All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 10 - 1969-1979 - Radical Directors in the 70s

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 Kyôko Kagawa

who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.

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

And in the movies
of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film,
an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation
across twelve decades,

six continents
and a thousand films.

In this chapter we encounter
the wild cinema

of Werner Herzog and Nicolas Roeg
and discover how movie making in the 70's

asked big questions
about identity and sex.

When most people think of '70s movies,
they think of Scorsese and Coppola,

Spielberg and Lucas,
but beyond the heat shimmer of L.A.

and the urban canyons of New York,
a world of exciting new cinema

opened up in the '70s.

As Willy Brandt became chancellor
in Germany, as Iran got rich,

as decolonized Africa worked out
what it wanted to be,

as Japan got even more radical.

Movie makers in Germany, Iran, Britain,
Africa, Asia, and Italy

asked big, brilliant questions
about themselves and their countries.

German cinema conquered the world
in the 1910s and '20s,

and Leni Riefenstahl had been brilliant
but misguided in the '30s and '40s.

After the war, and the division of Germany,
a great studio, DEFA,

started making films
in the east.

Then the Berlin wall was built.

Come the '70s, there was so much
to deplore and rethink

that it's no surprise
that German cinema

at the time, was about
identity and history.

This man, Wim Wenders,
was one of a generation of young filmmakers

who wanted
"to create a new German film."

They did so
through common cause.

The new German cinema
was nothing but that.

That sort of solidarity
of 15 powerless people

to become a powerful union.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder stated
the aims clearly to interviewers.

The basic idea of the new German cinema
is to make films again

which are important
and have something to say.

Films born out of our own life
and experience.

A massive generation gap
had opened up between baby boomers

and their parents who either voted
for Adolf Hitler or endured him.

An economic boom in West Germany
had begun to numb

the guilt about the holocaust.

New right-wing tabloid newspapers
pasted contentment over everything.

The new German filmmakers knew
that they wanted none of this,

but what did they want?

Who were they?

What made their hearts
beat fast?

Here is the most prolific
of them: Fassbinder.

Naked in front of his own camera,
displaying his personal life on the big screen.

He said, "the ideal is to make films
as beautiful as America's,

but to move the content
to other areas."

So he took this beautiful,
romantic American film,

with sweet, orchestral music,
All that heaven allows,

about this woman who's shunned
because she has a romance

with her younger,
working class gardener.

And remade it as this far less glossy,
less beautiful movie, Fear eats the soul
[Angst essen Seele auf].

Fassbinder uses
this very Hollywood tracking shot to show

the prejudice of the woman's family
and here he plays a part in the film.

In the remake, the woman is shunned
by society not because her lover

is working class,
but because he's black.

Fear eats the soul
was about the darkness of human identity,

as was this film that Fassbinder
made two years previously.

The bitter tears of Petra Von Kant,
Fassbinder's 13th film,

told the story of a famous clothes designer
who lives with her assistant, Marlene,

who is really her slave.

Fassbinder has his actors move
slowly, inexpressively,

as if they are haunted
or exhausted.

The part of Marlene
was partly based on Irm Hermann,

who plays her, herself, in the movie,
always in this same black dress.

She was Fassbinder's secretary and lover
in real life and he treated her appallingly,

sometimes beating her in public.

Body language in the film
expresses its tragedy.

Wigs and make-up conjure
its cruel artifice.

Fassbinder had in mind
this classic American movie: All about Eve.

Another film about two women
controlling each other,

fueled by alcohol
and all dolled up.

Tuck me in, turn off the lights
and tip-toe out.

Eve would, wouldn't you Eve?

If you'd like.

I wouldn't like.

But as he always did, Fassbinder took
the American story much further.

Petra falls in love
with this woman in brown, Karin,

and becomes her slave.

The poussin painting in the background
is also about abjection.

Midas begs Bacchus to rid him
of the power to turn things into gold.

Eventually, the agonies of love
ruin Petra.

Spit drips from her mouth.

She's alone in an empty room
waiting for the phone to ring.

The new German cinema had stolen
an American story

then rubbed
its nose in the dirt.

It loved Hollywood but sneered
at its lies about identity and love.

Where Fassbinder's films
were often about women

in confined spaces, those of Wim Wenders
were about men in open spaces.

And where it was the style
of the American films

that influenced Fassbinder,
it was America itself,

and its utopianism,
that was Wenders' jumping off point.

In his unforgettable road movie,
Alice in the cities,

the camera cranes down under a boardwalk
to find Rüdiger Vogler, a journalist,

who's drifting and numb.

Wenders saw himself in him.

This is Wenders' notebook
and storyboard for this boardwalk scene.

Later, Wenders has Vogler
arrange to meet a woman

at the top
of the Empire State building.

Again, he's using
an iconic American location.

He shoots in natural light.
Vogler's drifting, melancholic music.

Seventeen years earlier,
about a world away,

Hollywood director Leo Mccarey,
had Cary Grant arrange

to meet Deborah Kerr there.

This scene was shot in a studio,
visually precise, crisp, colored, controlled.

Whereas Wenders eye roams,
long lens.

Unsure of what it's looking for.

It's as if Wenders is saying:
"Remember what it is like to feel?"

Where Wenders defined
modern German identity

in relationship
to America,

our next director
was more interested in gender.

Margarethe Von Trotta
started as an actress.

This is her in a Fassbinder film,
insolent, like a German Julie Christie.

Then she made
her solo directorial debut with

The second awakening
of Christa Klages.

The title character Christa,
robs a bank,

but Von Trotta's robbery is one
of the least tense or macho ever filmed.

There's no shouting
or sync sound.

Just mellow music.

Von Trotta focuses instead
on the relationship

between Christa and this bank clerk
who Christa, at first, takes hostage.

In the film's climax, Christa is caught
by the police and confronted by the clerk.

The clerk's been hunting
her throughout the movie,

but then this happens.

Von Trotta uses close-ups,
almost direct to camera eye lines.

This creates intimacy
and equality between the two women.

Where Leni Riefenstahl's films
were expressionist and about men,

Von Trotta's were impressionist portraits
of women's intimacy in violent times.

The next German filmmaker of the '70s
went to the end of the earth to find himself.

He's German cinemas' wild man,
its explorer.

At the age of 18, Werner Herzog
ventured across the Sudan.

He walked from Munich to Paris.

In 1982, to make his film Fitzcarraldo,
Herzog and his crew

hauled a full sized ship,
this is a model of it,

up and over a hilly jungle,
Isthmus, in Peru.

A dangerous idea
that people tried to make safer.

But as this location filming,

with Herzog
speaking passionately in Spanish, shows,

he saw the haul not only
as a physical feat, but in symbolic terms.

And look at this key moment
in the film.

The boat is being hauled.
The crew seems to move it.

The documentary camera is far back
from the action but captures the rejoicing.

But then
one of the ropes breaks.

All these dreams are yours as well

and the only distinction between
me and you is that I can articulate them.

And that is what poetry, or painting,
or literature, or filmmaking is all about.

It's as simple as that.

Herzog's eyes in this interview
show his exhaustion.

He's talking about universal things
but he's almost crying.

And I know I can do it
to a certain degree.

Like Pasolini,
Herzog was a romantic.

He wasn't much interested in the feminism
of Von Trotta or the americana of Wenders.

He was far more taken
by primeval life.

After John Ford, he is
the most important landscape filmmaker

to appear so far in our story.

The geographical, historical, class,
gender, sexual, and spiritual diversity

of the new German cinema directors,
made their innovative movies wildly different.

But one thing's clear,
the films all ask the question:

"If I don't want to be
what my parents are, then what am I?"

We definitely changed
the way German's looked at each other.

Germans had not looked
at German history any more.

Fassbinder, more than any of us,

confronted them with their own image,
their own history.

Italy in the '70s had industrialized
and was haunted by its fascist past too.

But its great '70s films asked questions
not about identity and history,

but identity and sex.

The boldest Italian
depicter of sex in the '70s

was that '60s radical:
Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Italy had become so commercialized,
said Pasolini, that,

"enjoying life and the body means precisely
enjoying a life that historically no longer exists."

In other words,
you can't be who you are.

And so he set his so called
"trilogy of life" films in the past.

This is the ending of the last
of the trilogy, the Arabian nights.

Nur Ed Din, a young man,
has been looking everywhere

for his beloved maidservant,
Zummurud.

Pasolini filmed
in Iranian mirrored rooms.

Instead, Nur Ed Din finds himself in front
of this king, who wears a golden beard.

The young man reluctantly
submits to sex with the king,

not realizing that the king
is zumurrud in disguise.

Zumurrud can't contain
her giggles.

In contemporary Italy,
said Pasolini,

such fun was not possible,
consumerism had ruined everything.

He was murdered
by a male prostitute in 1975.

Bernardo Bertolucci,
who started as Pasolini's assistant,

became the greatest European filmmaker
of his time.

In 1970, he made this film.

The camera tracks right to reveal
a piazza and a man standing in it.

Then he walks
and we see a statue.

His father.

An anti-fascist hero
in the village.

Then the camera
is again moving right.

This time the man's visiting
an old girlfriend of his father.

She's standing still too
and then she starts to walk also,

as if she's been static for decades
and is suddenly swept into movement

by the camera's tracking.

And as the film sweeps into the past,
the man finds that his father wasn't a hero.

He collaborated
with the fascists.

What sort of identity
does that give the son?

But what made The spider's stratagem
[Strategia del ragno]

different from most '70s films
about identity

was its concern for visual beauty,
as well as it's gliding camera work.

Look at this shot:
blue dusk light in the sky

and the yellow white petroleum light
of the lamp in the same magic moment.

Bertolucci and his cinematographer,
Vittorio Storaro,

loved the haunting dusk lighting
in the surreal paintings

of Rene Magritte
and tried to capture it.

And then, Bertolucci upped
the beauty even further.

In the same year, 1970,
aged just 30,

he released a second masterpiece,
The conformist
[Il conformista].

It was also about fascism and identity
and, it too, was determinedly beautiful.

Look at this bold composition
with its plunging perspective.

And look at this shot,
the camera sweeps and the leaves do too,

as if they're both blown by the same wind,
like a Gene Kelly musical.

In the radical '60s,
visual beauty had been seen

as too Hollywood, too shallow.

But here Bertolucci was bringing
beauty back to Italian cinema.

That most hardcore '60s director,
Jean-Luc Godard,

saw The conformist's beauty
as a betrayal of radicalism.

He met Bertolucci at a café.

I was waiting for Godard
and finally Jean-Luc

appears next to me with
these dark sunglasses.

He doesn't say anything
but he gives me a note.

And then he leaves.

And his comments on
"The conformist":

"One has to fight
against imperialism and capitalism."

All that written on a portrait
of chairman Mao.

I was so upset that I tore it up
in thousands of pieces, that note.

And I am very sorry today.

I would like to see it
and to look at that again.

Godard notwithstanding,
The conformist

was one of the most influential movies
of the '70s, especially in America.

Francis Ford Coppola poached
cinematographer Storaro for Apocalypse now.

And the beauty of this scene,
in Taxi driver,

derives from The conformist.

It would be easy to film
this violent moment

with a wobbly handheld camera.

But Martin Scorsese goes high
and has the shot glide across the ceiling.

An ugly event turned
into gorgeous form.

Innovative British movies in the '70s
were about identity too.

Like Italian films of the time,
sexual identity was a key theme

but so was the idea
that identity is fragmented.

Ken Russell served in the air force,
then became a ballet dancer,

a rare career move, then became
Britain's Federico Fellini.

In this scene in Women in love,
he films a sex scene as a slow motion,

long lens, outdoor dance.

And puts the camera on its side,
making the action vertical.

Defying gravity,
as had hardly ever been done before,

and its strangeness, reminds us
how horizontal cinema normally is.

More daring still was this film Performance,
by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell.

It's about this London gangster:
Chaz.

He keeps checking himself
in the mirror.

His hair, nails, waistline.

This scene in Martin Scorsese's
Mean streets, made 3 years later

is about another narcissist
getting all dolled up.

Again, a mirror scene.

Again, clothes
are the gangsters uniform.

Movie gangsters
have often been about display.

Chaz, in Performance,
comes to this place in London to hide out,

because he's shot another gangster
and the mobsters will be after him.

He holds up in the house
of a fading pop star, Turner,

played by Mick Jagger.

As bohemian
as Chaz is clean cut.

Van Gogh, eh?

Oh no, this is the normal.

The normal?

Yeah.

I was just having a laugh.

And then this happens.

Here, Chaz is talking to Turner.

The camera moves behind Turner's head,
then dissolves through it,

to Chaz, who sounds more echo-y now
and looks straight at us.

The two men's faces dissolve
into each other.

Chaz is changing.

His identity is merging
with Turner's.

An idea taken from
this strikingly similar scene

in one of Ingmar Bergman's
greatest films, Persona.

In the end, the mobsters
come for Chaz.

His last act before he's taken away
is to shoot Turner,

maybe because he's shown him
too much of himself.

His bullet travels through Turner's brain
and a picture of the Argentine writer

about dreams and labyrinths, Borges,
and crashes through a mirror,

then back to London.

The most imaginative shooting
in the story of film

Then Chaz is led away
by the gangsters.

But things are not
what they seem.

A child toddles backwards.

And as Chaz heads off to his likely death,
we glimpse him in close-up and he's Turner.

Performance was not only
the greatest '70s film about identity.

If any movie
in the whole story of film

should be compulsory viewing
for filmmakers, maybe, this is it.

Australian film in the '70s
gathered momentum

and Nicolas Roeg fueled it.

This is Roeg's film,
Walkabout.

A white city-girl and her brother
head out into the outback.

Their father has just shot himself
and tried to shoot them.

They're scared.

Roeg films with a wide angle lenses
to stretch the space before them.

Roeg's film is about the contrast you see
all over Australia between nature and city.

The sea and swimming pools.

Raw and the cooked.

Years later, we're in a white world
of tower blocks

and chlorinated swimming pools.

The girl's married now.

She's in her clean,
middle class kitchen.

She wears make-up, like a mask.

She's with her husband but thinks back
to a half imagined free moment

when she swam naked
in the outback with an aboriginal lad.

A life less ordinary.

...Which means old mayor looks
like being out of a job.

Still, it's his own fault.
If you're going to compete on...

She's like Chaz in Performance,
shedding her clean cut self

when she meets
a more vital human being.

It's like she's remembering
what aboriginals call "the dream time."

Her sense of loss
is overwhelming.

Plus with all this changing around,
there's bound to be good news

as far
as salary's concerned.

I tell you though, in 2 years
we'll be holidaying on the gold coast...

In modern day Australia,
people swim in manmade pools.

The dreams and fears
of Roeg's film are still here.

The raw and the cooked became
a staple of aussie cinema.

The films were about
what sort of person you are.

One who swims in a chlorinated pool
or the open sea.

What sort of person's this girl?

She and her friends are wearing
long, white, victorian dresses

in the sultry heat
of the Australian outback.

I feel awful.

Really awful.

They're fish out of water.

Miranda,
I feel perfectly awful.

The film is
Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Director Peter Weir films the girls
in slight slow motion

to create a sense of mystery.

The girls are about
to disappear.

Miranda?

Miranda?

Miranda!

Miranda, don't go up there!
Come back!

Weir's plan was to explain
this disappearance at the end of the film.

They were to be discovered
and brought home on stretchers,

but his editor, Max Lemon,
instead did this:

he repeated earlier picnic scenes
in step motion,

the camera roaming,
no sync sound.

As if the girls are ghosts.

White Australian identity
evaporating in the heat.

Gillian Armstrong's debut feature
is set in victorian times too.

But My brilliant Career
isn't about a woman's relationship

with nature, but with men.

Her main character here
has theoverview.

Do you, um, need a hand?
No, thank you.

Sam Neill is glamorized
and filmed in dappled light, not her.

Do you work in the kitchen?

I'd be obliged to you sir,
if you'd take yourself out of the way.

Unless you want me foot
in your big fat face.

The female point
of view of the film

hinted at how gendered aussie cinema
would become in the '90s,

with the films of Jane Campion
and Baz Luhrmann.

How about a reward?
Let me go.

Sam Neil was in more women's films
than most actors.

Being in women's films makes as much sense
to me as being in a bloke's film.

And... there's a certain sensibility
that these things...

these films have in common,
I think, that I find agreeable.

Australia and New Zealand
are both post-colonial societies

where it's taken us a while
to wake up to women's issues.

Probably a little bit longer
than elsewhere.

Move from Australia to Japan
in the '70s and you find

some of the most radical
filmmakers of the decade,

who took a hammer
rather than a mirror to the real world

and tried to shape Japanese identity
with ground-breaking documentaries.

This is the climax of one
of the greatest documentaries ever made

which was
filmed over 17 years.

We're at the packed annual general meeting
of Japanese chemical company, Chisso.

Over many years it dumped methyl
Mercury into the fishing waters

causing hundreds of deaths
and bio-deformities.

The company
denied all responsibility.

Its bosses sit
at long tables on the stage.

The families of the dead
and the severely disabled are here.

They bought shares in Chisso
to force its board of directors

to take responsibility
for their appalling actions.

Director Noriaki Tsuchimoto
knew the protestors,

and so, got close to them.

His small 16-millimeter camera

allowed him to be at the center
of such explosive moments.

He uses little sync sound.

The jostled handheld camera
and torrent of words

make fiction film look staid.

In Japan, where identity
is not traditionally asserted,

such scenes were shocking.

Claude Lanzmann, who made
the holocaust documentary, Shoah,

called Tsuchimoto, "a great artist
with a profound vision as a fighter.

A marvelous filmmaker
and a rigorous creator of sublime work."

This man, Kazuo Hara,
made a documentary masterpiece

of the Japanese assertiveness
at its most shocking.

It's about an ex-soldier
called Mr. Okuzaki.

This is Mr. okuzaki.

He's meeting the brother and sister
of a friend of his who disappeared.

A soldier with whom he fought
in World War II.

Hara films with handheld camera.

He follows as they go
to this house.

An old commander lives here.

Together, they want to find out
what happened to the soldier.

But this visit
doesn't dig up the truth

and the two siblings
drop out of the investigation.

And so, astonishingly,
Okuzaki hires these two actors

walking dolefully behind him
to pretend to be the siblings.

He'll tell the next commanders
that the actors are the real siblings,

using emotional blackmail,
to try to get to the truth of what happened.

As the filming continued,
Okuzaki discovered

that his friends were probably
cannibalized by the commanders.

Okuzaki's in this commander's house now,
just to the right of this close-up,

again filmed
by Hara's handheld camera.

Okuzaki's angry now.

We hold our breath.

Okuzaki attacks
the commander.

Hara uses slow motion.

The fraught experience of making
the film,

gave Hara a sense that unpalatable truth
in life is buried under layers of lies.

As we've seen, filmmaking in Germany,
Italy, Britain, Australia, and Japan

in the '70s
was radical and about identity.

Jump to here, Senegal in West Africa
in the '70s, however,

and a whole new world
of radical movie making opens up.

A manifesto called "Towards a third cinema:
Notes and experiences for the development

of a cinema of liberation
in the third world"

by South Americans,
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,

angrily criticized cinema
for always having been a commodity.

They argued that this great collective medium
should fight poverty and oppression.

The manifesto had a huge impact.

This is a cinema in Burkina Faso,
one of the poorest countries in the world.

But painted on it is:

"a cinema can be
the heart of the community "

and "cinema is a dream."

The manifesto said
that there are three types of film.

The first, made mostly in Hollywood,
is the commercial, entertainment: the bauble.

The second type of cinema
is the modernist art movie genre

made by individual directors like Godard,
Antonioni, Bergman, and Fellini.

Third cinema, opposed to both industrial
and autobiographical art cinema, is political.

About post-colonial identity and made
in the non-western world after 1969.

These ideals were the rocket fuel
of '70s cinema here in Africa,

in south America,
and in the middle east.

In Burkina Faso today for example,
these people aren't going to a football match.

They're going
to the opening of a film festival,

in their tens of thousands.

Burkinabe filmmaker, Gaston Kaboré,
believes that making films

is crucial
to people's identities.

If we continue consuming
the images coming from abroad,

telling the stories of other people, it
might be interesting at the beginning, but

slowly we are going to lose
our own way of looking the reality.

As we've seen, there'd been
Arab filmmaking in Egypt since the '30s.

And this famous moment in
The Black Girl,

a boy removes a mask and looks hauntingly
into the eyes of the audience,

was the bold start of black feature
film making in Africa in the '60s.

But scenes like this,

Tarzan's scrubbed clean, white family,
having breakfast in a fantasy jungle,

were, still,
the most popular movie images of Africa.

But here's a more realistic African man.
He's Algerian.

There's no sync sound,
arabic music.

The film's been poorly preserved
but it's dreamlike.

The camera tracks backward.

Director Assia Djebar's main character
sees her man on his horse.

She towers over him.

He falls.

Then he's in a wheelchair.

Djebar's
is no fantasy Africa.

She looks at Algeria
through a feminist lens.

In West Africa in the '70s,

third cinema movies
about identity were on a roll too.

Where Scorsese, and Coppola,
and the rest

were kicking down the doors of Hollywood,

in this city, Dakar, tens of thousands
of miles away from the pool parties

and Oscar ceremonies of Los Angeles,

film was buzzing and cameras
were on the streets.

Ousmane Sembéne
was still leading the way.

His follow up to The black Girl,
Xala, was funny and rude.

It was about the move
from colonial to post-colonial identity.

It starts here, the chamber
of commerce in Dakar.

It's the end of colonial rule.

Senegalese triumphantly kick out
the symbols of the French state,

including Jack Boots
and a gendarme cap.

They look forlorn,
their time has gone.

But in the very next scene
the new businessmen

are aping their colonizers.

Sembéne mocks
their new trophy briefcases.

One of the businessmen has his car
washed in "Evian,"

Sembéne's tart way of showing
the decadence of the new regime.

Sembéne was against religion and wanted
Africa to undergo a radical enlightenment.

This is his house: Calle Ceddo.

Means home of the unbeliever.

From the front,
it's on the left of this image,

you can see
that it's just meters away from a mosque.

Sembéne planted his tripod
on the soil of Senegal

and created a new, radical type
of African cinema: Third cinema.

This man, Djibril Diop Mambéty,
seemed to love cinema even more.

He spoke slowly, in an almost dreamlike way
as this interview shows.

Sembéne's point of view
was ideologically certain,

but Mambéty chopped up
such certainty into fragments.

Mambéty's films helped
create African modernism.

Look at this scene in his caustic,
second short film, Badou Boy.

A man and a boy saddle up a horse.
Very simple.

But the repetition of "ça va?"

and the standing up
and hunkering down of the two people,

gives it an abstract
rhythm and jagginess.

Mambéty said,
"you either engage in stylistic research

or just record reality."

Mambéty lived here.

He struggled
to get financing for his films.

His punkiness
found little favor.

In 1992, he made this masterpiece:
Hyenas.

This woman
is half made of gold.

She's returned to the village
where she fell in love

with this man
who then spurned her.

She's as rich
as the world bank now.

This is director Mambéty
himself on the left.

She treats the villagers
to luxuries, consumer goods.

The villagers love these.

They become greedy.

They want more.

The village becomes
like a shopping channel.

A fun fair to celebrate
the joys of capitalism.

Then, devastatingly, the woman says
that they can have more luxuries,

but there's a price to pay.

They must kill the man
who spurned her.

They're so hooked now on capitalism
that they do kill him.

Mambéty films the lynching
where he himself grew up.

The mob closes in, murmuring.

Mambéty had become as angry
at consumerism, as Pasolini in Italy.

Sembéne and Mambéty
showed that African filmmakers

were making cinema say
what they wanted it to say

about who
modern West Africans were.

The result was exciting.

The joy of discovery.

New types of African symbolism
and storytelling.

And other directors emerged.

Safi Faye, Africa's
first important female director,

made this film,
Peasant Letter, in 1974.

She shows her village at dawn,
the beauty of the smoke,

mid-sized framings.

Everyday scenes.

Off screen and in a gentle voice
she describes what we see.

The film is a show and tell
to the outside world.

An Ethiopian, Haile Gerima,
made this remarkable film,

Harvest: 3,000 years.
[Mirt Sost Shi Amit]

Its story stretches
over 3 millennia.

It starts at dawn, as if all of history
has been just one day.

Low contrast, black and white.

Extremely long lenses
to telescope the land and eternity.

This makes us feel distant,
but Gerima is passionate.

He shows farmers treated like shit
by a trilby hatted armchair tyrant.

Again shot long lens,
barking orders.

Then comes this old, mad man,
Kebebe.

Kebebe tells a story about
the Queen of England.

Colonial power told almost like
a myth to everyone and no one.

Two hours into the film,
Kebebe batters the landlord with a stick.

Voices begin to flood
the sound track.

People are beginning
to talk to each other.

A key idea in third cinema.

The popular radicalism
of third cinema made movies

innovatived across the globe.

In the Middle East,
the great films of the '70s

were about identity and
national liberation.

The most notorious
middle eastern filmmaker of the '70s

was this Kurdish man,
Yilmaz Güney.

This is him acting in the film,
Hope [Umut ].

His ripped clothing
shows how poor he is.

He's a scruffy, masculine hero,
like a Kurdish Sean Connery.

He plays, here, an illiterate man
who's been searching for treasure

to feed his family
and has almost gone mad.

Spinning in space,
let down by life.

Then Güney started directing.

Here's a film he wrote
and co-directed: "Yol."

A man has been released
from prison for five days.

He's happy, free, running
with his dog.

Wide open spaces, long lens filming,
wind in the grass.

He comes to his village and smiles,
looks to camera,

but then
the smile dies on his face.

The village is cowering.

The music dies.

The state military are here.

Still-life shots of confrontation.

No words needed.

People look imprisoned
in their own windows and doorways.

Güney is credited as co-director
of the film with Serif Gören,

because remarkably he was in prison
for the whole shoot

but escaped in time
for the post-production.

He sent out explicit notes
on how shots should be filmed.

He was accused of killing
an anti-communist judge in a restaurant,

though it was probably
Güney's nephew that did it.

This character in Yol
was typical of Güney's men:

Old fashioned, proud
but powerless.

Their hopes dashed, banging
their heads against the wall of life.

Güney was a communist, a spokesperson
for ordinary people, and adored.

Yol won the main prize at the
Cannes film festival.

Back in south America,
where the third cinema ideas were born,

this, one of the most compelling
third cinema films, was made.

It was about identity
and betrayal.

Filmmaking that makes
you feel in the center of the action.

Marxist, Salvador Allende, was democratically
elected president of Chili in 1970.

On September the 11th, 1973,

Allende gives what will be
his last radio broadcast.

Then the military,
led by general Pinochet, moves in.

Director Patrizio Guzman
and his team filmed from rooftops,

with handheld cameras, zoomed in
to see soldiers running like ants.

They'd been shooting for months
before the violent coup,

which was
supported by the CIA.

History dramatically unfolded
in front of them.

They were sometimes hiding,

so walls and railings
would half-obscure their view.

They used direct sound.

No gloss, no distance.

The battle of Chile said:

"Here's what we are.
Here's what we're losing."

And we end our tour of identity movies
around the world in the '70s

with this unforgettable, outrageous film.

It was made by a Chilean born director too,

but it's far more about identity
and psychedelics than betrayal.

A near naked thief
climbs a vast tower.

Below him is a mad world
of fascists and religious obsessives,

who have used his body
as a mold to make images of Christ.

A very third cinema set up.

But when the thief
gets to the top of the tower

the film becomes something
like The wizard of Oz.

A strange corridor,
like a rainbow.

The thief advances.

He meets a man dressed
in white, flanked by goats,

a naked woman and a camel.

It's the director,
Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Jodorowsky studied
mime in Paris.

He believed in zen buddhism.

The idea that people
should dethrone themselves.

And he studied Carl Jung,
so this scene, in a way,

is a man climbing
into the maze of his own mind

where he discovers strange images
and archetypes

that he shares with
all human beings.

Indian music plays.

Jodorowsky's man in white
is an alchemist.

He asks the thief
if he wants gold.

He does, of course.

But the manner
of its making is extraordinary.

The thief must defecate
and give the alchemist his own sweat.

The thief's spiritual
awakening begins.

Eventually, his own excrement
becomes gold.

Jodorowsky certainly
had a sense of humor.

But his journey to the holy mountain
of self-discovery, and self-loss

is only just beginning.

Primary colors, egg shapes, a pelican,
nudity, a very '70s production design.

You are excrement.

You can change yourself
into gold.

The thief's journey of self-discovery
mirrored that of '70s cinema itself.

Its political, innovative filmmakers
had stripped cinema naked,

loaded it with symbolism
about selfhood, and turned it into gold.

And above and beyond these things,
they used movies to ask:

"Who are we, as modern Europeans, Asians,
Africans, South Americans?"

But movies in the '70s
weren't only innovative

when they were political
or about identity.

Mainstream and entertainment directors

in Mumbai, Hong Kong, and
Hollywood in the '70s

were about to change
the story of film.

Forever.

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