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These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated: 1 00:00:49,404 --> 00:00:53,484 1944, World War II, the Normandy beaches. 2 00:00:58,830 --> 00:01:02,004 A bunch of Allied troops have just plunged underwater 3 00:01:02,029 --> 00:01:04,677 to stop being shot by German machine guns. 4 00:01:13,284 --> 00:01:14,710 Above the water is hell. 5 00:01:19,364 --> 00:01:21,444 Bullets tinkle on iron. 6 00:01:24,357 --> 00:01:25,917 The camera's all over the place. 7 00:01:27,157 --> 00:01:30,077 This scene was actually shot on a peaceful beach in Ireland. 8 00:01:32,144 --> 00:01:35,790 But director Steven Spielberg brought bullets and blood 9 00:01:35,823 --> 00:01:37,463 and bombs to that beach. 10 00:01:39,210 --> 00:01:40,737 A lie to tell the truth. 11 00:01:44,784 --> 00:01:46,290 This is filmmaking. 12 00:01:49,397 --> 00:01:52,164 The art of making us feel that we're there. 13 00:01:58,697 --> 00:02:01,144 A young woman in Paris has her eyes closed 14 00:02:01,404 --> 00:02:04,044 to feel the warmth of the sun on her face. 15 00:02:09,911 --> 00:02:12,326 At the same time, unseen by her, 16 00:02:12,577 --> 00:02:15,057 this little street drama takes place. 17 00:02:20,204 --> 00:02:22,530 White light floods the screen, 18 00:02:22,970 --> 00:02:25,024 links the young and old woman. 19 00:02:25,391 --> 00:02:28,311 We want to reach into the screen to help the old lady. 20 00:02:33,377 --> 00:02:35,084 This is filmmaking. 21 00:02:35,471 --> 00:02:37,837 Cinema as an empathy machine. 22 00:02:46,130 --> 00:02:48,543 The Normandy beach scene and the French lady 23 00:02:48,568 --> 00:02:51,997 show that in its use of sound and light and truth, 24 00:02:52,284 --> 00:02:54,124 cinema can be great. 25 00:02:55,844 --> 00:02:59,217 The story of film is the story of that greatness. 26 00:03:00,344 --> 00:03:02,464 It's a story full of surprises. 27 00:03:02,744 --> 00:03:05,530 ..you can rely... 28 00:03:06,010 --> 00:03:08,383 At first thought, you'd guess that the story of film 29 00:03:08,408 --> 00:03:11,370 will be about scenes like this one from Casablanca, 30 00:03:11,684 --> 00:03:14,250 full of yearning, story and stardom, 31 00:03:14,557 --> 00:03:16,763 because Casablanca is a Hollywood classic. 32 00:03:16,990 --> 00:03:19,523 Ingrid Bergman's lit like a movie star. 33 00:03:19,810 --> 00:03:21,343 Highlights in her eyes. 34 00:03:21,524 --> 00:03:23,543 It's all filmed on a studio set. 35 00:03:28,997 --> 00:03:33,304 But films like Casablanca are too romantic to be classical in the true sense. 36 00:03:34,690 --> 00:03:39,438 Instead, Japanese films like this are the real classical movies. 37 00:03:41,317 --> 00:03:43,490 Romantic films are always in a rush 38 00:03:43,931 --> 00:03:49,104 but this moment in Record of a Tenement Gentleman is a pause in the story. 39 00:03:56,924 --> 00:04:02,003 A cat, a chiming clock, a kettle quietly coming to the boil, 40 00:04:02,444 --> 00:04:07,261 the almost square frame filled with smaller squares and rectangles. 41 00:04:07,563 --> 00:04:09,783 Calm, emotionally restrained, 42 00:04:10,106 --> 00:04:12,176 like a little classical Greek temple. 43 00:04:14,924 --> 00:04:16,710 So Hollywood's not classical. 44 00:04:16,844 --> 00:04:18,390 Japan is. 45 00:04:25,870 --> 00:04:27,697 With all its talk of box office, 46 00:04:27,757 --> 00:04:31,690 the film business would have us believe that money drives movies. 47 00:04:37,157 --> 00:04:38,317 Ticket sales. 48 00:04:39,870 --> 00:04:42,990 Marketing, glamour, premieres, red carpets... 49 00:04:44,357 --> 00:04:45,530 But it doesn't. 50 00:04:46,623 --> 00:04:48,390 Money doesn't drive cinema. 51 00:04:48,664 --> 00:04:51,310 The money men don't know the secrets of the human heart 52 00:04:51,537 --> 00:04:53,677 or the brilliance of the medium of film. 53 00:04:54,657 --> 00:04:57,577 But if money doesn't drive movies, what does? 54 00:04:58,290 --> 00:05:00,510 Here's the answer: ideas. 55 00:05:01,144 --> 00:05:05,044 Watch how a shot of bubbles becomes an idea in movie history. 56 00:05:08,470 --> 00:05:13,677 This is a scene from British director Carol Reed's 1946 movie Odd Man Out. 57 00:05:14,357 --> 00:05:15,784 A guy's in a mess. 58 00:05:16,550 --> 00:05:20,177 He sees his troubles reflected in the bubbles of a spilled drink. 59 00:05:21,324 --> 00:05:23,803 Now look at another close-up of bubbles in a drink. 60 00:05:24,044 --> 00:05:27,537 Again, a character is in trouble, self-absorbed. 61 00:05:29,930 --> 00:05:32,170 This film's director, Jean-Luc Godard, 62 00:05:32,195 --> 00:05:34,735 knew and admired Carol Reed's work, 63 00:05:35,721 --> 00:05:37,895 so he was probably thinking of Odd Man Out 64 00:05:37,968 --> 00:05:41,438 when, twenty years later, he filmed this moment. 65 00:05:44,810 --> 00:05:48,817 Now look at Martin Scorsese's film, Taxi Driver, of 1976. 66 00:05:53,550 --> 00:05:57,030 Scorsese loves the films of Carol Reed and Jean-Luc Godard 67 00:05:57,604 --> 00:06:01,510 and so used the same idea - that a character looking into bubbles 68 00:06:01,770 --> 00:06:03,263 can see their own troubles, 69 00:06:03,553 --> 00:06:05,943 and also, somehow, the cosmos. 70 00:06:05,968 --> 00:06:07,510 A piece of Errol Flynn's bathtub. 71 00:06:10,351 --> 00:06:13,257 Visual ideas, more than money or marketing, 72 00:06:13,424 --> 00:06:15,697 are the real things that drive cinema. 73 00:06:19,844 --> 00:06:21,857 Innovating with those ideas. 74 00:06:23,917 --> 00:06:27,523 It doesn't always seem like it, but sitting in the dark, 75 00:06:27,610 --> 00:06:32,283 it's images and ideas that excite us, not money or showbiz. 76 00:06:33,223 --> 00:06:36,629 But if the business people don't control film, who does? 77 00:06:37,364 --> 00:06:39,582 Who knows how to get inside your head? 78 00:06:40,430 --> 00:06:41,830 David Lynch does. 79 00:06:42,704 --> 00:06:44,270 And Baz Luhrmann does. 80 00:06:44,690 --> 00:06:48,397 And, in a different way, Samira Makhmalbaf does. 81 00:06:49,957 --> 00:06:53,850 The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a global road movie 82 00:06:53,917 --> 00:06:57,763 to find the innovators, the people and films that give life 83 00:06:58,103 --> 00:07:01,423 to this sublime, ineffable art form: 84 00:07:01,524 --> 00:07:02,696 cinema. 85 00:07:06,117 --> 00:07:07,657 And here's a third surprise. 86 00:07:08,564 --> 00:07:11,677 In the '70s, you'd guess that moments like this, 87 00:07:13,737 --> 00:07:16,004 the camera racing through space like a bullet, 88 00:07:16,330 --> 00:07:19,637 the scream of tyres on the road as a car chases a train, 89 00:07:20,197 --> 00:07:21,537 will be the big story. 90 00:07:25,591 --> 00:07:29,746 New American cinema was wonderful but Dakar in Senegal 91 00:07:29,771 --> 00:07:33,430 was as exciting as Los Angeles in the '70s, movie-wise. 92 00:07:36,277 --> 00:07:37,690 A surprise indeed. 93 00:07:38,697 --> 00:07:41,670 Much of what we assume about the movies is off the mark. 94 00:07:44,030 --> 00:07:48,529 It's time to redraw the map of movie history that we have in our heads. 95 00:07:50,006 --> 00:07:53,866 It's factually inaccurate and racist by omission. 96 00:07:58,558 --> 00:08:02,921 The Story of Film: An Odyssey could be an exciting, unpredictable one. 97 00:08:03,416 --> 00:08:06,549 Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride. 98 00:08:30,974 --> 00:08:33,055 New Jersey, east coast America. 99 00:08:34,879 --> 00:08:37,996 A mum and two daughters are going to the movies. 100 00:08:39,688 --> 00:08:41,203 Why are we here? 101 00:08:41,369 --> 00:08:43,821 Because something extraordinary happened here. 102 00:08:44,490 --> 00:08:47,741 In the 1890s, movies were born here. 103 00:08:51,088 --> 00:08:52,555 Lyon, France. 104 00:08:54,668 --> 00:08:57,118 Two college friends are going to the movies. 105 00:08:59,861 --> 00:09:01,639 Movies were born here too. 106 00:09:01,961 --> 00:09:04,298 Maybe even more so than in New Jersey. 107 00:09:07,823 --> 00:09:10,623 So what is there to discover about movies in New Jersey? 108 00:09:12,482 --> 00:09:15,164 We find this man, Thomas Edison. 109 00:09:16,503 --> 00:09:19,140 Edison was a manic, passionate inventor. 110 00:09:20,028 --> 00:09:21,391 Here's his office 111 00:09:22,432 --> 00:09:24,784 where he invented the light bulb and the phonograph. 112 00:09:26,026 --> 00:09:29,265 Here's his desk, full of compartments, full of detail. 113 00:09:29,577 --> 00:09:31,626 Obsessive, like he was. 114 00:09:33,004 --> 00:09:34,684 Here's Edison's factory. 115 00:09:36,764 --> 00:09:38,860 The beauty of Victorian engineering. 116 00:09:38,986 --> 00:09:40,467 The care and detail. 117 00:09:45,161 --> 00:09:49,227 Look at this quotation on the wall of the factory from the painter Joshua Reynolds. 118 00:09:49,598 --> 00:09:52,360 "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort 119 00:09:52,385 --> 00:09:55,397 "to avoid the real labour of thinking". 120 00:09:56,463 --> 00:09:58,862 Edison loved it and moved it around the factory 121 00:09:59,152 --> 00:10:02,592 so that his colleagues wouldn't get used to seeing it in one place. 122 00:10:04,045 --> 00:10:06,860 So Edison's factory was an ideas factory. 123 00:10:11,463 --> 00:10:14,137 Before Edison, there had been funfairs, 124 00:10:14,410 --> 00:10:18,500 circuses, magic lantern shows, magician's acts. 125 00:10:25,535 --> 00:10:29,698 Still images were reflected on mirrors or spun in a box. 126 00:10:43,943 --> 00:10:46,417 This happened not in fancy cities in the world, 127 00:10:48,284 --> 00:10:51,604 but places like this: Leeds in England. 128 00:10:56,023 --> 00:11:00,134 The American George Eastman came up with the idea of film on a roll. 129 00:11:03,710 --> 00:11:07,784 Edison and his colleague WKL Dickson egged each other on 130 00:11:07,809 --> 00:11:10,814 to find that if you spin these images in a box 131 00:11:12,206 --> 00:11:14,266 they give the illusion of movement. 132 00:11:16,125 --> 00:11:19,177 And then look at this, invented by Edison. 133 00:11:19,731 --> 00:11:21,606 It's called the Black Maria. 134 00:11:25,122 --> 00:11:28,604 Edison and many of the other manic, ideasy inventors of cinema 135 00:11:29,715 --> 00:11:32,603 realised that beyond the equipment and machines 136 00:11:33,618 --> 00:11:37,344 what you needed most for movies was light. 137 00:11:39,128 --> 00:11:42,780 It probably didn't occur to them that cinema would become the art of light. 138 00:11:45,418 --> 00:11:48,307 But, somehow, in building this box on wheels, 139 00:11:48,332 --> 00:11:50,366 that turned to follow the sun, 140 00:11:51,118 --> 00:11:53,599 whose roof opened by turning this wheel, 141 00:11:54,322 --> 00:11:57,281 Edison took the first steps in that direction. 142 00:11:58,423 --> 00:12:02,924 He had a hunch that cinema was a dark room, where light mattered. 143 00:12:03,998 --> 00:12:05,768 He shot little movies here. 144 00:12:08,217 --> 00:12:10,135 This couple kissing, for example. 145 00:12:10,444 --> 00:12:12,898 A little moment that everyone could understand. 146 00:12:17,353 --> 00:12:20,916 But to see these films you had to look inside something like this. 147 00:12:21,975 --> 00:12:25,271 That wasn't enough. It was too private and small. 148 00:12:25,709 --> 00:12:27,330 Cinema had to be bigger. 149 00:12:27,900 --> 00:12:29,324 And it became so. 150 00:12:30,063 --> 00:12:31,743 Here in Lyon. 151 00:12:32,658 --> 00:12:34,006 In this house. 152 00:12:34,435 --> 00:12:36,651 In the minds of these passionate men 153 00:12:36,719 --> 00:12:39,495 - Louis Lumière and his brother Auguste. 154 00:12:41,121 --> 00:12:43,390 The brothers were as ideasy as Edison. 155 00:12:43,848 --> 00:12:46,418 Louis in particular was technically brilliant. 156 00:12:46,958 --> 00:12:50,550 He realised that the grab advance mechanism of a sewing machine 157 00:12:50,861 --> 00:12:53,253 would allow the strip of film to be advanced, 158 00:12:53,278 --> 00:12:57,475 paused, exposed, advanced, paused, exposed. 159 00:12:59,218 --> 00:13:01,729 This is one of the very first Lumière cameras. 160 00:13:02,166 --> 00:13:04,404 Open its back, shine a light through it 161 00:13:04,692 --> 00:13:06,263 and it becomes a projector. 162 00:13:06,813 --> 00:13:09,012 Count Leo Tolstoy called the result 163 00:13:09,323 --> 00:13:12,457 "the clicking machine like a human hurricane." 164 00:13:14,561 --> 00:13:17,901 One of the first films the Lumières shot was this one. 165 00:13:24,366 --> 00:13:26,559 A short documentary of everyday life. 166 00:13:26,900 --> 00:13:28,989 They're workers leaving a factory. 167 00:13:29,226 --> 00:13:30,774 The Lumière factory. 168 00:13:31,541 --> 00:13:33,156 This is the factory today. 169 00:13:33,593 --> 00:13:35,504 The place of the first movie. 170 00:13:35,892 --> 00:13:37,349 The source of the Nile. 171 00:13:45,285 --> 00:13:48,763 But it wasn't enough for the Lumières to make such home movies. 172 00:13:49,078 --> 00:13:50,522 They wanted to show them. 173 00:13:50,806 --> 00:13:55,451 Not just in a box to one person at a time like Edison, but to groups. 174 00:14:00,146 --> 00:14:05,975 On 28th December, 1895, in this building on the Boulevard Capucines in Paris, 175 00:14:06,387 --> 00:14:08,587 the Lumière brothers projected film. 176 00:14:11,224 --> 00:14:12,772 Light shone through it, 177 00:14:12,797 --> 00:14:15,535 onto a screen, bigger than life. 178 00:14:19,381 --> 00:14:22,618 It's hard for us today to picture how enchanting it was. 179 00:14:28,959 --> 00:14:31,648 This is one of the very first films that the Lumières shot 180 00:14:31,673 --> 00:14:34,292 and showed on the Boulevard Capucine. 181 00:14:35,604 --> 00:14:37,683 It's said to have unnerved the audience. 182 00:14:37,818 --> 00:14:39,855 They thought the train was coming at them. 183 00:14:40,430 --> 00:14:42,001 This is laughable today. 184 00:14:42,161 --> 00:14:43,681 But look at this. 185 00:14:47,318 --> 00:14:50,969 Light projected on a building in 21st century Lyon. 186 00:14:51,238 --> 00:14:52,977 The effect is startling. 187 00:14:53,137 --> 00:14:56,089 Digital imagery of a type we haven't seen before - 188 00:14:56,474 --> 00:14:59,837 the shock of the new just like the Lumière train. 189 00:15:01,055 --> 00:15:02,796 Something that had already happened, 190 00:15:02,821 --> 00:15:04,621 light from a distant star 191 00:15:05,476 --> 00:15:08,287 came back to life for the very first time. 192 00:15:20,419 --> 00:15:24,033 Neither The Lumière brothers nor Edison nor the other inventors of cinema 193 00:15:25,246 --> 00:15:27,789 could have known how big the movies would become. 194 00:15:29,124 --> 00:15:30,946 How they'd make us want to escape, 195 00:15:31,235 --> 00:15:33,435 play with our erotic imaginations, 196 00:15:35,416 --> 00:15:37,972 fail to film the Nazi gas chambers. 197 00:15:38,712 --> 00:15:41,758 Make us want to be a princess or a hero or a cowboy. 198 00:15:46,146 --> 00:15:48,316 Neither the Lumières nor Edison could foresee 199 00:15:48,341 --> 00:15:52,390 that the movies would invent flashbacks - there are no flashbacks in Shakespeare 200 00:15:53,924 --> 00:15:55,598 - that they'd glamorise war, 201 00:15:57,553 --> 00:15:59,752 capture the horror of the D-Day landings, 202 00:16:05,374 --> 00:16:08,885 give us an image bank to flick through in our heads when we're bored, 203 00:16:08,910 --> 00:16:10,470 or happy, or sad. 204 00:16:14,870 --> 00:16:17,786 Movies would become the world's greatest mirror 205 00:16:18,255 --> 00:16:20,442 and, sometimes, a hammer too, 206 00:16:20,535 --> 00:16:22,752 that would bash reality into shape. 207 00:16:27,085 --> 00:16:32,522 By the end of 1896 much of the globe knew about this new invention: movies. 208 00:16:34,058 --> 00:16:37,962 But almost at once it was seen as lowbrow, for the working classes. 209 00:16:38,425 --> 00:16:41,310 Its jokes and jolts were unsophisticated 210 00:16:42,857 --> 00:16:44,549 and soon became boring. 211 00:16:45,435 --> 00:16:50,194 So, from about 1898 the earliest filmmaker-inventors turned their minds 212 00:16:50,284 --> 00:16:54,046 from the machinery of cinema to shots and cuts. 213 00:16:54,469 --> 00:16:56,417 Things started to get exciting. 214 00:16:59,151 --> 00:17:03,276 In Paris, for example, a theatre illusionist called George Méliès, 215 00:17:03,437 --> 00:17:06,229 who'd been at the Boulevard Capucines that first night, 216 00:17:07,437 --> 00:17:08,859 filmed on a street. 217 00:17:09,362 --> 00:17:11,940 The film's now lost but here's what happened. 218 00:17:13,946 --> 00:17:16,420 His camera jammed, then started again. 219 00:17:16,924 --> 00:17:20,783 When he looked at the results, streetcars seemed to disappear. 220 00:17:21,878 --> 00:17:24,048 Just like these people seem to disappear. 221 00:17:27,369 --> 00:17:29,436 Cinema's first magic trick. 222 00:17:32,926 --> 00:17:36,252 In this scene he used the same technique to make a man appear, 223 00:17:36,277 --> 00:17:38,260 rather than a streetcar disappear. 224 00:17:42,005 --> 00:17:44,272 Innovation by accident, you could say, 225 00:17:45,400 --> 00:17:47,701 but it drove the medium forward. 226 00:17:51,612 --> 00:17:54,524 Where the Lumières were cinema's first documentarists, 227 00:17:54,768 --> 00:17:58,012 Méliès was its first special effects director. 228 00:17:59,174 --> 00:18:02,744 His film A Trip to the Moon astonished people too. 229 00:18:03,181 --> 00:18:07,923 In Lyon today, in the Festival of Lights, a moon rises over the city 230 00:18:07,924 --> 00:18:09,825 as if in tribute to Méliès. 231 00:18:14,275 --> 00:18:17,067 Lumière, the name of the brothers, means "light" of course. 232 00:18:19,202 --> 00:18:22,446 And where other countries saw movies as a sideshow in these years, 233 00:18:23,024 --> 00:18:24,854 France took them seriously. 234 00:18:25,078 --> 00:18:27,173 Film historian Jean-Michel Frodon: 235 00:18:27,297 --> 00:18:29,711 France has been doing something completely different 236 00:18:29,736 --> 00:18:32,780 with cinema because of the French Revolution 237 00:18:33,158 --> 00:18:37,876 and because of this dream to project 238 00:18:38,105 --> 00:18:40,819 something to the world and to itself, 239 00:18:41,054 --> 00:18:44,786 like what we call "le Lumière". And this is - Lumière invents cinema 240 00:18:44,811 --> 00:18:49,979 but before they were "le Lumière" in the sense of the French Revolution, 241 00:18:50,004 --> 00:18:53,989 of le Encyclopédie, of Kant, et cetera. 242 00:18:54,863 --> 00:18:58,739 In the decades to come, France believed that cinema was such a beacon, 243 00:18:58,878 --> 00:19:03,129 almost an element of foreign policy, that it funded French filmmaking 244 00:19:03,239 --> 00:19:05,618 like no other country in the world. 245 00:19:08,637 --> 00:19:12,897 Also in France, the world's first female director, Alice Guy-Blaché, 246 00:19:13,078 --> 00:19:15,998 became as interested in magic as Méliès. 247 00:19:21,055 --> 00:19:24,975 And Brighton in England was a buzzing place in Victorian times too. 248 00:19:26,764 --> 00:19:31,443 Maybe the buzz and the light explains why local photographer George Albert Smith 249 00:19:31,725 --> 00:19:34,325 became one of the movies' early innovators. 250 00:19:40,524 --> 00:19:43,603 He was one of the first to film from the front of a train, 251 00:19:43,663 --> 00:19:48,063 creating a ghostly tracking shot, which became known as the "phantom ride," 252 00:19:48,866 --> 00:19:51,081 as if a ghost was floating through the air. 253 00:20:00,048 --> 00:20:02,226 There was a magic in such shots. 254 00:20:03,181 --> 00:20:05,966 In this great documentary about the holocaust, 255 00:20:06,275 --> 00:20:09,434 Claude Lanzmann filmed shots on the same train lines 256 00:20:09,524 --> 00:20:11,918 that took the Jews to the gas chambers. 257 00:20:12,279 --> 00:20:15,621 The phantom ride at its most morally serious. 258 00:20:19,135 --> 00:20:20,943 And, in a completely different way, 259 00:20:21,108 --> 00:20:23,972 director Stanley Kubrick used a phantom ride scene 260 00:20:24,051 --> 00:20:26,624 near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. 261 00:20:27,138 --> 00:20:30,472 The camera seems to zoom through the coloured light of the cosmos, 262 00:20:30,829 --> 00:20:33,672 as if the main character, or the film itself, 263 00:20:34,012 --> 00:20:37,252 is tripping or having an out of body experience. 264 00:20:40,586 --> 00:20:44,712 In 1900, Smith used one of the first close-ups in cinema. 265 00:20:47,209 --> 00:20:49,436 Filmmakers usually kept their camera wide 266 00:20:49,461 --> 00:20:51,599 because they hadn't considered other options, 267 00:20:51,624 --> 00:20:56,512 or assuming that if they went close, it would confuse or disrupt the audience. 268 00:20:57,460 --> 00:21:00,067 But then, GA Smith did this. 269 00:21:00,813 --> 00:21:03,672 He wanted to show us the cat eating in more detail. 270 00:21:04,116 --> 00:21:08,716 The cut between the wide and close not only worked, it seemed natural. 271 00:21:09,318 --> 00:21:11,198 And so close-ups were born. 272 00:21:14,218 --> 00:21:16,158 The films of some of the greatest directors 273 00:21:16,183 --> 00:21:18,174 are hard to imagine without them. 274 00:21:19,103 --> 00:21:22,903 In this incredible moment in Sergei Eisenstein's film, October, 275 00:21:22,928 --> 00:21:27,616 the government raises a bridge to stop revolutionary workers storming a city. 276 00:21:28,060 --> 00:21:30,603 But it's the close-ups of a dead woman's hand 277 00:21:30,628 --> 00:21:33,227 and hair being pulled off the raising bridge 278 00:21:33,331 --> 00:21:36,464 that give the real sense of movement and tragedy. 279 00:21:41,926 --> 00:21:44,623 In Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, 280 00:21:44,870 --> 00:21:48,356 it's only when Charles Bronson looks - in big close-up 281 00:21:48,616 --> 00:21:50,408 - into the eyes of Henry Fonda, 282 00:21:50,543 --> 00:21:53,419 that he realises that Fonda is the murderer 283 00:21:53,444 --> 00:21:55,839 he's been searching for all his life. 284 00:22:19,174 --> 00:22:23,589 Back in America, Enoch J Rector extended film in another way. 285 00:22:24,063 --> 00:22:29,019 He filmed a boxing match, not with the standard size of film - 35mm - 286 00:22:29,318 --> 00:22:32,544 but with a negative that was 63mm wide. 287 00:22:33,362 --> 00:22:36,353 The broader image showed more of the action. 288 00:22:36,967 --> 00:22:39,034 Widescreen cinema was born. 289 00:22:39,790 --> 00:22:44,731 It's the norm now but would not become commercially so until 1953. 290 00:22:47,097 --> 00:22:49,186 Film had already come far. 291 00:22:49,507 --> 00:22:51,704 It was born as a sideshow, a novelty. 292 00:22:51,924 --> 00:22:54,223 Quick fun, like fast food. 293 00:22:55,165 --> 00:22:58,795 But almost at once it became clear that it was also a language. 294 00:23:04,599 --> 00:23:06,051 A new language. 295 00:23:06,076 --> 00:23:08,118 A language of ideas. 296 00:23:25,550 --> 00:23:28,869 The early 1900s were a remarkable time to be alive. 297 00:23:29,780 --> 00:23:31,469 The first airplane flight. 298 00:23:31,955 --> 00:23:35,688 Albert Einstein announced that light, the flickering stuff of cinema, 299 00:23:35,924 --> 00:23:38,458 is the only constant in the universe. 300 00:23:39,199 --> 00:23:43,266 Here in Copenhagen, other physicists expanded his ideas. 301 00:23:44,470 --> 00:23:45,996 The Titanic sank. 302 00:23:46,953 --> 00:23:48,463 World War I began. 303 00:23:50,004 --> 00:23:53,204 Compared to all this, the changes in movies might seem tiny. 304 00:23:53,732 --> 00:23:54,989 But they aren't. 305 00:23:56,412 --> 00:24:00,932 By 1903, filmmakers had developed many of the key elements of the shot 306 00:24:03,940 --> 00:24:06,281 but they still had to learn how to do this. 307 00:24:08,236 --> 00:24:09,399 Cut. 308 00:24:09,643 --> 00:24:11,243 Editing made cinema. 309 00:24:14,620 --> 00:24:17,590 To see how, look at The Life of an American Fireman, 310 00:24:17,615 --> 00:24:23,103 made in 1903 by a Pennsylvanian dynamo of a man called Edwin Stanton Porter. 311 00:24:27,091 --> 00:24:31,750 A fireman arrives outside a blazing house to rescue a mother and her child. 312 00:24:34,349 --> 00:24:36,282 We see the street action first. 313 00:24:52,658 --> 00:24:56,273 Then the same action again from inside. 314 00:25:07,358 --> 00:25:10,624 Some years later, Porter re-cut the film. 315 00:25:11,172 --> 00:25:15,638 This time, after the fireman arrives, we cut inside the house, 316 00:25:15,663 --> 00:25:18,727 to see the first rescue, then outside again 317 00:25:18,779 --> 00:25:20,703 to see her being brought down the ladder, 318 00:25:20,728 --> 00:25:24,019 then inside again, to see him rescue the child, 319 00:25:24,363 --> 00:25:26,252 then back outside again. 320 00:25:26,706 --> 00:25:28,869 The audience follows the story of the rescue 321 00:25:28,894 --> 00:25:31,913 despite the fact that one space - the street 322 00:25:32,316 --> 00:25:34,361 - suddenly disappears from the screen 323 00:25:34,664 --> 00:25:38,983 and is magically replaced by another space - the room. 324 00:25:39,325 --> 00:25:41,221 This could never happen in theatre. 325 00:25:43,169 --> 00:25:44,762 The earlier version of the film, 326 00:25:44,787 --> 00:25:46,836 which you could call the theatrical version, 327 00:25:46,861 --> 00:25:51,940 doesn't fragment the space, but repeats the time like an action replay. 328 00:25:52,431 --> 00:25:55,899 The inter-cut version has a continuous timeline - 329 00:25:56,045 --> 00:26:00,771 we see everything in the order in which it was done, but the space is fragmented. 330 00:26:01,260 --> 00:26:05,393 Cinema was learning, experimenting, thinking even. 331 00:26:06,826 --> 00:26:10,878 It could now show the flow of action from one space to another. 332 00:26:12,353 --> 00:26:14,605 This made chase sequences possible. 333 00:26:15,124 --> 00:26:18,598 It liberated movies. It emphasised movement. 334 00:26:19,245 --> 00:26:21,843 Nearly every scene in The Story of Film 335 00:26:22,008 --> 00:26:27,467 will in some way use this most basic of storytelling devices: continuity cutting. 336 00:26:27,768 --> 00:26:30,738 The editing equivalent of the word "then". 337 00:26:31,925 --> 00:26:33,481 This was a landmark. 338 00:26:33,797 --> 00:26:37,392 Theatrical cinema was giving way to action cinema. 339 00:26:38,058 --> 00:26:41,984 And Porter? He lost everything in the Wall Street crash of the twenties, 340 00:26:42,009 --> 00:26:44,629 and died, forgotten, in 1941. 341 00:26:49,861 --> 00:26:53,276 It's easy to forget what a conceptual jump editing was, 342 00:26:53,577 --> 00:26:56,691 but 21 years after The Life of An American Fireman, 343 00:26:56,869 --> 00:27:00,038 the comic genius Buster Keaton shot a scene 344 00:27:00,063 --> 00:27:02,957 using double exposure which reminds us. 345 00:27:03,846 --> 00:27:05,763 Keaton plays a film projectionist. 346 00:27:05,942 --> 00:27:11,004 He falls asleep, dreams of cinema, climbs into a film. 347 00:27:19,856 --> 00:27:22,129 And then, bam! A cut. 348 00:27:22,515 --> 00:27:25,611 The world around him is suddenly replaced by another world. 349 00:27:25,888 --> 00:27:27,944 Instantly. Magically. 350 00:27:51,245 --> 00:27:54,497 In 1907, cinematic innovation went up a gear. 351 00:27:56,381 --> 00:27:59,633 Look at The Horse that Bolted, by the Frenchman Charles Pathé. 352 00:28:00,813 --> 00:28:02,894 A man leaves his horse on the street 353 00:28:03,004 --> 00:28:05,724 as he delivers food to an upstairs customer. 354 00:28:06,005 --> 00:28:08,598 The horse spies something to eat, and tucks in. 355 00:28:10,724 --> 00:28:12,592 Cut to the man climbing the stairs. 356 00:28:15,764 --> 00:28:19,541 Then cut back to the horse, which isn't doing a new thing. 357 00:28:20,124 --> 00:28:21,473 It's still eating. 358 00:28:22,316 --> 00:28:24,761 Then back to the man just a second later... 359 00:28:34,044 --> 00:28:35,747 ..then back to the horse. 360 00:28:36,402 --> 00:28:38,224 In The Life of an American Fireman, 361 00:28:38,426 --> 00:28:40,609 the cuts showed what happened next. 362 00:28:41,237 --> 00:28:44,519 Here they're showing what's happening at the same time. 363 00:28:45,238 --> 00:28:47,163 This isn't continuity editing, 364 00:28:47,254 --> 00:28:48,941 it's parallel editing. 365 00:28:49,362 --> 00:28:52,251 It doesn't say "then," it says "meanwhile." 366 00:28:54,140 --> 00:28:57,502 Great filmmakers have used this "meanwhile" editing ever since 367 00:28:57,562 --> 00:29:02,621 to contrast events, build tension or advance two storylines at once. 368 00:29:04,953 --> 00:29:08,242 And soon after continuity and parallel editing were invented, 369 00:29:08,351 --> 00:29:11,510 another remarkable editing technique was born. 370 00:29:12,075 --> 00:29:16,682 This woman is looking towards us, as if she's onstage and we're in the audience. 371 00:29:17,026 --> 00:29:18,825 But what if she does this? 372 00:29:19,463 --> 00:29:21,596 In the earliest movies, people seldom 373 00:29:21,621 --> 00:29:23,781 turned their backs to the camera like this. 374 00:29:24,571 --> 00:29:28,371 This film, made in 1908, was one of the first in which this was done. 375 00:29:29,551 --> 00:29:31,698 But if directors were to give actors the freedom 376 00:29:31,723 --> 00:29:34,046 to turn their backs to the camera like this, 377 00:29:34,825 --> 00:29:39,759 then, it occurred to them, they could point the camera in the opposite direction 378 00:29:40,381 --> 00:29:43,781 to see what would eventually be called the reverse angle shot. 379 00:29:45,130 --> 00:29:47,737 Directors were putting their cameras into the action, 380 00:29:48,004 --> 00:29:50,959 freeing themselves to film from any angle. 381 00:29:52,845 --> 00:29:56,126 This new freedom was an exhilarating break with theatre, 382 00:29:56,282 --> 00:29:59,748 and seemed entirely natural to cinema, central to it. 383 00:30:00,541 --> 00:30:03,961 So, in the 60s in France, when Jean-Luc Godard refused 384 00:30:03,986 --> 00:30:07,689 to bring his camera round to show the face of Anna Karina 385 00:30:07,714 --> 00:30:10,830 at the start of Vivre sa Vie, the effect was shocking. 386 00:30:20,587 --> 00:30:24,019 Combine this with this - GA Smith's close-up 387 00:30:24,402 --> 00:30:28,728 - and the actor, rather than the set, began to be the thing that was filmed. 388 00:30:34,507 --> 00:30:37,026 And just as the movie buildings were changing, 389 00:30:37,124 --> 00:30:40,085 the movies themselves took another leap forward. 390 00:30:41,258 --> 00:30:44,458 A look back at The Life of An American Fireman shows why. 391 00:30:45,076 --> 00:30:49,125 Audiences watching this film felt concern for the safety of this woman. 392 00:30:51,820 --> 00:30:55,420 But they knew nothing about the actress who played her, not even her name. 393 00:30:56,537 --> 00:30:59,907 If they'd known about her life, or recognised her from other films, 394 00:30:59,932 --> 00:31:01,581 they'd care even more. 395 00:31:03,418 --> 00:31:07,996 Then enter into the movies this actress dressed in white, wearing a hat. 396 00:31:09,940 --> 00:31:13,118 She was known, semi-anonymously, as the IMP girl, 397 00:31:14,066 --> 00:31:16,836 but in 1910 her producer, Carl Laemmle, 398 00:31:16,980 --> 00:31:19,263 announced in the press that she had died. 399 00:31:19,908 --> 00:31:21,167 She hadn't. 400 00:31:21,319 --> 00:31:24,597 And when she miraculously showed up in a scene like this, 401 00:31:24,622 --> 00:31:27,659 very much alive, anxious and looking around, 402 00:31:28,002 --> 00:31:29,972 Laemmle then told the newspapers 403 00:31:30,064 --> 00:31:33,795 that the crowds were so hysterical that they tore her clothes off. 404 00:31:35,405 --> 00:31:38,836 This wasn't true either, but the furore burnt her name 405 00:31:38,861 --> 00:31:40,631 into the public consciousness: 406 00:31:41,286 --> 00:31:42,885 Florence Lawrence. 407 00:31:43,543 --> 00:31:48,499 Lawrence became famous. She earned $80,000 in 1912. 408 00:31:49,054 --> 00:31:50,787 Then her career fizzled out. 409 00:31:51,146 --> 00:31:57,335 In 1938, aged 48, she committed suicide by eating ant poison. 410 00:31:59,081 --> 00:32:01,459 Florence Lawrence was the first movie star, 411 00:32:01,484 --> 00:32:05,837 and set a pattern for stardom - hype, fame, tragedy. 412 00:32:07,353 --> 00:32:12,057 Here in Denmark, this actress, Asta Nielson, became even more famous. 413 00:32:13,524 --> 00:32:15,279 There was less censorship in Europe. 414 00:32:15,575 --> 00:32:17,297 Actors could be more sexual. 415 00:32:20,244 --> 00:32:24,103 He's tied up. She's hip grinding in her slinky black dress. 416 00:32:27,284 --> 00:32:29,572 Hollywood learnt from Nielson's fame 417 00:32:29,997 --> 00:32:31,877 and, instead of sex... 418 00:32:33,482 --> 00:32:35,838 ..as this reveal of Gloria Swanson shows, 419 00:32:36,463 --> 00:32:39,645 it trowelled on the luxury and costuming. 420 00:32:40,900 --> 00:32:44,070 Hollywood was adding an element of sublime to stardom. 421 00:32:47,284 --> 00:32:50,824 Almost every aspect of cinema was affected by the star system. 422 00:32:51,432 --> 00:32:54,577 As the adoring public became more and more interested in Lawrence, 423 00:32:54,602 --> 00:32:56,283 Nielsen or Swanson, 424 00:32:56,638 --> 00:33:00,239 so moviemakers started to show their faces more clearly. 425 00:33:00,919 --> 00:33:02,843 Except it wasn't really their faces, 426 00:33:03,141 --> 00:33:06,438 it was their thoughts that audiences became interested in. 427 00:33:08,642 --> 00:33:13,020 The star system meant that psychology became the driving force of films, 428 00:33:13,272 --> 00:33:15,205 especially American ones. 429 00:33:17,004 --> 00:33:22,460 And through these years, 1907, 8, 9 and 10, small movie theatres, 430 00:33:22,485 --> 00:33:25,092 places for working class people, emerged. 431 00:33:25,949 --> 00:33:28,319 In America, they were called nickelodeons. 432 00:33:29,285 --> 00:33:32,418 This one, Tally's, was on Spring Street in LA. 433 00:33:33,351 --> 00:33:35,111 This is the same spot now. 434 00:33:37,137 --> 00:33:40,929 This little cinema, built in 1914, is in Leeds in England. 435 00:33:44,718 --> 00:33:48,888 And on this famous corner, the first nickelodeon in New York was built. 436 00:34:16,889 --> 00:34:20,051 In the early 1910s, the best filmmaking in the world 437 00:34:20,076 --> 00:34:22,696 was taking place here in Scandinavia. 438 00:34:23,546 --> 00:34:26,161 Maybe it was the northern light, how it changed. 439 00:34:26,679 --> 00:34:31,003 Or maybe it was the sense of destiny and mortality in Scandinavian literature 440 00:34:31,383 --> 00:34:35,994 that made Danish and Swedish movies more graceful and honest. 441 00:34:38,435 --> 00:34:43,079 By 1912, for example, the most innovative use of film light in the world 442 00:34:43,365 --> 00:34:45,524 was in the work of Benjamin Christensen. 443 00:34:51,929 --> 00:34:54,744 Christensen studied at this theatre in Copenhagen, 444 00:34:55,069 --> 00:34:58,863 then made this film, The Mysterious X, in 1913. 445 00:35:08,383 --> 00:35:12,659 Gorgeous photography, cross cutting, a dream drawn on film. 446 00:35:13,091 --> 00:35:15,738 One of the most daring debuts in film history. 447 00:35:22,888 --> 00:35:27,666 Later he built a vast studio here in Hellerup, in the suburbs of Copenhagen. 448 00:35:27,940 --> 00:35:32,660 To make Haxan, a masterpiece about witchcraft through the ages. 449 00:35:36,007 --> 00:35:39,125 The light sources were multiple, the effects complex. 450 00:35:39,292 --> 00:35:41,836 Christensen himself played the naked devil. 451 00:35:54,755 --> 00:35:57,436 This telegram in the Danish Film Archive says: 452 00:35:57,461 --> 00:36:01,899 "Your masterful film Haxan had its first screening to a full house, 453 00:36:01,924 --> 00:36:03,604 "with a standing ovation". 454 00:36:05,760 --> 00:36:10,253 In Sweden, director Victor Sjöström was just as great an early director, 455 00:36:10,383 --> 00:36:12,783 and was more influential than Christensen. 456 00:36:14,709 --> 00:36:19,988 Sjöström started by selling doughnuts but soon found himself here: Svenska Bio. 457 00:36:20,345 --> 00:36:22,509 Sweden's first major film studio. 458 00:36:23,900 --> 00:36:28,589 His 1913 film Ingeborg Holm had naturalism and grace. 459 00:36:29,329 --> 00:36:31,952 But, seven years later, still at Svenska, 460 00:36:32,044 --> 00:36:36,603 Sjöström made one of the great multilayered films of the silent era, 461 00:36:36,929 --> 00:36:38,564 The Phantom Carriage. 462 00:36:40,565 --> 00:36:44,244 It had stories within stories, moods within moods. 463 00:36:44,839 --> 00:36:48,232 In tinted blue evening light, an alcoholic, David Holm, 464 00:36:48,364 --> 00:36:52,602 tells a drunken story about a phantom carriage which arrives at new year 465 00:36:52,732 --> 00:36:55,002 to collect the souls of the dead. 466 00:36:56,764 --> 00:36:59,860 Here on the right, Sjöström plays Holm himself. 467 00:37:01,406 --> 00:37:03,739 Later in the story, David dies. 468 00:37:04,095 --> 00:37:09,169 Sjöström re-exposes the film to show the separation of his body and soul. 469 00:37:11,287 --> 00:37:15,499 The carriage-driver arrives and shows him how horrible his life has been. 470 00:37:15,672 --> 00:37:18,472 A wasted life wrapped in a haunted myth. 471 00:37:21,638 --> 00:37:23,918 And Sjöström was brilliant at women. 472 00:37:26,091 --> 00:37:28,446 His strong mother died when he was young. 473 00:37:30,195 --> 00:37:34,950 Sjöström ended his days in this cottage by the sea, west of Stockholm. 474 00:37:38,048 --> 00:37:40,885 Christensen and Sjöström became star directors 475 00:37:41,092 --> 00:37:44,255 and, as was to become the pattern for European talents, 476 00:37:44,507 --> 00:37:47,443 they were seduced by what would be, in the years to come, 477 00:37:47,468 --> 00:37:51,548 the centre of the movie world - a place called Hollywood. 478 00:37:52,922 --> 00:37:57,181 They sailed there, as a certain Swedish movie star called Greta Garbo did, 479 00:37:57,507 --> 00:38:00,662 and, later, another called Ingrid Bergman did. 480 00:38:02,860 --> 00:38:04,683 As a result of their departures, 481 00:38:04,708 --> 00:38:09,868 Scandinavia would not be central to the story of film again until the 1950s. 482 00:39:21,063 --> 00:39:25,263 A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away from Scandinavia, 483 00:39:26,559 --> 00:39:29,907 there was a garden that didn't know what was about to hit it. 484 00:39:30,537 --> 00:39:32,529 Sage brush in the rain. 485 00:39:32,903 --> 00:39:34,910 The eucalyptus in the rain. 486 00:39:36,223 --> 00:39:39,984 You see, the spring was such a marvellous thing there. 487 00:39:51,798 --> 00:39:54,819 The garden was about to be invaded, built upon. 488 00:39:55,649 --> 00:39:59,500 It was about to bring in artists and business people from around the world 489 00:39:59,648 --> 00:40:02,826 to paint clouds to look like real clouds, 490 00:40:05,561 --> 00:40:08,635 to create people to look like real people. 491 00:40:18,490 --> 00:40:21,845 The sort of place you'd wear costume jewellery in the daytime. 492 00:40:22,376 --> 00:40:25,401 The sort of place that invented youth and glamour. 493 00:40:26,055 --> 00:40:30,123 Where Marlena Dietrich could wear black feathers and be framed in a train window 494 00:40:30,381 --> 00:40:32,781 and be lit in a lattice of shadows 495 00:40:33,494 --> 00:40:35,373 and somehow look believable. 496 00:40:36,131 --> 00:40:37,424 How have I changed? 497 00:40:37,449 --> 00:40:40,138 Youth and glamour came out of its test tubes. 498 00:40:41,109 --> 00:40:44,931 No one was supposed to be plain here or sad, or old 499 00:40:44,956 --> 00:40:47,635 or racially equal or sexually different. 500 00:40:48,336 --> 00:40:51,218 What denial. What eugenics. 501 00:40:53,297 --> 00:40:56,556 And yet it attracted people, selves, 502 00:40:56,581 --> 00:41:00,067 ideas, styles, shape-shifters. 503 00:41:00,801 --> 00:41:02,726 It became a bauble, this place 504 00:41:02,907 --> 00:41:05,217 - shiny, perfect, brittle, 505 00:41:05,669 --> 00:41:07,721 something you could see yourself in. 506 00:41:11,383 --> 00:41:13,842 Movies started to be in the air here. 507 00:41:21,653 --> 00:41:24,008 Of course this place is called Hollywood. 508 00:41:25,735 --> 00:41:29,906 A fantasy name because one of the things that won't grow here is this: 509 00:41:30,146 --> 00:41:31,321 Holly. 510 00:41:36,168 --> 00:41:38,146 Why did movie people come here? 511 00:41:38,592 --> 00:41:40,509 Because of weather, sunlight. 512 00:41:42,519 --> 00:41:45,912 And because, on the East Coast, New Jersey and New York, 513 00:41:46,636 --> 00:41:50,116 the film process had been patented, copyrighted. 514 00:41:51,653 --> 00:41:53,534 Take this example of copyright. 515 00:41:54,497 --> 00:41:57,923 For years, film running through viewing machines had snapped 516 00:41:58,223 --> 00:42:00,200 because of the tension in the spool. 517 00:42:00,867 --> 00:42:04,844 Then the Latham brothers and people around Thomas Edison had the brainwave 518 00:42:04,869 --> 00:42:08,400 of creating this simple loop, which created a bit of slack, 519 00:42:08,548 --> 00:42:10,614 which would allow the machine to stop, 520 00:42:10,639 --> 00:42:14,496 project an image, then move on again without tearing the film. 521 00:42:15,370 --> 00:42:19,725 This so called "Latham Loop" was patented by its east coast inventors. 522 00:42:20,199 --> 00:42:23,288 You had to pay people to use it and other discoveries. 523 00:42:23,583 --> 00:42:27,286 But California was very far away from those rights owners 524 00:42:27,671 --> 00:42:29,368 so you could break the law there. 525 00:42:39,338 --> 00:42:42,368 This is South Spring Street in 1897. 526 00:42:44,124 --> 00:42:45,953 Here is the same spot today. 527 00:42:46,996 --> 00:42:51,027 Things moved quickly. The first studio was built in 1911. 528 00:42:52,284 --> 00:42:54,039 It was like an outdoor tent. 529 00:42:55,702 --> 00:42:57,084 It was built here. 530 00:43:01,572 --> 00:43:04,891 The first feature-length movie ever made, The Story of the Kelly Gang, 531 00:43:04,916 --> 00:43:06,580 was filmed in Australia. 532 00:43:06,659 --> 00:43:08,498 Outdoors. Available light. 533 00:43:08,698 --> 00:43:10,120 Head-on framing. 534 00:43:13,652 --> 00:43:18,119 Seven years later, Cecil B DeMille shot the first Hollywood feature here. 535 00:43:21,081 --> 00:43:23,110 Here it is: The Squaw Man. 536 00:43:23,414 --> 00:43:25,620 In it we can see another crucial element 537 00:43:25,645 --> 00:43:28,399 of filmmaking that fell into place in these years. 538 00:43:29,445 --> 00:43:32,660 A decent man is trying to decide whether to do a good deed. 539 00:43:33,267 --> 00:43:35,029 He looks right, through a window 540 00:43:35,054 --> 00:43:37,689 and sees a young woman who'll benefit from the deed. 541 00:43:46,281 --> 00:43:48,200 Their eyes meet for a second. 542 00:43:48,407 --> 00:43:52,436 He feels her pain, and decides to do the good deed. 543 00:43:54,301 --> 00:43:56,472 But imagine if DeMille and his cameraperson 544 00:43:56,497 --> 00:43:59,309 had lifted their camera from here, brought it round 545 00:43:59,334 --> 00:44:02,830 to the far side of this room and filmed the young woman from over there? 546 00:44:06,251 --> 00:44:08,858 The shot of her would have looked something like this... 547 00:44:11,864 --> 00:44:14,990 ..as if she was looking away from the man, rather than towards him, 548 00:44:16,198 --> 00:44:18,961 and the scene wouldn't have had the same power. 549 00:44:19,124 --> 00:44:22,259 It's because their eyes match across the cut, 550 00:44:22,379 --> 00:44:26,593 him looking right, her looking left, that they connect emotionally. 551 00:44:28,924 --> 00:44:31,346 Filmmakers in these years were discovering 552 00:44:31,371 --> 00:44:33,850 that to make it look like people in different shots 553 00:44:33,875 --> 00:44:35,561 were looking at each other, 554 00:44:35,586 --> 00:44:38,519 or that armies were marching towards each other, 555 00:44:39,451 --> 00:44:44,503 the camera had to stay on the same side of an invisible 180 degree line 556 00:44:44,636 --> 00:44:48,364 drawn between the two people looking at or talking to each other. 557 00:44:51,264 --> 00:44:52,893 Because this rule was new, 558 00:44:52,918 --> 00:44:56,568 filmmakers in the late 1910s sometimes broke it by mistake. 559 00:44:58,761 --> 00:45:01,938 Later in The Squaw Man, DeMille made such a mistake. 560 00:45:02,777 --> 00:45:04,444 A man's dangling from a cliff. 561 00:45:04,806 --> 00:45:07,554 He's looking right. The cliff is on the right. 562 00:45:08,220 --> 00:45:11,887 But then DeMille goes to the bottom of the cliff to show the man's fall. 563 00:45:15,637 --> 00:45:17,476 But he films from the wrong side of the man, 564 00:45:17,501 --> 00:45:20,512 so it looks like the cliff has switched to the left of the screen. 565 00:45:21,424 --> 00:45:24,802 The shot would have been more spatially clear if it was like this: 566 00:45:31,020 --> 00:45:34,198 And to make matters worse, his friends come to the rescue, 567 00:45:34,223 --> 00:45:38,331 leaving screen left but entering the next shot screen right, 568 00:45:38,604 --> 00:45:40,633 as if they've taken a detour to the pub. 569 00:45:43,688 --> 00:45:47,569 Once this discovery was made, it was used throughout mainstream cinema. 570 00:45:48,588 --> 00:45:53,587 This scene from The Empire Strikes Back, an old-style movie made 60 years later, 571 00:45:53,906 --> 00:45:56,380 shows how enduring the discovery was. 572 00:45:57,064 --> 00:46:00,005 Darth Vader is on the left of screen looking right. 573 00:46:00,232 --> 00:46:04,768 His underling, to whom he's speaking, is in a separate shot looking left. 574 00:46:05,458 --> 00:46:07,429 Because of the 180-degree rule, 575 00:46:07,606 --> 00:46:10,355 we completely believe that they're looking at each other. 576 00:46:10,444 --> 00:46:12,629 Set your course for the Hoth system. 577 00:46:12,900 --> 00:46:15,006 General Veers, prepare your men. 578 00:46:17,997 --> 00:46:21,796 Crucial to the inventiveness of American cinema before the 1920s 579 00:46:21,900 --> 00:46:23,642 was how female it was. 580 00:46:24,196 --> 00:46:26,181 Film historian Cari Beauchamp: 581 00:46:26,844 --> 00:46:30,755 Hollywood was built by women, immigrants and Jews, 582 00:46:31,229 --> 00:46:35,088 people who would not be accepted in any other profession at the time. 583 00:46:35,399 --> 00:46:40,259 So Hollywood became this magnet for people who wanted to work, 584 00:46:40,284 --> 00:46:44,521 who were incredibly creative, but wouldn't be accepted in other professions. 585 00:46:44,684 --> 00:46:48,232 Well, half of all films written before 1925 were written by women 586 00:46:48,706 --> 00:46:52,736 so that shows you how, just, comfortable women were in the business then. 587 00:46:54,555 --> 00:46:58,799 Perhaps the first woman to direct a film, and the first female studio boss, 588 00:46:58,974 --> 00:47:00,651 was Alice Guy-Blaché. 589 00:47:01,696 --> 00:47:04,332 Most of the film companies focused on the machinery 590 00:47:04,592 --> 00:47:07,569 and Gaumont started to make actual films. 591 00:47:07,604 --> 00:47:11,049 And Alice Guy was a secretary there. And they let her play with the cameras 592 00:47:11,074 --> 00:47:14,313 after hours as long as she'd gotten her secretarial work done. 593 00:47:14,668 --> 00:47:17,442 And Alice Guy was not only one of the first female directors, 594 00:47:17,467 --> 00:47:19,174 she was one of the first directors. 595 00:47:19,289 --> 00:47:22,444 She was one of the first to actually put film together 596 00:47:22,469 --> 00:47:24,624 into a story with an arc. 597 00:47:24,972 --> 00:47:27,113 Up until then, we'd had The Sneeze, 598 00:47:27,245 --> 00:47:28,459 The Wave 599 00:47:29,859 --> 00:47:31,142 - individual actions. 600 00:47:31,298 --> 00:47:35,288 But Alice created some dramatic arc films, for the very first time. 601 00:47:35,626 --> 00:47:38,719 Here's an example of Guy-Blaché's touching poetics. 602 00:47:39,186 --> 00:47:42,572 A little girl overhears a doctor say that her sister'll die 603 00:47:42,597 --> 00:47:45,111 before the leaves fall from the trees. 604 00:47:45,802 --> 00:47:49,040 So she goes outside and starts to tie them back on. 605 00:48:00,870 --> 00:48:04,018 One of the most innovative directors of the time was Lois Weber. 606 00:48:04,733 --> 00:48:07,955 Here she also plays the lead in her film, Suspense. 607 00:48:08,897 --> 00:48:10,793 A woman is at home with her child. 608 00:48:11,197 --> 00:48:12,664 She hears an intruder, 609 00:48:13,056 --> 00:48:14,435 looks out the window, 610 00:48:14,460 --> 00:48:17,782 sees him, in this remarkable sideways POV shot. 611 00:48:18,511 --> 00:48:19,963 She calls her husband. 612 00:48:20,541 --> 00:48:24,824 Weber uses a split screen to show the husband, the intruder and herself, 613 00:48:24,958 --> 00:48:26,425 all in the same moment. 614 00:48:27,113 --> 00:48:30,513 The husband jumps in a car and tries to race to save his wife. 615 00:48:38,177 --> 00:48:39,764 He's chased by the police, 616 00:48:39,789 --> 00:48:43,124 who Weber shows in this inventive shot of the wing mirror. 617 00:48:44,364 --> 00:48:46,257 The intruder climbs the stair... 618 00:48:50,441 --> 00:48:55,226 ..and again Weber's camera position emphasises the approach, the threat. 619 00:48:55,841 --> 00:48:59,100 In the end, the police and husband arrive and save the day. 620 00:49:04,456 --> 00:49:08,966 The film was, for years, credited to a male director, DW Griffith. 621 00:49:10,384 --> 00:49:13,392 Frances Marion was an even more significant figure. 622 00:49:13,784 --> 00:49:17,598 Well, Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter - male or female 623 00:49:17,843 --> 00:49:22,443 - from 1915 to 1935. That's an incredible accomplishment right there. 624 00:49:22,569 --> 00:49:25,851 She also is the only woman ever to win two Oscars for writing. 625 00:49:26,233 --> 00:49:31,137 And she won her Oscars for The Big House, the seminal prison film, 626 00:49:31,426 --> 00:49:34,363 and The Champ, the classic boxing film. 627 00:49:34,652 --> 00:49:38,443 And what I love about that is it just right there puts the lie to the idea, 628 00:49:38,652 --> 00:49:41,763 well, these women writers were writing the matinee weepies 629 00:49:41,764 --> 00:49:44,283 or the "women's films". 630 00:49:44,376 --> 00:49:47,991 No. They were writing every conceivable genre of film. 631 00:49:48,176 --> 00:49:53,004 Women like Francis, Adela Rogers St Johns, Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos. 632 00:49:53,242 --> 00:49:56,843 I mean, these were the crème de la crème of the writers, 633 00:49:56,995 --> 00:50:01,843 the ones that the Thalbergs and the Mayers went to when they had big productions 634 00:50:01,844 --> 00:50:03,558 they knew they needed to count on. 635 00:50:03,814 --> 00:50:07,692 Marion's screenplay for the film The Wind was about a woman living in a shack. 636 00:50:08,278 --> 00:50:09,826 The wind is incessant. 637 00:50:09,851 --> 00:50:11,139 Sand's everywhere. 638 00:50:11,799 --> 00:50:13,984 It seems to blast the visual image. 639 00:50:16,033 --> 00:50:18,507 An aggressive man forces himself on her. 640 00:50:18,857 --> 00:50:22,055 She shoots him then buries him in the sand. 641 00:50:22,553 --> 00:50:24,635 But the wind blows the sand away. 642 00:50:25,124 --> 00:50:26,938 The corpse is exposed. 643 00:50:27,175 --> 00:50:28,546 Just like her fear. 644 00:50:28,760 --> 00:50:31,200 Just like her unconscious mind. 645 00:50:32,216 --> 00:50:34,504 The Wind was an epic tone poem. 646 00:50:34,830 --> 00:50:37,386 Cut like a thriller but filmed like a dream. 647 00:50:39,604 --> 00:50:44,443 Hollywood films like it showed female audiences things they'd probably felt 648 00:50:44,702 --> 00:50:46,100 but never seen. 649 00:50:51,347 --> 00:50:55,147 Most people in America did not go further than 20 miles from their home 650 00:50:55,172 --> 00:50:57,251 from when they were born till they died. 651 00:50:57,524 --> 00:51:00,405 So you have this incredible country 652 00:51:00,430 --> 00:51:04,109 that really only lives in this bell jar of their own community. 653 00:51:04,643 --> 00:51:08,436 And as films start coming out, as movie theatres are being built, 654 00:51:08,559 --> 00:51:12,238 by 1920 there's over 15,000 theatres in this country. 655 00:51:13,069 --> 00:51:16,513 So all of a sudden, you can go around the corner, put down your nickel 656 00:51:16,538 --> 00:51:20,972 or your dime or your quarter and have this entire world open up to you. 657 00:51:21,602 --> 00:51:24,363 And it's not just they're seeing Paris for the first time 658 00:51:24,388 --> 00:51:26,765 - they're seeing New York City or San Francisco 659 00:51:26,790 --> 00:51:28,514 - they are seeing women's fashions, 660 00:51:28,539 --> 00:51:33,121 they are seeing women acting in ways that nobody would dare do. 661 00:51:33,328 --> 00:51:37,179 With talking films, the price of making movies skyrocketed 662 00:51:37,734 --> 00:51:39,369 and so with talking films, 663 00:51:39,394 --> 00:51:41,919 Wall Street really entered the business for the first time. 664 00:51:42,338 --> 00:51:45,938 And when money entered into it, the jobs starting paying more, 665 00:51:45,963 --> 00:51:50,716 it was taken seriously as a business and men wanted those jobs. 666 00:51:54,279 --> 00:51:57,864 If the great women filmmakers of the 1910s are under-remembered, 667 00:51:58,227 --> 00:51:59,698 you could say that this man, 668 00:51:59,723 --> 00:52:05,383 lanky, here in a stagey family scene with a painted skyline, is over-remembered. 669 00:52:06,100 --> 00:52:10,806 People say that DW Griffith invented close-ups or editing which isn't true. 670 00:52:12,891 --> 00:52:15,854 But he did something far more valuable for the art of cinema. 671 00:52:16,083 --> 00:52:18,165 He said it needs to show this: 672 00:52:18,698 --> 00:52:20,469 The wind in the trees. 673 00:52:35,158 --> 00:52:39,313 Before Griffith, film had a tendency to be stagey like this. 674 00:52:40,156 --> 00:52:43,417 Airless. He brought the wind in the trees to cinema. 675 00:52:46,844 --> 00:52:48,844 A sense of the outside world. 676 00:52:49,976 --> 00:52:54,161 The delicacy of Lillian Gish's performance here matches the delicacy of the light, 677 00:52:54,928 --> 00:52:56,516 the visual softness. 678 00:53:01,514 --> 00:53:06,737 Decades later, the critic Roland Barthes said that some images have unplanned, 679 00:53:06,762 --> 00:53:09,626 natural details in them that move us. 680 00:53:10,412 --> 00:53:12,398 Barthes called this the punctum. 681 00:53:12,578 --> 00:53:14,937 The thing that pricks our feelings. 682 00:53:15,168 --> 00:53:18,849 Griffith's work is full of the punctum, the wind in the trees. 683 00:53:25,372 --> 00:53:29,506 This scene from Way Down East is set on a treacherous thawing river. 684 00:53:29,794 --> 00:53:31,387 Griffith could never have planned 685 00:53:31,412 --> 00:53:36,223 that Lillian Gish's right arm would push ice off the adjacent ice flow. 686 00:53:37,222 --> 00:53:39,275 But we notice the realness of the moment. 687 00:53:41,989 --> 00:53:45,204 Griffith worked with one of the best cinematographers in the business, 688 00:53:45,337 --> 00:53:46,596 Billy Bitzer. 689 00:53:46,811 --> 00:53:49,396 Bitzer disliked the hard edge of the film image, 690 00:53:49,444 --> 00:53:51,603 so put a collar around the lens hood, 691 00:53:51,781 --> 00:53:54,262 to make the edge of the image go slightly darker, 692 00:53:54,287 --> 00:53:57,736 "adding class to the picture" as Bitzer himself put it 693 00:53:57,947 --> 00:54:01,867 and influencing the look of film in America for a generation. 694 00:54:03,027 --> 00:54:06,938 Griffith and Bitzer understood the psychological intensity of a lens. 695 00:54:07,435 --> 00:54:09,328 They used visual softness 696 00:54:09,731 --> 00:54:12,538 and backlighting, which gave a halo to hair 697 00:54:12,676 --> 00:54:15,553 and made actors stand out against backgrounds. 698 00:54:18,446 --> 00:54:23,298 What Griffith and Bitzer did in 1914 and '15 with all their talents, 699 00:54:23,323 --> 00:54:25,965 their haloed imagery, their splendid tracking shots 700 00:54:25,990 --> 00:54:30,768 and feel for the outdoors is one of the great shocks in the story of film. 701 00:54:31,279 --> 00:54:36,597 They made this deceitful state of the nation movie that raised a racist flag, 702 00:54:37,083 --> 00:54:40,157 which showed the power of cinema, and its danger. 703 00:54:42,128 --> 00:54:45,906 The Birth of a Nation looks like it was shot in Griffith's native Kentucky 704 00:54:47,730 --> 00:54:50,774 but it was actually filmed here near Los Angeles. 705 00:54:55,101 --> 00:54:56,861 It showed the American Civil War. 706 00:54:58,173 --> 00:55:00,587 Griffith mixed the epic with the intimate. 707 00:55:01,684 --> 00:55:03,698 A Southern officer returns home. 708 00:55:04,209 --> 00:55:08,395 He goes to his mother. Her arms come out of the doorway to enfold him. 709 00:55:16,116 --> 00:55:17,775 We don't see the rest of her. 710 00:55:19,063 --> 00:55:22,257 Such subtlety made the racism all the more dangerous. 711 00:55:23,738 --> 00:55:26,583 Black Senators were shown as drunk and unclean. 712 00:55:28,295 --> 00:55:30,932 In this scene, Griffith used Wagner music. 713 00:55:31,472 --> 00:55:34,599 The Cameron family are being attacked by black soldiers. 714 00:55:35,044 --> 00:55:38,503 They're rescued by the Klan - heroic and thrilling. 715 00:55:46,665 --> 00:55:51,057 After some screenings, black audience members were attacked with clubs. 716 00:55:51,946 --> 00:55:57,027 The Ku Klux Klan had been disbanded in 1869, but by the mid 1920s, 717 00:55:57,292 --> 00:56:00,432 its membership was back up to four million. 718 00:56:01,658 --> 00:56:03,806 Talk about the wind in the trees. 719 00:56:04,659 --> 00:56:09,369 More than 80 years later, DJ Spooky sampled and played with the toxic scenes 720 00:56:09,394 --> 00:56:12,819 of Birth of a Nation, almost as if he was scribbling on them. 721 00:56:19,302 --> 00:56:21,303 The year after The Birth of a Nation, 722 00:56:21,328 --> 00:56:24,881 Griffith saw this, the epic Italian film, Cabiria. 723 00:56:25,270 --> 00:56:28,929 He was stunned, particularly by these moving dolly shots. 724 00:56:29,860 --> 00:56:33,149 Inspired by these moves and production design such as this, 725 00:56:33,174 --> 00:56:35,329 using elephants to suggest scale, 726 00:56:36,729 --> 00:56:39,336 and also by the novels of Charles Dickens 727 00:56:39,514 --> 00:56:41,906 he made a three and a half hour film, 728 00:56:41,975 --> 00:56:45,439 Intolerance, about "love's struggle through history." 729 00:56:49,998 --> 00:56:52,412 The film showed human intolerance in Babylon... 730 00:56:54,362 --> 00:56:56,272 ..and the life of Jesus Christ, 731 00:56:57,092 --> 00:56:58,517 tinted in sepia... 732 00:56:59,104 --> 00:57:01,198 ..in the massacre of St Bartholomew, 733 00:57:01,307 --> 00:57:04,781 in medieval ages, violent scenes tinted blue... 734 00:57:06,830 --> 00:57:08,556 ..and in modern gangsterism, 735 00:57:08,749 --> 00:57:11,119 all shiny cars and jazz outfits, 736 00:57:13,122 --> 00:57:15,344 and then inter-cut these. 737 00:57:16,573 --> 00:57:19,965 Griffith said, "Dickens inter-cuts, so, so will I". 738 00:57:20,738 --> 00:57:25,259 He took storyline A so far, then jumped to storyline B, 739 00:57:25,545 --> 00:57:29,012 advanced it a certain amount, then went back again to A 740 00:57:29,116 --> 00:57:31,115 and picked up where he had left off. 741 00:57:32,580 --> 00:57:36,669 Previously a cut from one shot to the next meant, as we've seen, 742 00:57:36,956 --> 00:57:38,972 "then" or "meanwhile." 743 00:57:42,080 --> 00:57:45,320 Griffith's cutting between time periods wasn't saying either. 744 00:57:46,580 --> 00:57:50,484 It was saying, "look, these very different events, from different eras, 745 00:57:50,509 --> 00:57:52,976 all show the same human trait, 746 00:57:53,701 --> 00:57:56,220 - intolerance, or the failure of love." 747 00:57:57,065 --> 00:57:59,614 Editing as an intellectual signpost, 748 00:58:00,575 --> 00:58:04,538 asking people to notice not something about action or story 749 00:58:04,600 --> 00:58:06,600 but about the meaning of the sequence. 750 00:58:08,908 --> 00:58:12,048 Soviets such as Eisenstein wrote about this editing. 751 00:58:12,420 --> 00:58:15,330 And as far away as Japan in 1921, 752 00:58:15,664 --> 00:58:18,186 Minoru Murata made this film, 753 00:58:18,211 --> 00:58:19,588 Souls on the Road. 754 00:58:20,202 --> 00:58:22,158 Two storylines intertwine. 755 00:58:22,409 --> 00:58:24,476 In the end of the film, they come together. 756 00:58:24,848 --> 00:58:30,018 Two ex-convicts from one storyline here find a son from the other storyline, 757 00:58:30,264 --> 00:58:31,611 in the snow. 758 00:58:32,990 --> 00:58:36,642 Their story has been one of hope, but the son has died. 759 00:58:37,168 --> 00:58:40,294 A pioneering use of parallel editing in Asia. 760 00:58:41,719 --> 00:58:45,282 This made Souls on the Road the first great Japanese film. 761 00:58:52,929 --> 00:58:55,804 In LA today, a shopping mall on Hollywood Boulevard, 762 00:58:55,829 --> 00:58:57,603 where the Oscars take place, 763 00:58:57,628 --> 00:59:01,709 has partially rebuilt the massive Babylonian gate from Intolerance. 764 00:59:05,159 --> 00:59:08,329 The original was here, a mile away from the shopping mall. 765 00:59:11,940 --> 00:59:15,999 It was demolished when Hollywood didn't care much about its own history. 766 00:59:18,420 --> 00:59:21,118 But what history! What ideas! 767 00:59:21,284 --> 00:59:24,150 Filmed with a dolly on a crane, and even on a balloon, 768 00:59:24,175 --> 00:59:28,469 to get high enough up into the wind that flaps these vast hangings. 769 00:59:32,122 --> 00:59:35,559 Cinema was just 20 years old when this shot was filmed. 770 00:59:37,152 --> 00:59:39,152 A new art form had been born. 771 00:59:39,479 --> 00:59:42,404 Scandinavian directors had made it an art of light. 772 00:59:48,863 --> 00:59:51,692 Nickelodeons had given way to movie palaces, 773 00:59:52,603 --> 00:59:54,581 places built like cathedrals. 774 00:59:59,684 --> 01:00:01,180 Or Egyptian Temples. 775 01:00:03,875 --> 01:00:05,534 Or Chinese pavilions. 776 01:00:13,067 --> 01:00:17,460 A garden called Hollywood started to pump fantasies out into the world. 777 01:00:21,266 --> 01:00:25,288 Film editing captured the fragmented experiences of modern life. 778 01:00:28,765 --> 01:00:32,861 New creatures called movie stars became the most famous people in the world. 779 01:00:34,226 --> 01:00:37,107 They lived in places of rapture and escape. 780 01:00:39,643 --> 01:00:42,651 The story of film seemed to have reached its climax... 781 01:00:50,014 --> 01:00:53,006 but, in fact, it was only just beginning. 72768

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