All language subtitles for The.Story.of.Film.An.Odyssey.S01E02.720p.BluRay.x264-GalaxyTV

In this chapter we meet the great
film comedian, Charlie Chaplin,

and discover the realist directors
who threatened Hollywood.

1918. WWI had just ended.

Much of Europe was scorched earth.

The seeds of Nazism had been planted.

A few years later,
the Surrealist Manifesto

said that art should record dreams.

But what dreams?

In the hills of Los Angeles,
the myth of Hollywood had just been born.

The town had started to burnish itself.

Starlets with the especial
slenderness of youth

were attracted by the bauble
that is Hollywood,

shiny and romantic, with its
escapism and promise of perfection.

This part of The Story of Film is
about the strengthening of Hollywood,

how it becomes an industry, a factory
with which the world would fall in love.

But, as we'll see,
for all its strength and power,

many inside the factory system
of Hollywood seemed not to notice

how fragile it was,

how breakable.

Before the 1920s were over,

key filmmakers were trying
to break the bauble.

Investment in cinema increased
tenfold in the late teens and 20s.

Hollywood became an industry.

The money often came from
the East coast bankers.

On the west coast, it was spent
by a series of production bosses,

working class, Jewish businessmen.

Adolph Zukor,
a Hungarian immigrant and fur trader,

set up Famous Players,
which would become Paramount.

Four Canadian Polish
brothers set up Warner Bros.

A brash Russian called
Louis B Mayer ran MGM.

They built big boring
bunkers called sound stages,

so that filming could move indoors,
into the dark, to control this:

light.

This scene in Citizen Kane shows that
Hollywood could work wonders with light.

The beams make the library
look like a sepulchre.

The documents gleam.

Thank you, Jennings.

Hollywood set up
a production line system

the way that the model T
Ford motor car was assembled.

In Japan at the time,
directors led the production process,

but in Hollywood it was production
bosses like Zukor and Mayer and Warner.

Below them, in the movie barns,
writers would concoct stories,

talent scouts would find new starlets
in coffee shops or magazines.

Set designers in the boring buildings
would invent magnificent buildings.

This is what legendary Hollywood
designer William Cameron Menzies

thought Baghdad might look like.

Inhuman in scale.
Elegant and decorative.

Costume designers conjured
lifestyles and selves,

and got to know the bodies
of their stars.

This is one of Marilyn Monroe's dresses.

Make-up artists came up with new types
of foundation and eyelash and look.

This is the room and table where
Marilyn Monroe went blonde.

Engineers devised new technology

- lights to illuminate hair

to make eyelashes cast shadows
on the face of Marlene Dietrich

in Desire.

Dollies on which to move the camera,
to make the image glide.

The image glided in Gone With The Wind,

as if blown by the wind,

away from the lovers and the sunset.

And new cameras themselves.

Beautiful objects.

This one, used in World War II,

half camera, half gun.

This one, from the 60s,
portable and nosey.

And then the money men
thought, "Wait a minute!

"Why don't we buy the screens
as well so we can control

"where the films are shown and when?"

And so, things that were made in boring
buildings, were shown in grand ones.

The whole point was to
standardise and control.

Actress Joan Crawford's contract
specified when she should go to bed.

Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan contract fined
him for every pound he weighed over 190lb.

Novelist Henry Miller called
Hollywood's production line

"a dictatorship in which
the artist is silenced."

It was a dictatorship,

and yet some say there was genius in it.

A genius of sorts, Busby Berkeley,

choreographed this fantasy.

Girls in the snow,
making patterns with their moves.

Increasingly abstract. Geometric.

Stanley Donen,
who made Singin' in the Rain:

The studio system,

in my opinion,
didn't really get into the film.

The studio system was
the garden where we all worked.

I mean, there I was at MGM with
a lot of enormously gifted people

and...

I often think about that,

that idea of having a company

which brought people together to
make money is all they were doing.

They weren't doing it
for any other reason.

What was behind it
was an economic thing.

They were a company making
money, or hoping to make money.

So the industry was
a bauble but also a garden,

which is what Agnes deMille
called Hollywood a decade earlier.

And what varied flowers grew there!

MGM, for example,
which was so proud of itself

that it filmed its own
neo-classical buildings,

was said to have "more stars
than there are in heaven".

Its movies had an opulence and optimism.

In this dance scene in
Singin' in the Rain,

even the shadows have light in them.

Warner Brothers was more streetwise.

Its stars were angels with dirty faces.

Scenes like this one
in The Maltese Falcon

had a downtrodden hero, harder lighting,

sharper shadows, gangster
outfits, night time settings.

Murder, melodrama, movie journalism.

This scene from The Scarlet
Empress shows Paramount's style.

Sparkling, champagne-y,

costumes on display.

Feminine, Romantic, wry...

More taken by the "veiled" and the east.

Tell me, Alexei...

Are you still fond of me?

Yes, your imperial majesty, I love you.

The studio system was
a capitalist production line.

It was copied around the world.

In India, Mexico, Italy, Britain,
China, Hong Kong, Korea and France.

Each of those industries made
formulaic, copycat movies.

But the system also fostered
expertise and taste,

extravagance and brilliance.

The ghost in the machine was art.

Is it cold?

By the mid '20s, the boring buildings
were making 700 films a year.

This is one of them.
The Thief of Bagdad.

It could stand for many of them.

It states its theme up front -

A holy man shows that
"Happiness must be earned"

- a tweak of the American dream.

Then a wide shot of a street scene.

We hardly notice the man lying at
the head height of the merchants.

But then we dissolve inwards to see him.

We recognise him.

He's the movie's star,
Douglas Fairbanks.

He's also its producer.

He's asleep at the centre of the action,
unaware that we're looking at him.

And we dissolve in again.

Soft lighting, shallow focus, make-up.

A certain femininity.

But then he steals a man's wallet.

Our beautiful, dreaming hero is a thief.

The passer-by exits screen right,

notices his wallet is missing.

Cut to Doug, who looks screen right.

The camera doesn't cross the line.

We know he's looking at his victim.

Smiling.

In just 90 seconds the film
has told us its theme -

Romantic and American

- introduced us to a society,

then a scene...

..then an individual,

seduced us with style -

the poetics of lighting

- amused us with character

- a likable rogue,
a human being like us,

but more glamorous and
with a more exciting life.

It makes the space very clear.

We're not confused about where we are.

The story kicks in, of course.

The thief has broken into a palace.

He hears that a princess is there.

Glimpses her fairytale bed.

Will he go down to look at her? No.

No.

Maybe.

No.

Yes.

We can't wait to see her either.

The curl of the fantasy balcony.

The elegant attenuation
of her mosquito net.

His trousers are see through now.

He looks through the net.

His shadow.

Hollywood cinema, the bauble,

is brilliant at
the anticipation of seeing,

the desire to see,
the pleasure of seeing.

The thief falls in love, of course.

And his love sets in motion
the rest of the film.

This sort of movie is
usually called classical,

but really it's Romantic.

It became Hollywood's
claim to fame in the '20s.

It's what most people mean when
they even say the word movie.

It is the mainstream, the bauble.

So Hollywood mainstream films in
the '20s were entertaining and romantic,

but our theme is innovation in cinema.

Were they innovative?

Some of the most popular films of the 20s
the comedies, most certainly were.

Three filmmakers - Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd

- were the greatest of
the American comedy directors.

Before them, there was mostly slapstick.

This sight gag on a fast
moving train was typical.

A good cheap laugh
using a bucket of water.

But then came Keaton,
obsessed by the camera.

In this scene from his film The Cameraman
he shows that fascination.

Keaton became the greatest comic
image maker the cinema had yet seen.

He thought like an architect.

In this sequence in a short
film he made in 1920,

the house he's built becomes a playpen.

It falls around him.

Keaton helped define silent cinema.

He just got it.

We've already seen that
he got that in editing,

a cut replaces one space with another.

Here he jokes about it, as if,
as he's walking down a street,

he's suddenly on a cliff top.

But as this scene shows,

he also got that movies
are about looking.

And he got that they're
brilliant at dare-devilling.

He begins this sequence
with an overhead shot

to make the building look really high.

In the story, Buster must jump
between the tall buildings.

He had a set built above this
Third Street tunnel in LA.

Right at the very top of this
old archive shot of the tunnel.

Keaton's camera position makes him
look far higher up than he was.

There was a net just below, out of shot.

Just as well because Keaton didn't
make it and was badly bruised.

Keaton's inventiveness was often highly
planned, but sometimes spontaneous.

Here, he saw a train arriving
and so improvised a gag

to make it look like
he himself stopped it.

Then started it again.

One of his greatest movies, The General,
was a comedy epic about a train.

It's set during the American Civil War.

Buster's a Southern train driver -
a bit eccentric, obsessed by detail.

In the first half of the film,
he travels north to the captives' lair,

and rescues his sweetheart.

Every visual joke and set-up
in the first half is repeated

and amplified in the second,
but in reverse order.

We get the pattern.

We see the next joke coming and
we're laughing before it even starts.

The climax of the film has been called

"the most stunning visual event
ever arranged for a comedy,

"perhaps for any kind of film".

The northern enemy's advancing,

so Keaton sets fire to a bridge.

Their train crosses.
The bridge gives way.

This is no trick shot.

The locomotive and the bridge were real.

The wreck of the train was
visible for years to come.

Such scale, such sublime,

was a key element of silent film.

Labour was cheap,
Wall Street hadn't crashed,

imaginations were
extravagant and uncapped,

studios were not yet afraid of
the size of directors' dreams.

Keaton's dreams
outstripped his box office.

He was eventually sacked by MGM.

He hit the bottle and lived in a trailer
in a car park beside his former studio.

He was forgotten for years

but as this rare archive
footage of him shows,

Keaton was joking till the end.

This little cigarette routine shows
he still had the urge to improvise.

In 1965, at the Venice Film
Festival, he got a standing ovation.

He died the next year.

Amongst the scores of filmmakers
who were influenced by Keaton

is Palestine's Elie Suiliman.

This scene shows that Sulieman,
like Keaton, filmed in deadpan.

He keeps back from the action
and finds grumpiness funny.

Buster Keaton only
once shared the screen

with our next great silent film
comedian, Charlie Chaplin.

In this scene in Limelight,

Chaplin shows that whilst he was
less into the camera than Keaton,

he was far more into body movement.

Chaplin thought like
a dancer and a vaudevillian.

Here he rehearses a comic movement
before filming it in costume.

Actor and producer Norman Lloyd knew
Chaplin and also Alfred Hitchcock,

who was born not far
from Chaplin in London.

Hitch came from a middle class family.

His father was a poultry
dealer, fish and poultry,

and...

Hitch always had an aspiration
to be part of that world.

Charlie came out of the direst
poverty that you can imagine.

Unbelievable poverty.

I mean stuff like, he and his brother,
Sydney, who was his half-brother...

..stealing fruit, rotten fruit.

They would know where the wagon was
with fruit that was going to be dumped.

They'd go and get that
fruit, eat that fruit.

His mother being put into an asylum.

And out. In and out.

I think his father was a drinker.

Charlie had such an upbringing that

it's in the movies.

And never more so than in his first
feature-length picture, The Kid,

which recreated the rooms and
relationships of Chaplin's childhood.

Cold mornings. Worn out bedding.

Life in a London garret,
with a bath on the wall.

Chaplin plays a version of
his by now famous character,

a penniless tramp who thinks
he's a gentleman dilettante.

He finds an orphan
boy and brings him up.

The boy starts to work for his dad.

He breaks windows so
his dad can fix them.

Shot in America, of course,
but English-style windows and doors.

Eventually,
the boy's taken to an orphanage.

Chaplin coaxed a brilliant performance
from Jackie Coogan as he's taken away.

The film humanised comic cinema.

It DW Griffith-ised it, you could say.

It showed Chaplin's passionate
empathy with the poor.

It was a huge hit around the world.

Chaplin was cinema's Charles Dickens.

He built his own studio
in LA in the English style

and filmed it in time lapse.

A rare thing to do,
which shows his pride in it.

He had final cut on his films.

His premieres were mobbed.

The studio today looks like a row of
English houses plonked in a megalopolis.

A deleted scene from
his film City Lights

that Chaplin made ten years later,

shows how his mind worked.

He's on a street corner.

A piece of wood is stuck in an air vent.

Chaplin begins to play with it.
To improvise.

The Soviets thought of him as a Marxist,
but Chaplin was almost a Jungian too,

a believer in play, inspiration,

finding ideas within yourself.

It's like he's strumming on the table,

letting his unconscious do its work.

60 years later,
the British director Nicholas Roeg

also seemed to try to show
the unconscious lives of his characters.

You could be right.
Then again, why spoil the mystery?

The people act cool with each other,

but their hands, filmed in close up,

suggest twitchy mental energy.

Chaplin's deleted scene is a lovely little
poem about daydreaming on street corners.

Stanley Donen sees ideas in Chaplin too.

To be wonderful choreography
it has to have an idea

which overwhelms the whole production,

or dance,
or whatever you'd like to call it.

And that's what's hard to find -

a great, wonderful, encompassing idea

for the musical number.

Well, the idea of the dictator kicking
the balloon is a great metaphor

because it's Adolf Hitler
making the world his toy

and the image is so spectacular

that that's the kind of
thing I'm talking about,

if you can come up
with that kind of idea.

But it had to be,
first he was going to make,

I don't know how he thought of it,

in what order, but he was going
to make a film about Adolf Hitler

and he was going to play Hitler.

And how was he going to
make a buffoon of him

but not make him be
the ogre that he was?

And that's quite an accomplishment.

Fascism and ballet.

Who else would have thought
up a scene like this?

No-one else in the story of film
combines entertainment, ideas, movement,

improvisation and politics like Chaplin.

In France in the 1940s,
Chaplin inspired Jacques Tati,

but Tati leant forwards
and wore short trousers,

where Chaplin leant
backwards and wore long ones.

In Italy, Toto became a huge star,

wearing Chaplin's trademark bowler hat

and with Chaplin's
jabby, confident manner.

And in the massive
film industry of India

this man,
megastar and director Raj Kapoor,

modelled his screen character,
The Tramp, on Chaplin's.

Streetwise, plucky, tipping his
hat, stealing from the rich.

And in America itself, the great director
Billy Wilder saw Chaplin as his master.

Gloria Swanson explicitly
impersonates him in Sunset Boulevard.

But even a moment like this in
Chaplin's The Great Dictator...

..was reworked in this scene
in Wilder's Some Like it Hot.

Look at that! Look how she moves!

Chaplin co-founded United Artists,

the studio that made Some Like it Hot.

The studio was one of the great
foundation stones of Hollywood.

Chaplin was in American
cinema's bloodstream.

But to the country's shame,

it kicked him out in the '50s
because he was a leftist.

When you work with a man like
Chaplin, or Renoir...

..you assimilate -

you hope - their greatness.

That is to say,
you become part of their world.

And you try to not
only work on that level

but you...

absorb something from them

and you begin to have the points
of view that they have,

not that you've disregarded your own,

but what you bring...

..is the ability to...

assimilate what they're doing.

The comedian who was most
influenced by Chaplin in the 20s

was the Nebraskan son of a photographer,
Harold Lloyd.

At first Lloyd was too like Chaplin.

Here he shrugs, wears a frock
coat and sports a moustache.

But then he and his producer tried
him in big black-rimmed glasses.

In those days this was a nerdy look.

But add in Lloyd's athleticism,

and the flinty courage that we see
here and you get a ballsy dreamer,

both aggressive and
lyrical, a jock-nerd.

Lloyd's most influential
film, Safety Last,

ends with one of the most
famous sequences in '20s cinema.

He plays a hick who pretends to his
girlfriend that he's manager of a store.

In the climax of the film,
as a publicity stunt for the store,

Lloyd, who had vertigo and a missing thumb
and forefinger on one hand in real life,

climbs the building.

The sequence is
a vertical obstacle race.

A bird, a net, a plank,

a clock, a rope, a dog, a mouse,

a gun and a wind gauge

get in Lloyd's way.

When he finally reaches the top of
the building, the action reaches a crescendo,

and he swoops in an arc into
the arms of his sweetheart.

The climb is a beautiful idea on film.

On the other side of the world,
Japan's great director, Yazujiro Ozu,

was influenced by the ballsy dreamer.

The students in this film have been
working out how to cheat at exams.

They have Harold Lloyd's confident
silliness, his man-boyishness.

The comedies were the brightest,
most entertaining and innovative things

to come out of Hollywood in the '20s.

They, and the extravagant
romance of films

like The Thief of Bagdad
in all its splendour,

its special effects and sweep,

made Hollywood a major
export industry for America.

But something in its very flickering,

the fact that the bauble was a fantasy,

made it vulnerable.

This architectural dream of Baghdad
isn't the real Baghdad of course.

This is the real Baghdad.

To say so can shatter the bauble.

Reality can break fantasy.

And in the '20s,

several filmmakers
already realised this.

They wanted to show this.

Real life.

Without the costumes and glitter.

Non-fiction.

In 1921, an Irish-American
explorer, Robert Flaherty,

made the longest non-fiction
film so far in the story of film,

Nanook of the North.

It's set in Alaska. And has beautiful
but conventional scenic shots like this.

But then it focuses on
one real Itivinuit man,

Nanook, and his family.

Nanook of the North was no travelogue.

It stared into Nanook's face.

It was about his psychology,

his mythic struggle
against the elements.

Like Chaplin and DW Griffith,

Flaherty was a romantic

but, by using non-actors, non-stars

- no Douglas Fairbanks
or Garbo here

- he made the audience
look more ethically.

As it happens,
Flaherty staged this scene and others,

but Nanook of the North
was a huge hit around the world.

People had seen a real man,

a playful father with a sense of
humour, on screen.

You could buy Nanook ice cream bars.

Nanook's death, two years later,
of starvation, made headlines.

And, so documentary, as an art form,

as a viable genre, was born.

Documentary is often thought
of as merely information

but in fact non-fiction cinema is amongst
the most innovative in the story of film.

Farough Farrokhzad's Iranian
film, The House is Black,

used beautiful tracking shots to turn

a home for people with
leprosy into a film poem.

In this film essay, Sans Soleil,

Chris Marker filmed real
places in Japan and elsewhere,

then wrote a fictional commentary

in which an imaginary women quotes from
made-up letters from the filmmaker.

He wrote, "I'm just back from
Hikida, the northern island,

"Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane.
Others take the ferry.

"Waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep.

"Curiously all of that makes me
think of a past or future war."

Imagined words on top
of non-fiction pictures.

I think that's why I...

I got into so much
trouble when I got back.

'Cos I was in the mindframe of, well...

..I've just come back from a place
where everyone wants me dead.

And director Brian Hill and poet
Simon Armitage interviewed this man

about his war experiences,

then turned his words into poems,

then had him speak the poems,

to make his memories magical.

..exit wounds or burns to the face.

You're just soft in the head.

And the British Army isn't the place
for a lying bastard or basket case.

In the 60s, Jorgen Leth made this
short documentary, The Perfect Human.

In a documentary made
nearly 40 years later,

Director Lars Von Trier asked Leth
to remake the original five times,

each time with a startling
new challenge.

All these are innovative high
points in the story of film,

and show that documentary
directors, from Flaherty onwards,

were really co-directors.

The other half of the directing
team was real life itself.

Back in LA in the '20s,

maybe it was seeing documentaries
like Nanook of the North

that led our next filmmaker to use realism
to undermine the Hollywood fantasy.

A director called Erich Von
Stroheim took on the establishment.

Here he filmed himself square
on, looming out of the dark.

Grinning. Scarred.

Eric Von Stroheim was one of
the few legitimate geniuses

of the early silent days.

He was a man of such vision

and he was so great a poet and an artist

that he found nothing
but trouble in Hollywood.

Stroheim's drive to realism was
more obsessive than Flaherty's.

Here he even shows an actress how to
do a simple thing like comb her hair,

a small detail in the scene.

This is his gigantic fifth film, Greed.

The man on the right is a dentist.

His wife wins the lottery.

In the original prints,
the money was hand-tinted yellow.

As she gets obsessively greedy, so her
husband becomes drunken and penniless.

He beats her.

Stroheim shows her agony, her smallness.

Eventually the man murders his wife

and, in this famous climax,
shot in Death Valley,

also kills a rival who
put him out of business.

By now the yellow, the colour of money,

has flooded the whole
world of the story.

And, as the man is handcuffed to
the body so he himself must perish.

The story alone shows Stroheim's contempt
for Hollywood romance, for the bauble.

As did his techniques.

He shot every scene of the novel by Frank
Norris, on which the film was based.

Nine months of shooting.

Sometimes, as here, in baking heat.

Actors pushed to their limits,
a budget of $1.5 million.

The finished movie ran 7 hours.

Stroheim was the Emile Zola
or Dostoevsky of cinema.

Cinematographer Carl Brown:

Early in his life, he was visited
by such very great humiliation,

such deep, inward, psychic wounds

that there came in him an insane desire

to use his genius as a weapon.

MGM hated the results.

Stroheim's ultra
realism became a stigma.

He didn't get to direct many more films.

Here, in 1948, he returns to his
home city of Vienna to direct a film,

but nothing came of it.

In 1950, he saw the cut version of
Greed, and cried.

He said that the film was dead.

In the same year,
Stroheim played the protective butler

in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

Don't race upstairs.

The musicians mustn't
know what happened.

In this famous scene,

Wilder shows fictional
movie star Norma Desmond

watching one of her old movies.

The clip is from a sublime, extravagant
real movie from the 1920s, Queen Kelly.

It was directed, way back then,

by none other than the sublime,
extravagant Erich von Stroheim.

For complicated reasons,
the movie never saw the light of day.

We didn't need dialogue.

Three years after Von Stroheim's Greed,

another MGM film tried
to portray '20s America

with far more realism
than Romantic cinema.

It became the greatest
pre-Wall Street Crash

social problem picture of its time.

The Crowd tells the story of
an ordinary New York couple.

They have a child, but she dies.

In this heartbreaking scene,

the father thinks his dead
daughter is merely sleeping,

and so tries to hush the street noise

so that it won't disturb her slumber.

The Crowd's director, King
Vidor, met James Joyce in Paris.

He adored DW Griffiths'
ideasy epic Intolerance.

He was that rare Hollywood
beast, an intellectual.

His films almost never feature villains,

and were written mostly by women.

Vidor pushed realism in acting
beyond the Hollywood norm.

Here he films the leading actress
in The Crowd in static shot,

a longish take, no fancy clothes or set.

Just her growing despair.

The Crowd was the first movie to use
New York extensively as a location.

Vidor used hidden cameras.

He cast an unknown actor,
James Murray, instead of a star.

To show the scale of the office
where the husband worked,

he designed this magnificent sequence.

An overhead studio crane shot finds
John amongst the other identical desks.

Billy Wilder repeated it in The Apartment,
a bitter-sweet reworking of Vidor's film.

'..31,259 employees
without a serious traffic jam.'

We dissolve through
to Wilder's everyman,

played by Jack Lemmon at
the very centre of the frame.

'Especially when the weather is bad.'

And Orson Welles used the same
visual idea in The Trial,

exaggerating it by craning
upwards and using small people

and even dolls and smaller desks

in the background to
force the perspective.

MGM was uneasy about The Crowd's refusal
to romanticise ordinary New York life.

They made Vidor shoot seven different
endings in various shades of optimism.

They say for a studio tuned
to glamour pictures and happy endings

- which it was for then,
and many years afterwards,

to have a realistic picture...

which put the spotlight on marriage

and on any kind of American life,

and then you can't have
a happy ending on that.

It just wouldn't fit.

But the studio didn't know.

They were lost... what sort of--
how to end this picture happily?

So we made actually seven
endings and tried it out,

seven previews with the various endings

and finally I came up with the ending
where he's lost again in the crowd

and the camera moves back, back, back.

The Crowd sums up a lot about
cinema of the '20s and '30s.

It showed mass society emerging.

It focused on the everyman,

as French films would do.

And showed the kinetic
energy of cities themselves,

their rhythms and compositions,

like the German movies of
Fritz Lang and Walter Ruttmann,

and the Soviet films of Dziga Vertov.

In the Soviet Union itself in the '20s,

this wonderful film played with
the rebellious idea of realism and cities.

We're on Mars.

It's all angles, diagonals,
modernist costumes.

This is Queen Aelita.

She's shown Earth for the first
time and sees a city.

A battleship.

Then a focus pull to
a balcony in Moscow.

The queen has glimpsed something real
- Earth - and she wants it.

We'll get to the famous
Soviet films of the '20s soon,

but those by this director,

Yakov Protazanov, are quite unlike them.

Protazanov worked at the same time as
the director of this film, Yevgenii Bauer.

A scholar studies in his room.

Handsome side lighting.

The scholar's aunt arrives.

Bauer uses an open door to
create a slit on screen,

like a Vermeer painting.

Later, we're in the scholar's study.

Daringly for the time,
a main source light is in the shot,

here in the foreground.

Bravely natural.

Later, the scholar sees
a beautiful actress on stage

then, astonishingly,

gets a letter from her.

Asking to meet.

He waits for her in the snow.

She arrives in
the background of this shot

- a daring composition,
filmed in natural light.

And then the actress dies,

and the scholar begins to dream of her.

Here, in a field,
she walks into a beam of intense light.

At the end of the film, on his death
bed, exhausted with lamenting,

the scholar's aunt consoles him.

Then Bauer dissolves from night
time blue to black and white.

The ghost of the actress
is in the room too.

And so the scholar stirs once more.

His aunt can't see the actress
of course and becomes upset.

Where Romantic cinema
was usually optimistic,

these early Russian films were
laments, pessimistic in a way,

about the realism of grief
and loss and longing.

You'd think that films like Nanook
of the North and Greed and The Crowd,

and those of Yevgenii Bauer

would be the last word in
realism in cinema of this time,

but no.

One profoundly serious Danish filmmaker
challenged Romantic and fantasy cinema

with such deeply felt realism

that he was almost
a one-man Reformation,

undercutting the emotionalism
of mainstream cinema

with a spiritual spareness.

Look at this scene from
The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Joan, the 15th century
French Catholic girl,

who was accused of witchcraft,

has just signed a statement denying
God, to save her life.

The actress, Marie Falconetti,

had never been in a movie
before, nor would she again.

She's filmed only in close-up.

Wears almost no make-up.

You can see her freckles.

Her eyelashes are matted with tears.

Falconetti's hair was cropped
just before this scene was shot.

The filming was done in silence.

Such an atmosphere on the set that
even some of the electricians cried.

Look at the lighting and focus.

No depth to the image,

nothing in the background.

No set or shadows.

The walls were painted
pink to remove their glare,

so as not to detract
from Falconetti's face.

The set designer, Herman Warmm,
painted the shadows in Caligari.

The film was directed in France by a Dane,
Carl Theodor Dreyer.

He was brought up in
a strict Protestant family.

Falconetti and the others are speaking.

Dreyer had them say the actual
words that were spoken

at the trial nearly 500 years earlier.

He thought this gave
the scene conviction.

The '90s maverick,
Lars von Trier:

Dreyer is fantastic.

Why? He...

Yeah, the same thing that
he did with the décor,

he also did with the script, you know?

He started with a very thick script and
then he kind of reduced and reduced.

I don't know what he did but it had
this monumental feeling of course,

after reducing for many years.
It's like a very good soup, you know,

that's been reducing for a long time.

I don't know why he's great but, you
know, I think that goes for everybody.

Why is Tarkovsky great?
It's really difficult to say.

But it was, for me, to see his
films was kind of a revelation.

So it's really...

You should be thankful that it's
difficult to say why people are great.

Because it's just something that you...

that you feel very strongly.

And if you don't feel it
strongly then they're not great.

Dreyer was born out of wedlock,
adopted, and brought up a Lutheran.

He lived here

and went to churches like this.

Though he didn't believe in God,

the purity and plainness
of Lutheran churches

seem to have formed Dreyer's inner eye.

He's the master of pared-down décor.

Even in his first film, The President,

he seems to want to simplify

and purify his images
in a Protestant way.

Sets at the time were usually
cluttered, like this.

Soon he started to film on misty days,

or into the light to soften his imagery.

His shots became paler, whiter.

His haunting vampire movie, Vampyr,

features shadows against a white wall.

They have a life of their own.

And in its famous ending,
a vampire's accomplice dies

by suffocating in white flour.

Dreyer's utterly spare use of
whiteness was wildy rebellious.

Hollywood romantic cinema was supposed
to be decorative, full of detail.

Not blank.

No other director in the Story of
Film cared so much about whiteness,

its simplicity, its spirituality.

At the end of his film, Ordet, The Word,

a woman comes to life in a white,

entirely undecorated room.

In Dreyer's last film, many years later,

a woman believes so completely
in the power of love

that he films her as if through
a white scrim, as if in heaven,

and she says this....

Dreyer's seriousness
was deeply unfashionable

and, so, in the '50s,

not getting his films made,

he managed this cinema.

The Danish Film Institute now has
a study centre dedicated to his work.

It's hard not to see Dreyer's
radical reduction of set and decor

in Lars Von Trier's
completely setless film,

Dogville.

- Hey Martha.
- Hello Tom.

Listen, they're all coming.

This was the opposite of
romantic Hollywood cinema

- a million miles away from the decorative
splendour of The Thief of Bagdad.

..special permission from
the regional director, Tom.

Martha, and I repeat,
we don't need the organ.

We can be spiritual without
singing or reading from the Bible.

It's almost seven.
Don't forget your bell now.

This is the original screenplay
from Dreyer's film, Joan of Arc.

He sketched an idea for an
image in the film in the margin.

Dreyer had purged silent cinema
of its spectacle, its decoration,

its action, its bauble.

What was left was a girl facing her god.

Facing the camera.

Years later, France's great
maverick director, Jean-Luc Godard,

had his lover and muse, Anna Karina,

go to the cinema in his
film, Vivre sa Vie.

The film she saw was
The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Dreyer's Scandinavian
spiritualism and fatalism

was a universe away from this
place, Hollywood.

Escapist, romantic movies were what most
people saw in movie palaces like these.

Places you'd go after a hard day's
work to forget your troubles,

to see what utopia might feel like.

The realist directors of the '20s
hardly got a look in in these places.

But they'd seen something
brilliant in the movies

- the ability to capture reality

and make it splendid and moving.

And this was just the start.

Filmmakers in Germany, France,
Russia, Japan and China

would see other great
things in the filmstrip.

Their discoveries would make the 1920s

the greatest decade
in the story of film.