All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 7 - 1957-1964 - The Shock of the New

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

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

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

It's passion, innovation!

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

To discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Kyôko Kagawa

who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.

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

And in the movies
of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film,
an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation
across twelve decades,

six continents
and a thousand films.

In this chapter we meet
the brilliant Federico Fellini

and discover the explosion
of the French New Wave.

If the mid-1950s were a tense time,
in the late '50s and early '60s,

life got even more so in Europe,
life got more sexual.

East Germany built the Berlin Wall,
the nuclear nightmare grew.

Moviemakers had to take
all this on board

and, also, the fact that
it was now 60 years

since the first ever film
had been screened here.

Movies were no longer
the bright, young, new art form.

In the cafés of Paris,
this film studio in Rome,

and on the streets of Stockholm,
filmmakers planned a revolution.

They changed
the movies for good.

Made them more personal,
made them more self-aware,

the shock of the new.

Four legendary European directors,
Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson,

Jacques Tati, and Federico Fellini
led the way in making movies personal.

Here in Stockholm in the '50s,

the curtain went up
on the profoundly personal films

of a director
for whom cinema was like theatre.

This man, Ingmar Bergman.

Danish director, Lars Von Trier:

I have seen all of Bergman's films,
"Through a Glass Darkly"
[Såsom i en spegel],

one of my favorite films.

I don't know what it has to do
with anti-Christ, probably, but then...

Bergman has had a great influence on me,
especially he is very good with words.

I just thought his last film was called
"Saraband," or something like that,

which is maybe not a great film,
but it is, of course,

a good film because he made it...

But... the words are so good.

In the Swedish film archive,
there's a drawing,

that Bergman did
of his family when he was a boy.

And the brother as well.

And this is Ingmar
with his books?

Yeah, learning the...

The caption says that his dad
is impossibly authoritative.

Bergman shows himself
surrounded by books.

And look at this drawing.

In his early teens, Bergman claims to
have been locked in this building,

a hospital mortuary.

He saw the dead body
of a beautiful young woman,

pulled back
the sheet covering it,

almost touched her genitals.

Touch and death:
the two great themes in his work.

One of Bergman's great early films,
Summer with Monika,
[Sommaren med Monika]

was amongst
the most sensuous of its time.

And not only was
the sexuality modern,

Bergman allowed actress Hariett Andersson
to look straight into the camera.

Film historian Stig Björkman:

What struck Godard
and some of his comrades

from the new wave generation

was the freshness in which Bergman
had filmed the story

and this daring moment,
of course, when...

Harriet Anderson
looks intensely into the camera

and the camera
is drawn towards her

and Bergman darkens
the background behind her.

So it was a kind of cinematic trick
which hasn't been tried before.

This scene, from Bergman's
best known '50s film, The Seventh Seal,
[Det sjunde inseglet]

shows the evolution
of his thinking.

During the middle ages,
when the black death is rampant,

a knight who has returned
from the crusades,

agonizes about mortality.

It's as if the knight has seen
Summer with Monika

and realizes that the senses
are amongst the best things we have,

and so uses
them to question god.

Five years later,
in Winter Light, [Nattvardsgästerna]

Bergman seems to have concluded
that God is finally dead.

The central figure is,
like his father was, a clergyman.

Death would spread
through Bergman's cinema like a cancer,

first God died, then people.

Winter Light was also a reminder
of how autobiographical his films were,

how boldly personal.

Bergman's wife, Ellen Lundstrum,
had skin eczema.

When they argued he'd sometimes
complain about her eczema.

Now look at this scene between
the clergyman and a school teacher,

who's in love with him.

This is Bergman confessing
his guilt about how he treated his wife,

and showing how people
humiliate each other.

Bergman's film, Persona, shows that
not only did he use film as a confessional,

he used it as a self-aware medium,

just as modern artists had made
painting self-aware.

Towards the end of Persona,

the film breaks down and seems
to release a series of images

which it has been repressing:
Charlie Chaplin, a nail through the hand,

an eye.

It's as if the filmstrip had so far been
a pure surface of consciousness

through which the farcical, violent
and disturbing sub-conscious images erupt.

Film didn't only tell the story,
it was the story,

the big theme in the story
of innovative cinema in these years.

By the 1970s, Bergman
had been making films for 30 years,

he continued
to refine his ideas.

For decades he'd been filming
beautiful faces and seeing pain in them,

ugliness, something
about Sweden or life in general,

its loneliness, mortality,
and despair.

Faces were symbols for Bergman, on stage
or projected, as if by a magic lantern.

He wrote each of his films
in a notebook like this.

These ones are blank,
they're kept by the Swedish film institute,

a symbol of his unmade films.

Where Bergman's central
metaphor was the theatre,

the second outstanding art film director
of the time, Robert Bresson,

thought of human life as a prison
from which we must break out.

This is where Bresson lived,
the Isle de la Cité in Paris.

Between 1950 and 1961
he made four films about imprisonment.

One of them was Pickpocket.

Look at this scene
where the pickpocket

goes into the Gare de Lyon
in Paris to steal.

It's not exactly
the searing colorful melodrama

of All that heaven allows
or Mother India,

both made in the same year.

Are there plainer,
less adorned images in film history?

The lens is 50 millimeters,
the lighting's flat,

the clothes are
what ordinary people wear.

There's no expression
on the man's face,

the composition
isn't unusual in any way.

Welcome to the world
of Robert Bresson.

He wrote, 'one does not create by adding
but by taking away.'

And he follows this law
to the letter.

Everything expressive
is taken away here.

Like Ozu, his films are expressive
of no inner chaos or fire.

He wrote, "no actors, no parts,
no staging."

Stardom, that thing that began
50 years earlier with Florence Lawrence,

was nowhere in his work.

A total rejection of gloss, MGM,
razzmatazz, the bauble.

Like Dreyer he sandblasted
film history.

Why?

Take this beautiful, unsettling film
Au Hasard Balthazar

about a donkey which,
throughout its life, is treated cruelly.

Bresson films it in close-up,
simple framing.

The donkey, of course, has no expression,
we can't read its feelings.

The pickpocket is blank
like the donkey.

By stripping out material things,
by stripping movies

of their 60 years of excess style,

Bresson wanted to hint
at what he called

the 'invisible hand,
directing what happens, '

the hand of god.

His films are about the route to god,
cinema was, for him, a path to grace.

This is the church
where he worshipped.

Once, walking in these gardens
beside this church, Notre Dame,

he saw something.

He writes, 'I saw, approaching,

a man whose eyes caught
something behind me

which I could not see.

At once they lit up.

If at the same moment as I saw the man,
I had perceived the young woman

and child towards whom
he now began running,

that happy face of his would
not have struck me so.

Indeed I would not have noticed it.'

This is the root of Bresson.

In his films, he tries to show the invisible,
the ineffable, the transcendent.

At the end of Pickpocket, the thief
has been imprisoned for his crimes.

His girlfriend arrives,
he's finally found grace.

This is where the prison metaphor
in Bresson reveals its full richness.

People are imprisoned in their own bodies.
They have to escape from them

to apprehend the divine.

Paul Schräder:

'I think Freud
had a phrase for it:

the representation
of a thing by its opposite.

If you push away far enough,
you'll get there.

You'll get to the thing
you're pushing away from.

One thing that I did in
Taxi Driver...

...we did in Taxi Driver

which is by doing
what I call the monocular film,

which is having the same character
in every single scene,

which was kinda cribbed
from Pickpocket and Bresson,

and never letting the audience
be privy to any other reality,

any inter-cutting, you know?

The only world you know
is through your protagonist,

if he doesn't see it,
you don't see it.

And then by using interior monologue,
you can...

If you can hold the audience long enough,
which is about 45 minutes,

you can make them empathize
with someone

they do not feel is worthy
of empathy

and then you are
in a very interesting place as a creator.

And it wasn't only Schräder
who was influenced by Bresson.

Here in India, he had a deep impact
on the work of '70s directors

like this man: Mani Kaul.

In Poland, Krzysztof Kieslowski
saw Bresson's films

and they shaped his Dekalog.

And the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's
film Ratcatcher

is hauntingly attached to objects
and the physical world, like Bresson.

Still in France,
the third great unclassifiable director

of the late '40s and '50s
was Jacques Tati.

As we've seen,
his comic character monsieur Hulot

was a response
to Charlie Chaplin.

Hulot leant forward
and wore trousers too short

whereas Chaplin's character
leant back and wore his trousers too long.

Tati knew a hairdresser called Lalouette,
a happy bungler, a bull in a China shop,

a holy fool
and based Hulot on him.

Like Bresson and Ozu,
Tati disliked strong storytelling,

he preferred
little incidents, details.

Scottish director Bill Forsyth:

I think a lot of filmmakers think
a story is the purpose of the film

and that the characters and the actors
really have just got to service the story

and take it to where it's going.

And that seems to me
to be the complete opposite

of what should be happening
'cause there should be no story.

I mean, we spend our lives
inventing stories

but story actually doesn't exist,
you know?

We exist and our apprehension
of a story is how we explain

the, kind of, meanderings that we take,

so... there is no such thing
as the empirical story,

it's just what
happens to people.

Tati's film Mon Oncle, show his
and Hulot's feelings about modern life.

Hulot lives in an old fashioned,
typically French part of town.

Onions round the door,
charcuterie shops.

Tati films the old world
in warm sunlight.

Hulot's nephew lives
in a brand spanking new,

ultra modernist house
in another bit of town.

Tati films this in flat light.

The new world's pretentious,

Hulot's sister in law
only turns on her fish fountain

when important guests arrive.

Yoo-hoo!

Oh, what a surprise!

I was just passing and I...

The buildings
of modern architect Le Corbusier

were very fashionable
in the '50s.

Tati filmed the old world in part here,
St. Maur, a traditional part of Paris.

Modernity was coming here,
like an express train,

Tati found the conflict
delicious, hilarious,

he made cinema
laugh at modernity.

And, like Bresson,
he filmed with incredible rigor.

He never used close-ups,
he wanted to show

the whole picture of society,
its comedy of manners.

Sometimes key details
appeared in a tiny part of the frame.

In this famous scene in Mon oncle,
the frame doesn't move but our eyes do.

They follow Tati around the frame
as he appears at each window.

People often look lonely
in Tati's frame.

Tati found it harder and harder

to get his unique, reserved comic cinema
funded and so ran this cinema in Paris.

The name of this cinema,
"The Harlequin",

introduces the world of the fourth
great personal, modernist director

of the 1950s.

Where Bergman's world was a theatre
and Bresson's a prison,

and Tati's an intricate
Jigsaw of scenes and moments,

Federico Fellini's was a circus.

He ran away to one in 1927,
when he was seven.

He loved the color of the circus,
he loved its constructed world.

The circus world
was larger than life.

He took this love of the circus
here, to Cinecitta,

Rome's legendary film studio.

This is a baroque scene
from Casanova which he made here.

To Cinecitta, which became his home,
he brought things from the real world,

his childhood, Neo-realism even.

But then he drew other worlds.

Fellini was a cartoonist
and he had those worlds built here.

This is Maestro di Angelis, who made
some of the props for Fellini's films.

One the first films that shows
how modern Fellini was,

was this one,
The Nights of Cabiria.
[Le notti di Cabiria]

Fellini's wife,
Giulietta Massina, plays a prostitute.

She lives by night,
wears feathers, dances with the boys.

This shot makes you feel
Fellini's love for her.

In the second half of the film,
Fellini's greatness becomes apparent.

Massina goes to a catholic shrine,

she asks for the virgin Mary's grace,
but nothing happens.

In Bergman's The seventh seal,
god was missing.

In The Nights of Cabiria,
god is long gone

and kitsch is all that remains.

After this spiritual disappointment
Massina meets a man,

he takes her to a cliff top.

There, Fellini elevates
his film once more.

The crisp, bright roman light
becomes Scandinavian,

like an early movie
by Victor Sjöstrom.

Beads of sweat appear on the man's head,
does he want to push her off?

He takes her money and runs.

Back on the road and alone again,
mascara runs down her cheek.

Out of nowhere,
teenage musicians appear,

she smiles slightly,
feelings in these late scenes cascade.

The Nights of Cabiria kept
outdoing itself, changing style.

In the '60s, Claudia Cardinale
was Fellini's muse.

You know, with Luchino Visconti, nobody...

You couldn't speak, no smile,
nothing, silence.

With Frederico everybody was shouting,
singing, the telephone, everything.

Because for him, the noise
give him inspiration, just the opposite.

In Fellini's film, 8 1/2, Marcello Mastroianni
plays a director wanting to make a film,

Cardinale plays the
director's muse.

I mean, I was very young
when I did the movie

and to be the muse
of Frederico Fellini, it was incredible.

The one where I am the muse all in white,
and I am running and it is like I am flying.

It's incredible the way
he could change the image,

he just "transformait tout, quoi."
It's incredible.

And I bring the water to Marcello.
"Signore."

It was decided at the last minute,
everything, because there was no script,

everything was improvisation.

And I remember one scene also incredible
because I'm a terrible driver.

And I said to Marcello,
"Marcello I'm not driving. I'm terrible."

And when we are doing the scene,
Frederico was sitting next to me

and he was always asking me,
"you are in love with you,

always the one you love."

And after, Marcello has to say it
and you repeat what Frederico said,

because no script,
it was just improvisation.

I remember when you were on the set,
he was always sitting there.

Looking at you like...
with all the actors he was like this...

He loved the actors.

Yes, totally free and it was a marvelous
atmosphere on the set, really.

Fantasies, mixed with memories,
mixed with imagined conversations.

The precedent was
the stream of consciousness writing

of James Joyce, but also
the impressionist films of Abel Gance.

David Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese,
the Serb director Kusturica

and David Lynch have
all been influenced by Fellini.

It's hard to think of any filmmaker
apart from Charlie Chaplin

and Alfred Hitchcock
who's been more influential.

This is the opening scene
of Woody Allen's Stardust Memories.

Like the opening of 8 1/2,

the main character seems to have stepped
out of his own life and is looking at it.

Like there's a pane of glass
between him and it.

Like it's a party
to which he hasn't been invited.

No one, not even Méliès or Cocteau,
could wave a magic wand like Fellini.

He tuned a radio signal into the frequencies
of myth and sex, memory and rapture.

Bergman, Bresson, Tati, and Fellini
did so much to open up

the form of cinema in Europe
in the '50s and '60s,

but then it was carpet bombed
by French filmmakers.

The story of film had been upended before,
in the '20s and, again,

with Italian neorealism
in the mid-'40s.

But this time was a biggie.

The bombers,
the French new wave directors,

saw great films here
in the cinematheque francaise.

This was their rocket fuel.

They'd sit in cafés like this
and mix their passion for cinema

with the new ideas
about existentialism,

an explosive combination.

Paul Schräder:

Movies were becoming
an intellectual enterprise more and more.

You were looking at the first...
The film school generation.

The first generation of filmmakers
that are coming out of film from college.

Before that you came from newspapers,
you came from theatre, you came from TV.

But now they started
to come as film buffs,

and therefore the average film director
is more intellectual and more self-aware.

As a result, he starts
looking at Europe

because, you know, that tradition
was already alive and well at that time,

the idea of the intellectual cinema
and the camera-stylo and all of that.

The first great new wave director,
Agnes Varda, made this film,

which perfectly captures
the spirit of the new wave,

its sense of drifting
through modern day cities.

Cleo from 5 to 7 [Cléo de 5 à 7]
starts,

in black and white and color,
when a woman is told by a tarot reader

that she's got cancer.

The woman is shocked
and heads out onto the streets.

Shots from her point of view,
real streets, real people.

She gets lost
in her own thoughts.

The woman goes to a park.

She's gradually less weighed down
by her apparent diagnosis.

She seems almost carefree.

Then she meets a man,
they get lost in each other's worlds.

The woman starts
to feel something like joy.

Varda captured the flow of thought,
its unpredictability.

Putting thought on film was fresh, modern,
all the rage in those years.

Director Alain Resnais also made
a film about a couple drifting.

In this haunting scene in
Last Year in Marienbad"

a man seems to be remembering
looking at a woman,

but the film
actually questions what's real.

The camera cranes up
to a statue which is in a garden

with a balcony in front of it.

But then we see the exact same statue
and there's now water in front of it.

As these two shots are memories
of the man, has he misremembered?

Or is director Resnais,
on purpose,

making us question the very building
blocks of film storytelling,

continuity, memory and truth.

No previous film had been more
about uncertainty,

a key theme in modern life.

Varda and Resnais were left wing,

but this self-taught young critic,
François Truffaut

felt that conventional movies
were too left wing, too social.

He wanted films to be fresher,
more of the moment,

more a celebration
of the medium itself.

In this scene in his first
film, Les Quatres Cents Coups,

a 12 year old boy
is at a funfair.

It's like he's in a zoetrope,
one of those precursors of cinema

where an image
was spun in a box.

The boy's got neglectful parents,
escapes a children's home

and goes on the run.

But unlike Neo-realist films
like Bicycle Thieves,

Les quatre cents Coups
is not so much about social problems,

as the feeling of being alive,
like Cleo.

Look at the spontaneity
of this screen test of the boy,

which made its way
into the film.

The sound's a bit hissy but Truffaut
loved the boy's cocky freshness.

He's like the boys in Jean Vigo's
Zéro de Conduite.

So modern European cinema
in the late '50s and '60s

was becoming personal, self-aware,
about fleeting moments and ambiguity.

A revolution indeed,
but then came this man:

Jean-Luc Godard.

The most fascinating character
in the French new wave,

the greatest movie terrorist.

In his youth he sat in this café,

holding a rose,
imagining that he was Jean Cocteau.

He saw Bresson's film,
Pickpocket, ten times.

He once called his approach to life,
"right wing anarchism."

Godard said that the story of film
is about boys filming girls,

and about men worrying
about mortality and women not doing so.

As we've seen,
the great catholic French critic,

Andre Bazin, said that cinema is best
when the shot's wide,

when our eyes can wander within it,
but Godard was such a loner.

Someone said that he had a
"frenzied individuality,"

that he preferred close-ups
which isolated people from the world.

And, so, when Godard
eventually came to make his first film,

what did it look like?

This.

A car thief with
an American girlfriend,

close-ups filmed
by cameraman Raoul Coutard

using short rolls of film
sold for stills cameras.

The back of her head then, cut,
the same angle, same girl,

same hair, same speed,
then cut again.

As we've seen,

from the days of Edwin S. Porter's
The Life of an American Fireman onwards,

a cut almost always took place
to show something else.

But Godard uses cuts to show
the same thing

but with the sunlight
from a different direction

or a slightly
different background.

There'd been jump cuts
before in movies.

In this Soviet film, for example,
they're used to show

a man's mental agitation.

But in A bout de Souffle,
they aren't trying to express

the woman's mental state,
for example.

They're there
because they're beautiful in themselves.

Because they emphasize
that this is cinema,

just as Picasso and Braque used Cubism
to emphasize the surface of a painting.

How modern.

Godard and François Truffaut
saw cinema not as something

that simply captures real life
but that's part of it, like love or cafés.

Movies were part
of the sensory experience of, say,

sitting in a café
watching the world go by.

Again, back to
Jean Seberg's neck.

These shots didn't say,

"Here's a woman in a car
which is part of this film's story",

they said, "I think this moment
is beautiful, this moment is true."

In other words,
"I think."

A shot is a thought,
a director's thought.

This was the ultimate bomb
that the new wave planted under cinema,

but not everything
they did was revolutionary.

Looking back it's clear that
in their love of old movies

and in their traditional views of women,
much of the new wave was almost classical,

not a million miles
away from the Hollywood bauble.

Australian director
Baz Luhrmann:

If you've been used to the cinema
only being about beautiful sets,

wonderful costumes, sweeping
shots, big emotions

and someone comes along
and says, "it's a girl in jeans,

with a white t-shirt that says
'The Herald Tribune' on it,

and the camera is going to move

and it is going to feel
like a news report,"

you're gonna go like,
"yeah man, that's like life."

Well, no, actually,
it's just another cinematic device.

And let me say,
as a kind of reinterpretation

of lovely costumes, big gestures,
you know,

it's alive in cinema now,
and it's a new permutation of that.

Again we'll see another rejection of that,
I mean the...

The language, good language
is a living thing.

It changes, it evolves.
What you're saying never changes.

People still say I love you,
people still say I will kill you.

How they say I love you,
how they say I will kill you, it's fashion.

But, whether the new wave was really new,

it was incredibly influential
across Europe and the rest of the world.

To see how obsessive
Godard's followers were, for example,

look at this sex scene
from Jean-Luc Godard's

Une Femme mariée

and then Paul Schräader's
American Gigolo."

The same framing, body parts,
camera angles, blank background.

In a European art film, Godard
breaks the space up into pieces,

and the body into parts.

In a mainstream American film,
Schräder does the same.

But this is only the beginning.

The new wave of modern cinema
swept across the whole of Europe.

In Italy in the '60s,

movies became
more exciting than ever before.

Society was changing fast,
very fast.

Workers and peasants
were moving into cities,

into apartment blocks like this,
which Mussolini had built

way back in the '30s.

Whilst filming here,
this man, Raffaele Feccia,

comes up to us
and asks us what we're doing.

He's polite,
with old style manners.

When we say we're making
a film about cinema,

he says he knew a man,
a famous man, a director,

with whom he played football as a boy,
Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Pasolini was a lightning rod
in Italian cinema in the '60s.

He'd experienced fascism at first hand,
so wrote for this communist newspaper.

He was a marxist and catholic,

who was in his way,
against both these things:

the state on the left,
the church on the right.

He was a poet, he was gay,
and he used the word "stupendous" a lot.

His life and work
were stupendous!

He was in the north
but hung out here,

Where the people weren't rich,
where the guys were young,

where '60s consumerism
hadn't yet corrupted.

Accatone, Pasolini's first film as director
passionately captured his life experiences.

It was about a pimp in dirt poor Rome,
Pasolini saw him almost like a Saint.

He used religious music
to make every day struggles spiritual.

Director Bernardo Bertolucci was
Pasolini's assistant on Accattone.

He wanted to do close-ups, still shot
and still shot... of, medium shot,

but the camera
wasn't on wheels like my camera,

my camera
is always moving on wheels.

Pier Paulo was thinking much
about the primitive... and paintings.

They always have this close-ups of saints
and Pier Paulo was influenced by that.

And in fact, in everything, in the novels,
in the poems, in the movies,

a kind of strong sense of the sacred,
so that even the face of a pimp

would become
a Saint from the painting.

He was in fact
a fantastically religious person,

not the religion
that takes you to church

but he was religious, in front of life,
in front of the mystery of life.

In a secular and consumerist age,
this was daring.

It was the spareness and seriousness
of Accattone that made it modern.

On its release, Accattone
was picketed by fascists.

Two years later,
Pasolini made a film

that boldly challenged
the otherworldly way

that the virgin Mary
is usually shown in catholic art.

Pasolini's
The Gospel according to St. Matthew

pictured the Madonna like this:
unadorned, back to basics, spare.

In order to show his cinematographer
what he had in mind,

he took him to see this film
by the great paint stripper

in film history,
Carl Theodor Dreyer.

The simplicity of the filming
of this pious woman,

influenced the filming
of this pious woman.

And Pasolini wanted to strip the paint
not only from cinema, but from life.

He felt that consumerism
was taking over,

that people like this...

were turning into people like this...

Pasolini's sometime assistant
Bernardo Bertolucci,

worked with another
of the great innovative personalities

in Italian cinema in the '60s,
Sergio Leone.

Leone was one
of the best Italian directors

in the sense that... Italian directors
were always, were doing...

All of them, they were
doing Italian comedy,

I hated it,
I didn't like it at all.

Leone resisted the allure of comedies,
and instead opted for a genre

that was dying out in America
in the '60s: the western.

In A Fistful of Dollars,
Clint Eastwood's character

was lonely and mysterious
because Leone loved Kurosawa's films.

Eastwood as the nameless samurai,
reluctant to trust,

squared up to by others.

But what was really innovative
was the visual style.

In this scene, for example,
the foreground and background

are far apart
but sort of in focus.

This was rare in widescreen cinematography,
usually shallow staging was used.

Leone could do deep staging

because the Italians invented something
called Techniscope in 1960.

Leone was the first director
to exploit this to the full,

it gave his imagery
a dramatic, epic quality.

Imagine that these two poles
are, say, Sergio Leone gun fighters.

In conventional widescreen,
shallow focus,

one of them
would always be out of focus.

Techniscope allowed Leone
to have both, in focus.

Leone's great, epic western,
Once upon a Time in the West,

took these innovations and applied
them to a mythic screenplay,

co-written by Bertolucci.

It was great, because also,
it was my only way through a western

to smell a bit of what I
liked which was very much

the Hollywood movies
of those years.

Once upon a Time in the West's
famous opening sequence

shows gunmen waiting for a train
that's bringing the man they are to kill.

Time has stood still.

Leone is channeling
the Italian Neo-realist idea

that time in cinema
should be real, like life.

Screenwriter Bertolucci and Leone had seen
Nicholas Ray's film Johnny Guitar,

the classic western in which
Joan Crawford

prowls like a cat as she waits
for the railroad to come,

to bring modern life
to the west.

They loved this idea of waiting
for the future and used it here.

In Once upon a Time in the West,
the train also brings Claudia Cardinale,

a widow who inherits
a homestead.

I mean, I'm the only woman there,
I'm surrounded by men.

We start on the train,
it was in Spain

and then the camera goes up...

and I am in America.

Leone has this shot rise up,
as if to view the whole of human history.

He invented this slow motion
on your body...

and you know what he did...
also something... the first one,

before we start the scene,
he put the music of the film,

then, you know, you become immediately
the part you are doing.

And it's the only director
who did that.

And also the way he was shooting
with the camera on your body,

on your face, on the eyes.

Like A Bout de Souffle,
this climactic gunfight

in Once upon a Time in the West
is about films themselves.

The pleasure of watching
them for their own sake.

Its crane shot is more beautiful,
its music more operatic,

its conflict more elemental
than any previous western.

Leone's work cast a long shadow.

The best western director of the '70s,
Sam Peckinpah,

said that he'd have been nothing
without Leone.

Stanley Kubrick said that Leone
influenced A Clockwork Orange.

Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet,
has several Leone sequences,

and Martin Scorsese and John Milius
learned from him.

But there was still more
to the Italian new wave in the 1960s.

Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone,
one of the country's leading aristocrats,

was born and brought up
in this palazzo.

About as un-modern a place
as you could find.

In the '30s, he escaped fascist Italy,
and became a communist.

In the '50s, he directed
opera in Milan.

The scale and emotions of opera
entered his film work.

This is the opening scene
of his film Senso.

The color, lighting, and costumes
are so sumptuous

that you'd think that
this is a celebration

of such aristocratic life.

But it's not.

Its heart is with the ordinary people
in the gods, they're protesting.

They look down
on the aristocrats.

This says so much
about Visconti's films.

He was the master of the crane shot,

but instead of using it
to celebrate the aristocratic world,

he used it to float through that world,
look down on it,

fascinated, attracted
and repelled.

As a marxist like Pasolini,
he thought that workers and peasants

had the greatest moral authority
in society.

And in this film, Rocco and his Brothers,
we can again see

Visconti's sympathies
for the poor.

Alain Delon, on the left here,
is from a poor family

that has moved
north to Milan, to find work.

The story shows
the hard social detail of such lives.

But look at the bruised beauty
of the people and the cinematography.

Visconti films from the top
of the Milan cathedral,

another crane's eye view,
you could say.

And he films some scenes in a moving tram,
a kind of working class crane shot.

Society and beauty.

It's as if marxism itself
is a crane shot.

Where Visconti pictured people

in a kind of historical
opera of social class,

the next great Italian director
of the '60s, Michelangelo Antonioni,

saw life more abstractly
and framed it like this: on the edge.

In his 1962 film, L'Eclisse,
Alain Delon is a Roman stockbroker.

He starts a relationship
with a woman played by Monica Vitti.

Almost at once we see
that Antonioni frames his people

unconventionally and immoderately,
on the edge of the screen, or half hidden.

Antonioni had studied
American abstract painting

and his films looked like
canvases of modern life

in which people
only partially appear.

Antonioni seems to see
an emptiness in the relationship

between Vitti and Delon,
the void of modern life.

In the famous ending of L'éclisse,
Vitti walks out of the film.

Never to reappear.

Instead we see
the places, street corners

where she and Delon once were.

The void seems to take over,
the world seems empty.

As if everyone
is indoors or dead.

We see this woman
and think it's Vitti,

our main character, returned.

But it's not,
it's just another anxious passerby.

As we've seen, the people in the films
of the great masters of '50s art cinema,

Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini
and Ingmar Bergman,

are at the center of the movies.

And the films themselves
are based on closed worlds:

prisons, circuses, the theatre.

Antonioni's people
on the edge of the frame

are as unhappy
as Bergman's or Bresson's

but they live in spaces so open
that they, the spaces, seem to take over.

Look at this ending of Antonioni's
The Passenger, [Professione: reporter]
for example.

Jack Nicholson's character
is here lying on his bed.

The camera leaves him,
as it left Vitti in L'éclisse,

and seems to go for a walk.

The film becomes this walk.

The shot doesn't cut
as it goes through the window grille.

When the camera finally returns
to Nicholson, he's dead.

Whereas Bergman's characters
seem to spiral inwards,

Antonioni's spiral outwards,
they disperse.

This is the first time in the story of film
that characters have dissolved into space.

Antonioni's sense
of what a human being is,

a figure that can disperse,
was almost Buddhist, or socratic.

His long, slow, semi-abstract shots

paved the way for three great
European directors of the future:

Hungary's Miklós Jancsó and Béla Tarr
and Greece's, Theo Angelopoulos.

This is the second shot in Angelopoulos'
film The travelling Players.

The camera slowly withdraws,

the shot is about the street
as much as people.

In conventional cinema
this would establish the location,

then we'd cut to a close up.

Angelopoulus
doesn't give us the close-up.

Antonioni's films weren't exactly
a bundle of laughs

but in Italy's fellow
Southern European country, Spain,

the new wave sweeping through
world cinema in the '60s

manifested itself in comedy.

Take this film,
The Wheelchair. [El cochecito]

The man standing in the middle
is Don Anselmo,

his wife has died
and he's bored.

There's nothing wrong with his legs
but he wants a motorized wheelchair

because all his friends have one,
and it seems fun.

You can meet in the park.

What was new here was the edgy,
non-conformist tone.

Spain was still governed
by its right wing dictator general Franco,

so filmmakers weren't free
to experiment openly.

But the wheelchair took a social problem,
the living conditions of an old man,

and mocked it.

The film opens with men marching
with toilets on their heads,

making fun of Franco's
military marches.

In the end, frustrated, Don Anselmo
ends up poisoning his family.

This combination of realism and irony
in Spanish culture at the time

was called
"esperpento," the grotesque.

Spain's most famous post-Franco filmmaker,
Pedro Almodovar, said of this grotesque:

"In the '50s and '60s,
Spain experienced a kind of Neo-realism

which was ferocious and amusing,
I'm talking about The Wheelchair.

Almodovar's 1984 film,
What have I done to deserve this?

features the same kind
of dysfunctional family as The Wheelchair.

The tone, heartfelt, funny, absurd,
is just like The Wheelchair."

The grandmother detests city life
and just wants to go back to her village.

And if Spain's take
on the '60s new wave was mocking,

then it's no surprise that the Patron Saint
of movie mockery, Luis Buñuel, was there.

This film, Viridiana, was made
30 years after Buñuel's L'age d'or.

It would become his most banned film ever
and was a knee in the balls to Franco.

A man approaches a woman on a bed
and kisses her, nothing too risqué in that.

But, he's her uncle and she's a nun
and he has drugged her.

And earlier, we've seen him try on
her white high heels and basque.

And a young girl is watching.

Bunuel sees the uncle
as symbolizing Franco, shock after shock.

And finally, in Sweden in the '60s,
the modernist new wave surged.

This notorious Swedish film, Vilgot Sjöman's,
I am curious Yellow [Jag är nyfiken - en film i gult],

was about a young woman
who confronts life head on.

In this scene
her burning belief in social justice

starts to come apart
because of a bad experience

in her personal life.

To cut the scene as if she's talking
to Martin Luther King is daring indeed,

politics as fantasy.

Luther king was still alive
when the film was released,

the scene
ethically disturbing now.

The revolution in cinema
in the late '50s and '60s

was as ground-breaking
as that in the '20s or '40s.

Filmmakers sat in this café
and places like it,

and dreamt of making cinema more personal,
self-aware, ambiguous, enraged, and ironic.

They achieved these things
and, as we'll see,

influenced movie making
around the world.

But nothing lasts forever.

And the idealism
of the French new wave

eventually had the stuffing
knocked out of it.

A film shot in this very café
deals with that defeat.

La Maman et la Putain
is about this man and three women,

in cafés and in bedrooms.

Jean Pierre Léaud, the lively boy
in Truffaut's Les quatres cents coups,

is now a man and shows
his despair, straight to camera.

He covers his eyes.

The dreams of European cinema
of the '60s were dead,

but elsewhere
they were just being born.

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