All language subtitles for The Story of Film - An Odyssey S01E11

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

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

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

It's passion, innovation!

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

To discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Ky�ko Kagawa

who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.

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

And in the movies
of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film,
an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation
across twelve decades,

six continents
and a thousand films.

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

and feel the force
of a movie called Star Wars.

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

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

The Bruce Lee movies
from Hong Kong.

And the Indian epic, Sholay.

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

but they were also innovative.

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

the best of the mainstream films
did new things.

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

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

Now it's this.

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

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

transit lounge, and capitalist catch-all
for Chinese filmmakers

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

Low cost, money-savvy production
has ruled here.

The cinema of the migrant maybe.

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

And who want to make a fast
buck.

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

It was a gold rush.

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

was Run Run Shaw.

In 1957, he came here,

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

and built the largest private film studio
in the world.

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

These buildings were
Asia's dream factories.

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

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

fanfare music, was to be
transported to another world.

A '50s world like this one.

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

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

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

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

Every move designed.

Graceful.
Exquisitely engineered cinema.

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

he might have made
films like King Hu.

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

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

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

He stared at a wall
for 9 years without speaking.

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

This caught on, it became
a new martial art,

transmitted
from master to pupil.

Loyalty and discipline were key,
it spread through Asia.

The Shaolin temple
was destroyed in 1674.

The surviving monks
formed secret societies.

They became swordsmen,
folk tales were told about them.

Fantasies were spun.

Myths became legends, epic,
romantic, or supernatural.

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

as the myth
of the Wild West did in America.

And they did.

And kung fu cinema was born.

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

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

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

Sunlight cuts like a sword,
it sounds like steel.

The Buddhist monks levitate.

A social film turns
into a transcendental one.

This was action cinema
at its most innovative.

King Hu's daring
changed film history.

Most Asian directors revere him.

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

was a homage to him.

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

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

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

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

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

He'd experienced racism
and wanted to get even.

There's real anger
in Lee's face.

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

Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan
sees the shift to masculinity

as part of a bigger trend.

But for all the dynamism
of the Bruce Lee films,

if we look again at them
we see that,

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

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

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

The imagery was steady and wide.

Then, in 1986, came this.

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

Eighties clothes, sex, hedonism.

A rowdy lunch.

A story about male bonding,
loyalty and betrayal again.

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

Influenced by Kurosawa
and Sam Peckinpah films,

director John Woo filmed shoot outs
with several cameras.

Some of them tracking
and used slow motion.

Some called it
"the aesthetic of the glance."

Scenes were broken down
into fragments.

Sequels followed fast.

A cycle about
amoral heroic gangsters was born.

Hollywood couldn't fail
to notice filmmaking this intense

or box office on this scale,

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

and then Mission Impossible 2.

Hong Kong imagery
looked different now.

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

But looking back,
there were other reasons

for Hong Kong's new dynamism.

The first is this man:

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

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

which he directed
and choreographed.

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

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

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

Master Yuen, borrowing
from King Hu and Peking opera,

spun his characters
into the air.

Master Yuen's innovation
impressed Hollywood of course.

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

They were planning a film
called The Matrix.

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

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

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

the fast constant punching
of kung fu.

John Woo and master Yuen
were key innovators

in Hong Kong cinema
after the '70s.

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

Tsui Hark is
the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong.

He produced both A better Tomorrow
and Iron Monkey,

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

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

This character
is a legendary kung fu master.

Europeans and Americans
are invading China.

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

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

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

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

His first glimpse of her
is a dramatic high angle.

Tsui films him
from her low angle point of view.

No ordinary first encounter.

But then the director sets a
slapstick rabbit running.

Two buckets of glue or paint
begin to tumble.

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

slow motion and spinning
just for the sake of it.

And he hits the ground
in slow-mo too.

And the glue
gets its punch-line.

And then another.

There was no rational reason
for staging such a small scene

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

Five would have been enough.

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

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

She is unsettled
by Brigitte Lin.

They fight.

What a fight.

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

Dance and erotic�s.

Grace and, of course, spinning.

Tsui Hark produced
and strongly influenced this film.

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

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

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

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

Everything went in circles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hollywood, be afraid,
be very afraid.

But this place is nearly empty.

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

when its movies dealt
a body blow to world filmmaking.

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

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

grew in scale
but also in inventiveness.

India, in all its photogenic luminosity,

had quietly built the biggest film industry
in the world.

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

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

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

The crown prince
who will marry her.

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

but recently
it has been colorized.

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

Pink and pistachio.

Mother of Pearl.

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

In 1971 alone,
India made 433 films.

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

Mainstream Hindi entertainment cinema
was magnetic.

When last we met her,
Sharmila Tagore was understated,

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

Look at her now.

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

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

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

without whom
'70s Indian cinema is unthinkable.

Tagore's character
is in love with this doctor

played by the legendary
Sanjeev Kumar.

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

But life's tragic
for Tagore's character

and this is
where Gulzar's innovation comes in.

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

Then over the crest of
the mountain walks an older Kumar

looking back
at his younger, happier self.

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

Indian cinema was great
at such masterstrokes of storytelling.

Our films in Bombay
were different.

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

which was part
of the narrative, so to speak.

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

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

So, that was quite different
and more glamour,

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

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

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

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

to say something
or gave a little extra pause.

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

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

And of course in Bengali
it would be exactly the opposite

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

You have to..."

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

"Hindi cinema."

And you have to pause
before you react.

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

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

Amitabh Bachchan.

Not since the days
of silent cinema and Charlie Chaplin

had world movies gilded
one human being with such fame.

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

I've been in films
for 40 years now.

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

and entered
the film industry in India.

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

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

I enjoy that.

I wanted to express myself
through a medium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and rage, and realization.

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

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

...a desire to
communicate ideas,

spend a lot more time
in expressing those ideas.

The written word had
a great amount of importance.

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

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

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

They were not happy with the way
the system was functioning

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

and take charge
and solve their problems.

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

and came up fighting
against the system single-handedly.

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

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

And then, becoming a great hero.

And Bachchan plays the hero
in this movie: Sholay.

The innovative colossus
of '70s cinema.

Widescreen titles like an epic,
landscape like a western,

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

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

in the story of film.

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

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

of the times in his screenplay.

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

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

was changing for the first time.

You know, in '47 India
got independence.

We got democracy,
an impeccable constitution, secularism,

freedom of expression
and so on and so forth.

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

and all the solutions
are around the corner.

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

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

When idealism shatters,
art gets into trouble.

Art gets into
a kind of a trauma.

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

And that's reflected
in mainstream commercial cinema also.

And you saw
an angry young man emerging.

This man was a vigilante.

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

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

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

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

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

This scene is
the dramatic core of the movie.

The family of a policeman is
brutally gunned down.

Freeze frames, slow motion.

The squeak of a swing.

This trauma electrifies the film
and propels its operatic emotions.

The policeman's need for
revenge.

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

If Sholay looks like
The magnificent Seven,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, this pebble is the revolt
from the tradition.

It wants to move away, but...

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

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

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

This tension of tradition and revolt
against the tradition are,

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

You will always find the synthesis
of tradition and revolt

from the tradition
together in any good art.

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

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

by the policeman to avenge
the murder of his family.

But the movie finds room for
this famous musical scene:

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

The open road, constant movement,
friendship celebrated.

One minute it's
a light buddy musical.

Then we have what looks like
a big Hollywood production number

for the festival of color.

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

but the rapture
of this suddenly is blasted away.

Driving percussion,
more frenetic action.

Then, take this scene,
near the end.

The killer has the brassy girlfriend
of Bachchan's sidekick

dance for the sidekick's life.

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

No Hollywood musical,
not even the dark ones like Cabaret

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

Sholay melds Chaplin
and Leone, Cliff Richard musicals

and horror cinema
in its furnace.

In Sholay when the cops arrive,

to take charge of everything,
was really an afterthought.

Had we gone according
to the original idea of the script

there was just Sanjeev Kumar
who had lost his hands

and who was the Thakur.

He was going to take his revenge

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

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

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

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

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

the cops landing up
after the whole thing is over.

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

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

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

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

that has so many
unforgettable characters.

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

you remember in Star Wars.

You remember certain characters
of Gone with the Wind.

But not to the extent of Sholay.

Sholay was released in 1975,
it is 34 years.

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

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

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

In a way Sholay is Bollywood
because as Bachchan says:

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

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

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

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

that you get
poetic justice in 3 hours."

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

That is
the most attractive portion.

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

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

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

Far from it.

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

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

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

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

But look at this wide screen shot
for example.

We have to defend ourselves.

You are the messenger of God.

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

In the baggage of war,
we are pathetic.

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

We are led by God, and you.

Now, I know how
you hate the sword.

But we have to fight them.

Then he walks away.

They have stolen our property.

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

I say, by God, get it back!

Instead, the camera raises up
and walks towards him.

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

is talking to the prophet Muhammad,
his nephew,

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

Islam doesn't allow the depiction
of the prophet,

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

Fight them.

Filmmaker Moustapha Akkad
even leaves gaps in the soundtrack

where Muhammad's voice would be.

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

Akkad could have simply dubbed
the film into Arabic,

for the vast Arab audience
but he didn't.

He felt that Western and
Arab acting styles

are so different
that he should make two versions.

Here director Akkad walks
from the English language editing suite

to the Arab one.

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

in the '70s juggling tasks.

Akkad went on to produce the
famous Halloween horror films.

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

in a hotel in Jordan in 2005.

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

- I'm the third world?

- Are you?

- No, you are.

The "third world," Jesus Christ!

We've been around 7,000 years

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

Are we so underdeveloped?

That's not civilization.

Civilization is
how you contact the other people.

Do you know how to love?

Do you know how to care?

This is civilization.

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

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

and then he'd offer it to you.

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

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

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

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

Then, if you're still a savage,

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

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

of a terrible moment
in Arab history.

The Egyptian president Nasser
announces on TV

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

Chahine films his actors
watching the broadcast. Dismay!

He dollies in to capture
the emotion, the shock.

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

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

Chahine tracks in front of her,
windows open.

Despair spills out
and becomes a collective feeling.

One of the most famous moments
in Arab filmmaking.

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

So I wanted to show
the real people.

The people who went down
into the streets.

This interview was done five years
before the revolution in Egypt

that threw Hosni Mubarak
out of office.

But Chahine seemed
to foresee it.

I hate the word.

Not to prophesize
but you must predict

what is going to happen
in view of all the factors

that you see around you.

Especially economically right now.

It's really bad.

And the authority
is always very violent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

but something happened in American cinema
which changed everything.

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

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

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

demolished all records
by taking nearly $500 million.

Cinema was on a roller coaster.

There had never been figures
like this before.

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

Producers started to make films

about things
that people fantasized about seeing.

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

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

lured people back to the cinema.

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

What the culture wants to see.

New movie theaters called,
multiplexes were built.

The era of the blockbuster
had begun.

Here's The Exorcist.

A believable middle-class home.

Mom's all dolled up.

Is it coming out, Lily?

Yes, I think so.

A maid.

Then, the scream of evil.

A handheld wide angle shot
captures the rush of fear.

And then this.

Director William Friedkin's innovation
was to slap horror cinema

in the face with realism.

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

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

Friedkin hired the brilliant actress
Mercedes McCambridge to do it.

I'm Damien Karras.

And I'm the devil!

Now kindly undo these straps!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look what happens to your voice

It has to happen
when you have no freedom.

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

You son of a bitch!

One of the most innovative
vocal performances in movie history.

But Friedkin pushed
other actors hard too.

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

on the face, then immediately filmed
his trembling response.

But Friedkin's techniques
were traditional too.

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

with no craperoo".

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

veteran director Howard Hawks.

He was going out
with Hawks' daughter.

People queued around the block
to see the film

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

Tremendous film.

Just turned my mind.

I thought it was pretty disgusting.

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

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

I couldn't take anymore.

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

Audiences are reported
to have been fainting,

to have been
vomiting themselves.

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

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

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

It wasn't glossy
like entertainment TV.

It was rough and handheld
like The Exorcist itself,

and caught the panic
of people actually fainting.

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

These nine words killed
the complexity of new Hollywood.

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

"the most influential director
in cinema history."

Steven Spielberg had been making
amateur films since boyhood.

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

There he is, Dorinda.

Go on.

I'm setting you free, Dorinda.

I'm moving out of your heart.

Goodbye.

Goodbye, darling.

The pilot says goodbye
to the woman he loves

because he's been killed
in the war.

He must watch her fall in love
with another man.

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

bighearted, unashamed emotions
that touched the young Spielberg.

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

Jaws was both an establishment film
and an innovative one.

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

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

A nerdy scientist on the left.

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

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

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

Three very different men
filmed in three-shot,

like Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.

It would have been easier
to shoot in a studio tank

but Spielberg,
like Friedkin, wanted realism.

He had the scientist
crush a polystyrene cup

in mockery of the macho crushing
of a beer can.

In interviews, Spielberg speaks
as vividly as Alfred Hitchcock

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

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

making it better
using color and lenses.

The death of the Kintner boy
and all the paranoia

and the tension and suspense
leading up to the actual attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that you knew
who was looking at who.

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

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

It's not about the Kintner boy
being killed.

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

his chief responsibility
to protect the public.

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

and these people
are going swimming anyway.

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

of change of visual perspective,

as Hitchcock did in Vertigo.

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

shows his filmic signature:
the awe and revelation scene.

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

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

Instead, the scene builds.

They get out, we track and rise.

And the music rises.

And here's the one in
Jurassic Park.

Looking again.
Removing glasses to see better.

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

I mean, this thing is...

This thing... What?

And again.

Then getting out of the car
to see better still.

Then the camera rises
and the music does too.

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

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

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

who encountered the sublime.

At his best, he burnished
mainstream cinema

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

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

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

The words drive backwards
into deep space.

The sound track recorded
in the relatively new format

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

It felt as if the cinema shook.

And then models of spaceships
glided past such wide angle lenses

that they plunged into perspective too,
and looked enormous.

The camera moves
were programmed by computers.

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

and save the universe.

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

Interiors look like caves
or kitchens or spaceships.

There's talk
of a mystical force.

Luke dresses like a samurai.

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

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

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

saw as the shamed American president,
Richard Nixon.

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

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

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

The robotic comic duo was based
on two funny characters

in Akira Kurosawa's
The hidden Fortress.

As were Star Wars'
soft edge screen wipes.

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

The evil characters were filmed
in a way that was reminiscent

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

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

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

Fast cutting.

The music crashes like waves.

Luke uses a computer
to find his target.

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

He tells Luke
to use his intuition.

Use the force Luke.

Let go, Luke.

The force is strong
with this one.

Luke, trust me.

So Luke puts away the computer,

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

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

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

Maybe baby boomers had tired
of activism, of change,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What followed was exciting.

Movie makers
got their banners out.

The '80s were
the movie years of protest.

Corrected and synced by
job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today