All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 1 - 1895-1918 - The world discovers a new art form

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 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.

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1944, World War II,
the Normandy beaches.

A bunch of allied troops
have just plunged under water

to stop being shot by German machine guns.

Above the water is hell.

Bullets tinkle on iron.

The camera's all over the place.

This scene was actually shot
on a peaceful beach in Ireland.

But director Steven Spielberg

brought bullets and blood
and bombs to that beach.

A lie to tell truth.

This is filmmaking.

The art of making us
feel that we're there.

A young woman in Paris has
her eyes closed

to feel the warmth of the sun on her face.

At the same time unseen by her
this little street drama takes place.

White light floods the screen,
links the young and old woman.

We want to reach into the screen
to help the old lady.

This is filmmaking.

Cinema as an empathy machine.

The Normandy beach scene
and the French lady

show that, in its use
of sound and light and truth,

cinema can be great.

The story of film is the story
of that greatness.

It's a story full of surprises.

At first thought you'd guess
that the story of film would be

about scenes like this one
from Casablanca,

full of yearning,
story and stardom,

because Casablanca is a Hollywood classic.

Ingrid Bergman is lit
like a movie star.

Highlights in her eyes.

It's all filmed on a studio set.

But films like Casablanca are

too romantic to be classical
in the true sense.

Instead, Japanese films, like this
are the real classical movies.

Romantic films are always in a rush
but this moment

in Record of a Tenement Gentleman
there's a pause in the story.

A cat, a chiming clock, a kettle,
quietly coming to the boil.

The almost square frame filled
with smaller squares and rectangles.

Calm, emotionally restrained
like a little classical Greek temple.

So Hollywood's not classical,
Japan is.

With all its talk of box office,

the film business would have us
believe that money drives movies.

Ticket sales.

Marketing.

Glamor.

Premiers.

Red carpets.

But it doesn't.

Money doesn't drive cinema.

The money men don't know

the secrets of the human heart
or the brilliance of the medium of film.

But if money doesn't drive movies,
what does?

Here's the answer: ideas.

Watch how a shot of bubbles
becomes an idea in movie history.

This is a scene from the British director

Carol Reed's 1946 movie
Odd Man Out.

A guy is in a mess.

He sees his troubles reflected
in the bubbles of a spilled drink.

Now look at another close-up
of bubbles in a drink.

Again a character is in trouble,
self-absorbed.

This film's director, Jean-Luc Godard,
knew and admired Carol Reed's work,

so he was probably thinking of
Odd Man Out when,

20 years later, he filmed this moment.

Now look at Martin Scorsese's
film �taxi driver� of 1976.

Scorsese loves the films of
Carol Reed and Jean-Luc Godard

and so used the same idea,
that a character looking into bubbles

can see their own troubles,
and also, somehow, the cosmos.

Visual ideas, more than money or marketing,

are the real things that drive cinema.

Innovating with those ideas.

It doesn't always seem like it,
but, sitting in the dark,

it's images and ideas that excite us,
not money or showbiz.

But if the business people don't
control film, who does?

Who knows how to get inside your head?

David Lynch does.

And Baz Luhrmann does.

And, in a different way,
Samira Makhmalbaf does.

The story of film: An odyssey
is a global road movie

to find the innovators,
the people and films

that give life to this sublime,
ineffable art form:

Cinema!

And here's a third surprise.

In the 70s you'd guess that
moments like this -

the camera racing through space
like a bullet, the scream of tires

on the road as a car chases a train -
will be the big story.

New American cinema was wonderful
but Dakar in Senegal

was as exciting as Los Angeles
in the 70s movie-wise.

A surprise indeed.

Much of what we assume
about the movies is off the mark.

It's time to redraw
the map of movie history

that we have in our heads.

It's factually inaccurate
and racist by omission.

The story of film: An odyssey

could be an exciting,
unpredictable one.

Fasten your seatbelts.
It's going to be a bumpy ride.

New Jersey, East Coast, America.

A mum and two daughters are
going to the movies.

Why are we here?

Because something extraordinary
happened here.

In the 1890s movies were born here.

Lyon, France.

Two college friends are going
to the movies.

Movies were born here too.
Maybe even more so than in New Jersey.

So what's there to discover
about movies in New Jersey?

We find this man, Thomas Edison.
Edison was a manic, passionate inventor.

Here's his office where he
invented the light bulb

and the phonograph.

Here's his desk,
full of compartments, full of detail.

Obsessive, like he was.

Here is Edison's factory.

The beauty of Victorian engineering,
the care and detail.

Look at this quotation
on the wall of the factory

from the painter Joshua Reynolds.

'There is no expedient
to which a man will not resort

to avoid the real labor of thinking.'

Edison loved it and moved
it around the factory

so that his colleagues wouldn't get used
to seeing it in one place.

So Edison's factory was an ideas factory.

Before Edison, there had been

funfairs, circuses,
magic lantern shows, magicians acts.

Still images were reflected on
mirrors or spun in a box.

This happened not in fancy cities
in the world,

but places like this:
Leeds in England.

The American George Eastman
came up with the idea of film on a roll.

Edison and his colleague W.K.L. Dickson
egged each other on

to find that if you spin
these images in a box,

they give the illusion of movement.

And then look at this, invented by Edison.
It's called the black Maria.

Edison and many of the other
manic, ideasy inventors of cinema,

realized that beyond
the equipment and machines,

what you needed most
for movies was light.

It probably didn't occur to them that
cinema would become the art of light.

But, somehow, in building
this box on wheels

that turned to follow the sun,

whose roof opened by turning this wheel,

Edison took the first steps
in that direction.

He had a hunch that cinema was a
dark room, where light mattered.

He shot little movies here.

This couple kissing, for example.

A little moment that everyone
could understand.

But to see these films you had

to look inside something like this.
That wasn't enough.

It was too private and small.
Cinema had to be bigger.

And it became so.

Here in Lyon.

In this house.

In the minds of these passionate men:
Louis Lumi�re and his brother Auguste.

The brothers were as ideasy as Edison.

Louis in particular was
technically brilliant.

He realized that the grab-advance
mechanism of a sewing machine

would allow the strip of film
to be advanced, paused, exposed,

advanced, paused, exposed.

This is one of the very first
Lumi�re cameras.

Open its back, shine a light
through it and it becomes a projector.

Count Leo Tolstoy called the result

'the clicking machine,
like a human hurricane.'

One of the first films the
Lumi�res shot was this one.

A short documentary
of everyday life.

Their workers leaving a factory.
The Lumi�re factory.

This is the factory today.
The place of the first movie.

The Source of the Nile.

But it wasn't enough for the
Lumi�re's to make such home movies.

They wanted to show them,

not just in a box to one person
at a time like Edison, but to groups.

On the 28th of December 1895,

in this building on the Boulevard Capucines
in Paris,

the Lumi�re brothers projected film.

Light shone through it, onto a screen,
bigger than life.

It's hard for us today
to picture how enchanting it was.

This is one of the very first films
the Lumi�re's shot and showed

on the Boulevard Capucines.

It's said to have
unnerved the audience.

They thought the train
was coming at them.

This is laughable today.
But look at this...

Light projected on a building
in 21st century Lyon.

The effect is startling.

Digital imagery of a type
we haven't seen before.

The shock of the new
just like the Lumi�re train.

Something that had already happened,
light from a distant star

came back to life for
the very first time.

Neither the Lumi�re brothers, nor Edison,

nor the other inventors of cinema,

could have known how big
the movies would become.

How they'd make us want to escape,
play with our erotic imaginations,

failed to film the Nazi gas chambers.

Make us want to be a Princess or
a hero or a cowboy.

Neither the Lumi�re's nor Edison
could foresee that the movies

would invent flashbacks.

There are no flashbacks
in Shakespeare.

That they'd glamorize war.

Capture the horror of the D-day landings.

Give us an image bank
to flick through in our heads,

when we're bored, or happy, or sad.

Movies would become the world's
greatest mirror and, sometimes,

a hammer too, that
would bash reality into shape.

By the end of 1896,
much of the globe

knew about this new invention:
movies.

But almost at once it was seen
as lowbrow for the working classes.

Its jokes and jolts were unsophisticated
and soon became boring.

So, from about 1898
the earliest filmmaker inventors

turned their minds from the machinery
of cinema to shots and cuts.

Things started to get exciting.

In Paris, for example,
a theatre illusionist called George M�lies,

who'd been at the Boulevard Capucines
that first night, filmed on a street.

The film's now lost but here's
what happened.

His camera jammed, than started again.

When he looked at the results,
streetcars seemed to disappear.

Just like these people seem to disappear.

Cinema's first magic trick.

In this scene he used the same technique
to make a man appear,

rather than a streetcar, disappear.

Innovation by accident, you could say,
but it drove the medium forward.

Where the Lumi�re's
were cinema's first documentarists,

M�lies was its first special
effects director.

His film The moon at one Meter,
astonished people too.

In Lyon today, in the festival of lights,
a moon rises over the city

as if in tribute to M�lies.

Lumiere, the name of the brothers,
means �light� of course.

And where other countries saw movies
as a sideshow in these years,

France took them seriously.

Film historian Jean-Michel Frodon:

'France had been doing
something completely different

with cinema because
of the French revolution

and because of this dream
to project something

to the world and to itself.

Like what we call "le Lumi�re"

and this is Lumi�re invents cinema
but before they were �le Lumi�re�

in the sense of the
French revolution,

of the encyclop�die, of Kant, et cetera.'

In the decades to come,
France believed that cinema

was such a beacon, almost an element
of foreign policy,

that it funded French filmmaking like
no other country in the world.

Also in France, the world's first female director,

Alice Guy Blach�, became
as interested in magic as M�lies.

And Brighton in England was
a buzzing place in Victorian times too.

Maybe the buzz and the light
explains why local photographer

George Albert Smith became
one of the movies' early innovators.

He was one of the first to film
from the front of a train,

creating a ghostly tracking shot,
which became known

as the �phantom ride.�

As if a ghost was
floating through the air.

There was a magic in such shots.

In this great documentary
about the holocaust, Claude Lanzmann,

filmed shots on the same train lines
that took the Jews to the gas chambers.

The �phantom ride� at
its most morally serious.

And, in a completely different way,
director Stanley Kubrick

used a �phantom ride� scene near the end
of 2001: A space odyssey.

The camera seems to zoom
through the coloured light of the cosmos,

as if the main character,
or the film itself,

is tripping or having
an out of body experience.

In 1900, Smith used one
of the first close-ups in cinema.

Filmmakers usually kept their camera wide

because they hadn't considered other options,

or assuming that if they went close

it would confuse or disrupt the audience.

But then G.A. Smith did this:

he wanted to show us
the cat eating in more detail.

The cut between wide and close
not only worked, it seemed natural.

And so close-ups were born.

The films of some of the greatest directors

are hard to imagine without them.

In this incredible moment
in Sergei Eisenstein's film,

October, the government
raises a bridge to stop

revolutionary workers storming a city.

But it's the close-ups
of a dead woman's hand and hair

being pulled off the raising bridge

that give the real sense
of movement and tragedy.

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

it's only when Charles Bronson looks,
in big close-up, into the eyes

of Henry Fonda, that he realizes
that Fonda is the murderer

he's been searching for all his life.

Back in America, Enoch J. Rector
extended film in another way.

He filmed a boxing match,
not with the standard size of film,

35 millimeters, but with a negative
that was 63 millimeters wide.

The broader image showed
more of the action.

Widescreen cinema was born.

It's the norm now but it would
not become commercially so until 1953.

Film had already come far.

It was born as a sideshow.
A novelty.

Quick fun, like fast-food.

But almost at once it became
clear that it was also a language.

A new language.

A language of ideas.

The early 1900s were
a remarkable time to be alive.

The first airplane flight.

Albert Einstein announced that light,
the flickering stuff of cinema,

is the only constant in the universe.

Here in Copenhagen,
other physicists expanded his ideas.

The Titanic sank.

World War I began.

Compared to all this,
the changes in movies might seem tiny.

But they aren't.

By 1903, filmmakers had developed
many of the key elements of the shot,

but they still had to learn
how to do this: CUT!

Editing made cinema.

To see how, look at
The Life of an American Fireman,

made in 1903 by a Pennsylvanian dynamo
of a man, called Edwin Stanton Porter.

A fireman arrives outside a blazing house
to rescue a mother and her child.

We see the street action first.

Then the same action again from inside.

Some years later, Porter recut the film.

This time, after the fireman arrives,

we cut inside the house
to see the first rescue,

then outside again to
see her being brought down the ladder,

then inside again,
to see him rescuing the child,

then back outside again.

The audience follows the story
of the rescue despite the fact

that one space, the street,
suddenly disappears

from the screen and is magically replaced
by another space, the room.

This could never happen in theatre.

The earlier version of the film,
which you could call the theatrical version,

doesn't fragment the space,
but repeats the time like an action replay.

The intercut version
has a continuous time line.

We see everything in the order
in which it was done,

but the space is fragmented.

Cinema was learning,
experimenting, thinking even.

It can now show the flow
of the action from one space to another.

This made chase sequences possible.

It liberated movies.

It emphasized movement.

Nearly every scene in the story
of film will in some way use

this most basic of storytelling devices:
continuity cutting.

The editing equivalent of the word �then.�

This was a landmark.

Theatrical cinema was giving way
to action cinema.

And Porter? He lost everything

in the Wall Street crash of the 20s
and died, forgotten, in 1941.

It's easy to forget
what a conceptual jump editing was,

but 21 years after
The Life of an American Fireman

the comic genius Buster Keaton
shot a scene using double exposure

which reminds us.

Keaton plays a film projectionist.

He falls asleep.

Dreams of the cinema.

Climbs into a film.

And then, bam!

A cut.

The world around him is suddenly
replaced by another world.

Instantly.

Magically.

In 1907, cinematic innovation
went up a gear.

Look at The Horse that Bolted,
by Frenchman Charles Path�.

A man leaves his horse
on the street

as he delivers food
to an upstairs customer.

The horse spies something
to eat, and tucks in.

Cut to the man climbing the stairs.

Then cut back to the horse,
which isn't doing a new thing.

It's still eating.

Then back to the man
just a second later.

Then back to the horse.

In The Life of an American Fireman,
the cuts showed what happened next.

Here, they're showing what
is happening at the same time.

This isn't continuity editing.

It's parallel editing.

It doesn't say �then�,
it says �meanwhile.�

Great filmmakers have used
this �meanwhile� editing ever since

to contrast events, build tension
or advance two storylines at once.

And soon after continuity
and parallel editing were invented,

another remarkable editing technique was born.

This woman is looking towards us,
as if she's on a stage

and we are in the audience.

But what if she does this?

In the earliest movies,
people seldom turned their backs

to the camera like this.

This film, made in 1908, was one of
the first in which this was done.

But if directors were
to give actors the freedom

to turn their backs to the camera like this...

Then, it occurred to them,
they could point the camera

in the opposite direction
to see what would eventually

be called the �reverse angle shot�.

Directors were putting
their cameras into the action,

freeing themselves to film from any angle.

This new freedom was
an exhilarating break with theatre,

and seemed entirely natural to cinema.

Central to it.

So, in the 60s in France,
when Jean-Luc Godard

refused to bring his camera round
to show the face of Anna Karina

at the start of Vivre sa Vie,
the effect was shocking.

Combine this with this,
G.A. Smith's close-up,

and the actor, rather than the set,
began to be the thing that was filmed.

And just as the movie buildings
were changing, the movies themselves

took another leap forward.

A look back at

The Life of an American Fireman
shows why.

Audiences watching this film felt
concern for the safety of this woman.

But they knew nothing
about the actress who played her,

not even her name.

If they'd known about her life
or recognized her from other films,

they'd care even more.

Then, enter into the movies,
this actress dressed in white,

wearing a hat.

She was known,
semi-anonymously, as the imp girl,

but in 1910 her producer, Carl Laemmle,
announced in the press that she had died.

She hadn't.

And when she miraculously
showed up in a scene like this,

very much alive, anxious
and looking around,

Laemmle then told the newspapers
that the crowds were so hysterical

that they tore her clothes off.

This wasn't true either,
but the furore burnt her name

into the public consciousness:

Florence Lawrence.

Lawrence became famous.

She earned $80,000 in 1912.
Then her career fizzled out.

In 1938, aged 48, she committed
suicide by eating ant poison.

Florence Lawrence was the first movie star,
and set a pattern for stardom.

Hype, fame, tragedy.

Here in Denmark this actress,
Asta Nielsen, became even more famous.

There was less censorship in Europe.
Actors could be more sexual.

He's tied up.

She's hip grinding
in her slinky black dress.

Hollywood learnt from Nielson's fame
and, instead of sex,

as this reveal of Gloria Swanson shows,
it trowelled on the luxury and costuming.

Hollywood was adding an element
of sublime to stardom.

Almost every aspect of cinema
was affected by the star system.

As the adoring public
became more and more interested

in Lawrence, Nielsen or Swanson,

so moviemakers started to show
their faces more clearly.

Except it wasn't really their faces,
it was their thoughts

that audiences became interested in.

The star system meant that psychology
became the driving force of films,

especially American ones.

And through these years,
1907, 8, 9 and 10

small movie theatres,
places for working class people emerged.

In America they were called nickelodeons.

This one, Tally's,
was on Spring Street in L.A.

This is the same spot now.

This little cinema, built in 1914,
is in Leeds in England.

And on this famous corner,
the first nickelodeon in New York was built.

In the early 1910s,
the best filmmaking in the world

was taking place here, in Scandinavia.

Maybe it was the northern light,
how it changed.

Or maybe it was the sense
of destiny and mortality

in Scandinavian literature
that made Danish and Swedish movies

more graceful and honest.

By 1912, for example,
the most innovative use of film light

in the world was in the work
of Benjamin Christensen.

Christensen studied
at this theatre in Copenhagen.

Then made this film,
The Mysterious X, in 1913.

Gorgeous photography, cross cutting
and a dream drawn on film.

One of the most daring debuts
in film history.

Later he built a vast studio
here in Hellerup, in the suburbs of Copenhagen.

To make H�xan, a masterpiece
about witchcraft through the ages.

The light sources were multiple,
the effects complex.

Christensen himself
played the naked devil.

This telegram in the Danish film archive says:

�your masterful film, H�xan,
had its first screening to a full house,

with a standing ovation.�

In Sweden, director Victor Sj�str�m
was just as great an early director,

and was more influential than Christensen.

Sj�str�m started by selling donuts
but soon found himself here:

Svenska Bio,
Sweden's first major film studio.

His 1913 film Ingeborg Holm
had naturalism and grace.

But, seven years later, still at Svenska,

Sj�str�m made one
of the great multilayered films

of the silent era, The Phantom Carriage.

It had stories within stories,
moods within moods.

In tinted blue evening light,
an alcoholic, David Holm,

tells a drunken story
about a phantom carriage

which arrives at New Year,
to collect the souls of the dead.

Here on the right, Sj�str�m
plays Holm himself.

Later in the story David dies.

Sj�str�m re-exposes the film to show
the separation of his body and soul.

The carriage driver arrives and shows
him how horrible his life has been.

A wasted life wrapped
in a haunted myth.

And Sj�str�m was brilliant at women.

His strong mother died when he was young.

Sj�str�m ended his days in this
cottage by the sea, west of Stockholm.

Christensen and Sj�str�m

became star directors and, as was to become
the pattern for European talents,

they were seduced by what would be,
in the years to come,

the center of the movie world.
A place called Hollywood.

They sailed there, as a certain Swedish
movie star, called Greta Garbo, did.

And, later, another,
called Ingrid Bergman did.

As a result of their departures,
Scandinavia would not be central

to the story of film again until the 1950s.

A long time ago in a galaxy
far, far away from Scandinavia,

there was a garden that didn't know
what was about to hit it.

Sagebrush in the rain.

The eucalyptus in the rain.

You see, the spring was such
a marvellous thing there.

The garden was about to be invaded.
Built upon.

It was about to bring in
artists and business people

from around the world to paint clouds
to look like real clouds.

To create people to
look like real people.

The sort of place you'd wear costume
and jewellery in the daytime.

The sort of place
that invented youth and glamor.

Where Marlena Dietrich
could wear black feathers

and be framed in a train window
and be lit in a lattice of shadows.

And, somehow, look believable.

Youth and glamour came out
of its test tubes.

No one was supposed
to be plain here

or sad or old or racially equal
or sexually different.

What denial.

What eugenics.

And yet it attracted: people, selves,
ideas, styles, shape shifters.

It became a bauble this place:
shiny, perfect, brittle.

Something you could see yourself in.

Movies started to be in the air here.

Of course this place is called Hollywood.

A fantasy name because one of the things
that won't grow here is this: holly.

Why did the movie people come here?
Because of the weather, sunlight.

And because, on the East Coast,
New Jersey and New York.

The film process had been patented, copyrighted.

Take this example of copyright.

For years, film running through
viewing machines

had snapped because
of the tension in the spool.

Then the Latham brothers
and people around Thomas Edison

had the brain wave
of creating this simple loop,

which created a bit of slack,
which would allow the machine to stop,

project an image, then move on again
without tearing the film.

This so called �Latham loop� was
patented by its East Coast inventors.

You had to pay people to use it
and other discoveries.

But California was very far away
from those rights owners.

So, you could break the law there.

This is South Spring Street in 1897.

Here is the same spot today.

Things moved quickly.

The first studio was built in 1911,
it was like an outdoor tent.

It was built here.

The first feature length movie ever made,
The Story of the Kelly Gang,

had been filmed in Australia.

Outdoors, available light,
head-on framing.

Seven years later, Cecil B. Demille
shot the first Hollywood feature here.

Here it is: The squaw Man.

In it we can see another
crucial element of filmmaking

that fell into place in these years.

A decent man is trying to decide
whether to do a good deed.

He looks right, through a window
and sees a young woman

who'll benefit from the deed.

Their eyes meet for a second.

He feels her pain,
and decides to do the good deed.

But imagine if Demille
and his camera person

had lifted their camera from here,

brought it around
to the far side of this room

and filmed the young woman
from over there?

The shot of her would
have looked something like this...

As if she was looking away
from the man, rather than towards him.

And the scene wouldn't
have the same power.

It's because their eyes match,
across the cut,

Him looking right, her looking left,
that they connect emotionally.

Filmmakers in these years
were discovering

that to make it look like people
in different shots

were looking at each other,
or that armies were marching

towards each other,
the camera had to stay on the same side

of an invisible 180 degree line,
drawn between the two people,

looking at or talking to each other.

Because this rule was new,
filmmakers in the late 1910s

sometimes broke it by mistake.

Later in The squaw Man,
Demille made such a mistake.

A man is dangling from a cliff.

He's looking right.

The cliff is on the right.

But then Demille goes
to the bottom of the cliff

to show the man's fall.

But he films from the wrong side

of the man, so it looks
like the cliff has switched

to the left of the screen.

The shot would have been
more spatially clear if it was like this...

And to make matters worse, his friends
come to the rescue, leaving screen left

but entering the next shot screen right,
as if they'd taken a detour to the pub.

Once this discovery was made,
it was used throughout mainstream cinema.

This scene from The Empire strikes back,
an old style movie made 60 years later,

shows how enduring the discovery was.

Darth Vader is on the left
of the screen looking right.

His underling, to whom he's speaking,
is in a separate shot looking left.

Because of the 180-degree rule
we completely believe that

they're looking at each other.

Crucial to the inventiveness
of American cinema before the 1920s

was how female it was.

Film historian Cari Beauchamp:

'Hollywood was built
by women, immigrants and Jews.

People who would not be accepted
in any other profession at the time.

So Hollywood became this magnet
for people who wanted to work,

who were incredibly creative, but
wouldn't be accepted in other professions.

Well half of all films written
before 1925 were written by women.

So that shows you how, just, comfortable,
women were in the business then.

Perhaps the first woman to direct a film,
and the first female studio boss

was Alice Guy Blach�.

Most of the film companies
focused on the machinery

and Gaumont started to make actual films.

And Alice Guy was a secretary there.

And they let her play
with the cameras after hours

as long as she'd gotten
her secretarial work done.

And Alice Guy was not only
one of the first female directors,

she was one of the first directors.

She was one of the first to actually put
film together into a story with an arc.

Up until then we'd had
�the sneeze,� �the wave.�

Individual actions.

But Alice created some dramatic arc films,
for the very first time.

Here's an example
of Guy Blach�'s touching poetics.

A little girl overhears a doctor say
that her sister will die

before the leaves fall from the trees.

So she goes outside and starts
to tie them back on.

One of the most innovative directors
of the time was Lois Weber.

Here she also plays the lead
in her film, Suspense.

A woman is at home with her child.

She hears an intruder.

Looks out the window, sees him

in this remarkable sideways
pov (Point Of View) shot.

She calls her husband.

Weber uses a split screen

to show the husband, the intruder
and herself, all in the same moment.

The husband jumps in a car
and tries to race to save his wife.

He's chased by the police,

who Weber shows in this inventive shot
of the wing mirror.

The intruder climbs the stair.

And again Weber's camera position
emphasizes the approach, the threat.

In the end, the police
and husband arrive and save the day.

The film was, for years,
credited to a male director,

D.W. Griffith.

Frances Marion was
an even more significant figure.

'Well, Frances Marion
was the highest paid screenwriter,

male or female, from 1915 to 1935.

That's an incredible accomplishment
right there.

She also is the only woman ever
to win two Oscars for writing.

And she won her Oscars
for The big House,

the seminal prison film,

and The Champ ,
the classic boxing film.

And what I love about that
is that it just right there

puts the lie to the idea that
these women writers were writing

the "matinee weepies" or the "women's films",

quote/unquote.

No. They were writing
every conceivable genre of film.

Women like Frances, Adela Rogers St. Johns,
Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos.

I mean, these were the cr�me de la cr�me
of the writers.

The ones that the Thalberg�s
and the Mayer�s went to

when they had big productions
they knew they needed to count on.'

Marion's screenplay for the film
The Wind

was about a woman living in a shack.

The wind is incessant.
Sand's everywhere.

It seems to blast the visual image.

An aggressive man forces himself on her.

She shoots him,
then buries him in the sand.

But the wind blows the sand away,
the corpse is exposed.

Just like her fear.

Just like her unconscious mind.

The wind was an epic tone poem.

Cut like a thriller,
but filmed like a dream.

Hollywood films like it,

showed female audiences things
they'd probably felt but never seen.

'Most people in America did not go further
than 20 miles from their home

from when they were born
until they died.

So you have this incredible
country that really only lives

in this bell-jar of their own community.

And as films start coming out,
as movie theatres are being built,

by 1920, there's over
15,000 theatres in this country.

So all of a sudden you can go
around the corner,

put down your nickel or your dime
or your quarter

and have this entire world open up to you.

And it's not just
they're seeing Paris for the first time.

They're seeing New York City
or San Francisco.

They are seeing women's fashions.

They are seeing women acting
in ways that nobody would dare do.

With talking films, the price
of making movies skyrocketed

and so with talking films
Wall Street really entered

the business for the first time.

And when money entered into it
the jobs starting paying more...

It was taken seriously as a business
and men wanted those jobs.

If the great women filmmakers
of the 1910s are under-remembered,

you could say that this man, Lanky,
here in a stagy family scene

with a painted skyline, is over-remembered.

People say that D.W. Griffith invented
close-ups or editing, which isn't true.

But he did something far more valuable
for the art of cinema.

He said it needs to show this:
the wind in the trees.

Before Griffith, film had a tendency
to be stagey like this: airless.

He brought the wind in
the trees to cinema.

A sense of the outside world.

The delicacy of Lillian Gish's
performance here matches

the delicacy of the light.

The visual softness.

Decades later, the critic,
Roland Barthes,

said that some images have unplanned,
natural details in them that move us.

Barthes called this the �punctum�.
The thing that pricks our feelings.

Griffith's work is full of the �punctum�,
the wind in the trees.

This scene from Way Down East,
is set on a treacherous thawing river.

Griffith could never have planned
that Lillian Gish's right arm

would push ice off the adjacent ice flow.

But we notice the realness of the moment.

Griffith worked with
one of the best cinematographers

in the business, Billy Bitzer.

Bitzer disliked the hard edge
of the film image,

so put a collar around
the lens hood

to make the edge of the image
go slighter darker.

�Adding class to the picture,�
as Bitzer himself put it

and influencing the look of film
in America for a generation.

Griffith and Bitzer understood
the psychological intensity of a lens.

They used visual softness
and back lighting, which gave

a halo to hair and made actors
stand out against backgrounds.

What Griffith and Bitzer
did in 1914 and 1915,

with all their talents, their haloed imagery,

their splendid tracking shots
and feel for the outdoors,

is one of the great shocks
in the story of film.

They made this deceitfull
state of the nation movie,

that raised a racist flag which showed
the power of cinema and its danger.

The birth of a nation

looks like it was shot
in Griffith's native Kentucky.

But it was actually filmed here,
near Los Angeles.

It showed the American civil war.

Griffith mixed the epic with the intimate.

A Southern officer returns home.
He goes to his mother.

Her arms come out of the doorway
to enfold him.

We don't see the rest of her.

Such subtlety made the racism
all the more dangerous.

Black senators were shown
as drunk and unclean.

In this scene Griffith
used Wagner music.

The Cameron family are being
attacked by black soldiers.

They're rescued by the Klan.

Heroic and thrilling.

After some screenings, black audience
members were attacked with clubs.

The Ku Klux Klan
had been disbanded in 1869,

but by the mid-1920s,
its membership was back up to 4 million.

Talk about the wind in the trees.

More than 80 years later,
D.J. Spooky sampled and played

with the toxic scenes
from The Birth of a Nation,

almost as if he was scribbling on them.

The year after The Birth of a Nation

Griffith saw this,
the epic Italian film Cabiria.

He was stunned,
particularly by these moving Dolly shots.

Inspired by these moves
and production design such as this,

using elephants to suggest scale

and also by the novels
of Charles Dickens,

he made a three and a half hour film,
Intolerance

about �love's struggle through history.�

The film showed human intolerance
in Babylon,

in the life of Jesus Christ,
tinted in sepia.

In the massacre of Saint Bartholomew

in medieval ages, violent scenes,
tinted blue.

And in modern gangsterism,
all shiny cars and jazz outfits.

And then inter-cut these.

Griffith said:
�Dickens inter-cuts, so, so will I�.

He took storyline A so far,
then jumped to storyline B,

advanced it a certain amount,
then went back again to A

and picked up where he had left off.

Previously, a cut
from one shot to the next

meant, as we've seen:
�Then� or �meanwhile.�

Griffith's cutting between time periods
wasn't saying either.

It was saying: �look, these very
different events,

from different eras,
all show the same human trait.�

Intolerance, or the failure of love.

Editing as an intellectual signpost.

Asking people to notice

not something about action or story

but about the meaning of the sequence.

Soviets such as Eisenstein,
wrote about this editing.

And as far away as Japan in 1921,

Minoru Murata made this film,
Souls on the Road.

Two storylines intertwine.

In the end of the film,
they come together.

Two ex-convicts from one storyline

here find a son from the other storyline,
in the snow.

Their story has been one of hope
but the son has died.

A pioneering use
of parallel editing in Asia.

This made Souls on the Road
the first great Japanese film.

In L.A. today, a shopping mall
on Hollywood boulevard,

where the Oscars take place,

has partially rebuilt the massive
Babylonian gate from Intolerance.

The original was here,
a mile away from the shopping mall.

It was demolished when Hollywood
didn't care much about its own history.

But what history!

What ideas!

Filmed with a Dolly on a crane,
and even on a balloon,

to get high enough, up into the wind,
that flaps these vast hangings.

Cinema was just 20 years old
when this shot was filmed.

A new art form had been born.

Scandinavian directors
had made it an art of light.

Nickelodeons had given way
to movie palaces.

Places built like cathedrals

or Egyptian temples
or Chinese pavilions.

A garden called Hollywood started
to pump fantasies out into the world.

Film editing captured
the fragmented experiences of modern life.

New creatures, called movie stars,
became the most famous people in the world.

They lived in places of rapture and escape.

The story of film seemed
to have reached its climax.

But, in fact, it was only just beginning.

Subtitles corrected and synced
by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today

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