Original subtitles

Humankind has been responsible for some incredible achievements -

conquering the landscape,

growing the Great Wall of Chinese,

discovering Mona Lisa

and inventing global warming.

But none of these superficially-impressive feats

compares to our finest creation -

cinema.

Outside this palace of dreams, your life is so meaningless,

you might as well be a smudge on a bathroom tile.

But in here, you can forget all that and lose yourself

in a world beyond your stunted imagination.

A world of fantastical derring-do and derring-don't,

of intergalactic explosionations,

of heart-stopping romance between people so good-looking,

they wouldn't even recognise you as part of the same species.

A world where men can be heroes, where women can get off with heroes

and where bullets merely sting a bit

and no-one ever goes to the toilet...

..unless you're watching a specialist film from Japan.

In this landmark documentary, I'll trace the story of cinema

from the early lows of unacceptable picture quality

to the modern heights of contemporary arthouse.

Along the way, I'll be speaking to critics,

composers, historians, experts,

screenwriters, cinematographers,

actors and directors

and waiting for them to speak back to me.

Why do directors shout "Cunt!" at the end of every scene?

"Cut," you mean?

I'm looking at the latest advances in AI-generated video

and wondering whether Hollywood is finished

or just about to be finished.

So join me, Philomena Cunk, as I embark on a blockbuster journey

into the deepest guts of film.

This is Cunk On Cinema.

To understand cinema,

it helps to speak to someone who knows it from within.

Hello. Who are you?

Er, hello. I'm...

I'm Benedict Cumberbatch. I'm an actor.

I've seen you in something.

What might that have been?

- Doctor Strange? - Nah.

Er... Imitation Game?

Power of the Dog?

No! I've remembered it now.

- I saw you in a blue coat in a Tesco Express... - Oh. - ..in about 2019.

You were looking at chickpeas.

Do you like chickpeas?

- Yeah, I like hummus. - Right.

Do all actors like chickpeas?

Uh, to an exten-... I can't speak for all actors.

Right.

I've sort of run out of things to say now.

Oh, this is a disaster.

- Because... - The producer said we have to include recognisable faces

in this programme as early as possible,

or viewers will just switch off.

Movies haven't always been with us.

In fact, for centuries, Earth was a barren wasteland,

devoid of entertainment content.

It's hard to imagine a time before film,

unless you watch a film of it,

which you can't because cameras hadn't been invented yet.

But luckily we have something that's almost as good.

These - eyes.

For centuries, eyes were literally useless

because there was nothing worth looking at.

In desperation, humans invented art.

But even the Dutch masters took ages to make paintings by hand

because they didn't understand how to write AI prompts.

But eventually, in the 1800th century, someone invented a machine

that would thankfully put artists out of their misery -

the camera.

Miraculous though the camera was, it had limitations.

The pictures were static

and the people you photographed had to stand still for so long,

they grew facial hair while posing,

meaning they all looked like they worked at a craft brewery start-up.

This is Eadweard Muybridge.

He was only 12 when he started posing for this photo,

and just look at him.

Muybridge didn't always have a beard.

He was born hairless and screaming

in an unassuming corner of English Britain,

above Barkman Computers in Kingston upon Thames.

He later moved to the USA, became a photographer

and made his name solving a mystery about horses.

Up until now, people didn't know whether horses

lifted all four of their horse feet - or "hooves" -

off the ground when they ran.

So Muybridge put 12 cameras along a racetrack.

As the horse ran past, the cameras would snap freeze-frame pictures

of the long-faced beast.

When Muybridge developed the film, he was astonished to discover

each horse was actually 12 different horses,

all a slightly different shape.

Even more incredibly,

if he viewed these pictures in sequence,

the horse appeared to move.

One man who saw the potential of this as a form of entertainment

was a fully-clothed inventor known as Edison.

Thanks to Edison's Kinetoscope, by simply peering through a hole,

you could witness people you'd never met

doing interesting things with their bodies,

something perverts had known for centuries.

But Edison's invention wasn't perfect.

It gave you a crick in the neck.

You couldn't eat popcorn without it falling down the "film hole."

And, like a whore with two broken wrists,

it could only service one customer at a time.

Luckily, in France, the Lumiere brothers invented something

that could satisfy an entire room full of punters -

like your mum.

The cinematograph.

It's where we get the word cinema,

and also the word mat.

And toe, and graph, and sin.

And enema...

..almost.

Using this, films could be projected onto a wall

and shown to an audience.

This is one of the first films an audience beheld,

Train Arriving At A Station.

Like all French films,

the lead character smokes heavily throughout

and is clearly not wearing a bra.

Still, it was the first movie star in history,

so chances are the steam train was chuffed.

The Lumiere brothers made that film about a train arriving at a station.

Why were people so shocked by that?

I mean, there's a spoiler in the title.

There's no twist or anything.

It's almost as boring as Ben Affleck.

Yeah, because people had not seen that before.

People had seen paintings and theatre,

but they'd never seen an actual moving train coming towards them.

And Ben Affleck, I have my own opinions on.

Do you? What are your opinions on Ben Affleck?

- I think he's got good hair. - Yeah, he does.

European film-makers were quick to realise this fledgling medium

wasn't limited to humdrum reality.

Films could take the audience on a fantastical journey

into the impossible,

a journey filled with wonder and emotion.

One moment, they were gasping in horror

at mankind's senseless blinding of the Moon,

the next, laughing themselves sick at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The magic of cinema was born.

Soon, little cinemas spread around the globe.

In the USA, small viewing holes sprang up called nickelodeons -

"nickel" meaning the US five cent coin

and "odeon" meaning...something else.

And while the French had been content

to watch a train pulling into a station,

the Americans turned it into an action movie -

Edison's The Great Train Robbery,

which ended with a man firing a gun directly down the lens.

Legend has it, when audiences first saw this,

they found it so realistic, all of them died.

Movies quickly became big in America,

big enough to need a whole city devoted to making them.

At the turn of the century, Hollywood was home to a small,

upscale community of teetotal Methodist fruit farmers.

The sort of people who, ironically, no-one's ever made a film about.

The Californian climate, which was ideal for growing lemons,

was even idealier for shooting films

because it had a free overhead lamp called the Sun.

In 1910, to the horror of the devoutly religious farmers

who lived here, film-makers arrived in droves,

bringing woke showbiz debauchery with them.

Early directors relentlessly pumped out froth,

like your dad did in the '80s.

But they soon created the first controversial blockbuster.

The Birth Of A Nation is a typically woke Hollywood fantasy

in which the Ku Klux Klan are the heroes.

Why do people say Birth Of A Nation was racist when it's nothing

compared to some of the stuff my aunt Carol puts on Facebook?

Well, I mean, it sounds like you might need to have a conversation

with your aunt Carol,

cos there's some pretty frightening stuff in Birth Of A Nation.

It's sort of problematic on a bunch of levels.

Could they make it less controversial today,

like re-dub it so KKK are shouting,

"This is wrong, we should stop doing this"?

You know, because their mouths are covered up,

so it'd be quite easy.

But not all Hollywood faces were covered up.

The stars were there for all to see.

Before cinema, humans had to be content

with staring at the plain faces of their loved ones.

Now, for the first time in history, more symmetrical,

attractive faces were available, projected metres high on a wall.

One of the first big stars was Mary Pickford,

who was known as America's Sweetheart,

like JD Vance is today.

Pickford had incredible range.

She could play a woman in a hat,

a woman with no hat,

a woman who's having a think,

a woman touching her face,

a woman beside a fence,

a woman who's got a... Er...

Even more famous was Charlie Chaplin, the Little Tramp.

To this day, the only homeless person it's OK to openly laugh at.

Chaplin was born in London and grew up in squalor,

which I couldn't find on a map but was somewhere around here.

His early life wasn't funny at all,

apart from the bit where he was sent to this workhouse

at the age of seven.

Chaplin overcame an obvious twitching condition

and debilitating clumsiness

to become the most recognisable man on Earth.

Although, tragically, even at the height of his fame,

he still couldn't afford proper clothes or decent living conditions.

With his physical japery,

he became known as the godfather of slapsdick.

Why is it called slapsdick, when you never see them

actually slap anyone in the dick?

It's always round the face, or with a pie.

- Erm... Slap-stick. - What?

It's called slap-stick.

What, so they slap each other with sticks? What's funny about that?

- That's assault. - That's where it came from.

That's what they used to do in Italian theatre.

My mate Paul runs an OnlyFans

where he slaps his own dick quite hard.

It started with just an open palm,

but now he uses any object his followers request.

Like, the other day, he hit it with a hardback copy

of Silas Marner because a bloke in Truro paid him 30 quid.

That sounds quite different to silent movie slapstick.

Another master of silent comedy was Buster Keaton,

who maintained a deadpan face while his life collapsed around him,

like we all fucking do.

He had a reputation for fearlessly performing

absolutely death-defying stunts,

like this one from Steamboat Bill Jr.

The stunt was incredible,

but it actually looked more dangerous than it was.

We're recreating it here to prove it.

So, there's the wall.

And you can see the open window up there.

Now, the whole thing's rigged to fall.

But luckily it won't do that until I hit this button,

because the timing is absolutely crucial.

Now, there's a camera over there,

carefully positioned to capture the action head on.

Now all I have to do is stand on this spot here,

which has been worked out geometrically.

So I'm safe as long as I stay in position

and I don't move about

before I press this button, because if I did, that'd be fat-...

Thanks to pioneers like Keaton, throughout the 1920s,

movies became incredibly popular...

..even though they were silent.

Did you know that Buster Keaton was from Cornwall

and spoke with a really strong Cornish accent?

I had never heard that.

I had heard that Buster Keaton

was from an American family of performers.

No, no, no, he was.

I fed one of his films into an AI thing and interviewed him,

and he spoke with a really strong Cornish accent.

- Well, I think that may be something.... - Have a listen to this.

Oh, hello, I'm Buster Keaton.

I'm sad I died before the invention of the iPhone.

Do you want to listen to it again?

- No, I... Buster Keaton... - Oh, hello, I'm Buster Keaton.

I'm sad I died before the invention of the iPhone!

- Well, but this is a computer simulation... - That's him.

- Unbelievable. - But he made some sound films.

He went on to do some sound films, so we know what he sounds like.

And he did not sound like that.

I did a video of him riding a BMX bike.

Do you want to see that?

ROCK MUSIC PLAYS FAINTLY ON PHONE

Well, again, this is.... By the same token, that's a simulation.

- Yeah. That's not... That's not really him. - No.

No, but he did have a Cornish accent.

This is Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov,

founder of the world's first film school in Moscow -

seen here thinking about milkmaids' bums,

for all I know.

One day, Kuleshov noticed that if he edited two unrelated shots together,

viewers would project their own meaning onto it.

He started with footage of a man looking down the lens

with a neutral expression.

Then he discovered that if he cut from a bowl of soup

to the man's expression,

people watching it decided the man looked hungry.

Although the joke's on them, because I don't like soup.

Then Kuleshov found if he showed a different view of footage

of a woman in a coffin, then cut to the same footage of a man,

viewers assumed the man was heartbroken.

Again, wrong. I couldn't give a shit.

Finally, when he cut from something sexy to the man's face,

they thought he looked aroused.

And, to be fair, that is the face I pull when I orgasm

or unclog a sink or anything.

In a film, when they do editing,

like they're showing a horse in a field,

then they cut to, like...

..I don't know, a man peeling an orange,

where did the horse go?

The hor-...

The horse disappeared.

Because editing is replacing one world with another world.

So is the horse in a sort of void?

The void... The horse is in your memory.

I think editing isn't much use,

because by the time it cuts from one thing to another thing,

I've forgotten what the first thing was.

Should I take a photo of the first thing while it's happening

so I can refer to it when the second thing is on the screen?

Well, your mind takes a photograph.

You remember what's just happened,

and then you feel an emotion

because you're moved on to something else.

- What was the first thing? - The horse.

See, I'd forgotten already.

The early Soviet film-makers soon realised editing's ability

to manipulate emotion made it a powerful tool of persuasion.

This is Russian director Sergei Eisenstein,

the man responsible for one of cinema's unwatchable masterpieces,

Batshit Pumpkin.

Batshit Pumpkin is a startling piece of both prop and ganda,

which used Soviet montage theory to full effect.

It tells the story of an uprising brutally crushed by the state.

And what it lacks in superheroes,

car chases or love scenes,

it makes up for in black and white shots of people shouting.

It also contains one of the most influential and emotional scenes

in movie history,

the massacre on the Odessa Steps.

As riflemen marched down the steps, relentlessly shooting at civilians,

a pram rolls out of control in front of them,

and your heart's in your mouth.

You're genuinely worried it might block their line of sight

as they aim at the women and children.

While the Soviets mastered propaganda,

the Germans were cooking up an avant-garde,

dream-like film-making style known as German Expressionism.

- Can I ask you about German Expressionism? - Yeah.

Should we bother doing German Expressionism in this programme?

Yes. I think if you're talking about cinema,

you've got to do German Expressionism.

It's important.

So there's no way round it?

Perhaps the most timeless example of German Expressionism is Nosferatu,

a nightmarish classic whose skilful use of light and shadow

petrified cinemagoers, 67 years before the release

of unrelated German novelty hit Pump Ab Das Bier.

TECHNO BEAT

# Pump ab das Bier, pump es ab

# Trink ihn aus den Humpen

# Komm lass dich nicht lumpen

# Man kann ich euch pumpen

# Pump ab das Bier, pump es jetzt, pump es hier!

# Pump ab das Bier, pump es ab

# Pump es, pump es, pump es!

# Auuuua, das schmeckt so gut... #

Europe was also busy inventing sci-fi,

with films like Metropolice.

What's Metropolice about?

Do you mean Metropolis?

No, it's pronounced "Metropolice".

I think you mean Metropolis, which is a...

No, it's definitely Metropolice.

OK, well, if it's Metropolis, then it's not a...

It's not a film I'm familiar with.

If it's Metropolis, then it's the Fritz Lang classic.

And it's a sort of science fiction parable.

No, it's definitely Metropolice.

- Let me just check with... - OK. - ..ChatGPT.

How do you pronounce Metropolice?

You would pronounce it as Metropolice.

The emphasis is on the first syllable of metro

and the second syllable of police.

It's Metropolice.

OK, but now you have to ask it how you pronounce Metropolis.

What's Metropolis?

Metropolice tells the story of a future world

in which inequality is rife,

the elite get richer and the poor are dominated by machines -

a world the likes of you can scarcely imagine.

Metropolis influenced countless films you've heard of.

Blade Runner borrowed from the soaring cityscapes.

C-3PO's design was based on the robot,

and a third example also happened

which we'll figure out in the edit.

Thanks to Russian editing and German Expressionisming,

film-making was becoming an art form.

But America was about to strike back with an even bigger leap forward.

A revolution was about to hit the world of cinema,

something that would change the way we saw movies forever

by letting us watch them with our ears.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

# Toot-toot, Tootsie, goodbye

# Toot-toot, Tootsie, don't cry. #

What was The Jizz Slinger?

I have no idea.

The Jizz Slinger, the old film. The one with sound.

- Oh, you mean the Jazz Singer? - Not the Jizz Slinger?

The Jazz Singer is a famous early sound film with Al Jolson.

Well, it's controversial today, isn't it?

Which one? The Jazz Singer or the Jizz Slinger?

I don't know.

I think it's a crucial difference

because the Jazz Singer uses blackface,

which is completely unacceptable.

Al Jolson's use of blackface is a shocking reminder

of early Hollywood's casual and endemic racism.

It's the sort of cultural insensitivity

that today would lead to him being cancelled,

or given an hour-long Netflix stand-up special.

Sadly, sound had been invented just in time

to record one of the most consequential noises in history -

the Wall Street Crash.

The Great Depression had an upside for Hollywood.

Movies were a cheap form of escapism for the greatly depressed.

For the price of a ticket, you could forget your troubles

and maybe find some stale popcorn on the floor

to eat like a starving rodent.

Thanks to sound, you didn't even have to look at the screen

as you desperately scavenged around on the carpet.

Even better, a whole new genre had arrived - the musical.

# We're in the money, we're in the money

# We've got a lot of what it takes to get along. #

Musicals reflected the preoccupations of the age.

Gold Diggers of 1933 opened with We're In the Money,

which, given the Great Depression,

was about as sensitive as opening Live Aid

with Food, Glorious Food.

# We're in the money

# Come on, my honey

# Let's lend it, spend it

# Send it rolling around. #

Not all escapitism was so upbeat.

Hollywood nicked the arty visuals of German Expressionist cinema

and repackaged it into commercial horror movies

like Dracula and Frankenstein.

Perhaps the biggest horror of all

was special effects blockbuster King Kong,

named after the monkey of the same name.

The film begins on a remote island ruled by a monster

with an unnatural lust for young women,

source material that was later adapted into Jeffrey Epstein.

A group of film-makers capture Kong and put him on display in New York,

where some paparazzi arseholes torment him,

just like they did with Britney Spears.

The epic scenes of Kong's furry fury

were a huge breakthrough in animated special effects.

King Kong was made with stop motion, wasn't it?

But those are two different things.

How does it work?

Well, they basically film the model for a second

and then stop the camera,

move the model and film again.

So it's stop and then a motion over and over again

- to get the illusion of the model itself... - Jesus Fucking Christ.

That's boring, innit?

King Kong goes batshit in the film when they take his picture.

He must have been sick of it. How did the animator train a monkey

to stay still while they took his photo thousands of times?

Well, they didn't use a real monkey.

- They used a model. - It's not a real monkey?

It's not a real monkey. No, no.

SHE SIGHS DEEPLY

I don't know what to believe any more.

King Kong was surprisingly graphic,

and not just because of the extreme violence.

Viewers were shocked by the sexual overtones

of the disturbing scene in which Kong peels Fay Wray

like a titted banana,

making her cinema's first BILF.

And King Kong wasn't the only movie pushing boundaries.

Other films of the era also served as a shop window

for raunchy content.

For years, Hollywood had been considered a hotbed of degeneracy

that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable

both on and off screen.

But now the Great Depression was making studios

even more desperate to sell tickets than usual,

and their films were becoming increasingly violent and raunchy.

The Catholic Legion of Decency was worried youngsters

were spending their time in cinemas being corrupted by movies

rather than in church, being molested by a priest.

So they organised a boycott,

which their members embraced without question

because it had the word boy in it.

Faced with a box office bloodbath,

the studios signed up to a set of moral guidelines

known as the Hays Code.

As a result, American movies got more chaste.

On-screen couples like Freddie Stare and Ginger Rogers used dancing

as a visual substitute for sex.

Their graceful and balletic movements

took the place of cuddling, kissing,

fingering, missionary,

doggy style, reverse cowgirl,

anal play, fisting,

golden showers, coprophilia and rimming.

In other words, all the things couples can be freely seen

doing on screen today on a dark web browser through a VPN.

I was told that because of censorship,

when Freddie Stare and Ginger Rogers are dancing,

that's a visual euphemism for having sex.

I would like to think that's true.

So dancing in films is the same as sex.

So the family in The Sound Of Music are all doing it.

And in Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke

fucks about 15 chimney sweeps on a roof

in front of some children.

Well, you know, he's a talented guy, and he's still alive.

But that doesn't mean that it's right.

Just as Hollywood pivoted into lightweight entertainment,

one of the scariest films in history arrived in Europe.

Worst of all, it was a documentary...

..in German.

Triumph Of The Will was a propaganda epic

which used all the film-making techniques we've seen so far

to promote mega-twat fascist influencer Adolf Hitler

and his Nasty Party.

It was directed by a woman, which is progressive,

and it glorified the rise of a psychotic far-right regime,

which isn't.

Like all women's films, there's an emphasis on costumes.

It's very talky and doesn't have much of a plot,

apart from the one to take over the world.

HE PROCLAIMS IN GERMAN

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Who played Hitler in Triumph Of The Will?

Erm... That was Hitler.

- He played himself? - He played himself, yes.

- So he was an actor? - No, he wasn't an actor.

He's actually just being filmed being Hitler.

Did Hitler star in any other films?

- No. - So his acting career sort of failed.

Is that why he shot himself?

Brownshirts are marching in triumph,

for Adolf Hitler rules Germany at last.

When the Nazis rose to power,

many film-makers fled Europe for the safety of Hollywood,

taking their film-making secrets with them -

which, like their rockets,

would later be used to pretend man had gone to the moon.

In 1939, as Hitler invaded Poland,

Hollywood was having its best year ever,

with two massive blockbusters,

Gone Off With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz,

which literally opened the door to a new world of technicolour.

In the film, Dorothy leaves her soothing sepia home behind

to enter a hideously oversaturated fantasyland

filled with excessively colourful characters.

# We're off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard Of Oz... #

She journeys along a migraine-inducing yellow brick road

and finally makes it home, thanks to a pair of hideously tacky red shoes,

so gaudy, a blind drag queen would refuse to wear them

in a black and white photograph.

It was like being stabbed in the eye by a box of fucking crayons.

# We're off to see the wizard. the wonderful Wizard Of Oz! #

What was the message of The Wizard Of Oz?

The final line, "There's no place like home,"

is probably the best summary of the message.

Oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home.

She'd been on this fantastical adventure,

but at the end of the day,

returning home was what really brought her happiness.

I thought it was just, scarecrows are cunts.

The Wizard Of Oz was just one of a deluge

of critically acclaimed mega movies

that cemented 1939 as the creative peak of American film-making.

Meanwhile, the best Europe could muster that year

was a depressing sequel called World War II.

Compared to World War I,

the picture quality was an improvement,

as were the production values.

And despite a modest opening in a small Polish market,

it soon swept across the map and, before long,

it was all anyone could talk about.

This was one European production America couldn't ignore forever.

Next time, Hollywood defeats the Nazis and television,

introduces a galaxy of screen icons

and creates the modern blockbuster.

Jaws is famous for its score, isn't it?

Yes, it's in everyone's head.

So you could kind of go anywhere in the world and be like,

"What does a shark sound like?"

And they'd probably think it sounds like...

HE PLAYS JAWS THEME

No, no, I mean its final score.

Sharks 5-1 Humans.