up.

You can see her freckles.

Her eyelashes are matted
with tears.

Falconetti's hair was cropped
just before this scene was shot.

The filming was done in silence.

Such an atmosphere on the set
that even some of the electricians cried.

Look at the lighting and focus.

No depth to the image.

Nothing in the background.

No set or shadows.

The walls were painted pink
to remove their glare,

so as not to detract
from falconetti's face.

The set designer, Hermann Warmm,
painted the shadows in Caligari.

The film was directed in France
by a Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer.

He was brought up
in a strict protestant family.

Falconetti and the others
are speaking.

Dreyer had them say
the actual words

that were spoken at the trial
nearly 500 years earlier.

He thought that this gave
the scene conviction.

The '90s maverick Lars Von Trier:

Dreyer is fantastic.

Why?

He... The same thing that
he did with the décor,

he also did with the
script, you know?

He started with a very thick script
and then he kind of reduced and reduced.

I don't know what he did
but it had this monumental feeling of course,

after reducing for many years, it's
like a very good soup, you know,

that's been reducing
for a long time.

I don't know why he's great
but I think that goes for everybody.

Why is Tarkovsky great?

It's really difficult to say,
but it was, for me,

to see his films were
kind of a revelation.

So it's really... You should be
thankful that it's difficult to say

why people are great,
because it's just something

that you feel very strongly and
if you don't feel it strongly

then they're not great.

Dreyer was born out of wedlock,
adopted, and brought up a Lutheran.

He lived here and went
to churches like this.

Though he didn't believe in God,
the purity and plainness

of Lutheran churches seemed
to have formed Dreyer's inner eye.

He is the master
of pared down décor.

Even in his first film, The president,
he seems to want to simplify and purify

his images in a protestant way.

Sets at the time
were usually cluttered, like this.

Soon he started to film
on misty days.

Or into the light
to soften his imagery.

His shots became paler, whiter.

His haunting vampire movie Vampyr,
features shadows against a white wall.

They have a life of their own.

And, in its famous ending, a
vampire's accomplice dies

by suffocating in white flour.

Dreyer's utterly spare use of
whiteness was wildly rebellious.

Hollywood romantic cinema was
supposed to be decorative.

Full of detail.

Not blank.

No other director in the story of
film cared so much about whiteness,

its simplicity,
its spirituality.

At the end of his film Ordet,
(The Word) a woman comes to life

in a white, entirely
undecorated room.

In Dreyer's last film, many years later,
a woman believes so completely

in the power of love
that he films her as

if through a white
scrim, as if in heaven,

and she says this:

Dreyer's seriousness was
deeply unfashionable

and, so, in the '50s,
not getting his films made,

he managed this cinema.

The Danish film institute now
has a study center dedicated to his work.

It's hard not to see Dreyer's
radical reduction of set and decor

in Lars Von Trier's completely
set less film Dogville.

This was the opposite
of romantic Hollywood cinema.

A million miles away from the decorative
splendor of The T hief of Bagdad.

Martha, need I repeat,
we don't need the organ.

We can be spiritual without singing
or reading from the Bible.

It's almost seven.
Don't forget your bell now.

This is the original screenplay
from Dreyer's film Joan of Arc.

He sketched an idea for an image
in the film in the margin.

Dreyer had purged silent cinema
of its spectacle its decoration,

its action, its bauble.

What was left was
a girl facing her God.

Facing the camera.

Years later, France's great
maverick director, Jean-Luc Godard,

had his lover and muse, Anna Karina,
go to the cinema, in his film Vivre sa Vie.

The film she saw was
The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Dreyer's Scandinavian spiritualism
and fatalism was a universe away

from this place: Hollywood.

Escapist, romantic movies
were what most people saw

in movie palaces like these.

Places you'd go after
a hard day's work

to forget your troubles.

To see what utopia
might feel like.

The realist directors of the '20s
hardly got a look in in these places.

But they'd seen something
brilliant in the movies,

the ability to capture reality
and make it splendid and moving.

And this was just the start.

Filmmakers in Germany, France,
Russia, Japan, and China

would see other great things
in the filmstrip.

Their discoveries would make the 1920s
the greatest decade in the story of film.

Subtitles corrected and synced by
Job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today