All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 9 - 1967-1979 - New American Cinema

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 explore
the films of Martin Scorcese,

Francis Coppola
and Terence Malik.

The '60s in America had been a day
in the sun, but then night came.

The decade ended with the
deaths of Malcolm X, Jimi Hendrix,

Janis Joplin and Roman Polanski's wife,
Sharon Tate, and their friends.

Four hundred colleges
protested against the Vietnam war.

In cinema the Hollywood
studio system came to an end.

So come the new dawn: The '70s.

You'd think that movies in America
would be slumped in the corner,

but you'd be wrong.

The rising sun of the new decade
brought fresher air and new honesty.

The explicitly personal filmmaking
of the '60s and a "film school" awareness

of European cinema and film history
gathered momentum and gained confidence.

The garden started
to bloom again.

The new American cinema,
as it came to be called,

fell into three separate types:

Satirical movies made by people
like this man, Buck Henry,

that mocked society
and their times.

Dissident films made
by people like Charles Burnett

that challenged
the conventional style in cinema.

And assimilationist movies,
made by Robert Towne and others,

in which old studio genres
were reworked, with new techniques.

First, the mockery.

Many in the counter culture in America
in the '60s and '70s thought:

"It's too late to salvage society,
so let's satirize it."

And so they did.

American movies
had satirized society for decades.

Here, in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup,
made in the 1933,

people wait for Rufus T. Firefly,
the president of Freedonia,

to arrive at the top
of the stairway...

But he comes in from the bottom.

You expecting somebody?
Yes.

Hail, hail, Freedonia
Land of the brave

A topsy-turvy world.

Come the '60s,
psychologist R.D. Laing's suggestion

that sanity itself is a bit insane,
and vice versa,

made the world feel even more
like a Marx brothers movie.

So it's no surprise to find
that Frank Tashlin, Buck Henry,

Robert Altman and Milos Foreman
brought new satirical bite to American film.

Tashlin found consumerism vulgar
and offensive to his gentle eye

so made lurid films like this one
which looked like a cartoon.

Its color, style and happiness
were meant to show

that society is fake
and manic and infantile.

We're just demonstrating
the new sign.

Mr. Kelly!
Watch it!

He made a brilliant kids' book
that tells of a happy possum

that's hanging in a tree.

Passersby see the possum
but they mistake his smile

for a frown, because
he's hanging upside down.

They take him on a tour,
into the city, through the air,

to make him happy,
to give him an adventure.

He sees the world
and doesn't like it.

It's scary and crumbling.

Eventually the people
return him to his tree.

They're pleased.

He looks to them like
he's smiling but, of course,

as he's upside down,
he's really frowning.

A lovely parable about
upsidedownness.

The great French playwright Feydeau
said that in order to be funny,

you need to, "think sad first."

Buck Henry is one of
American cinema's masters

of the upside down, of satire.

Henry's adaptation
of Joseph Heller's novel, Catch 22,

directed by Mike Nichols,
is one of the great movie satires.

It's World War II, bomber pilot Yossarian,
on the right here,

tries to get out of flying.

This scene, which gives the film
and novel its title, explains why:

That's all he's got to do
to be grounded?

That's all.

And then you can ground him?

No! Then I cannot ground him.

There's a catch.

A catch?

Sure, catch 22.

Anyone who wants to get out of combat,
isn't really crazy so I can't ground them.

Okay.

Let me see if I got this straight.

In order to be grounded,
I've got to be crazy,

and I must be crazy
to keep flying.

But if I ask to be grounded
that means I'm not crazy anymore,

and I have to keep flying.

You've got it,
that's catch 22.

That's some catch,
that catch 22.

Yossarian's world
is upside down.

Like you.

Like us!

You'll be surprised how easy
it is to like us once you begin.

You see Yossarian, we're going
to put you on easy street.

We're gonna promote
you to major.

We're gonna give
you another medal.

We're gonna glorify your exploits,
send you home a hero.

You'll have parades
in your honor.

You can make speeches,
raise money for war bonds.

And all you have to do
is be our pal.

Say nice things about us.

Tell the folks at home
what a good job we're doing.

Henry not only wrote the film
but, here, acted in it too.

Take our offer, Yossarian.

That brilliant exchange,
which is Joe Heller's, of:

"We want you to like us,"
is one of the, I think,

great pieces
of American character.

"We're going to chop your children
into little bits and feed them to the fish,

but basically what we want
is for you to like us."

It's very, very... It's the reason
a lot of people didn't like the movie.

They perceived it as being
anti-American or un-American.

Orson Welles plays
General Dreedle.

If you've got any sense
and you hire Orson

to play a part in your movie,
you have already determined

that he will be the
center of something.

And not necessarily good, or detrimental,
but he will be a force field.

Orson did something
I've never seen an actor do.

We're out there doing the long scene
where Yosarrian gets naked,

Yossarian gets the medal from the general
for doing everything wrong.

Orson says to Nichols,

"you know something?
In this exchange, Mike,

I know you hear it exactly
the way you want it.

Why don't you just stand
where you are

and give me each line
as it comes up,

and I will do it exactly
the way you give it to me."

So that whole exchange,
it's Orson copying exactly

what Mike says for every line.

I mean that's so fabulous.

Well, one: I know
he was up all night drinking cognac.

So, there wasn't a lot of time
for memorizing lines.

I don't think he ever did.

Except maybe one line at a time.
They were all wonderful.

If he wants to receive a medal
without any clothes on,

what the hell business
is it of yours?

That's my sentiments exactly, sir.

Here's your medal, captain.

You're a very weird person,
Yossarian.

Thank you, sir.

An actor will do anything to avoid
seeming to copy anyone else.

"Don't give me that line! Just give
me the sense of what you..." You know.

And in this turnabout I thought,
"well, that's great."

He's saving time and he's doing
it exactly the way Mike hears it.

Catch 22 came out at the same time
as Robert Altman's film Mash.

Another war.

Army surgeons operating
on appalling injuries.

But Altman's approach
is innovative.

He fills the screen with actors,
mix them all up.

Records all their dialogue
at the same time.

Then mixes a complicated
sound track of overlapping dialogue.

The fact that they're
wearing masks here

means we can't see their lips
so he has even more freedom.

And though the situation is tragic,
the attitude is light hearted,

mocking even.

An upside down world.

Huxley, move out the way
because I'm looking around over there.

Baby we're going to see some stitches
like you've never saw before.

Attention, attention.

Okay, here she goes.

This is from
colonel Blake's office.

The American medical association
has just declared marijuana

a dangerous drug.

Despite earlier claims by some physicians
that it is no more harmful than alcohol,

this is not found to be the case.

That is all.

And because Altman
used zooms and long lenses,

actors weren't even sure
if they were on camera or not.

The satirical tone for such films
was set by buck Henry's adaptation

of the novel The Graduate.

It was a massive hit
around the world.

This student, Benjamin, floats
in the California blue swimming pool

of his bourgeois L.A. Parents.

A world of beer and boredom.
He's expressionless, inert.

Benjamin has an affair
with one of his parent's friends.

Well, my theory is
that what the great audience

of younger people recognized
in the film was:

Our generation's sense
of not being part of the generation

older than we were,
and a little bit lost,

which was...
just about everyone who didn't know

they were going to become a doctor
and hoped they weren't going to Vietnam.

We all were Benjamin.

Turman said, "I bought this book
because I am Benjamin,"

and Nichols said, "i am making this film
because I am Benjamin."

Dustin Hoffman's performance played
on this everyman quality of Benjamin.

He walks like a robot.
Dresses anonymously.

Drinks beer and slumps
in front of the TV.

A blank sheet that Buck Henry's
generation would understand.

My generation
would understand it.

My generation and my, yes,
I'll use the word, my class.

But it managed
to go far beyond that, I think.

He says, "what did you study?"
And she says, after a pause, "art."

Which is, of course,
a stunner to him as it should be to us.

That: "Oh my god,
there was an aesthetic here?

An intellectual side?
A creative bone in this graveyard?"

It's really interesting.

What was your major?

Benjamin, why are you asking me
all these questions?

Because I'm interested,
Mrs. Robinson!

Now what was
your major subject at college?

Art.
Art?

But I thought...

I guess you kind of lost interest
in it over the years then.

That whole sequence
of them in bed together

is virtually lifted
from the book.

And it's an interesting exercise
in the difference between reading something

and looking at something,
because in the middle of it Mike said:

"Well, you know it's fine,
but they're just lying there talking.

We've got to do something."

So, Sam O'Steen, the editor,
came up with the idea

of turning the lights off and on

to give a kind of pacing to the scene
that wasn't there just in the dialogue.

And it was very nice.

That's just a little lesson in filmmaking
that I hope will profit you

and all the rest of us.

Will you wait a minute please?

Mrs. Robinson.

Do you think we could say a few words
to each other first this time.

I don't think we have
much to say to each other.

As we've seen, Milos Forman
started making films

in communist Czechoslovakia, like this one,
The Fireman's Ball.

Dead pan, documentary-like,
making these fireman look clueless and funny.

In America in the '70s,
Forman had to adjust

his approach remarkably little.

We're in a mental institution.

Forman again shoots
with naturalistic light,

close-ups to see
the actors' faces.

It's just that I don't want anyone
to try and slip me saltpeter,

do you know what I mean?

It's alright, nurse Pilbow.

If Mr. McMurphy doesn't want
to take his medication orally,

I'm sure we can arrange
that he can have it some other way.

Jack Nicholson isn't mentally ill,
he's just pretending to be.

Another film where the world
of the story is upside down.

After the satirists came
the dissident American filmmakers

of the '70s
who challenged film style.

The first of these radicals is
Dennis Hopper.

His film, The last movie,
was Hopper's follow up

to the massive success
of Easy rider.

We're in Peru.

An America film crew
is making a western.

Hopper films this
as a making-of documentary,

but this
is the actual movie story.

Hopper, dressed in denim here,
plays a production manager on the film.

The shoot finishes,
the crew leaves but Hopper stays on.

Then remarkable things happen.

The locals make icons
of the film equipment out of bamboo

and treat these
like they're real.

It's as if the film
was a kind of god that visited them.

And because they didn't understand
that the punch-ups on set were fake,

they recreate
them with real violence.

Anarchy ensues.

Hopper was drunk
for much of the shoot.

The last movie was a
brilliant, daring hate letter

to American film
and movie exploitation.

But the stupid critics
called it a fiasco, and it bombed.

Hopper said
to have cried every night.

Robert Altman was as radical
as Hopper and, a year after Mash,

he released this film
McCabe and Mrs. Miller,

another anti-western.

As in Mash,
Altman's camera roams, the lenses are long.

The colors are muted.

Julie Christie is a savvy madame who helps
a naïve, opportunist man to run a brothel.

But they ultimately
fail in their aims.

Unlike the John Ford films,
there are no heroes here.

Just characters lost in the snow,
in Altman's low contrast imagery.

Out of their depth
and uncertain about the world.

Visual uncertainty to match
a '70s uncertainty

about what American history
even means.

This man, Francis Copolla,
started as a dissident.

There was something
of Orson Welles about him.

His film The godfather
is an assimilationist one,

but its success allowed him
to direct something more radical.

His film The conversation was about this:
The new type of sound equipment.

A professional surveillance expert is in
his lair, surrounded by the new equipment,

that allows him
to eavesdrop on things far away.

He accidentally records
a conversation between apparent lovers.

He can't see them
but Copolla shows us them,

filmed in long lens, the visual equivalent
of the man's distance microphone.

The man becomes obsessed
with a mystery on the tape.

In doing so he almost
has a breakdown.

He'd kill us
if he got the chance.

Coppola's film was
about getting so lost in the fragments

of other people's behaviors
that your own life dissolves.

In 1970, Coppola met a passionate,
nervy young filmmaker

at the Sorrento film festival
in Italy.

Not nearly as radical as Hopper
or Altman, nor as Wellesian as Copolla.

Martin Scorsese, our fourth '70s dissident,
became the most respected of them all.

In a single phrase, he expressed
more clearly than anyone

the aims of new Hollywood.

He said: "We were fighting
to open up the form."

Scorsese was brought up on these streets
in New York City's little Italy.

He was often unwell as a child
so found himself observing

the life of the streets
rather than participating in them.

His first great film
Mean Streets, is about those streets.

Scorsese said of a scene like this,
filmed in a church with a tracking camera:

"The whole idea was
to make a story of a modern Saint

in his own society,
but his society happens to be gangsters."

It's all bullshit
except the pain, right?

As if to prove his desire for sainthood,
its main character holds his finger in a flame.

Confessing his sins.

In 1976, Scorsese filmed
a screenplay about a Vietnam veteran

driving around New York
in a taxi.

Filmed in slow motion,
the taxi glided through the steamy night,

like an iron coffin.

The world of the story was
New York's hell's kitchen.

Junkies, porno theatres.

This world disgusted
the taxi driver.

The film was written by Paul
Schrader who drank heavily

like his main character Travis Bickle,
who lived in his car,

whose self-obsession
was festering like Bickle's.

The motivator behind
Taxi Driver was existentialism.

So the two things
that I re-read just before writing

it were "Nausea" by Sartre
and "L'étranger" by Camus.

And that's
what I was trying to do.

I was trying to do that character
in an American context.

Bickle's world
is one of booze and porn.

He walks around
in the blue light of dawn.

He finds it painful to be alive.

Here, Bickle is making a phone call
to a woman he's obsessed by.

Scorsese has the camera track away
from Bickle, almost in embarrassment.

He later explained that it was
too painful to watch the scene.

This is wholly modern.

Its emotional wisdom is close
to the way that Mizoguchi

kept his camera away from raw emotion,
not showing his characters' faces.

Taxi driver
was a huge success.

The new directors' storming
of the Hollywood citadel seemed to be easy.

They were pushing
on an open door.

And so Scorsese, De Niro,
and Schrader pushed harder.

At this table in Musso
and Frank's restaurant in Hollywood,

where Charlie Chaplin
and Douglas Fairbanks used to eat,

De Niro told Scorsese
that he'd be interested

in acting in a film about
a boxer called Jake Lamotta.

The resulting film, Raging Bull,
written by Schrader,

was about
this self-destructive man.

A catholic boxer on a downward slope
who reaches rock bottom

before finding redemption.

This scene was shot documentary style,
long lenses, flat lighting and staging.

It was visually influenced
by the documentary

Scorsese had made about his parents,
Italianamerican.

The same type of shot, sofa,
table lamps, and domesticity.

The boxing scenes were from
another stylistic universe.

Slow motion shots, like bloody statutes
of Christ in a baroque cathedral one minute.

Then fast cutting, wide angle lenses
and tracking like Orson Welles the next.

Tell me why.

I could have been somebody,
instead of a bum, which is what I am.

Let's face it.

It was you, Charlie

At the end, the boxer recites
Marlon Brando's lines

in On the waterfront,
the most reflective moment in the film.

You got about five minutes.

Okay.

Do you need anything?

Nah.

Are you sure?

I'm sure.

Never before had
such explicit Italian Catholicism

been the theme
of an American film.

Ethnicity and the specifics of ghetto life

were one of the things
that romantic cinema had screened out.

You could feel Scorsese's
very nervous system in his films

and his city's metabolic rate.

The existential dilemma, you know:
"Should I exist?"

And, you know,
the post-modern answer is, you know...

to put quotes around "exist" and the
meaning of that. You know what I mean?

And as a result, you know, we've lived
in a kind of mash-up world, progressively,

where a lot of things that
we've thought were...

Were the standards,
the artistic standards.

A certain kind of harmony
a certain kind of balance,

a certain kind of beauty, you know,
the concept of beauty.

And once you get
in that post-modern frame of mind,

once you start talking about meta-cinema
there really is no inner...

there is no center anymore.

And so, it's just a collection.
A pastiche.

When Paul Schrader came to direct,
he was a dissident too,

but his particular rebellion took
the form of, of all things,

a fascination with
religious grace.

Schrader's film American gigolo,
is about a male prostitute,

floating through the world,
'80s red lighting.

His masterpiece Light sleeper
is about a drug dealer,

also floating, peeping
at the world in night-time blue.

Each man is spiritually empty.

In both films, Schrader wanted to show
their rescue from this emptiness.

How did he do this?
His solution was astonishing.

He borrowed this great ending,
from Robert Bresson's film Pickpocket,

where a man in prison is visited
by a woman, and somehow,

her touch represents the incursion
of heavenly grace into the world.

It's taken me so long
to come to you.

In American gigolo the male prostitute
is also in prison,

and again finds grace through
a woman in exactly the same way.

And in the ending of Light sleeper,
the drug dealer has a similar revelation.

Again shot with
the exact same camera angles.

American gigolo was
a very dissimilar film to Pickpocket.

This was all a film
about a superficial person

and surfaces and glamour.

And, you know, kind of perversely
I took the ending of Pickpocket

and put it on "American gigolo" even though
I didn't think it was that kind of film.

And so it's really a kind
of a perverse, almost an in-joke kind...

And because, you know, the reference
doesn't really mean anything.

Really.

And so then, some years later I was writing
another one of these one-character stories

and this one was about
a middle-aged drug dealer, "Light sleeper."

And I was writing that and I said,
"now this is the one

I should have put
the Pickpocket ending on!

I put it on the wrong film!

So, I'll put it on this one,
this is where it belongs."

I did four films that are sort of alike
and then they're double bookends.

So there's Taxi driver,
which is bookended by Light sleeper,

And American gigolo,
which is bookended by The Walker.

"Taxi driver" and "Light sleeper"
is you have:

one's in the front seat,
one's in the back seat.

And Gigolo and Walker is:

one's in the closet and one's not.

You know, frankly I kind of miss,
you know, the existential cinema

and I wish
there could be more of it.

On the other hand,
sometimes you look at it and you say,

"Oh god, this feels old." You know?
"God, this feels old."

Hopper, Altman, Copolla,
Scorsese, Schrader.

Five brilliant, white, male dissidents
of Christian heritage,

trying to open up
the form of American film

in the heyday of the 1970s.

The story of the movies in the '70s
was full of rebels,

but then came this man: Charles Burnett,
a different kind of outsider.

Burnett made one of the greatest films
of the '70s, Killer of sheep,

but even how he got
into movies is revealing.

There were part of us
who got into films as a reaction

to some of what Hollywood
was making, all the stereo types

and things like that, you know?

We had debates about that all the time,
we had discussions all the time

about what is a black film
and what is our responsibility

and things like that.

One of the founding films in America
was this famously racist one,

The birth of a nation,
here black senators

were portrayed as drunks.

It took nearly 60 years before
black filmmakers like Gordon Parks

and Charles Burnett got
to make good feature films.

The delay was shameful.

Even liberal places like this,
UCLA's film school,

played an ambiguous role in the emergence
of black cinema in America.

UCLA in the film department
didn't show any black films at all.

Any African films or anything like that,
they were all American films

and European films
and things like that, you know?

Not even from North Africa
or any place.

It was only until this
person by the name of...

a teacher by the name of
Elyseo Taylor came in,

and Elyseo Taylor was the
first black teacher, I think,

at the film department at UCLA.

And he was very radical
and outspoken.

And he introduced third world cinema
at UCLA and, you know,

Latin American cinema,
all this kind of stuff, you know.

And then he brought in Ousmane Sembene
and people like that, you know?

And so we had to see in person and then
we’ve seen him screen African films, you know?

That was the first time and it was
a mind-blowing experience, you know?

And things... And so at that point
it was very, you know, in early '70s,

that I got a chance
to experience, you know, African film.

"Why was it mind-blowing?"

It's like, all those films,
like, third world cinema,

and everything,
because they spoke to us. You know?

It wasn't... I mean...
It was like the same thing when I saw Ozu

and people
like that, you know, Kurosawa?

You saw this all this propaganda
about people. You know?

And this myth that was created about,
as though they weren't human.

And, you know, it wasn't until
I saw these films that, you know,

it's like you realize
that your neighbor exists.

That there's a person, you know?

That, you know, like,
you've been robbed of a reality.

Part of your reality
had been distorted and compromised.

You'd been brainwashed.

People telling their stories
outside this formula. You know?

And like, they were real people,
live people and stories that were,

you know, about how do you
live in post-colonial society?

And on the basis of stuff
like that, you know?

Which in a way we were suffering under,
you know, in a certain way. You know?

And just daily life of a person,
like in Ozu and things like that, you know?

And just make drama out of that.

In 1977, here in Watts and Compton in L.A.,
Charles Burnett took these ideas

and made a masterpiece,
Killer of sheep.

I had looked at a lot of photographic books
and paintings and stuff like that.

And I was really aware of compositions from
a lot of these photo-journalist things,

but I wanted to tell it
from the kids point of view mostly,

because I didn't want it
to look Hollywood at all, you know?

Burnett filmed in black and white,
often shooting details of kids play,

and used great black music,
like Paul Robeson here.

As a kid I saw things
that I wasn't satisfied with

and putting in the school system
and things like that

because I thought
it just killed a lot of kids, you know?

The whole system, and I wanted
to write about it and make films about it.

So the only thing I'd do,
I would put a narrative together

from all these incidences
that I have seen and experienced.

And let it comment on itself,
you know?

But I was looking at the poetic part
of what I saw,

the oddities and the absurdities
and things like that.

But there were a lot of poetic moments
in the community where I grew up in.

Where black consciousness was a belated,
exciting new dissident force

in American film of the '70s,

another innovation came
from a more surprising direction.

As the first movie moguls were Jewish,
and as some of the greatest directors,

like Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder
were Jewish,

you'd think that Jewishness
would be central to American film.

But Jewish characters and situations
were more likely to be found

around the edges of stories.

Like here in
The shop around the corner.

The woman is a central character,
charming, white Anglo Saxon protestant.

Felix Bressart on the left,
who fled the Nazis,

is not the hero of the piece,
but his logic and humor

provide the film's beauty.

Oh, then let's drop
the whole thing.

You see, I thought of giving it
to my wife's uncle for Christmas.

Oh, I'm so sorry, can't you
give him something else?

It's not so easy.

You see, I don't like him.

I hate to spend a nickel on him,
and still I must give him a present.

So I thought, if I have to give
him a present, at least give him

something he won't enjoy.

The box costs $2.29,
that's a lot of money,

but it's worth it to ruin
my wife's uncle's Christmas.

But then this man came along:
Woody Allen!

Here he's Alvie in Annie Hall.

He's an intellectual,
explicitly Jewish character

at the center of the frame,
at the center of the film,

talking directly to camera.

He's an Ingmar Bergman fan
and about as far away

from Hollywood beefcake
as you can get,

yet he falls in love with a mid-western girl,
Diane Keaton's Annie hall.

I can't put it in the pot!

I can't put a live thing
in hot water!

Let me do it.

What did you think
we were gonna do?

Take him to the movies?

Oh good, Alvie, oh thank you!
Okay, it's in.

The joke was that New York Jewishness
is alien to just about everywhere

except New York itself.

I can't get it out.

This thing's heavy

In this scene Annie and Alvie
are trying to cook lobsters.

Cooking isn't very New York
and boiling lobsters certainly isn't.

We should have gotten steaks
'cause they don't have legs.

They don't run around.

Great, great, god!
Jesus!

Alright, alright

The scene's a single shot,
there's no cut.

The kitchen light
is hit by mistake.

One of the funniest moment
in American cinema.

One more, Alvie, please?
One more.

Chaplin played the lead role
in his films too, and Annie Hall

is the offspring of Charlie Chaplin's film
City Lights.

Chaplin is the butt of his own jokes too,
but makes a blind girl see.

Allen makes the woman
believe in herself.

He does this montage to show
her magic moments.

Both are Pygmalion myths.

Brilliant films that
nonetheless reminded us

of how few women were
themselves making films in America.

In the late '70s, Allen went
from the freeform shooting of Annie Hall

to the compositional rigor
of films like this one, Manhattan.

A city symphony
if ever there was one.

Widescreen images in love
with the built world.

Again Allen's Jewish character
is at the center of the story.

Hopper, Altman, Copolla, Scorsese,
Schrader, Parks, Burnett,

and Allen were all, in some way,
against old style Hollywood.

They were about
the modern truths.

About people and places.

An article in the New Yorker magazine said,

"our recent films have
been about self-hatred.

There's been no room
for decency or nobility."

But a third set of American filmmakers
were less against nobility,

or Hollywood, or romance.

These were the assimilationists.

Take this man,
Peter Bogdanovich.

Passionate film historian.

Friend of Orson Welles
and John Ford.

There's no way he could be
totally against the old guard.

This movie shows
how he mixed old and new.

We're in an old Texan town.
Young people are driving at night.

Bogdanovich uses
old movie style.

Black and white,
conventional reverse angle editing.

They meet Ben Johnson,
a regular actor in old John Ford movies,

who plays Sam the Lion,
a decent, heroic man.

Country music plays.

Need any money?
No, we've got plenty.

Well you better take some
for some insurance.

Take money below that border,
it sort of melts sometimes.

Thanks Sam.

And try not to drink too much
of that bogey water.

At first look this could be a John Ford
western like My darling Clementine"

But then look what happens.

This woman, played by Cloris Leachman,
is agonizingly lonely.

She's been having an affair
with Timothy Bottoms, but here,

at the end of the film,
has found out that

he's dumped her for
the local beauty.

He's too inarticulate even
to apologize.

Never you mind, honey.
Never you mind.

Bogdanovich and his creative partner
Polly Platt have Leachman do the forgiving.

Then, a slow 16 second dissolve,
as long as the longest dissolve

that Orson Welles ever used.

And we're tracking and panning
in the town.

A ghost town
with all idealism gone.

A rotten place to live.

The camera pans round to show
a closed-down movie theatre,

where romantic films
once were shown.

The American assimilationists

weren't as interested
in opening up the form,

as restoring its power
by applying it

to edgier, more
thoughtful content.

They worked in the clear light
of the new day of '70s cinema.

Their films were
spatially clear but tense.

Almost all their central characters
were male,

never more so than in the films of the
assimilationist director

of this scene from The wild bunch,
Sam Peckinpah.

Peckinpah took and stretched
Sergio Leone's Neo-realist idea

of extending time,
to slow down a scene.

Doing so revealed the scene's
constituent agony and beauty.

His beautiful widescreen film
Pat Garret and Billy the kid,"

shows how torn Peckinpah was,
by the mid-'70s, about American history.

The film's set at the end
of the 1800s.

The Wild West
has been commercialized.

Idealism has long flowed
down the river.

Here, outlaw-turned-sheriff,
Pat Garrett, sees a family drifting by.

Pointlessly, inevitably,
the father and Garrett end up

pointing their guns
at each other.

The macho west,
the beautiful west.

Cattle barons have hired Pat Garrett
to kill his former friend,

the outlaw Billy the kid.

Both are part of the past,
ghosts.

When Garret finally kills Billy,

he quickly shoots
himself in the mirror.

Something Peckinpah once did.

It's as if Garrett
couldn't face himself.

The void within, the shame.

Just before Garrett kills Billy,
he meets this coffin maker,

who's played by Peckinpah himself,
in half-light,

as if he's been there all the time,
like Garret's conscience.

Go on, get it over with.

Peckinpah hated producers and was
as temperamentally against the system

as Erich Von Stroheim
was in silent days.

Peckinpah was too romantic
to detest the myth of the west,

and the assimilationist director
of our next film, Badlands,

was too romantic to detest
the myth of the outsider.

A young man with James Dean hair
and '50s denims.

His young girlfriend.

Asleep like a child.

He climbs a tree,
drops her an egg.

They're like Adam and Eve
in the garden of Eden.

But they play war games.

It's like he's in Vietnam.

He gave me lectures on how a gun works,
how to take it apart...

This actor, Martin Sheen,
would later star

in the most operatic Vietnam film,
Apocalypse now.

These characters are even
more damaged than James Dean.

They're so needy,
they're almost mentally ill.

The film was made by one
of the most reclusive figures

in film history,
Terrence Malick.

Malick studied philosophy
and it shows.

His follow up to Badlands
was this one, Days of heaven.

We're on a Texan estate,
a golden world.

The camera flows.

What are you talking about?
That's not fair!

Then leave, you're fired.

Cinematographer Néstor Almendros
attached the camera to his own body

with a cantilevered brace
called a panaglide.

This was the first time
this was done.

Panaglides would soon evolve
into steadicams

which gave a floating feeling
to much of cinema of the '80s and since.

One of the main characters
is this migrant worker.

Malick cuts between him
and landscape shots.

He's trying somehow
to apprehend the infinite.

Almendros, who had worked
with François Truffaut,

tried to capture
the beautiful natural light

of D.W. Griffiths' films.

Malick had key scenes shot after the sun
has dipped below the horizon

but before its glowing light
has died from the sky.

This magic hour lasts only twenty minutes,
so there's always a panic to capture it.

To simulate a locust swarm,
Malick and his D.P.

dropped peanut shells
from a helicopter

whose rotor blades made them into a whirl,
then reversed the shot

so that the locusts
appeared to be swarm upwards.

Actors and extras in such scenes
had to walk backwards

so that when the film was reversed
their action would appear normal.

At the climax of the film,
wheat fields go on fire.

Only the light from the flames
was used.

The resulting
images have amongst

the shallowest focus
of any in cinema history.

The delicacy of this,
the cave-like darkness

worked brilliantly
with the film's mythic ambitions.

It's only been recently revealed
that Haskell Wexler

shot much of
Days of heaven."

Actually in the final film
about 46 minutes are my shooting.

Terry is just a special,
far out, or far in person

and certain aspects that I note

he has a certain intimate
contact with nature.

That life concept of connection
to the earth, and to people as well,

and that's the way he writes
and that's the way he thinks.

And he seems to think
like D.W. Griffith too.

Griffith said that cinema
is the wind in the trees

and Mallick loves
to film wind too,

Its poetic properties.

And in this film from Soviet director
Andrei Tarkovsky,

whose work has so much
in common with Malick,

wind seems to be nature coming alive,
part of the story.

Malick has only made a handful of films,
but they are love letters to life,

as if their screenplays were by philosophers
like David Hume, or Martin Heidegger.

One of greatest American films
of the '70s

to mix old techniques with new style
was this movie: Cabaret.

A clean-cut young man
singing a melodic song.

Could be
an old style Hollywood musical.

Except musicals
weren't usually shot in close-ups.

And there are lots of them here.

? Now fatherland, fatherland ?

? show us the sign ?

? your children ?

? have waited to see ?

? the morning will come ?

? when the world... ?

They tilt up as people stand.

Because we're in Nazi Germany.

The faces become
more impassioned.

A shiver runs down our spine.

? Tomorrow belongs to me ?

? now fatherland, fatherland ?

? show us the sign ??

The film showed the life and loves
of Christopher Isherwood's character,

Sally Bowles,
in decadent Berlin of the 1930s.

Cabaret's director, Bob Fosse,
was old Hollywood,

born of musical theatre parents
and steeped in Broadway.

He choreographed and directed
using the best of the old techniques.

This song is about living
for the moment.

Its performer, Liza Minelli,
daughter of Judy Garland,

is a direct link
to old school Hollywood.

But the political messages and celebration
of non-conformist sexuality are very '70s.

? Life is a cabaret, old chum ?
? come to the cabaret ??

That I cannot do.

Another assimilationist film
from 1972 was even more amoral.

Francis Ford Copolla's, The godfather,
was the most successful upgrading

of another '30s American genre:
the gangster movie.

Coppola had it shot
like a Rembrandt painting.

No trendy '70s long lenses,
no helicopter shots.

Gordon Willis, his cinematographer,
lit Marlon Brando from overhead

to create shadows
in his eye sockets.

Audiences couldn't see clearly
the eyes of the don.

I understand.

This so-called north lighting
was rare in American cinema,

and had not been used well
since the days of Marlene Dietrich.

You had a good trade,
made a good living.

Police protected you
in the courts of law.

You didn't need
a friend like me.

But now you come to me and you say,
"Don Corleone, give me justice."

The low lighting levels also meant
that focus was shallow,

constraining actors to minimal movements,
internalizing their performance.

Gangster pictures of the '30s were
about the rise and fall of individuals,

but The godfather
showed a network of relationships.

Robert Towne contributed
to its screenplay.

Francis called me one day
and said,

"Jeez, I don't have the scene
between the two leads in my movie."

Then it fell to me to decide what
the nature of that scene would or should be.

So, I had something structural to do...
I mean...

in the sense of the way that I placed it
and what it was about.

When it was your time that you would be
the one to hold the strings.

Senator Corleone,
governor Corleone or something.

Another pezzonovante.

Well, there wasn't enough time, Michael.
Wasn't enough time.

We'll get there, pop.
We'll get there.

Now listen, whoever comes to you
with this Barzini meeting,

he's the traitor.
Don't forget that.

Over dinner one day,
during the shooting of The godfather,

its producer, Robert Evans,
commissioned another film

about the lust for power.

Our final assimilationist movie
of the '70s.

Its style was old Hollywood,
a film noir almost,

but somehow baking
in the clear light of the '70s day.

It would be based on the true story
of how the head of Los Angeles's department

of water and power, William Mulholland,
redirected water from the Owens valley,

depriving farmers of water in order to expand L.A.

And fill its swimming pools.

A rape of the land.

Los Angeles has a kind of,
and particularly in those days,

a lazy, sense out,
dreamy quality to it, you know?

And that, for him, to discover
the dark shadows in this sunny place.

And the crime was right in front of his,
eyes every time he turned on his spigot.

Robert Towne's screenplay
became Chinatown.

It was shot widescreen,
had muted '30s color,

and starred Jack Nicholson
as a puzzled private eye,

driving around L.A.

Who unknowingly stumbles
into the appalling story

of the theft of the water.

I think that the sunny quality
there is because the corruption

is just so pervasive,
so all encompassing.

It's not just one criminal,
it's not just one Maltese falcon.

It's everyone.

Every really good detective story,
that you find satisfying,

always has
that element in it.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy
in "The Maltese falcon."

Let's just say, "I'm desperate
and I need your help,"

but the killer is right in front
of his eyes from the very beginning.

It's her.

But it takes him the entire exploration
for him to discover what he knew all along,

which was the killer.

He can't see that,
in the case of this, it's literal.

Help me Mr. Spade,
I need help so badly.

I have no right to ask you,
I know I haven't but I do ask you.

Help me!

You won't need much
of anybody's help, you're good.

It's chiefly your eyes, I think,
and that throb you get in your voice

when you say things like:
"Be generous, Mr. Spade."

I deserve that.

But the lie was
in the way I said it.

Not at all in what I said.

It's my own fault
if you can't believe me now.

Now you are dangerous.

The director of The Maltese falcon,
John Huston, played the business man

who steals the water and rapes
his daughter in Townes' screenplay.

It was a time before
World War II.

It was a time when the full extent
of the possibilities of human evil

hadn't occurred to him.

Most of them follow along the lines
of the usual graft and corruption.

A man who would be willing
to violate his daughter.

That's just
not a nice thing to do.

The presence of evil is kind of
brilliantly rendered by both,

Roman and John, who's that kind
of false bonhomie and pleasantness.

Yeah, he says,
"I've still got a few teeth in my head

and a few friends
in town" he says.

My daughter is
a very jealous woman.

I didn't want her to find out
about the girl.

How did you find out?

I still got a few teeth left
in my head, and a few friends in town.

Okay.

Because it goes
beyond mere greed.

What do you hope to get
that you don't already have?

And his answer to that is,
"the future, Mr. Gittes. The future."

I just want to know what you're worth?
Over 10 million?

Oh my, yes.

Why are you doing it?
How much better can you eat?

What can you buy
that you can't already afford?

The future Mr. Gittes,
the future!

Now where's the girl?

I want the only daughter
I got left.

As you found out,
Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.

Who do you blame for that?
Her?

The film was directed by
Roman Polanski.

Three years earlier, Polanski's wife
and unborn child and friends

had been horrifically murdered
by Charles Manson's gang of deluded hippies.

Polanski's early life had been tragic,
but the murders seemed to strip him

of any lingering delusions
about people.

Polanski's life had had far too great
an amplitude to even countenance

the shallow pleasures
of escapist romantic cinema.

Nor had he any time
for the fleeting, impressionistic lightness

of Jules et Jim
by Truffaut, for example.

He had Chinatown filmed
with wide angle lenses,

bright lights and precise framing,
like an MGM musical almost,

except that the movie was about rape,
incest, power and greed.

Towne wrote an ending with some hope,
but Polanski made it much darker.

In his version, Huston's daughter
who had a child by him

is shot through the eye.

We're in proper film noir territory
in this ending.

A car horn creates
a sense of panic.

A hand held swish pan to reveal
the scene of the atrocity.

Towne called this tragic ending
"the tunnel at the end of the light."

Chinatown was a high point
in American film of its time.

New American cinema was full
of mockery and stylistically bold.

It was old school,
laced with new truths.

It felt like the best movie party
to be at in the '70s.

But there are other parties
around the world

that were just as exciting,
radical, and self-possessed.

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