Film and Media Studies Portal
The Story of Film: An Odyssey [DVD1]952512001500Authenticity of location - a lie to tell the truth - this is filmmaking - the art of making us feel that we are there.Cinema as an empathy machine - Three Colours: Blue.The French Lady95259906000 Is classic cinema the cinema of money or the cinema of ideas?- money and spectacle - Saving Private Ryan, Casablanca (the urgency of war and romance)- or Ozu's 'Record of a Tenement Gentleman' (left) films as the epitome of classic - deliberate slow pace representing a patient naturalism - paradox : urgency of Hollywood to the pause of Ozu.41789359779000Idea - bubbles in a beer glass as a soul searching metaphor - looking deep into despair - Odd Man Out (right), Taxi Driver, Two or Three Things I Know About Her - intertextuality - connotation and representation.Key idea - the symbolism of bubbles - can see their troubles and even the cosmos.Aesthetics driving cinema - images and ideas not money and showbiz.Innovator - sublime ineffable life of cinema.The French Connection - 70s - camera racing through like a bullet - New American Cinema.Secret heart of the medium of filmWho knows how to get inside your head? Lynch, Luhrmann.Dakar, Senegal - Redraw the map of movie history - factually inaccurate and racist by omission1895-1918: A New Artform- East Coast US, New Jersey - 1890s - movies born - Thomas Edison - manic, passionate inventor - obsessive - factory was an ideas factory with this quote moved around the office -?"there is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking" - Sir Joshua Reynolds.- Lyon, France - movies born here too, even more so than in NJ - The Lumiere Brothers - louis and Auguste - ideas men, Louis technically brilliant - the grab advance mechanism of a sewing machine would allow a strip of film to be advanced, paused, exposed - open the back of the Lumiere's first camera invention and it becomes a projector - Leo Tolstoy called it "the clicking machine, like a human hurricane"Still images spun in a box with the movement of a carousel, or reflected in mirrorsMagic Lantern showsTraffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888) - Louis Aime Augustine Le PrinceGeorge Eastman - film on a roll - Edison and colleague WKL Dixon - spin in box - give illusion of movement - The Black Moria invented by Edison - what you needed most for movies beyond equipment was light - cinema later became 'the art of light' - box of wheels that turned to follow the sunThe Kiss (1900) - Edison short movie - Cinema had to be bigger than a private viewing box?39185859842500571501841500Employees Leaving The Lumiere Factory (1895)- short documentary of the factoryNot just make but show beyond single viewing to group audience - 28 Dec 1895 - Scribe Building - Boulevard Capuccine, Paris - Lumiere's projected film - light shone through to screen bigger than life – enchanting - Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) -unnerved audience - train coming at them.Cinematic appeal – Escapism, Erotic imaginations, Flashbacks, Glamorising War, Capture horror.Image bank to recollect - What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City (1901, dir: George S.Fleming, Edwin S. Porter, Edison Manufacturing Company).Cinema as low brow for the working classes1898 - from machinery of cinema to shots and cuts- Paris - illusionist Georges Melies inspired by new technology - editing as magic trick - Melies, the first special effects director- Lumiere means light - France funded filmmaking like no other country - believed that it was such a beacon in the decades to comeAlice Guy-Blaché?- Alice Guy at the end of the nineteenth century.?Alice Guy-Blaché?(July 1, 1873 – March 24, 1968) was one of the first female pioneers in early French cinema. She is revered as the first female director and writer of narrative fiction films.[The Phantom Ride]Brighton, England - buzzing place in Victorian times - local photographer George Albert Smith became one of movies early innovators - A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) - one of the first to film from the front of a train: ghostly tracking POV shot - became known as the 'Phantom Ride'.-6356667500Shoah (1985, dir: Claude Lanzmann)- the 'Phantom Ride' at its most morally serious - the train line that took the Jews to the gas chambers in the Holocaust filmed in present day to evoke a ghostly genocidal past.279404445002001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir: Stanley Kubrick)- end - 'Phantom Ride' used - camera zooms through coloured light of the cosmos - as if the main character is tripping or having an out of body experience.[Evolution of the Close Up]The Little Doctor and the Sick Kitten (1901, dir: George Albert Smith)- filmmakers usually kept their camera wide because they hadn't considered other options.- first close up - wanted to show the cat eating in more detail - birth of close ups and cut/edits.October (Ten Days That Shook The World) (1928, dir: Sergei Eisenstein)- close up of dead women's hair over the lowered bridge brings home the intensity of the tragedy more than the epic wide angle shots of people en masse.017335500Once Upon A Time in The West (1968, dir: Sergio Leone)- Charles Bronson in extreme close up looking into the eyes of Henry Fonda - narrative cue: Fonda is the murderer he has been searching for all his life.[The Birth of Widescreen]The Corbett-Fitzimmons Fight (1897, dir: Enoch J Rector)- standard film was 35mm, but Rector filmed boxing match in a negative 63mm.- broader image showed more of the action.- widescreen cinema was born - now, the norm but only commercially so after 1953."Film isn't just a sideshow novelty, it is also a language of ideas".[1903-1918: Thrill Becomes Story]- Albert Einstein - physicists expanded his ideas.- Titanic sank and WW1 was won - was film trivial in comparison? No.- 1903: key elements of the shot were formed - however, the cut/editing hadn't taken off.[Evolution of the Cut]The Life of an American Farmer (1903, dir: Edwin Stanton Porter)- street action of a rescue - same action again from inside - wipe edit.- intercut a few years later - inside and outside house - continuous timeline but space fragmented.- flow of action from one space to another.- continuity cutting - the editing equivalent of the word 'then'.0-190500Sherlock Jr. (1924, dir: Buster Keaton)- conceptual jump 21 years later - double exposure - falls asleep, dreams of cinema, climbs into film - cut: world around him suddenly replaced, causing him to fall over - the magic of editing.The Horse That Bolted (1907, dir: Charles Pathe)- intercut scene of horse eating food and man walking upstairs, and a room full of guests - not continuity editing but parallel editing to advance two storylines at once.The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (1908, dirs: Calmettes, Le Bargy)- characters turning their back to the camera - like a character reacting to a punch- the reverse angle shot.469906096000Vivre sa Vie (1962, dir: Jean-Luc Godard)- character not facing camera - no reverse angle to reveal face - shocking, enigmatic effect.- "I don't know, I wonder what I'm thinking about" - dialogue given without facing the camera.The jump cut - Godard/Truffaut specialism.[The development of star persona]The Life of an American Fireman (1903, dir: Edwin Stanton Porter)- caring for the plight of an actress in an imaginary situation of the house being on fire.- the lie of its reality propelled a curious divide between the actresses persona and the actresses real life.Those Awful Hats (1909, dir: D.W. Griffith) and The Mended Lute (1909, dir: D.W. Griffith)- actress presumed dead reappears in latter Griffith film, surprising its audience.- crowds hysterical - Florence Lawrence's name burned into public - The Biograph Girl - earned $80,000 in 1912 but committed suicide by eating any poison at 48 after her career fizzled out - set pattern for the star (hype, fame, tragedy - echoed in Sunset Boulevard - silent actress never breaking into talkies)The Abyss (1910, dir: Urban Gad)- Denmark actress Asta Nielsen - he's tied up, she's hip grinding in her slinky black dress.- less censorship in Europe, actresses could be more sexual.- Hollywood learned from Nielsen's success - instead of sex, it focused on luxury.Gloria Swanson in Star Struck (1925, dir: Allan Dwan)- luxury and costume - element of sublime to stardom.- Lawrence, Nielsen, Swanson star persona of image.- audiences became more interested in their thoughts - Bette Davis.- star system meant psychology became the driving force of films.1907-1910 - small theatres for working class people emerged- in USA, called nickelodeons?- 1914 cinema in Leeds, England - Hyde Park Picture House- West 34th and 7th Street in NY - first NY Nickelodeon?- early 1910s - Scandinavia - best filmmaking the world at this time was taking place here - maybe it was the Northern Light, how it changed - maybe it was the sense of destiny and mortality in Scandinavian literature that made Danish and Swedish movies more gracefulThe Mysterious X (1913, dir: Benjamin Christensen)- a dream drawn on film - daring debut, cross-cutting editing - ?later built vast studios in Copenhagen to make Hakan (1922): a masterpiece about witchcraft - complex effects - Telegram - standing ovation first screening.Ingeborg Holm (1913; dir: Viktor Sjostrom) - naturalism and grace.019113500The Phantom Carriage (1921, dir: Viktor Sjostrom) - multi layered - stories within stories, moods within moods - re-exposes film to show separation of body and soul - wasted life wrapped in haunted myth.[Hollywood]Centre of movie world - a place called Hollywood - Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman left Scandinavia to pursue a career there - took til 1950s for Scandinavia to be at the centre of cinema again.Painted background = illusion of reality.019748500Shanghai Express (1932, dir: Joseph Von Stroheim)- Marlene Dietrich framed in lattice of shadows.- youth and glamour came out of its test tubes.- Movies in the air - fantasy, sunlight.- film process patented and copyrighted - Latham Loop patented.- Hollywood used it breaking the law of copyright.First Hollywood studio built in 1911.The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906, dir: Charles Tait)- first feature length film, filmed in Australia.First Hollywood feature = Cecil B Demille's The Squaw Man (1918)- crucial element of filmmaking - eyeline match cut - emotional connection between man and woman - 180 degree line of action identified - spatial errors - exit screen left, enter screen right.[Women in Hollywood]Women, immigrants and Jews found their place in pre-1925 HollywoodStory arc developed by First female director Alice Guy - Falling Leaves (1912)- girl tries to save a life through a symbolic act of putting heart shapes back on leaves.- one of the first female directors to develop film into an arc.Suspense (1913, dir: Lois Weber)- sideways POV shot - direct address to camera representing intruder and wife looking at each other: wife from upstairs window, intruder at the door entrance looking up at her.- triple split screen to show husband and wife and intruder - simultaneous action.- husband tries to save wife, chased by police, intruder walks menacingly up the stairs, husband and police arrive, and tackle intruder to ground.- film was wrongly credited to DW Griffith.Frances Marion- highest paid screenwriter from 1915-35.- only woman to win 2 oscars for screenwriting - won for The Big House, and The Champ.- subverted stereotypical expectations of female storytelling.The Wind (1928, dir: Viktor Sjostrom)- incessant wind, woman in shack.- aggressive man forces himself on her, she kills and buries him, wind reveals corpse again, symbolic of her fear and vulnerability that she can't escape.- epic tone poem filmed like a dream.- classic for female empathy.Bell Jar of own community - people rarely travelled any further than 20 miles from their home.- 15,000 theatres that show an entire world open up to you for the first time.- Wall Street and money entered the business - men then overtook the business from women.[The Influence of Griffith]Rescued From The Eagle's Nest (1908, dir: J Searle Dawley)- people say DW invented close-ups or editing - isn't true - what he did say was, "you need to capture the wind in the trees" negating the notion of painted backdrops like in this film.?Films were staged like The House with Closed Shutters (1910, dir: DW Griffith) until Way Down East (1920, dir: Griffith) - sense of outside world - delicate light, visual softness, delicate performances - unplanned natural details that move us - punkdom - critic Roland Barthes - the thing that pricks our feelings.- Griffith's work is full of the punkdom - realness in Way Down East of fallen character coincidentally pushing ice away with her still hand whilst lying supposedly comatose do on a moving glacier - this unplanned moment brings a sense of realness - magical accident.Orphans of the Storm (1921, dir: Griffith)- Griffith understood the psychological intensity of the lens.- back lighting gave a softness and made actors stand out against backgrounds.019621500Birth of a Nation (1915, dir: Griffith)- what Griffith and Bitze (cinematographer) did with all their talents - splendid tracking shots and feeling of the outdoors - one of the great shocks in the story of film - they made a deceitful state of the nation movie raising a racist flag - showed the power of cinema and its danger.- looks like it was shot in Griffith's native Kentucky, but was actually filmed in LA - showed American civil war - mixed the epic with the intimate - such subtlety made the racism all the more dangerous - black men were shown as drunk and unclean - the KKK are given heroic music, and the black men are represented as villains - at some screenings, black audience members were attacked at the clubs - re-emergence of the ku Klux Klan from their 1860s disbanding to their 1920s re-emergence in Washington DC by the White House on marches - 4 million people on the MarchRebirth of a Nation (2007, dir: DJ Spooky)- scribbled on toxic scenes as if playing with them.Cabiria (1914, dir: Giovanni Pastrone)- moving dolly shots.0-190500Intolerance (1916, dir: Griffith)- inspired by Cabiria and Dickens - 3 and a half hour epic about love's struggle through history.- shows human intolerance in Babylon - then Jesus Christ's crucifixion tinted in sepia - medieval ages' violent scenes tinted blue - modern gangsterism with shiny cars.- intercuts - "Dickens intercuts, so so will I" - jumped between storyline A, B et al distinguishable by the tinted lens of each scene.- previous intercutting featured in Porter's ?The Life of an American Fireman (1903) was match-on action rather than simultaneous progression in two contexts.- thematic intercutting between time periods - different events, different time periods, same theme - all events show 'intolerance'.- editing as an intellectual signpost asking - not asking about action or story, but instead,my he meaning of the sequence.Souls on the Road (1916, dir: Minoru Murata)- two storylines intertwined that come together at the end of the film.- First great Japanese film.LA - relics from Griffith's Intolerance still there - but most of its architecture was demolishedScandinavia made cinema the art of light.Nickleodeons had given way to movie palaces, like Egyptian temples or Chinese pavilionsGarden of Hollywood started to pump fantasies around the world, editing captured fragmented experiences of modern life.Star persona - new fame (like Florence Lawrence).Story of film had seemingly reached its climax - it was only just beginning.[1918-1928: The Triumph of American Film - and the first of its Rebels]1918: World War One had just ended - much of Europe was scorched earth - the seeds of Nazism had been planted - art should record dreams, but what dreams?- Dreams - in LA, the myth of Hollywood had just been born - starlets attracted by the shininess of Hollywood - the Hollywood bauble.- How did Hollywood become an industry and factory of dreams? Why was it considered so fragile?- Before the 1920s were over, key filmmakers were trying to break the Hollywood 'bauble'?- investment in cinema increased tenfold in the 10s and 20s - Hollywood became an industry.- money often came from East Coast bankers.- West Coast: spent by a series of production bosses - working class Jewish businessmen - Adolf Zucker - a Hungarian immigrant, fair trader, set up famous players - became Paramount.- four Canadian/polish brothers set up Warner Bros.?- brash Russian called Louis B. Mayer set up MGM.- built big boring bunkers called sound stages - indoor film to control light.-635-444500Citizen Kane (1941, dir: Orson Welles)- Hollywood could work wonders with light - beams make library look like sepulchre, the documents gleam.Hollywood set up a production line system - the way that motor manufactures work.Directors were responsible for film processes in Japan, but in LA, it was production bosses like Zukor, Mayer, Warner. Writers would concoct stories.Talent scouts would find new starlets from coffee shops - Set designers would invent magnificent buildings.0-190500The Thief of Baghdad (1924, dir: Raoul Walsh)- set design had a sprawling set for his representation of Bagdad - Mise-en-scene took centre stage.- costume design, make up, engineers devised certain lighting to illuminate hair.- States theme upfront - "happiness must be earned" - illuminated in the stars.- Douglas Fairbanks - star and producer - soft light, shallow focus, a certain femininity - our hero is a thief - likeable rogue - the anticipation desire and pleasure of seeing - classical or romantic? - their falls in love, sets in the motion the rest of the film.Marilyn Monroe went blonde in a make-up room.Lights to illuminate hair.Desire (1936, dir: Frank Borzage)- to make eyelashes cast shadows on the face of Marlene Dietrich.Gone With The Wind (1939, dir: Fleming, Cukor, Wood)- dollies for the camera to make the image glide - like the wind.New cameras were beautiful objects.Money men decided to buy the screens so that companies had control over where their films were shown, and what billing they would get- boring production, grand exhibition- whole point was to standardise and control - Joan Crawford - contractual obligations (when to go to bed).- Henry Miller called the Hollywood production line a dictatorship where the artist was silencedGold Diggers of 1933 (1933, dir: Mervyn LeRoy, WB)- genius in the dictatorship?- abstract, geometric patterns with balloons in choreography.The Studio System - not into the film - it was the garden of work - to make money - economic drive.- bauble and garden - varied flowers.- MGM neoclassical building - more stars than in heaven, opulence and optimism.Singin in the Rain (1952, dir: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Loew's)- dance scene has shadows in them despite being filmed in a studio.WB was more streetwise - The Maltese Falcon (1941, dir: John Huston)- stars were angels with dirty faces – Humphrey Bogart.- downtrodden hero - sharp shadows, nighttime settings, gangster charactersParamount style in The Scarlet Empress (1934, dir: Josef von Sternberg)- costume, feminine, romantic, wry.- sparkling, champagne.Studio System was a capitalist production line - it was copied around the world.- India, Mexico, Italy, UK, China, Hong Kong, Korea, France.- formulaic copycat movies in system as well as expertise and taste.- extravagance and brilliance - the ghost in the machine was art.- studios making 700 films a year - 1920s – The Thief of Baghdad – “happiness must be earned” – tweak of the American Dream – Douglas Fairbanks as star – character (loveable rogue), setting (exotic), theme (search for happiness) established quickly, external conflict (besotted by high-society woman), internal conflict (indecision over whether to woo the woman – risk) – classical and romantic.[Hollywood mainstream] - entertaining and romantic, but are they innovative - mainstream bauble.Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd – great comedy actor/directors – innovative.685803619500The Cameraman (1928, dir: Buster Keaton)- obsessed by camera – film featuring a camera.- comic image maker - One Week (1920) – thought like an architect with his visual gags - art of looking. Helped define silent cinema.- Sherlock Jr. (1924) - jokes about editing, looking, daredevil illusions.- Three Ages (1923) - daredeviling - overhead shot vertigo effect.?- Buster Keaton Rides Again (1965) - improvised gag - standing ovation.- The General (1928) - train driver - stunning visual event for comedy - train crosses bridge gives way - sublime scale was key element of silent film - imaginations were extravagant- his dreams outstripped his box office - sacked by MGM – forgotten for years.?Influenced by Buster Keaton: Divine Intervention (2002, dir: Ella Suleiman)- Palestine film - deadpan grumpiness is funny - old man punctures football on roof then throws it down to kids again.?Only once did Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton share the screen together.Limelight (1952, dir: Charlie Chaplin)- Chaplin more into body movement, Keaton more into camera work.019431000City Lights (1931, dir: CC)- rehearsed scenes.- Hitchcock - middle class upbringing, fisherman family – aspirational.- street corner - improvises and plays with wood.- believed to be a Marxist but more Jungian - finding the child within yourself.- Chaplin came out of dire poverty - mother in asylum, father a drinker.- The Kid (1921, dir: CC) - brings up orphan boy - film humanised cinema – empathic - Chaplin was cinema's Dickens - Griffith intellectualised cinema - time lapse of CC's production studio.Nicholas Roeg also showed the unconscious mind of his characters just like Chaplin did- Bad Timing (1980, dir: Nicolas Roeg) - hands filmed in close up suggest twitchy energy despite their seemingly confident demeanour at a party.Stanley Donan sees ideas in Chaplin - choreography - idea overwhelming a dance- The Great Dictator (1940, dir: CC) - kicking balloon a powerful metaphor of Adolf Hitler making the world his toy - making a buffoon of Hitler without making him an ogre - brings politics in a unique way.Mr Hulot's Holiday (1952, dir: Jacques Tati) inspired by Chaplin.Toto in Colour, Awara, Sunset Blvd all influenced by Chaplinesque character of the tramp.Train blowing smoke scene reworked in Some Like it Hot, originally in The Great Dictator.Chaplin kicked out in 1950s for being a leftist.Chaplin and Renoir - you hope to assimilate their greatness.Luke's Moody Muddle (1916) - Harold Lloyd - Safety Last! (1923).Ozu influenced by Chaplin and Lloyd in I Flunked But... (1930).The Hollywood bauble - the fact that it was a fantasy made it vulnerable, reality can break fantasy and shatter the baublWithout the costumes and glitter - non-fiction.0000 Nanook of the North (1922, Robert J. Flaherty) - made longest non-fiction film of its time - set in Alaska - focuses on one real Inuit man - the psychology - mythic struggle against elements - romantic like Chaplin and Griffith but using non-actors for the same effect - created an ethical audience - some scenes staged - real man, playful father on screen.Documentary as an Artform and a viable genre was born.- non-fiction cinema is among the most innovative in cinema history.- The House is Black (1963, dir: Forugh Farrokhzad) - Iranian - beautiful tracking shots.?- Sans Soleil (1983, dir: Chris Marker) - filmed real places in Japan, wrote fictional commentary in which an imaginary woman quotes from made up letters from the filmmaker.- imagined words on top of non-fiction pictures - history of Japan in times after the war.- The Not Dead (2007, dir: Brian Hill) - interview about war experiences and then turn them into poems with Armitage's help.- The Five Obstructions (2003,dir: Jorgan Lath) - lars von trier asked Lath to remake five times a certain film with specific direction.Realism to undermine the Hollywood fantasy.Blind Husbands (1919, dir: Eric Von Stroheim)- vision, poet, artist - drive to realism was obsessive -?Greed - fifth film -'yellow (the colour of money) floods the whole world of the story.- contempt for Hollywood romance.?- budget of 1,5 million - finished movie 7 hours - the Dostoevsky of cinema.- use his genius as a weapon.1948 - returns to city of Vienna.1950 - saw cut version of Greed and cried.Sunset Blvd. - silent von Stroheim film used as Norma Desmond's screening.James Joyce - rare Hollywood beast.King Vidor films - The Crowd (1928)- naturalism over glamour.- office shot inspired intro to Billy Wilder to The Apartment (1960) and Orson Welles' The Trial (1960).- Made Vidor shoot 7 different endings in various shades of optimism!Happy endings and glamour versus mundane social realism.Cinema focused on the Everyman, Rhythms, Compositions.Auteurs - Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov.Aelira: Queen of Mars (1924, dir: Yakov Protazanov)- angles, modernism, conceptual design.Posle Smerti (1915, Yevgeni Bauer)- side lighting, Vermeer painting style lighting, source light in shot, bravely natural, natural light composition - ghostly laments, pessimistic about grief, loss and unrequited love.Realism - Danish filmmaker challenged romantic cinema -'spiritually spare.01968500- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1915, dir: Carl Theodore Dreyer).- filmed only in closeup, no makeup, tearful, hair cropped, silent film, lighting focus (no dWith), directed in France and Dreyer was brought up in strict Protestant family, conviction of acting.- would reduce and reduce - monumental feeling.- Dreyer brought up a Lutheran - purity and plainness informed his inner eye – Ordet.- "you cannot simplify reality without defining it first".- The President (1919) - aim to purify images - soften imagery - paler, whiter.- Vampyr - shadows against white wall - life of their own.- spare use of whiteness was wildly rebellious.- Gertrude (1964) - the idolatry of whiteness.- purged of its bauble - Scandinavian spiritualism and fatalism - antithesis of escapist romantic Hollywood in movie palaces to experience utopia- realist 20s cinema hardly got a look in.Tarkovsky, Herzog and Dreyer have an enigmatic air that is hard to define - strong feeling.Dogville - opposite of Hollywood cinema - Undecorative, sparse, spiritually wretched.Intertextual French cinema - Jean Luc Godard's film Vivre da Vie starring Anna Karina - she goes to see Joan of Arc in the cinema.Germany France Russia China Japan innovators - 1920s - greatest decade in story of film.[1918-1932] - The Great Rebel Filmmakers Around The WorldRebellious directors around the world challenged the glitter of Hollywood.- Entertainment cinema of 20s and 30s - battle for the soul of cinema made it splendid.- soft lighting, shallow focus, make up, dreamlike versus the scrubbed, anti-gloss realism.What it's like to be alive - film as its laboratory - obsession, ideas, societies.- Ernst Lubitsch - overacting, mocked Victorian repressiveness.- The Oyster Princess (1919, dir: EL) - mocking, subversive tone - capitalist smoking cigar with stenographers and black servants.- The Mountain Cat (1921, dir: EL) - visually daring, girl falls in love with lieutenant - gives heart - she eats it - snowmen come to light and play music -'surrealism and screen masking.- Hollywood noticed - because of US censorship - inventive in how he represented sexuality.- The Marriage Circle - psychiatrist and wife have breakfast - stirring coffee - urgent urge to eat overtaken - cinematic equivalent of raised eyebrow - daring in representing sexuality.Billy Wilder had a sign in his office saying: "how would Lubitsch do it?"Paris - pioneering Lumiere brothers had been influenced by impressionist painters and now filmmakers - cinema Impressionism (mental images).La Roue (1923, dir: Abel Gance)- double exposures.- complex love triangle - one falls off cliff, women try to save him.- images of his unrequited love flash in his inner eye at shutter speed in his last moments before death - inside his head - cinema becomes his inner eye - some frames last only 1 frame per second in a 24fps film - flashes as impressions of final moments.Jean Cocteau - "this is cinema before an after La Roue just as there is painting before and after Picasso" - Podovkin, Eisenstein and Shevchenko studied it in detail.Gance hadn't peaked - 4 hour impressionist film about Napoleon Bonaparte.?Napoleon (1927) - protagonist as tragic hero, made mainstream romantic cinema seem static, dynamism of man and his escapades - Gance rethought camera movement and the impression of Napoleon's experience - sponge around the lens so boys could punch it and not get hurt.Kinetic energy of horse ride captured - attached a compressed air powered camera to a saddle of a horse - Napoleon as a young man in Corsica.How would Gance top such dynamism at the climax of the movie?- when Napoleon enters Italy.- a land grab for which the film fails to condemn.- how would he outdo the epic imagery and grand sets of Pastroni's Grand Liberia and DW Griffith's Intolerance??- filmed with 3 cameras minded on top of each other - each pointing in a slightly different direction - audiences had to turn their heads to see the whole spectacle.- Napoleon premiered at Paris Opera - LA Times called it the measure for all films ever.- 1979 restoration for Telluride Film Festival - Gance watched his masterpiece for the last time.German late 10s and 20s - challenge to innovative romantic cinema.- deeper aspects - experienced by Expressionist painters - Expressionist films.063500- The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919, die: Robert Wiene) - most influential - fear, haunting, graphic rooms.- flooded set with flat light and made shadows on the floor.?-political edge of story: Chesree, a sleepwalker on short fairgrounds murders enemies of his master Dr Caligari - at night - Caligari represented the controlling German state, Chesree represented ordinary people manipulated by it.- got away with political edge with ending - showing that it was all the dream of a madman and that Dr Caligari isn't evil after all and the German state doesn't control its people after all.- bizarre imagery took points of view in a unique way - echoes Escher paintings.- influenced Charles Klein's The Tell Tale Heart (1928) - Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927) - A Page of Madness (1926, dir: Teinosuke Kinugasa) - visual overlays and fast cutting like in LA Roue and with a women dancing in an Art Deco setting - mental states exploring psychosis in film form as well as characters.Fritz Lang - deep structure of society rather than surface claims:038417500Most iconic film of the Silent Era - Metropolis (1927) ?- clashes between workers versus authoritarian industrialists in a giant futuristic city - brilliant model shots - Maria is Helen of Troy meets Christ inspiring workers - industrialist manipulates by creating ?a robot made to look like her - Deco mannequin made with symmetrically themed flashing lights - Frankenstein parallels - the astonishing opening eyes of the woman in the metal bodice enhanced by makeup - transition to human - in the end, Maria and the industrialists son save the city and workers and owners become United - takes place on steps of a cathedral. Lang’s cityscapes and robotics, exploitation and urban paradise – profoundly influential.Hollywood director King Vidor loved Metropolis and its expressionism is echoed in his city film The Crowd (1928, MGM).Adolf Hitler liked Metropolis and the inmates of Nazi concentration camps compared the ramps they had to build from a scene in the film.Metropolis was shot using 2 million ft of film and 36,000 extras.0-381000Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, dir: F.W. Murnau, Fox Film Corp.)- the city was a scary thing in the early 20th century - expressionist masterpiece – man and wife walk through the city together – they don’t notice the traffic around them – the city becomes nature – and then city again – then joy becomes tragedy on the way back from the city – his wife drowns in a lake – grief-stricken, the man blames the city – a woman who tried to seduce him shows the bright lights, dancing – becomes a symbol of city greed and speed.- F.W. Murnau – one of the greatest directors – cameos in Sunrise as an awkward and shy bystander whilst the two leads dance – made the film in Hollywood – given total freedom and final cut (rare in Hollywood) – gigantic set built – he made most of the subtle lighting effects available in Hollywood – the city woman as a symbol of modernity and avarice leaves – life of the woman and the man becomes like that of a German Romantic.- Sunrise was voted the best film of all time by French critics – the French poetic realists of the 1930s reconsidered Murnau their master – he seemed to see into the human heart more than any other director and made haunting visuals.- Murnau died in a car crash in 1931.In 1920s Germany and France, movies had become intellectually fashionable – art school favourites – experimental artists and filmmakers moved away from the Hollywood norm with German expressionism – they were the fifth set of rebels to challenge conventional cinema in the 20s and 30s.Opus 1 (1921, dir: Walter Ruttman)- painted on glass, wiped the wet paint, added more, filmed again.- one of the first abstract animations.- Dada was an art movement of mockery – anarchic comedy.Entr’act (1924, dir: Rene Clair)- Dadaist Francis Picabia commissioned this film to play in the interval of a ballet.- Clair was a former journalist put the camera in places a conventional ballet could only dream of.- right underneath the dancer or on the barrel of a dancing cannon.- “it respects nothing but the desire to burst out laughing” – absurdist comedy.Rien que les heurs (1930, dir: Alberto Cavalcanti)- haunting experimental film – power of imagery – montage of eyes.- the surrealist Salvador Dali 20 years later, was inspired by Cavalcanti’s imagery.- used in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945, dir: Alfred Hitchcock) – dream sequence designed by Dali.- Bunuel and Dali thought endlessly about the imagery of dreams.019304000Un Chien Andalou (1929, dir: Luis Bunuel)- starts with an image of Bunuel smoking – sees a cloud going across the moon – cut to: an extreme close-up of a razor cutting a woman’s eye (actually a dead horse’s eye) – shocking free association – attempt to show how the unconscious works – man dressed as a woman falls off his bike – carrying a box – ants appear out of hole/gash in the palm of a hand – man appears to the man whose eye has been sliced – dissolve to: a woman’s armpit – dissolve to: a sea urchin – last shots are again, free associations – absurdist imagery for excitement, fear and sex – chopped off hand being poked by a man with a stick whilst a guard pushes back the outraged onlookers.Blue Velvet (1986, dir: David Lynch)- Un Chien Andalou is a direct influence – strange, erotic discovery – a chopped off ear in a field discovered with ants crawling out from it.6667545910500L’Age d’or (1930, dir: Luis Bunuel)- Bunuel’s feature length film – still shocking – a man and woman are trying to make love in the mud – a crowd of bourgeois people and clergy stop them – man seems to have an image of the woman on a toilet – toilet roll seems to burn – dissolve to: lava – sound effect of toilet flush whilst image displays lava – back to the man.- film was premiered on December 3rd 1930 at Studio 28 – members of the Fascist League of Patriots hurled ink at the screen and attacked the audience – a Spanish newspaper called it ‘the new poison that Judaism and Masonry want to use in order to corrupt the people’ – it was out of distribution for 50 years – rejected the content of Romantic Cinema.[Sixth set of rebels rejected the Form of Romantic Cinema].0314325000- in two revolutions, Russia felt it had dashed towards modernity in order to make society more equal and violently removed the ruling class – set life in a spin.- one of the children of the revolution – Dziga Vertov – whose name means ‘spinning top’ made an incendiary newsreel:Kino Pravda no.19 (1924, dir: Dziga Vertov, Goskino)- camera attached to a train, worshipping the work of peasants.- new boss of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Lenin said ‘out of all the arts, cinema is the most important’.Glumov’s Diary (1923, dir: Sergei Eisenstein, Proletkult)- brilliant innovator – first film where actors briefly perform for the camera.- complex person in the story of film – Marxist on the outside, engineer, Christian, Jewish and bisexual – layers of the character – made the film on a battleship.Battleship Potemkin (1925, dir: Sergei Eisenstein, Goskino)- how to show the horror of the murder – Newtonian moment dropping a cherry down steps gave him an idea for an iconic cinematic shot – steps are like the world tilted forwards like a stage – stage for the murdered people cascading down steps – moment to detonate.- caption: suddenly – close up of a woman’s distressed face ricocheting – an umbrella towards the camera with a man with no legs trotting by – wipe to: a fall shot with handheld camera – camera on a dolly beside the steps as people run away down them – 3 second shots (US average at time = 5 seconds, Germany = 9 seconds) – Eisenstein cast a boy to fall – mother’s delayed reaction and shock (her face is a myth, a mask, primal) – people step on the fallen boys’ hands – baby falls on steps – cut to: shocked mother – she takes the trodden boy, picks him up and then walks up the steps in a corridor of light.- new caption: don’t shoot – camera has moved from bottom left to top right – mother with baby in pram – close up on pram wheels on steps – marching soldiers’ legs close up – marching soldiers’ guns – pram teeters and dying body pushes it – like the cherry stone, the pram falls through the killing fields – your heart races hoping the baby survives.- montage of horrors – The Odessa Steps Sequences – montage creates a leap – the horrors of the state articulated through this tragic sequence.Charlie Chaplin loved Battleship Potemkin – Walt Disney admired Eisenstein.62 years later, Brain De Palma played homage to the Odessa Steps Sequence:The Untouchables (1987)- same pram, distraught mother, silent screams, splintered editing, short shots, shooting sequence.- some say that Eisenstein justified violence – others disagree – it was not a school for violent revolutionaries – vulgar interpretation – it is a cautionary tale of violent overthrows – anti-war message – Humanism of Eisenstein.Arsenal (1929, dir: Alexander Dovzhenko)- Eisenstein admires this Ukrainian filmmaker encapsulating a complex time in the nation’s history – there is a war – women stand motionless in dead villages – it is like the women can hear the song of the war in their heads.- A German goes mad with laughing gas – astonishing image of a soldier dead, half buried>- Alexander Sokurov on Dovzchenko – “he knows how to excite deep feelings in his audience, his films were so evocative and atmospheric, and he was deeply sincere”.- Original screenplay available in a film school where Eisenstein taught.Earth (1930, dir: Alexander Dovzhenko, VUFKU)- Sokurov: “think of the scene where he shows a man walking along a road, all at once he begins to sing. What’s so strange is that suddenly the man collapses. Why does this happen? No-one knows. It’s a mystery.”Russian context – Lenin died and Stalin came along – the brilliance of Soviet editing died too – Eisenstein went on to create more masterpieces and then he died in 1948.[The Seventh Challenge To The Hollywood Bauble]- Subverting the Romantic Entertainment Cinema of Hollywood 1920s – Japan.- Japan fought most of the world in the 30s and 40s on the side of the Nazis – killed millions – its moviemakers, to compensate, made the most humanistic films.- Concept of ‘The Gentle Rebel’ – Yasujiro Ozu – a philosopher and great director – no interview footage exists – didn’t marry, work in a factory or go to university – 30 years he made films about the calm lives of married people, factory workers, students.I Was Born, But… (1932, dir: Yasujiro Ozu, Shochiku Eiga)- thought of as a serious director but his first movie was an exquisite comedy about brothers – naturalistic performances, low tripod at the boys’ height.- they go on a hunger strike when they realise that their father, on film, is quite foolish.- Ozu supposedly said of this 1932 silent film – “it was supposed to be a comedy but it came out kind of dark” – extraordinarily honest film about society, kids, fatherhood – balanced masterpiece – innocence is precious.- Realization: the emperor is just an ordinary man. Ozu was a great dethroner of myth – unlike Akiru Kurosawa, he didn’t believe in heroes. Very un-Hollywood. - The boys see that people are merely decent – resignation and disappointment are part of growing up – Ozu encapsulated what it ‘feels’ like to grow up – the sadness of time passing.Tokyo Story (1953, dir: Yasujiro Ozu, Shochiku Eiga)- Setsuko Hara (playing Noriko Hirayama) in famous mid-shot looking towards the camera (POV shot from father’s perspective).- Mother takes ill, daughter fans her mother’s body – keeps looking at her watch – Ozu has his own precise rhythm – camera position was low – tried not to film the floor and film part of the ceiling – three-dimensional appearance – used film like no other director – gave the image a feeling of balance – camera eyeline, almost looking just past the camera.- rather than eyeline match edits, Ozu would work on composition, actors almost looking past each other.- Cameras as windows in unbalanced pictorial worlds.- did everything not to break the frame – if a character stood up, they would remain in frame, unlike the error in ‘I Was Born, But…’- 50mm lens instead of 20 or 30mm so that the face is not bulging.02095500Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, dir: Chantal Akerman, Ministere de la Culture Francais de Belgique)- one of the few films to use Ozu’s camera height.Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947, dir: Yasujiro Ozu, Shochiku Eiga)- compositional emptiness – the void – kettle boils.- Ozu, like the Renaissance artists, was interested in centering the human body – and like Buddhists, decentering the human ego – far and away from the straining emotional Romanticism of Hollywood cinema – they’re the most balanced in movie history – hard to imagine any American director getting away with breaking the Hollywood rules of cinema so completely.Japanese Studio System was director and not producer fed – Toho Studio – Orson Welles called Kurosawa’s studio land, “the biggest train set in the world”. Ozu called the shots in such spaces.Kenji Mizoguchi – attitude: modern – attacked the arrogance of Japan, especially the noble pretensions of the Samurai – focused instead on Japanese women whose lives remain a misery.-635194627500Ozaka Elegy (1936, dir: Kenji Mizoguchi, Daiichi Eiga)- the telephone operator who is forced into prostitution as a Geisha.- Mizoguchi – personal film for him, growing up in poverty – his sister was sold to a Geisha House.- Strong staging – extreme foreground character on left, background action on right.- Beat Orson Welles’ similar staging in Citizen Kane (1941) by five years – juxtaposition of playful childhood outside and bureaucratic severity indoors with the adults.- Mizoguchi decides the camera position after the rehearsal.- her on a bridge comtemplating suicide because she’s been labelled a ‘delinquent’. Chikamatsu monogatari (1954, dir: Kenji Mizoguchi, Daiei Studio)- Oosan is married to a pompous husband – he thinks she is having an affair (accuses her) and thinks she should commit suicide – devastating moment.- In Romantic cinema, it would have been shot close-up and brightly lit – Mizoguchi cuts away from expressed emotion – so we can’t see her distraught face – instead of weeping with her, we feel moral indignation at her plight.- Mizoguchi’s mantra – “observe carefully then reflect…” – b aware of each other’s movements and lines – then, we come up with believable movements and dialogue.- her husband is so horrible that she flees with another man – Mizoguchi is considered a woman’s director.- Mizoguchi never told his actors what was wrong or gave them advice – organic approach – don’t act with your head but with your body.Mildred Pierce (1945, dir: Michael Curtiz)- similar scene to Osaka Elegy contemplation of suicide – because it is Hollywood, it is depicted with a Romanticist lens – her face sculpted beautifully, lighting glamorizing the scene – shallow focus emphasizing eyes.One of the greatest oversights in cinematic history is how under-the-radar Ozu and Mizoguchi remained in Hollywood until decades later with revisionist acclaim.[The Eighth Alternative To Hollywood Mainstream Romantic Cinema]China – in 1931, Japan brutally invaded China – life was already difficult for most Chinese people – ensuing war would see 13 million die – at this moment, Chinese cinema enters the story of film.Romance of the West Chamber (1927, dire: Minwei Li, Hou Yao, Miixin Film Company)- period costumes, and an iris used to point out a suitor coming over the roof.Scenes of City Life (1935, dir: Yuan Muzhi, Diantong Film Company)- Leftist/Realist Cinema – challenged Hollywood fantasy – inventive camera angles and symbolism to show how some men really seduce women. Shanghai – Paris of the East – cosmopolitan.The Goddess (1934, dir: Yonggang Wu)- Ruan Lingyu – Chinese Greta Garbo – single mother at her son’s school’s performance – money is so tight that Ruan has been forced to sell her body to pay for her son’s education – lovely tracking shot shows the whispers of disapproval (“do you know what she does for a living?”) – when the school hears of her prostitution, it shuns her – imprisoned by disapproval.- women in Chinese culture identified with Ruan – wild, real, reflecting society.- Ruan’s movies often set in Shanghai backstreets – but recreated in Shanghai movie sets.- people say that realistic acting began with Marlon Brando in America, but Ruan’s weariness and understated gestures and body language in The Goddess, paint a different picture – decades before Brando.Centre Stage (1992, dir: Stanley Kwan)- biopic on Ruan Lingyu – famous scene from The Goddess repeated.New Women (1935, dir: Chushen Cai)- Ruan plays a real-life actress who committed suicide after being hounded by the press.- prurient Shanghai tabloids trashed Ruan’s name because she was modern and realistic.- in response, Ruan took an overdose, like the character she played, and died in 1935.- the funeral procession was 3 miles long – she died at the age of 25.- New York Times frontpage called it the most spectacular funeral of the century.- today, Ruan doesn’t appear in almost all film encyclopedias.From the alleyways of its 30s films, Chinese cinema became a Disneyland of capitalist consumption – 1940s Chinese promontory for cinematic filmmaking was Hong Kong.1910s-1930s – arguably the most dazzling – maybe the greatest period in the whole story of film. Time of fantasy cinema and its brilliant alternatives – on a high – this sublime tension – one thing missing – silent cinema – we didn’t hear.The Story of Film: An Odyssey [DVD2]The dawn of sound – 1928.America at the end of the 1920s – the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression which would last for 12 years begins – sound cinema was taking off – talking pictures sold 10 million more tickets a year than silent cinema – money in sound. Palace Theatre in NY – wired for sound – whole new way of making movies.Real locations were hard to use now – hammering or digging in the road.Filmmakers forced back into studios renamed ‘sound stages’.Her Dilemma (1931, dir: David Burton)- picture came secondary to sound – flat lighting, poor framing, good sound.Love Me Tonight (1932, dir: Robert Mamoulian, Paramount)- set in Paris – Mamoulian depicts morning awakening of Paris as an emerging symphony of everyday noises.- sound as a unifying sequence – sound as a metaphor for travel – sound as the thing that cinema follows – sound calls, image responds – substituting real sound for metaphorical sound – freed directors from sonic literalness.Sound helped to standardize films – six genres: horror (Der Golem, Frankenstein), gangster (The Public Enemy, Scarface), western (The Iron Horse, My Darling Clementine), comedy (Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby), musicals (The Golddiggers of 1933) and animation (Gertie the Dinosaur, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Plane Crazy)[HORROR]Borrowing the look of German expressionism gave popular Hollywood horror- Frankenstein – adaptation of Shelley’s novel – screenwriters had ‘The Monster’ hardly speak at all despite much dialogue from him in the novel. Karloff’s humane performance is a delight.-1905017716500 Eyes Without a Face (1960, dir: Georges Franju)- surgeon’s doctor has a disfigured face – wears a mask – emotionless, she floats – desperate to see what’s behind the mask – horror is about anticipation – the dread of the unseen.Audition (1999, dir: Takashi Miike)- horrors get closest to our nervous system than any other.[GANGSTER]Prohibition era for alcohol – 1920-33- gangs of entrepreneurial lawbreakers ran the alcohol between cities – gangsters of often Italian or Irish descent – structured their empires like families.0444500 The Public Enemy (1931, dir: William A. Wellman)- two years after sound came in – always on the alert – sound as a catalyst for action.- emerges almost smirking after his buddy dies – no grief here.- moral debate about gangster films.Scarface: The Shame of the Nation 1932, dir: Howard Hawks)- turning gangster genre into Greek tragedy – lover’s embrace of a brother and sister – incestual connotations – ultra-violent, not-so-bright Italian gangster.- the tragic neediness underneath the macho image – the tragedy of crime emasculates the doomed anti-hero – dies under a sign saying ‘The World is Yours’.Scarface (1983, dir: Brian de Palma)- remake – Oliver Stone wrote – trademark crane shots – recent immigrant, now Cuban thug now dealing cocaine – shiny buildings, flashy pop music – uses ‘The World is Yours’ line and turns it into a baroque scene – craning shot points to the irony – the world is not Montana’s – the world is over for Montana.Hollywood made 70 gangster films after 1930 alone – they influence cinema on every continent for decades.Seven Samurai (1954, dir: Akira Kurosawa)- mix of gangsterdom with traditional Japanese Samurai scenes.Once Upon A Time In America (1984, dir: Sergio Leone)- perhaps the best gangster film – Noodles (De Niro) – dismay, fascism, hubris, style, enigma and victimhood of gangsterdom – derived from US films of 1930s.[WESTERN]Most Westerns are set between 1860 and 1900.The Iron Horse (1924, dir: John Ford)- shows much about the genre – landscape not cityscape, fast camera (chase scene), shootouts between white settlers and indigenous Indians.- ‘The Iron Horse’ is a metaphor for the coming of modernity – a big theme in Westerns.My Darling Clementine (1946, dir: John Ford)- many of the best Westerns are about lawmakers in an idealistic age.- Gangster films are about lawbreakers in a cynical age.- Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp – marshall and tombstone to create the law.- time is born for white people – Earp sees it as verging territory.- in gangsterdom – the world is dying not dawning, the world is dark not light.[COMEDY]Twentieth Century (1934, dir: Howard Hawks)- change since comedies of the Silent Era – comedies became feminized.- down-at-the-heel persuades his ex-lover, now a Hollywood star, to return to Broadway.- they hate each other – but the sparring love/hate adds to the comedy.- making a complete idiot out of oneself – the speed of interaction was new in this cinema.011239500 Bringing Up Baby (1938, dir: Howard Hawks)- dawn of the screwball comedy – Hepburn and Grant – speed, mayhem.- pet leopards, dinosaur bones, comedy of errors premise – realism meets surrealism.- feeble man, brassy dame – overlapping dialogue – added to the realism of film acting.- Hawks – nickname, the earl grey fox – plain spoken – slightly gruff – auteur of Studio Age.- Studio director of the purest kind – its patron saint.[MUSICAL]Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, dir: Mervyn LeRoy)- choreographed by one of the most innovative musical directors – soldiers in choreography – theatricality – his bath was a place for deep thinking.- most Hollywood films were from the man’s POV – here was a women’s plight in song.- social commentary married with patterned images, erotic longing and filmic display.[ANIMATION]Gertie the Dinosaur (1914, dir: Winsor McCay)- drawn in pencil, black and white, flickering, comic.The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, dir: Lotte Reiniger and Carl Koch)- German animation – Victorian cut-out techniques – metal hinges on the original cut-out – how she created the movement.Walt Disney – loved Robert Louis Stevenson and Charlie Chaplin.Plane Crazy (1928, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks)- magically changes car into airplane.Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, dirs.: William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen, Walt Disney Productions)- Snow White was the first human Disney animation – filmed an actress and transcribed her shape and movement onto paper – motion capture – pioneering – painstakingly drawn.Disney testified about the McCarthyist anti-Communist witch-hunts.- production process changed – drawings were photocopied onto film.101 Dalmations (1961, dirs.: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton S. Luske, Wolfgang Reitherman, Walt Disney Productions)- cheaper process – lower quality animation.- early Disney had touches of surrealism and were technically innovative – decades later – surrealism and innovation were replaced by more Conservative techniques and messages.1930s Paris - there were standardized films too but the best directors extended cinema in the magical direction of Georges Melies and beyond the realism of the Lumiere Brothers.The Blood of a Poet (1930, dir: Jean Cocteau)- a talking statue tells a young artist in order to get out of a studio, he must go through a mirror, so he does – as if gravity did not exist - influenced by smoking opium, Picasso, impresario Diaghilev.Inception (2010, dir: Christopher Nolan)- film under the spell of Cocteau’s influence – corridor built in a huge barrel and spun around to give the illusion of warped gravity.0000 Zero de Conduite (1933, dir: Jean Vigo)- mass pillow fight in a repressive boarding school – slows the action, plays with sound – a piece played backwards – the rioting pupils were a contention for French politics – film was banned until mid-1940s – fun, chaotic filming.If…. (1968, dir: Lindsay Anderson)- combined Vigo’s radicalism with British class structure.- instead of books, students had machine guns.063500 L’Atalante (1934, dir: Jean Vigo)- non-conformism, wonder – woman who marries a young man and joins him on his barge.- tender, humorous – snowed halfway through shoot causing continuity problems.- Boris Kaufman (cameraman) pointed upwards to avoid continuity issues.- underwater swimming – if you swim underwater, you see the one you love.- apparition of his wife appears gleefully smiling.- turbulent spectatorship response to film – not conventional enough.- Vigo wasn’t interested in plot – he wanted to show the fascinating, uncensored way that this woman was opening up to life.- Vigo had leukaemia and died the same year at the age of 29.Le Quai des Brumes (1938, dir: Marcel Carne)- Forgotten people encountering each other in the bleak morning light.- Poetic realism movement – Jean Gabin has had a bad luck life – new start – travelling.- truck’s headlights light up the gloom, mist and dust make world look weary. – Carne had this film shot with diffusion on the lens – intentional.- Gabin has an expressionless face like Humphrey Bogart – alone except for a friendly dog.- beautiful mood piece of film with its eyes lowered.Les Enfants du Paradis (1945, dir: Marcel Carne)- set around a 19th century Parisian theatre- music to the mime – street scene becomes theatre.- it was enforced escapism at the time of Nazi occupation – political satire had to be subtle.- nostalgic for a carefree, frivolous time in France – escapism where we don’t feel guilty.- ‘The Children of Paradise’ – reference to the ‘cheap seats’ in the gods of the theatre.- Carne – realist, romantic, socialist.Jean Renoir – the great humanist of French cinema.0000 La Regle du Jeu (1939, dir: Jean Renoir, Nouvelles Editions de Films)- Drawing room of aristocrats who know nothing of real life – two old friends discuss love.- Framing, lighting, camera angles are not innovative - observe- “I want to disappear in a hole/I wouldn’t have to figure out what’s good and what’s evil/The terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons”- Political context – WWII – Nazis breathing down the neck of the French – remarkable.- You cannot rely on solid Manichean concepts.- Renoir – son of famous painter, Pierre Auguste Renoir – born in Montmarte.La Grande Illusion (1937, dir: Jean Renoir)- French officer in WWI uniform – and an aristocrat - same dying aristocratic class.- Stroheim treats the prisoners as equal as the officer and the aristocrat in framing.- war films of the 1930s usually stereotype goodies and baddies.- Renoir sees good in all and respects each – regardless of class.- wanted to insert wedges into films – disliked straight story – liked zigzags, tangents.- stops plot for a moment to have each man talk about Jewish generosity – soldiers discuss decency and goodness.- Renoir believes that people create a veil in their lifes that screens them off from the joy of the real world – Renoir films try to let us glimpse this joy.Was not just France creating great non-genre films in the 1930s.Limite (1931, dir: Mario Peixoto)- South America’s – Brazilian - innovative movie – Eisenstein a fan.- Series of dissolves as if we’re walking towards her on a peak – camera lifts and rushes towards her face (handheld) – then camera soars – character just out of prison – the camera articulates her whirlwind emotions at a peak time of tension in her life.The Adventures of a Good Citizen (1937, dir: Stefan and Francizka Themerson)- Polish – non-genre film – men carry mirrored wardrobe into forest.- cinematography plays with light and exposure.Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958, dir: Roman Polanski)- Polish auteur pays homage to Themerson’s avant-garde experimental piece.- Poland had a hard time in the 30s, invaded by its neighbor, Germany.Das Blaue Licht (1932, dir: Leni Riefenstahl)- soft light, mist, mountain landscapes, romantic close-ups of herself.019431000 Triumph of the Will (1935, dir: Leni Riefenstahl)- nationalistic, fascist Nazi propaganda on Adolf Hitler’s and Joseph Goebbels permission.- filming of one of their rallies mythologizing the leader – given scope that Griffiths had.- images geometric, euphoric, bombastic.Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty (1938, dir: Leni Riefenstahl)- groundbreaking shots – filmed liked Greek gods.Tiefland (1954, dir: Leni Riefenstahl)- controversial – allegedly used extras from concentration camps.- glossy film shots, elaborating tracking, moody lighting.The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993, dir: Ray Muller)- images of African people similar to athletes in 1930s – like Greek gods.[SEVEN REASONS WHY HITCHCOCK IS THE GREATEST IMAGE MAKER OF THE 20TH CENTURY]1. Point-of-view shots (character immersion)2. Beyond reality: to prove the unprovable (Jesuit logic)3. Understanding of fear (anticipation, suspense, delaying the inevitable)4. Use of close-ups (dramatic punctuations)5. Subverting exposition conventions - enigmatic (close up ambiguous mid-shot establishing shot)6. Use of silence (haunting suspense – focus on tiny, effect-altering details)7. High angle shots (close ups as punctuation marks, high angle shots as tremolo) Tremolo = a wavering effect in a musical tone – produced either by rapid reiteration of a note, by rapid repeated slight variation in the pitch of a note, or by sounding two notes of slightly different pitches to produce prominent overtones.Hitchcock’s Youth – born in Essex, England– phantom cam revealed to him that a camera could become the eye of a character.- studied at St. Ignatius Catholic College – Jesuits taught him a logic to prove the unprovable – otherworldly logic of his film.019240500 Vertigo (1958, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)- dreamy sex film – camera becomes the eye of James Stewart looking through the windscreen as Stewart tracks a blonde woman in a car with whom he is obsessed with.Saboteur (1942, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)- little cause and effect – no scene shows how he got out – from wet to fairly dry.- intentional Jesuit logic that would continue throughout his career.- image maker – hanging from the Statue of Liberty – murmuring sound of wind – thriller would usually choose big, dramatic music with shouting – no music, whispered dialogue – why no sound? Noise would take away from the tiny stitches tearing apart on his suit jacket – Hitchcock loved dramatic silence – the anticipation of falling emphasized. High drama through understated representation.In ordinary places – different from shock – Sabotage (1936, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)- About a German trying to bomb London – boy on a London bus – package explodes.- fear is different to shock – anticipation, suspense – 15 times told the package is a bomb.- “Don’t Forget The Birds Will Sing At 1:45” – fear comes from knowing the shock is coming.- Hitchcock told us well in advance WHEN to be scared.The 39 Steps (1935, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)- obsessed by hands – extreme close-ups – extended metaphor:- mysterious man with the severed hand knows what the 39 steps are.- the reluctant girl that the protagonist gets handcuffed to as she takes off her stockings.- holding hands in the end.- Hitchcock said that close-ups are crashes of symbols dramatic punctuations in the story.Convention of cinema – establishing shot mid shot close-up. – Hitchcock subverts.06159500 Marnie (1964, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)- Sean Connery and Tipi Hedron on a cruise and he wants sex and she doesn’t.- So he rips off her gown, she freezes – apologises and offers his coat – she stares into the void – cuts to high angle – they kiss – she stares into the distance – shot reverse extreme close up of eyes.Gainsborough Studios (N1 5ED) statue of Hitchcock:- Hitchcock’s physical presence – Buddha-like and masterful.Uncategorisable directors: Cocteau, Vigo.Brilliant, scary talents: Riefenstahl.Obsessive trickster: Hitchcock.Ninotchka (1939, dir: Ernst Lubitsch)- role of pleasure and escape – Ninotchka is a joyless Communist who finds love in Paris.- starts dressing like a princess – intoxicated with love, diamonds, the glittering city like Romantic cinema in the 1920s – fantasy world.The Wizard of Oz (1939, dir: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, King Vidor)- lives in a grey reality – back of an actress wearing sepia clothes on a sepia set.- opens the door to reveal fantastic colour set – Oz – land of apparent pleasure.- Oz is a false dream for Dorothy – “there’s no place like home” – questioning the very idea of escapism - Pleasantville adds a subversive element to the colour/b&w paradigm.Gone With The Wind (1939, dir: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood, Selznick International Pictures, MGM)- rich and spoilt character – in fantasy world – steps into reality – showing scale of trauma.- God’s eye view punishes Scarlet for her denial – content explicitly attacks escapism.- vivid emotional universe – bitter pill of the confederate flag.- the escapism of 1939 under question.Cue: realism and Orson Welles…[1939-1952]The Devastation of War And A New Movie LanguageItaly 1939 – mass rallies (Mussolini selling an idea of order, superiority, purity) – befriends Adolf Hitler – these two ‘mates’ ruin a lot of the world.Italian neorealismRome Open City (1945, dir: Roberto Rossellini)- deals with the trauma of war – filmed in real streets, urgent and tragic.- movies of 1940s had to get this raw because life had become this raw.0444500 Stagecoach (1939, dir: John Ford)- iconic Western made a star of John Wayne – camera rushes into his face – 94th film made by John Ford – Ford hates analysis and didn’t want to say much about his movies.- the twitches of life and the silhouettes of legend – Stagecoach is a legend – a bunch of misfits on a journey – one of them is a saloon girl and prostitute – cold shouldered by the others – she’s befriended by cowboy called Ringo Kid (John Wayne) – many of the shots in the coach itself are a back-projection.- Ford contrasts the claustrophobia of the stagecoach with classically composed pastoral wide-shots – Ringo Kid brave enough to challenge the snobbery against the girl.- John Ford = self-confessed coward – says the quiet man usually has more guts and courage than the big blowhard – the little man does the courageous things.- in this scene, Ringo and the girl start a new life together – in the meritocratic West – Ford stages the scene in deep space – created a new fashion for deep focus in early 1940s – pioneered both deep staging and deep focus.Osaka Elegy (1939) – Mizoguchi was staging things in depth too.Previous trend in cinema – the flattering effect of shallow focus:The Flesh and the Devil (1926, dir: Clarence Brown)- eyes sharp, hair soft, background out of focus.Deep focus uses a wide-angle lens, allowing actors and objects to be really close to the camera and really far away – both can be seen crisply – deep focus emphasized the distance between them – low camera with the ceiling creates a bold compositional line – deep staging and deep focus allowed the audience to know where to look – our eyes do the editing within the frame – jumping around from place to place – Stagecoach’s innovation changed film history.One person who saw Stagecoach 30 times in 1940 was Orson Welles.Follow The Boys (1944, dir: Edward Sutherland and John Rawlins)- Orson Welles as the magician of cinema – the colossus.-635-63500 Citizen Kane (1941, dir: Orson Welles)- debut film – Welles and cinematographer – pushing deep staging as far as it can go – Welles plays a hubristic newspaper magnate – less than a metre from camera – Everett Sloan is so far away – deep focus forces scale and is as expressionistic as the shadows of Caligari.- Citizen Kane challenged the soft and shallow look of Romantic Hollywood cinema.- Why? Because of the talent and instincts of the magician who made it – RKO Studios – staging Shakespeare at the age of 4 – mother died when he was 8, his father when he was 12.- lived in Shanghai, visited the palaces of faded emperors, got to know the story of power entrapped in its ruin – should have been the D.W. Griffith of the sound era – in fact, in a career that lasted nearly 50 years, he didn’t direct a single foot of film for any of the 4 major Hollywood Studios.- Orson Welles’ acclaimed staging of ‘Julius Caesar’ – Norman Lloyd played Sinna the poet – the story of the staging was told inaccurately in a recent film Me and Orson Welles.- Citizen Kane thinks of himself as a Medici or Medieval Emperor – Kane is full of the lust for power – his world is massive but empty – maybe the last time he felt anything real was as a boy playing in the snow on a Rosebud sledge – a scene in deep staging and deep focus.- Citizen Kane denounced the grandeur, egomania and maybe even the cinematic hubris that made Cabiria’s tracking shots (1914) and Intolerance’s epic scale (1916) and The General’s outlandish production values (1936). Keaton’s film was famously expensive.- Shakespeare’s, the Medicis, the Moguls, the Ottomans were not the only source of Welles’ visual and human ideas – there was the fact of his own body and voice – both were enormous, mature, unfeasible – could never play a young person or a teenager or an ordinary guy or a twentieth century everyman – the space in his films were gigantic because his persona was gigantic – sound was gigantic – overlapping dialogue like Howard Hawks’ comedies to fill a whole film.Me and Orson Welles (2008, dir: Richard Linklater)- “Sinna is Shakespeare’s indictment of the intelligentsia, he is a lofty Byronic figure”.- Norman Lloyd didn’t have this argument with Orson. Chimes at Midnight (1965, dir: Orson Welles)- great force in his films – battering ram – here he plays Shakespeare’s Falstaff – a buffoon shot in deep space – he was interested in Italian Renaissance painting – his attraction to powerful people: kings, tycoons, inventors – is like Shakespeare’s.- Like Shakespeare – he looked to the past and times before democracy and liberalism.The Maltese Falcon (1941, dir: John Huston)- the visual ideas of Toland and Welles of deep focus and deep space excited filmmakers around the world – everything in focus.The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, dir: William Wyler)- scene in a bar – the older man asks the younger to end his romance with his daughter.- he agrees to do so and goes to call her in a phonebox – camera stays far away – a deep focus of him at the phonebox in the distance whilst the foreground remains the father’s back to the audience – the context of the bar in full flow is all in deep focus.- war veteran who has lost his hands plays the piano – tiny booth in extreme background still in shot – the crucial action has been sucked away by a black hole – we are forced to imagine the conversation – its enigmatic ambiguity leads to suspense, anticipation and intrigue – just as, in real life, we can’t always see everything we want to see.Code Unknown (2000, dir: Michael Haneke)- deep space used to show a woman on a train getting away from harassment.Satantango (1994, dir: Bela Tarr)- uses deep space to move our eyes from foreground to background to foreground.- develops tension as if the world were in a forcefield where the people are held.How To Marry a Millionaire (1953, dir: Jean Negulesco)- deep staging would become less fashionable again in Hollywood’s 50s – the new colour widescreen film stocks were not sensitive enough to suck in all that information at once – the space is shallow and actors are hung across it like a washing line.Un Homme et une Femme (1966, dir: Claude Lelouch)- shallow focus – long lens – floated in her own visual world like Garbo.Heat (1995, dir: Michael Mann)- influenced by pop videos – long lens – focus so shallow that the lights behind Pacino in this shootout become dreamy blobs.Italy was at the centre of the movie world in the 1940s – Centro Sperimentale – film school.Cinecitta – Italian epics and comedies – used as an army barracks in WWII.Film lights were limited – filmmakers took to the streets – before the war, central Rome looks opulent – by 1945, it was in ruins – the world around them had changed, the city had changed, the film industry had changed.1945-52 – the Italian language of film changed – known as ‘rubble movies’ – Rome Open City – portrait of the city struggling to resist Nazism – contrast of glamour and anti-glamour – Rossellini wanted his images plain and unadorned – rather than Wellesian wide angle lens, or long lenses – DP loosened the head of the tripod to give greater movement – lightbulbs were bare in Italian neorealism.Raging Bull (1980, dir: Martin Scorsese)- Rossellini influenced Scorsese’s use of bare lightbulbs.Italian neorealist films introduced cinema to the toilet – Rossellini said that if he made a beautiful shot, he would cut it out.Reduction of plot – de-dramatization. Echoes of neorealism. Revelatory real time – ordinary details mattered. Hitchcock cut out the ‘boring’ bits, neorealist cinema IS the boring bits, intentionally – REAL life, in all its mundane glory.011176000 The Bicycle Thieves (1948, dir: Vittorio de Sica)- unemployed man has his bike stolen – him and his son look all over Rome for it – worn out and afraid to not even get basic work, he himself steals a bike – stark and harsh lighting, camera well back from the theft, as if not to intrude.- cut to: his son on the realization that his father has stolen the bike – conventional empathy employed – not afraid to use conformist techniques alongside subversive elements.- earlier scene – unusual – boy nearly gets hit by a car – twice – in Hollywood film, the Dad would have seen this, grabbed the boy and scolded him or comforted him and realized how much he loves him – such moments in Italian neorealism happen without cause and effect – the father has ignored the whole scene and the son catches up to him.- pre-war stories were chains of cause and effect – in Italian neorealism, the chain was sometimes broken – turned the realist dissidence of 20s cinema into a national film movement in the 40s, then swept around the world.Hollywood 40s started to get less glossy – Pegg Entwhistle jumped to her death from the ‘H’ of the Hollywood sign – after a long day in the sunshine of LA, night-time falls, only a few streetlights, really dark – hardly anyone walks, so those that do can hear their own footsteps – the eucalyptus and orange blossom smells almost sickly sweet – grills from windows cast shadows like prisons – throughout WWII, Hollywood kept making films like Pin Up Girl (1944, dir: H. Bruce Humberstone) – newsreels were an antithesis – rows of dead bodies in open ground burial spaces – paradise got a bit lost – 1941-59 – more than 350 dark films made in Hollywood:[FILM NOIR]0-190500 Double Indemnity (1944, dir: Billy Wilder)- actress and the wall are both in focus – deep focus/staging like films by Mizoguchi, Welles, Ford – situation: insurance man coming out of the door has fallen for the woman behind the door – she convinces him to help kill her husband to share the insurance payout – they do so – man in dark suit begins to suspect that the woman behind the door is the murderess – goes to the man’s apartment to tell him his hunch – if the boss saw the wife there, it would confirm his hunch and implicate the employee – she stays hid behind the door.- Billy Wilder was an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis in 1933 – in bright Santa Monica, his films were thematically dark – like many émigrés who made great film noir: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz – loved the pretentiousness of US but hated its worship of money – wife in Double Indemnity lusts for money, man lusts for her and because he is weak, lusts for money too.- war, city of LA, flawed characters, social and legal collapse in mid 40s US society – created noir – but so did: lattice of shadows of German expressionism (The Testament of Dr Mabuse – Lang 1933) – light casts a grid of shadows with the handrail, a lattice too.- Double Indemnity was co-written by Raymond Chandler (pulp fiction writer) – Dashiel Hammett and Chandler created the character types in their noirist fiction.Robert Towne wrote the film Chinatown – discusses film noir – characters are fated – flaw of some kind – moths and flames – Walter in Double Indemnity can’t resist a pretty anklet (foot fetishist) – Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past – wants to be with a decent girl but can’t stay out of the way of a femme fatale, even when he wants to disentangle himself, he can’t avoid it – Chinatown – flaws drives Gittes to his fate even if they try to avoid it – not just a dark world – men who at some deep, unconscious level seek out their fate even if they try to avoid it.Paul Schrader wrote the film Taxi Driver and Raging Bull – the flawed hero – post-war surge from social dislocation – women were expected to give up their WWII jobs for the men – men who fought in the war didn’t have any money – frustration – Freudian hero (realistic compared to 30s and 40s)0136207500The Big Sleep (1946, dir: Howard Hawks)- written by Dashiel Hammett – Humphrey Bogart played Philip Marlowe – film crackled with snappy dialogue – feature of noir – most influential noir since Double Indemnity – complex plot, fashion. - Rio Bravo (1959, dir: Howard Hawks) - Angie Dickinson gets the best lines – feminist writer? - Bracket also co-wrote Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) – style of Hollywood Romance. Out of the Past (1947, dir: Jacques Tourneur)- women of film noir haunt the film – female protagonist takes her time, moves like velvet – knows that the man is weak – meets his gaze, turns it to her advantage – usually in noir, it is an immoral advantage – only 1 of 350 noirs was directed by a woman:Ida Lupino – spotlighting, subjective camera – The Hitch-Hiker (1953)- directing US film at this stage had become a boys’ club.Edward G. Robinson starred in noirs in 40s/50s and gangster films in 30s – the intertextual connection added layers to spectatorship.The pessimism of noir owed much to the Poetic Realist films of France (Les Quai de Brumes).La Chienne (1931, dir: Jean Renoir)- France 30s film had influenced US 40s films – a man falls in love with a hard-hearted young woman – remade as Scarlet Street by Fritz Lang – man pleading for the womans’ love.Gun Crazy (1950, dir: Joseph H. Lewis)- the single take drive-through robbery – Bart and Laurie a pre-cursor to Bonnie and Clyde – performers free rein to improvise – filming a stick-up done in 3 hours – unbroken shot covered 2 miles of ground.Influence of noir, whilst officially depleting in 1958, had a renaissance in 1982, 1997 and 2008:LA Confidential (1997, dir: Curtis Hanson)- Kim Basinger as Veronica Lake lookalike – femme fatale.Blade Runner (1982, dir: Ridley Scott)- Sean Young walks through shadows in a pool of light – classic noir femme fatale – venetian shadows abound.The Dark Knight (2008, dir: Christopher Nolan) – city in feted and morally dark (Gotham).Shiva (2008, dir: Ram Gopal Varma) – Mumbai noir – shadows and low camera angles.The influence of film noir has travelled the world. Did noir smash the bauble of Romantic cinema – Titanic’s 1997 flick suggests not.The first generation of directors mostly died in 1940s.0254000 McCarthy era – movies caught in regressive Communist witch-hunting times – The House of un-American Activities – the biggest trauma in American Cinema.- hearings in 1947 – Studios agreeing to sack employees that would not co-operate with authority-led interrogations regarding any Communist sympathies – government feared ‘subversive’ Communist tendencies infiltrated the ideological representations of US cinema via scriptwriting, direction, producing and acting.- most principled filmmakers refused to testify against Leftists – others named names – many artists were blacklisted – those affected included Charlie Chaplin, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson, Abraham Polonski, Delores Del Rio.Elia Kazan testified against the Leftists – lost his vindication for lack of contrition.Fascinating who clapped and didn’t clap the Oscar Lifetime Achievement Award.An American In Paris (1951, dir: Vincente Minnelli)- MGM – Gene Kelly chance to show Studio still had joy and beauty – influenced by The Red Shoes (1948, dirs.: Powell and Pressburger) – Gene Kelly was a Leftist who abhorred the anti-Communist witch-hunts.Singin’ in the Rain (1952, dir: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)- Flying Down To Rio 1933 – Donen found dance and sexuality of Astaire/Rogers musicals entrancing – the joy of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ is a beautiful metaphor for inverting conflict and finding joy whatever the context – the camera is just the pencil to work with.Indiscreet (1958, dir: Stanley Donen)- change of Donen’s work echoes the change in Hollywood itself – Grant/Bergman – innovative technique to challenge censorship – Hays’ Code – a couple could not be in bed together – hence, split-screen, two separate beds, on the phone, flirting with each other.Two For The Road (1967, dir: Stanley Donen)- Melancholia was entering Hollywood cinema – Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney – contrast between first and last road trips together – similar to the Before Trilogy.Donen had made 21 films by the age of 43.Mainstream Hollywood cinema grew up in 40s and 50s – war and Italian neorealism – life in US cinema was no longer a bowl of cherries – Welles, film noir had given US film new style and punch.19051905000 A Matter of Life and Death (1946, dirs.: Powell and Pressburger)- Britain in 40s and 50s – RAF bomber pilot’s plane has been hit and on fire – no parachute about to die – last words to American woman on air controlbase – plunged into searing drama, shallow focus, romantic dialogue, rich colour, lighting that hides tears – conversation becomes profound – air man doesn’t die but gets brain damage – fell in love with woman on phone – goes into dream world on brink of death – honesty of trauma of war juxtaposed with Romantic cinema.Post Haste (1933, dir: Frank Cadman)- Postman so devoted to his duty – even after he’s tied up, he still delivers his letter.- Poetic style – British auteur Terence Davies reveres Jennings – Listen To Britain (1942, dir: Humphrey Jennings) – quintessential Britishness – sharing landscape, history and culture – collective unconsciousness – legacy of feeling – the thing that gets people through trauma – forcefield between shots – the vulnerability of heads through associative imagery (Charles I, women without hats, soldier uniforms and helmets).The Third Man (1949, dir: Carol Reed)- Set in Vienna after WWII – a city split between the victors – film’s Catholic writer, Graham Greene – Harry Lime played by Orson Welles – making money selling penicillin which is supposed to help children – director Carol Reed discusses French Poetic Realist films – the seriousness of this situation, the pessimism – many shots off the horizontal axis to show the moral imbalance – The True Glory (1946, dir: Carol Reed) – Oscar-winning war-time documentary – cinema engaging with reality – Harry Lime’s first reveal – expressionist bravura – ending: Harry Lime’s decent, disappointed friend Holly Martins stands to the left of the image waiting for Anna (old girlfriend) – walks from extreme distance (reference to deep staging of Welles) – doesn’t cut the shot or dissolve the walk as Scorsese would later do in Taxi Driver – Reed plays an ode to Italian neorealism – lets Anna walk the whole way – de-dramatized time. Writer envisioned a happy ending – Reed like Polanski (Chinatown) rejected optimism – she walks straight past him – compendium of 40s cinema – moral seriousness of 40s/50s cinema.The dawn of Global Cinema…[1953-1957]The Swollen Story: World Cinema Bursting At The SeamsRebel Without A Cause (1955, dir: Nicholas Ray)- 50s, widescreen, colour – young American actor, James Dean – kicks and punches desk.- emotions bursting at the seams – passionate theme.To get to the heart of these emotional times – you need to go to Egypt.More to kick out against – era of the melodrama.0-63500 Cairo Station (1958, dir: Youssef Chahine)- wrote, directed and starred in – the first Great Arab film.- sweaty intensity – filmed alone with his erotic imagination looking at a pin-up picture.- born boundary pusher – captured tension of times, sexual repression and frustration thanks to the taboos of religion.- crippled newspaper seller obsessed by Hind Rostam, a voluptuous cold-drinks seller – films himself staring at her from the outside looking in.- he listens as she has sex with another man – train on the rails, dolly/cut/dolly/cut/track out – symbol of emotional strain – thought so cinematically.- about social justice – where did Chahine get the balls to be so innovative.Story of Indian film is as vast as the current – know more about devastation in the 50s – de-colonialisation, partition, famine, traumatized by caste system.- 1950s – India seemed made for cinema – colours seemed to have the hand of production designer, its lumosity has the feel of a Studio art light.Paper Flowers (1959, dir: Guru Dutt)- naturalistic spotlight beam, camera tracks around it towards a man (film’s director), coutnry’s Orson Welles – he plays a director who looks at a woman who wants to be cast in the film – she is light from below, no hairlight – the opposite of Hollywood lighting.India’s streets look like a movie director has designed the action.The country is photogenic like Marilyn Monroe is photogenic.The first movies made by Indians were about the lives of Saints.Mythologicals like Raja Harishchandra (1913, dir: Dhundiraj Govind Phalke)- superimpositions like early Melies – someone lit on fire, someone’s head blown off by black smoke.1930s – India’s film industry wired for sound – drew on musical theatre traditions in the country – result: only national cinema where musical interludes became the norm and the seeds of Bollywood were sown – colour, display, theatricality – like Hollywood – cinema as bauble.Socials/reforming films challenging the caste system, materialism and the disparity between rich and poor – emerged in the 1930s – pre-dates Italian neorealism:Sant Tukaram (1936, dir: Vishnupant Govind Damle)Tidal wave of post-WWII realism swept across the world in the late 40s and early 50s – greatest heights in Calcutta – Satyajit Ray - Hollywood and Bollywood were usually set in a fantasy everywhereland - Ray wanted to make his films about a very specific place – 30 minutes from Calcutta to a small Bengali village, Boram:0381000 Pather Panchali (1955, dir: Satyajit Ray)- cinematography had texture, lustre, tenderness – opening our eyes to India for the first time – portrait of the life of Opu – son of a priest and relationship with sister, mother and aunt – Aunt was the opposite of the smooth faces of glossy cinema – new – living in a brothel and needed a dose of morphine everyday to keep her going – real village – movie dispelled ignorance about village life – domesticated life – Ray was a modernist – believed in Prime Minister’s plan to industrialise India – idea of the train treated as a great wonder of hope – plumes of grass – camera swishes with excitement – Opu runs with excitement.No place for artificiality in Pather Panchali – anti-artifice – played in NYC for 6 months.The Opu Trilogy often referred to the best Asian films ever made.Devi (1960, dir: Satyajit Ray)- 14 year old lead actress – dreams that she is a goddess – transition of candlelight – double exposure – stress on eyes – frequent close-ups – haunting faces – helplessness of the marriage – she is just a young village girl confused not finished growing up yet – victim of the repressive mindset of orthodoxy.Mother India (1957, dir: Mehbaab Khan)- aspirational dreams vs. discovery – hard work, sweat, mud – independent workers laboring to be modern and socialist – combination of romance and struggles – parallels made to Gone With The Wind – peasants stand on the map of India – echoes everything from Hollywood to Soviet propaganda – a state of the nation film.China – unique social pressures in 1950s – Golden Age in 30s – Mao created Communist Statist Control:Two State Sisters (1964, dir: Xie Jin)- recognize this filmmaking – first sister is a revolutionary, second sister seeks fame and fortune – Jin’s camera tilts down into the world of the story (indigenous village) – craning down – roof of the stage seems to rise – from God’s eye view to a peasant’s – very melodrama, very 50s – Mao’s cultural revolution devastated Jin’s career – both of his parents killed themselves – film was accused of ‘cinematic Confucianism’ – he was given a job of cleaning the toilets of the movie Studio – once, a leading director – no movie lives, not even Roman Polanski’s, have such amplitude.Japan recovering from its disastrous wartime experiences – war ended in 1946.1950s – second Japanese Golden Age – central to this = Akira Kurosawa:Mizoguchi and Kurosawa both long take directors.M used long lenses for a close up, so the camera is far away and can move freely, so we don’t need to pay attention to the camera position when we act.Ikiru (1952, dir: Akira Kurosawa)- bureaucrat with cancer –weight of world on shoulders – grew up under feudal emperor – told to keep his head down, passive and trudge along – hit by juggernaut of modern life – Japan lost the war – had to start thinking for himself – breadth of life, where does he fit in?Kurosawa’s films are about the emerging of the individual- how someone distinguishes themselves from others without being selfish.- all of the Kurosawa heroes keep at it – perseverance, resilience – however mundane.Stray Dogs (1949, dir: Akira Kurosawa)- against all odds – tries relentlessly.Seven Samurai (1954, dir: Akira Kurosawa)- a group of swordsmen defend a village – end of an epic battle in a muddy rainstorm – one thinks it is still winnable – walks around in a circle, throws sword away, he’s been shot – the era of the sword is over, the era of the gun has begun – beginning of a new era – interested in atmospheric effects, the poetic rush of imagery and enduring.0-317500Throne of Blood (1957, dir: Akira Kurosawa)- Shakespeare adaptations – filming of Lady Macbeth character like a ghost gliding through a room, her kimono squeaking fading into the black of a darkened room and back out again.- like the trees have fingers in the wind – warriors advancing in a nightmare vision – nature running wild and chaotic.- death of Macbeth – armies in the mist firing arrows mercilessly – The Godfather (1972 dir: Francis Coppola) execution scene (also see: Bonnie and Clyde and Training Day) owe much to ‘Throne of Blood’s denouement – multiple gunshots.Kurosawa’s work became a style book for cinema – one-man film school – The Magnificent Seven was a US adaptation of Seven Samurai – widescreen, colour.Latin American cinema (Limite)Brazilian film - Rio 40 Degrees (1955, dir: Nelson Pereira dos Santos)- boy who sells nuts and papers – camera tracks back – influenced by neorealism.- filmed in slum locations – with advanced visual techniques.- innovative shift between teenage boys and adults – flowing from one conversation to another in a continuous – realism and energy of film.Early Mexican film is more advanced – intertwined with life since 1910sDona Barbara (1943, dir: Fernando de Fuentes)- virtually invented Mexican national cinema with its themes of rich and poor.- brilliantly controlled melodrama – character about to be raped – men photographed against the sky – hardened by the assault.The Wild Bunch (1969, dir: Sam Peckinpah)- actor who influenced Mexican cinema also directed La Perla – Wellesian lighting techniques – life as doomed, fated to fail – combination of light/dark – landscape/Mexican film noir.Los Olvidados (1950, dir: Luis Bunuel)- walked around slums of Mexico CIty for a month to ascertain the reality of lifes of the young and poor – filmed street gangs attacking disabled people in the scorching heat – high contrast film stocks – realism wasn’t enough for Bunuel – surrealist meat metaphors.‘Land of the Free’ – idealized America – Eisenhower became President – Christian middle-class Conservatism was the agenda.05969000All That Heaven Allows (1955, dir: Douglas Sirk)- Eisenhower America at its most lush – far more innovative and subversive than it seems – Carrie Scott is widowed – White society expects her to settle down to charity work – starts affair with Rock Hudson, her younger gardener – shunned by her friends – director Douglas Sirk, who fled the Nazis exposed the conformity and viciousness of the 50s American Dream – society cannot cope with Carrie’s continuing sexual desire – hoping that the TV will distract her from the gardener – imprisoned by its propaganda – her reflection, boxed in metaphorically and psychologically.Every genre was swelling with Freudian feeling.06096000Johnny Guitar (1954, dir: Nicholas Ray)- Joan Crawford – strides into a room of outlaws – highly decorated saloon – waiting for the railroad to bring customers – the straight-laced locals hate this and form a lynch mob – Emma, dressed in black, spitting fascist hatred – ‘they’ll push us out’ (people from the East – modern people) she declares, fear-mongering and rabble-rousing – Ray used Emma as an example of the ‘House of un-American Activities’ committee – thus adding to the film’s subversion and political anger – Joan Crawford’s body language makes her the strongest man in the film – hated for her sexual deviance.Francois Truffaut said anyone who rejects it should never go to see movies again.Fireworks (1947, dir: Kenneth Anger)- pressure cooker of sex – Anger’s character is stripped and beaten by sailors – gory shot about pain and sex – poetic underground cinema.Scorpio Rising (1964, dir: Kenneth Anger)- combined masculine costume, bodily close-ups, low level lighting and fetishism and rock’n roll songs – highly innovative – technique borrowed by Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets and David Lynch in Blue made in New York – challenging the Conservative vision of Eisenhower.Marty (1953, dir: Delbert Mann)- phones a girl, asks her out but his confidence is low – he has had many knockbacks from women.0127000One of the great method films – On The Waterfront (1954, dir: Elia Kazan)- fury, long suppressed, comes to a head at the film’s climax/denouement – confronts the union bosses – connected with suppressed fury in his personal life (application of method) – tenderly pushes gun away from friend (brotherly love doesn’t lead to rage but disappointment).Red River (1949, dir: Howard Hawks)- Montgomery Clift fighting back against John Wayne – challenged concepts of masculinity.James Dean – the modern man – son of a rich family in Rebel Without A Cause – attacks father – puts the boot into good taste – Dean died aged 24.Young, angry, East Coast, inarticulate men – tensions between parents and kids.Welles, Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks – the 4 master directors:Touch of Evil (1958, dir: Orson Welles)- Welles as Hank Quinlan – set in Venice, California – corrupt law man.- Hank is desperately lonely and obsessed by a woman – Marlene Dietrich.0571500The Searchers (1956, dir: John Ford)- also about a lonely man obsessed by a woman – his niece who has been abducted – holds her up to the sky, not sure whether to hug or harm her – abductors were native Americans – racist overtones.Vertigo (1958, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)- Scotty is obsessed with an apparently dead woman – follows a lookalike, his eyes burning blue – Hitchcock films his POV, putting us in his driving seat – Scotty slips into an erotic dream-state – in an era where families were the social norm, none of these men are in them.Rio Bravo (1959, dir: Howard Hawks)- sheriff who has assembled this monthly posse who joke, chill and sing.- conformity, sexual repression etc. – warm colours – closest that mature American cinema got to show an ordinary family.Britain in the 50s – tensions about sex and society were more hidden – David Lean (still waters run deep – Empire in decline) – Great Expecations (1946) – human scale of the nation of England (Dickens adaptation) – Pip from a humble background encounters a haughty class stopped in time – “your clock has stopped miss” – gothic and erotic storytelling Lean’s films about landscape and how it dwarves people – Lawrence of Arabia (1962)- Lawrence imagines going to the desert – hints at Lawrence’s attraction (colonial dream of elsewhere) was also sexual – rising of the Arabian sun.O Dreamland (1953, dir: Lindsay Anderson)- held Lean in contempt – bookish, caustic director – believed people were selfish.- Anderson was a Leftist – Dreamland’s irony – working classes as noble types in Battleship Potemkin – poor, scared by plight, pity, disappointment and some contempt – conflicted and class-ridden, just like Britain itself in the 50s.France - ...And God Created Woman (1956, dir: Roger Vadim)- beauty that made box-office gold, with unambiguous gawking men objectifying her.- Bardot’s hair unkempt – refused to dress like a posh, Parisian woman – brought more money to the French economy – and motorcar manufacturer – Renault – sex was coming out in the open.1950s = pressure cooker decade of cinema – Western world had sex and power on its mind.- swollen with the desires of the times – fraying at the seams – something had to give…The Story of Film: An Odyssey [DVD3][1957-1964]Modern Filmmaking in Western EuropeIf the mid-1950s were a tense time, the late 1950s and early 60s, life got even more so – Berlin Wall, nuclear nightmare, brimming breakout of sexual expression, movies were no longer the bright, new artform – but filmmakers planned a revolution.Four visionary European directors - Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, Federico Fellini – led the way in making cinema more personal.Stockholm in the 1950s, the curtain went up – cinema was like theatre for Bergman.Lars Von Trier on Ingmar Bergman: seen all of his films, Through a Glass Darkly is my favourite (influenced Antichrist). Bergman has had a great influence on me, he is very good with words, his last film was Saraband. At a Swedish museum, there is a drawing Bergman did as a boy – captions say that his dad is impossibly authoritative. Bergman shows himself surrounded by books. Draws a cinema projection. In his teens, Bergman claims to have been locked into a small building (a hospital mortuary) – he saw the dead body of a beautiful young woman, he almost touched her. Touch and death are two great themes in his work.Summer With Monika (1953, Ingmar Bergman)- one of the most sensuous films of its time – allowed actress Harriet Anderson to look straight into the camera. - Struck Godard and French New Wave filmmakers was the freshness that he had filmed the story and the daring breaking of the fourth wall (Harriet looking into the character) – innovative.952518669000The Seventh Seal (1957, dir: Ingmar Bergman)- evolution in Bergman’s thinking – “is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one’s senses? Why does he hide in a cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles? How can we believe in the faithful when we lack faith?” – during the Middle Ages, when the Black Death is rampant, a knight who has returned from the Crusades agonises about mortality – it is as if the knight has seen Summer With Monika and has realized that the senses are amongst the best things to have and so uses them to question God.016573500Winter Light (1963, dir: Ingmar Bergman)- Bergman seems to have concluded that God is finally dead – central figure is, like his father was, a clergyman – “I put my faith in an improbable image of a fatherly god, one who loved mankind of course, but me most of all. Do you see, Jonas, what a monstrous mistake I made? An ignorant, spoiled and anxious wretch makes a rotten clergyman.”- Death would spread through Bergman’s cinema like a cancer – first, God died, then people - autobiographical elements – boldly personal – Bergman’s wife Ellen had skin eczema – when they argued, he would sometimes complain about her eczema – clergyman and school teacher who is in love with him – “I am fed up with your short-sightedness, your clumsy hands, your anxiousness, your timid ways in bed. You force me to occupy myself with your physical condition. Your poor digestion, your rash, your periods, your frostbitten cheek.” – this is Bergman confessing his guilt in how he treated his wife – he is showing how people humiliate each other.Persona (1966, dir: Ingmar Bergman)- would show that he would not just use film as a confessional, he would use it as a self-aware medium, just as modern artists had made paintings self-aware – towards the end of Persona, the film breaks down and seems to release a series of images which had been oppressing – cryptic flashes of images – it was as if the film strip had been a pure surface of consciousness, through which the farcical, violent and disturbing sub-conscious needed to erupt.Film didn’t only tell the story, it was the story - the big theme in the story of innovative cinema all these years.By the 1970s, Bergman had been in films for 30 years – he continued to refine his ideas – for decades, he had been filming beautiful faces and seeing pain in them, ugliness, Sweden, life in general, loneliness, mortality, despair – faces were symbols for Bergman – on stage or projected as if by Magic Lantern – he wrote each of his films in a notebook – blank ones kept by the Swedish Film Institute as a symbol of his unmade films.Where Bergman’s central metaphor was the theatre, the second outstanding art film director of the time, Robert Bresson, thought about human life as a prison from which we must break out – Bresson lived in Paris – between 1950 and 1961, he made four films about imprisonment:04381500Pickpocket (1959, dir: Robert Bresson)- scene where the pickpocket goes into the Guardes de Lyons in Paris to steal – not exactly the searing colourful melodrama of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows – lens is 50mm, cinematography is black & white, the lighting is flat, costume/clothing are ordinary, the protagonist’s face is expressionless – the composition is not unusual in any way – welcome to the world of Robert Bresson – he wrote, “one does not create by adding but by taking away” – and he follows this lot to the letter – everything expressive is taken away in this pickpocket scene where the thief swaps a ladies handbag at the front of the queue for a newspaper without her noticing – he has multiple thrifters working as a team in on the act – like Ozu, his films are expressive of no inner chaos, or fire, no actors, no parts, no staging – stardom was nowhere in his work – a rejection of the ‘bauble’. - the pickpocket is blank like the donkey in Bresson’s Balthazar – stripping out material things like 60 years of cinema’s excess style – Bresson wanted a hint of what he called ‘the invisible hand’ – directing what happens, the hand of God.- end of Pickpocket, the thief is imprisoned for his crimes, his girlfriend arrives – he has finally found grace – “something lit up her face” – he kisses her forehead through the bars, she holds his hands through them – this is where the prison metaphor of Bresson’s reaches its full richness – people are imprisoned in their own bodies – they have to escape from them to apprehend the divine.-635-4762500Au hazard Balthazar (1966, dir: Robert Bresson)- unsettling - about a donkey that has been treated cruelly throughout his life – Bresson films the donkey in close-up, simple framing – the donkey has no expression – we can’t read its feelings.Bresson’s films are about the route to God – cinema on a path to grace – Christian – “I saw approaching a man whose eyes caught something behind me which I did not see. At once, they light up. The same moment I saw the man, I perceived the young woman and child towards whom, he now began running. That happy face of his struck me so. Indeed, I would not have noticed it.” – this is the root of Bresson – he tries to show the invisible, the ineffable, the transcendent.Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese were clearly influenced by Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) for Taxi Driver (1976) – monocular film – same character in every single scene – never allowing the audience to be privy to any other reality, any intercutting – the only world revealed is through the protagonist – if he doesn’t see it, you don’t see it – by interior monologue, you can make them empathise with someone that they would not think is worthy of empathy – interesting place as a creator.Kryczstof Kieslowski saw Bresson’s films, which shaped Dekalog: The Ten Commandments.Scottish director, Lynne Ramsay was also influenced by Bresson with Ratcatcher (1999) – hauntingly attached to objects in the physical world like Bresson. Jacques Tati was the third great unclassifiable director of the 60s – Monsieur Hulot was a response to Charlie Chaplin – leaned forward and wore his trousers too short whilst Chaplin’s were too long and he leaned back. Mr Hulot’s Holiday (1953) compared to City Lights (1931)- intentional aesthetic opposites.Tati knew a hairdresser called La Louet – a happly bungler, a bull in a china shop, a holy fool – like Bresson and Ozu, Tati hated strong storytelling – very little incidents, details. Story is the attempt to quantify the meanderings of life into a meaningful arc. This can sometimes be synthetic and forced, when films that are more happenstance, inconsequential and void of reason are more applicable to the notion of realism. Artifice versus authenticity.0317500Mon Oncle (1958, dir: Jacques Tati)- shows Tati’s and Hulot’s feelings about modern life – Hulot lives in an old-fashioned, particularly French part of town, onions round the door, charcuterie shops – Tati films the old world in warmth and sunlight – Hulot’s nephew lives in a brand spanking new, modernist house in another bit of town – Tati films this in flat light – the new world is pretentious (fish fountain for guests) – Tati found the conflict between modernity and traditionalism delicious, hilarious – made cinema laugh at modernity – like Bresson, he used incredible vigour – never used close-up – wanted to show the whole picture of society – its comedy of manners – sometimes, key details appeared in a tiny part of the frame – still frame – Tati appear at various places around a house.Federico Fellini’s cinema was a circus – he loved its colour, its constructed world, larger than life. He had many muses – the noise gives him inspiration.Fellini’s Casanova (1976, dir: Federico Fellini)- gargantuan props.0-190500The Nights of Cabiria (1957, dir: Federico Fellini)- shows how modern Fellini was – his wife Juliette Marcina plays a prostitute – she lives by night – second half of the film, Fellini’s greatness becomes apparent – Marcina goes to a Catholic shrine – she asks for the Virgin Mary’s grace – nothing happens – in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, God was missing, in The Nights of Cabiria, God is long gone and kitsch is all that remains – after this spiritual disappointment, Marcina meets a man – takes her to a clifftop – there, Fellini elevates his film once more – the crisp, bright Roman light becomes Scandinavian like an early movie by Victor Sjostrom – beads of sweat appear on the man’s head – does he want to push her off? – he takes her money and runs – Marcina is back on the road and alone again – mascara runs down her cheek – out of nowhere, teenage musicians appear – she’s smiling slightly – random occurrence, or has she retreated into fantasy in order to survival (madness as a last resort) – she finds refuge in kitsch.8? (1963, dir: Federico Fellini)- Marcello Mastroianni plays a director wanting to make a film – he made the film’s siren look like she was flying through framing, illusion and movement – no script, just improvisation – “who do you love? Claudia, who are you with? Who do you care for? / You / You arrived just in time, you know – fantasies, memories, imagined conversations – influenced by stream-of-consciousness writing of James Joyce and also the impressionist films of Abel Gance.Cronenberg, Scorsese, Kusturica and Lynch all influenced by Fellini.Stardust Memories (1980, dir: Woody Allen)- alludes to Fellini’s 8? - main character seems to have stepped out of his own life and is looking at it like there’s a pane of glass between him and it – like it’s a party to which he hasn’t been invited.Not even Melies and Cocteau could wave a magic wand like Fellini – he tuned radio frequencies into the notions of myth, sex, memory and rapture – they did so much to open up the form of cinema.[FRENCH NEW WAVE}French up-ended cinema with the New Wave (the Nouvelle Vague) – fueled up on cinema, sat in cafés mixing the passions for cinema with philosophies of existentialism – movies were becoming more of an intellectual enterprise – the rise of the film buff – the average film director is more intellectual and self-aware.0-127000Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, dir: Agnes Varda)- first French New Wave filmmaker (Varda) – perfectly captures the spirit of the New Wave - the sense of drifting through modern day cities – starts in black and white and colour – a woman is told by a tarot reader that she has cancer – woman is shocked and heads out onto the streets and wanders for 2 hours awaiting her test results – POV shots, real streets, real people - gets lost in her own thoughts – goes to the park – less weighed down by her apparent diagnosis, almost care-free – meets a man – get lost in each other’s worlds – excellent POV shot from car driving away – the woman starts to feel something like joy – Varda captured the flow of thought, its unpredictability – the ebb and flow – putting thought on film was fresh, modern, all the rage – crifitng.Last Year in Marienbad (1961, dir: Alain Resnais)- the film questions what is real – temporal discontinuities on purpose – playing with notions of continuity, memory and truth – no previous film had been more about uncertainty – a key film in life.Varda and Resnais were left-wing whilst Truffaut thought that conventional movies were too left-wing, too social. He wanted films to be fresher, more of the moment, more of the medium itself. The 400 Blows (1959, dir: Francois Truffaut)- Protagonist, 12 year old boy lying down in a train carriage laughing – POV shot like a Zooetrope revolving motion image – the boy has neglectful parents, escapes a children’s home and goes on the run – unlike neorealist films like The Bicycle Thieves – it is not so much about social problems but about the feeling of being alive – spontaneity of the actor’s screen-test which made its way into the film – Truffaut loved the boy’s cocky freshness.Revolutionary New Wave - personal, self-aware, fleeting moments, ambiguities.Jean-Luc Godard is the most fascinating character of the French New Wave – the greatest movie terrorist – in his youth, he sat in a café holding a rose imagining that he was Jean Cocteau – he saw Bresson’s film Pickpocket – he once called his approach to life right-wing anarchy – Godard said that the story of film is about boys filming girls – about men worrying about mortality and women not doing so – Godard was such a loner, people said that he had a frenzied individuality – preferred close-ups which isolated people from the world and so Godard eventually came to make his first film – A Bout de Souffle.Great Catholic French critic Andre Bazin – believed that cinema was best when shot wide, when our eyes can wander within it.0-317500A Bout de Souffle (1959, dir: Jean-Luc Godard)- car thief with an American girlfriend – in-car close ups – short rolls of film sold for stills cameras – the back of her head then cut, the same angle but a jarring edit (jump cut) – from The Life of an American Fireman (1903, dir: Edwin S. Porter), a cut almost always took place to show something else – but Godard uses cuts to show the same thing but the sunlight from a different direction or a slightly different background – jump cuts were also popular with Arsenal (1929, dir: Aleksandr Dovzhenko) in order to show the man’s mental health agitation – not the same emphasis in Godard’s jump cut – beautiful in themselves, emphasizing ‘this is cinema’ – high modern – “this moment is beautiful, this moment is true” – a shot is a thought, a director’s thought.Much of the New Wave was almost classical.The Language of cinema changes and evolves – the ‘how’ this happens changes like fashion.Une Femme Mariee (1964, dir: Jean-Luc Godard)- sex scene – POV shot from man’s perspective (hands moving up her body) – woman looking directly into camera – body parts partitioned from the whole.- homage by Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980).[ITALY IN THE 60s]- Pasolini against the state on the Left and the church on the Right.Accattone (1961, dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini)- captured personal life experiences – about a pimp that Pasolini perceived like a saint – turned the everyday into spiritual struggles – Bertolucci was Pasolini’s assistant – in a secular consumerist age, this film was daring – fascists picketed this film – Pasolini was a communist – subversive representations of Catholicism outraged some.0-190500The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964, dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini)- Mary represented back-to-basics, spare, unadorned – influenced in cinematography by The Passion of Joan of Arc – simplicity of representation – minimal mise-en-scene.Pasolini strongly rejected the rise of consumerism.Sergio Leone (loved Kurosawa films – lonely and mysterious Clint Eastwood as samurai squared up to by others) – Italian Western director – A Fistful of Dollars – innovative visual style – foreground/background were far apart – deep staging (Techniscope) – dramatic epic quality to imagery – Once Upon A Time In The West (screenplay written by Bertolucci) – time stands still (neorealist influence) – influenced by Johnny Guitar where Joan Crawford prowls like a cat – waiting for the future – operatic grandeur of the music.Baz Luhrmann, Stanley Kubrich and Sam Peckinpah all influenced by Leone’s Westerns.Visconti (high society upbringing) escaped Fascist Italy in the 30s and became a Communist, in the 50s, he directed opera in Milan – the scale and emotions of opera entered his film work.Senso (1954, dir: Luchino Visconti)- colour, lighting, costume = sumptuous – is it a celebration of aristocratic life? – no – it’s heart are with the ordinary people who are protesting – they look down on the aristocrats.Visconti was a master of the crane shot – he did not use it to celebrate to aristocratic world but to look down on it – fascinated, attracted, repelled.As a Marxist like Pasolini, peasants have the greatest moral authority of their society.0000Rocco and his Brothers (1960, dir: Luchino Visconti)- Visconti’s sympathies for the poor – hard, social detail of lives – bruised beauty, cinematography – Visconti films from the top of a Milan cathedral- another crane’s eye view – some scenes filmed in a tram: a kind of working-class crane shot – opera of social class.Michelangelo Antonioni saw law more abstractly – framed on the edge.L’Eclisse (1962, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni)- protagonist starts a relationship with Monica Vitti’s character – unconventional framing – both characters talking around a wall – the wall taking half the frame – Antonioni had studied American abstract painting – canvases of modern life in which people only partially appear – the void of modern life – Vitti walks out at the end never to re-appear – the places and street corners where they once were are seen – the void takes over – the world seems empty as if everyone was indoors or dead – false positive (Vitta lookalike, not her).The Passenger (1975, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni)- the spaces take over – film becomes the walk – Bergman’s characters spiral inwards, Antonioni’s characters spiral outwards – characters cropped out of frame – long, slow, semi-abstract shots.0-317500The Travelling Players (1975, dir: Theodoros Angelopoulos)- when the camera slowly withdraws, the shot is more about the street than the people – Angeloupoulos doesn’t give us the close-up.The Wheelchair (1960, Marco Ferreri – Spain)- a film during the Franco regime daring to mock it in a non-conformist fashion with grotesqueries – men marching with toilets on heads (satirical), comedy scenarios with people wanting motorized wheelchairs because their friends have one – openly mocking – protagonist in despair poisons family – realism and irony in Spanish culture called Esperpento – ferocious and amusing.Almodovar influenced by Spanish Esperpento films What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984, dir: Pedro Almodovar)- tone – heartfelt, funny, absurd – grandmother detests the city and misses the village.-63519748500Viridiana (1961, dir: Luis Bunuel)- patron saint of movie mockery – the most banned film ever – a knee in the balls to Franco – controversy: uncle romantically kisses his nun niece on a bed lying down – he’s drugged her – we’ve seen him try on her white high heels and basque – a young girl observes from the window – Bunuel sees the uncle as symbolizing Franco – shock after shock.I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967, dir: Vilgot Sjoman)- her burning belief in social justice starts to come apart after a bad experience – politics as fantasy. Idealism of the French New Wave had the stuffing knocked out of it.La Maman et la Putain (1973, dir: Jean Eustache)- film that undermines the Nouvelle Vague – “it’s a pathetic story” – talking to camera.- the dreams of the European films of the 60s were dead.[1964-1969]New Waves Sweep Around The World.Filmmaking went global in the 60s for the first time – exhilarating energy – Eastern Europe behind the Berlin wall – Poland, Hungary, Czechoslavakia and Soviet Union – modern, personal films that drove the medium forward and stood up to their governments – some filmmakers were stopped in their tracks and imprisoned, and many of them were banned.0-444500Ashes and Diamonds (1958, dir: Andrez Wajda)- young man and woman flirt – first day of peace after WWII – Poland has been torn apart – the man has been in the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis but now the Communists are coming and he hates them too – wears sunglasses because he has spent most his time in the underground sewers of Warsaw (protects eyes) – rebel WITH a cause – Wellesian, expressionist, symbols – the world turned upside down (statues) – in a very Polish way, he disguises meaning by encoding it.Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958, dir: Roman Polanski)- cuts face to the jazzy bass strumming – action: punching a man repeatedly in rhythm.- small part in his own film – Jewish man – in the war, he saw Poles defecate on German soldiers – his mother was murdered in Auschwitz Berkenau.- Polanski grew up on Olivier’s Hamlet, escapist musicals, colour films – loved tracking shots, castles, claustrophobia.Knife in the Water (1962, dir: Roman Polanski)- claustrophobic – husband who owns boat, wife, student – deep focus photography – woman swimming – guy playing knife game with hand, husband talking to student – wife fancies student – a love triangle – husband’s arm literally forms triangle with wife inside – husband resents student, student knows this and plays parlor games – the humiliation of getting too close – this film did not deal with war – society and history less interesting for Polanski in this one than the human triangle – not social realist enough for Polish cinema, too modernist for them.The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967, dir: Roman Polanski)- spoof horror film – set in winter wonderland – cut off from society – Chagall painting.- Polanski plays dopey apprentice – beautiful actress cast opposite – Sharon Tate – (sidestory: they took LSD together in real life and conceived a child) – set up home in Hollywood – wife and child were murdered by the Manson family.The Hand (1965, dir: Jiri Trnka)- hauntingly symbolic Czechoslovakian movie – fun-loving man in a home is disturbed by a hand - Trnka uses live-action for the hand – stop-motion for the man – like in Sirk films, the TV gift is used as a form of indoctrination – symbols of power are broadcast – the puppet is coaxed to make as effigy of his master, his leader – the hand – when he tries to resist the indoctrination, the hand orchestrates a terrorist act where the puppet’s house explodes.Milos Forman – embraced comic absurdism – Jewish, parents killed by the Nazis.The Fireman’s Ball (1967, dir: Milos Forman)- Firemen were supposed to be portrayed as heroic public servants in the Communist Czech era – but Forman emphasizes the farcical nature of their incompetence and immaturity with a Laurel and Hardy-esque representation – they’re staging a beauty contest but they could not organize a piss up in a brewery – documentary style almost like a Cassavetes film.Daisies (1966, dir: Ver Chytilova)- most innovative Czech director – two female characters squeak like dolls discussing their virginity – as if they are puppets – trippy sequences like Lumieres on acid – we’re in the world of pop art and Andy Warhol – the authorities hated Daisies – after the Soviet Union clamped down on Czech films in 1968 – Chytilova banned from working for six years.0000The Red and the White (1968, dir: Miklos Jancso)- movies entered its innovative Golden Age – in Russia in 1918 – Revolutionaries (Reds) clash with Counter-Rebels (Whites) – red soldier hides behind bush as white guards capture his friend – Jancso shows this in a single roaming 3 minute shot – 10 camera moves without a single cut – preferred long take tracking shots like Mizoguchi in Japan or Hitchcock in America to create tension, a sense of breath being held – like Mizoguchi, he doesn’t get close to his characters’ faces – the detached control of Jancso’s camera is like the detached control of the white infantry men – form echoing content – a very modern idea – end of film: finally, a near-close up – a soldier looks to camera – gradual zoom in – humanity crashes into Jancso’s icy universe of control and despair – no one in the story of film uses long takes better in order to evoke suffering than Jancso – massive influence for Bela Tarr.Socialist dreams calcified and turned to kitsch.Andrei Tarkovsky – arguably the greatest director of Soviet 60s – in a materialist society of the Soviet Union, he made non-materialist films – the elevation of the human soul – transcendence. Director of ‘the absolute’ with astonishing denouements.Andrei Rublev (1966, dir: Andrei Tarkovsky)- set in 1400 – we’re in the Bell Tower – peasant ties himself to something – crisp black and white photography – a hot air balloon made of animal skins – it takes off and we look down – the wide angle lens makes the perspective plunge – birth of Tarkovsky’s cinema – the film was banned for 6 years because it was religious.The Mirror (1975, dir: Andrei Tarkovsky)- as a man dies, a bird flies from his hand – like the Christian idea of the holy ghost.0-63500Stalker (1979, dir: Andrei Tarkovsky)- for two hours, we’ve followed three men to ‘the zone’ – we meet a girl – daughter of one of the men – steam from hot water in a glass – the camera creeps backwards – colours are muted and sepia – dandelion seeds float in the air – we hear a train amidst tweeting birds – suddenly, a glass moves as if by telepathy by the girl – an off-screen dog yelps as if it has been scared by the ghostly event – the train rumbling shakes the glass too – the physical and the metaphysical combine.Nostalghia (1983, dir: Andrei Tarkovsky)- reflections in the pool in the foreground – gradual reveal – ruined cathedral – whole story contained in it – then it snows – rapture – ancient context, new techniques – imagery contains awareness of the infinite – the spiritual within matter. From the school of thought of Dreyer and Bresson, but imagery unparalleled.0000Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965, dir: Sergei Parajanov)- adored Poetic cinema of Dovchenko – had a love for his nation’s history – breathtaking POV shot for the film’s inciting incident - a falling tree lands on a man trying to save his partner from it hitting her - another shot from under a daisy looking up at two children playing – camera seldom at eye level – no cinematographer since Welles used foreground more – story of film like Romeo and Juliet – dream sequence: girl seems to have died – two in silver forest searching for each other – have become like spirits of the forest with silver faces – magical and personal world – floating entities – everything the Soviet Realists hated: personal, sexual, decadent – imprisonment for incitement to suicide and homosexuality – other filmmakers protested – released 4 years later.Japanese modernist 60s cinema was in ‘angry mode’.Boy (1960, dir: Nagisa Oshima)- widescreen composition – by on left, mother on right – both about to fake an accident – boy pretends to get run over- stepmom blackmails the driver – Oshima is showing the cynicism and greed of modern Japan.In The Realm of the Senses (1976, dir: Nagisa Oshima)- another bitter Oshima film – based on a true story, starts like a Mizoguchi movie – old man humiliated by kids – snow thrown at his naked body – provocation against national propriety, modesty, nationalism and respect for elders – Geisha becomes obsessed by a client and castrates and strangles him – blood red imagery and near silence haunts the frame – woman it is based on spent 5 years in jail for second degree murder – blew apart the mystique of geishas.The Insect Woman (1963, dir: Shohei Imamura)- films insect as metaphor for human beings struggling over life’s terrain – cuts to: 1910s Japanese woman – raped, has daughter who works on farm with father – suckles on her – works in factory – exquisite use of widescreen space in a factory (foreground out of focus looms create an in-space deep focus window) – key characters framed in the far distance like deep focus shots in Welles’ Citizen Kane. – we hear woman and American making love – child spills boiling water over herself (scolded child).Ajantrik (1953, dir: RItvik Ghatak) – heightened emotions, life goes on – Indian melodrama.The Cloud-Capped Star (1960, dir: Ritwik Ghatak)- original sin – majestic avenue of trees – refugee Bengali female main character – forced by partition to live on the outskirts of Bengali – tries to hold family together – ineffectual brother who just sits down and sings – background of train passing – misty as the tree but slicing through the horizon like a knife – Ghatak’s visionary film shows the family sliced by history.Jutki, Takko Aar Gappo (1975, dir: Ritwik Ghatak)- widely experimental in his use of sound like a sci-fi film.Uski Roti – delayed gravity.The idea that the person making the film is the subject of the film is the very definition of modernism.[Modern New Waves – Brazilian 1960s]Black God, White Devil (1964, dir: Glauber Rocha)- the concept of the cinema novel by theoretician, Glauber Rocha – cowboy has killed his greedy and exploitative boss – cowboy’s wife turns in bewilderment and despair at the throng of supporters immortalizing the revolutionary cowboy – antithesis of musical carnival films of Brazil’s commercial output – the cowboy and his woman follow a strange, black Christian preacher who preaches revolution – they follow the preacher praising the promised land – suddenly the preacher’s followers are shot – scenes edited like an Eisenstein movie – the killer is Antonio, a symbol of vengeance – at the end, a troubadour sings ‘A World Badly Divided’ – the earth belongs to man, not God nor devil – Rocha wrote that violence is normal when people are starving – he found a way of combining innovative film style with fiercely anti-colonialist ideas – cinema novel inspired filmmakers throughout the Third World.1959 Cuban Revolution – -4762517208500I Am Cuba (1964, dir: Mikhail Kalatozov)- rejected by many Cuban filmmakers – a student filmmaker has been killed by right-wing authorities – the camera seems to levitate – wide-angle lens, handheld, beautiful exposure, slow motion – a prayer for the dead student – the camera climbs a building – a crane shot so beautiful that in the 90s after years of I Am Cuba being forgotten in America, it was shown at the Telluride Film Festival and impressed Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola- re-released – camera crosses street – still no cut – moves to end of room, flags unfurl – camera floats down the Havana street – pared down minimalism was often used in Cuban cinema, but this Russian-Cuban film believed that a ‘camera on wings’ to symbolize the soul of a dead student will make the idea of the revolution itself beautiful.[Middle East 60s Modern Cinema]0-127000The House is Black (1963, dir: Forugh Farrokhzad)- in a colony of people with leprosy – female 27 year old Iranian director – film’s sincerity – attempt to move beyond simple description – the people in the film are thankful for their lives – the wheelbarrow ride of the girl intercut with shot from other people in the community – sight and sound rhyme – Forugh died in a car accident aged just 32 – her flair influenced other Iranian directors.[Senegalese Cinema]Black Girl (1969, dir: Ousmane Sembene)- a young black girl works for a white French family – looking after their kids – gives the family an African mask as a present – she’s impressed by luxuries like a sprinkler to water the garden – filmed in rich parts of Senegalese capital – Sembene had been a bricklayer in Moscow and had joined the Communist party – cares about the dignity of work – the girl’s work becomes drudgery – she’s treated as a slave – the girl commits suicide in a bath – shaken and guilty, the French husband returns the mask to the poor part of Dakar – the girl’s younger brother follows the man – Sembene films simply like a John Ford Western – the boy haunts the French family with the mask – the mask to the spirit of hope has become a death mask – symbolism in flux – a guilt mask, a weapon.In colonialization, what kind of films should Black Africans make – contemporary films about modern society in which Marxism and gender are linked and laced with symbols.[British Cinema in the 60s] – class based cinema.Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960, dir: Karel Reisz)- class based UK cinema set in the Midlands – no exterior lights – factory worker who still lives in 2 up 2 down house with mum and dad – cramped room, dad’s haircut from the 30s – son has a touch of rock’n roll about him – gets a girl pregnant, she has an abortion.Kes (1969, dir: Ken Loach)- pre-Thatcher era – bullied boy who finds solace by training a kestrel – collective experience into an honest and direct style – tried to echo the style of Czech films with naturalistic light – range of lenses which kept the camera away from the performer so they weren’t inhibited by an overbearing camera – naturalistic editing when your eye would normally go to a person – would cut the moment someone speaks rather than 2-3 seconds before – identified the connection between film style and politics.A Hard Day’s Night (1964, dir: Richard Lester)- relatively conventional, then speeds up – cut to helicopter shot whilst Beatles performers run, dance and goof – how joyous the youth rebellion – shaky camera filmed without diagetic sound – improvised – film like a stag weekend – liberating, fresh like Truffaut or Forman.US 60s cinema – President John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Malcolm X was gunned down in 1965, protests against the War in Vietnam (where 1 million plus civilians died) grew, and in cinema, box-office continued to tumble – TV generation.Primary (1960, dir: Robert Drew)- a new kind of documentary – unstaged account of JFK – no interviews or hidden camera techniques – this all became known as ‘fly on the wall’ documentary – following JFK without the glitz of stage and camera production effects.0-254000Shadows (1959, dir: John Cassavetes)- fly-on-the-wall style following three African-American characters – on the streets, constant movement – influence of Italian Neo-realism came into play too – new acting methods of Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift – one of the first movies of a movement known as New American Cinema.Psycho (1960, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)- Hollywood was becoming stale whilst fly-on-the-wall documentaries and Cassavetes urgency seemed fresh and visceral – he tried to apply this to his renowned horror – filmed in black and white – women steals money then returns it, showers to clean the moral dirt – film splinters into shareds with the knife attack scene – cutting of Eisenstein, Abel Gance and LaRue – expressionist flashes – 17 camera angles for 45 seconds of film.66 Scenes from America (1982, dir: Jorgen Leth)- art underworld – Warhol – pushed directness of modern filmmaking – static shot, flat lighting, eats a hamburger, no expression – blankness of the here and now – fascinated by repetitions of supermarket products (Campbell’s Soup) – fascinated by 50s celebrity icons.Blow Job (1963, dir: Andy Warhol)- radical approach – stripped of expressive elements – close-up of man’s face – no dialogue or sound – we assume from the title and the man’s gestures and expressions of his face that he is receiving a blow job – no camera movements or story – Bresson minus any attempt at spirituality.[New Queer Cinema of the 90s] – Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol.Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966, dir: Mike Nichols)- Cinematographer Haskell Wexler – changed the look of Hollywood Studio movies – filmed an A-lister daringly in black and white minus glitz and glamour – harsh lighting.0254000Medium Cool (1969, dir: Haskell Wexler)- pushed the relationship between documentary TV and US fiction cinema as far as it could go – about TV cameraman – hears a Martin Luther King speech and feels fired up – ‘Jesus I love to shoot film’ – he has a sensory feeling about images – filmmaking protects him detached from reality as the observer – the observation resolves him of being a participant – Wexler was influenced by Godard – the car crash scene – no more than four disorientated frames at a times with black frames inserted in between – all along the cameraman has been the voyeur – now he is the centre of the voyeurism – from observer to participant – Wexler turns the camera on the audience – to consider how we are being represented and the politics of spectatorship and filming itself.1500 film courses taught around America – the film school generation was on its way – Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Brian De Palma, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich all worked in a B-movie studio first produced by Roger Corman – horror movies, prison pictures, biker flicks – lots of nudity, politics and style.Easy Rider (1969, dir: Dennis Hopper)- culturally defining biker movie – rock soundtrack, wind in your hair, sunglasses, the open road – long cinematographic lens – Hopper captured the carefreeness of the hippie days – Hopper hurled modern techniques at his film – moved from one scene to the next by intercutting to it – mucked around with the grammar of editing – why was it a box office sensation? – young people who impatient with old conformist filmmaking – characters killed by conservative duck hunters – middle America gets its own back on the hippie generation – foreshadowing that the hippie era will end – liberal moviegoers saw Martin Luther King, Bobbie Kennedy and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in the tragic ending.2001: A Space Odyssey (1969, dir: Stanley Kubrick)- camera positioning was central to his art – he would often film from below – Welles and Keaton – inventive and confident realizer of physical worlds on screen – Kubrick attached camera to the set in order to create a gravity-defying effect - mind altering experiences – abstractions and hallucinations – alluded to films by Walter Ruttmann such as Der Sieger (1922) – if modernism was about self-loss, ambiguity and the emptiness of lives – the hallucinogenic scene is its greatest moment.Film was not just a window to see characters, it was a language and way of thinking in and of itself in relation to space, colour, shape and time – was it always about time and abstraction as well as story and character? No – Romantic cinema would soon be back in the 70s.[1967-1979] - New American Cinema60s in America had been a day in the sun, but then night came – the decade ended with the deaths of Malcolm X, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate by Charles Manson – 400 colleges protested against the Vietnam War – Hollywood’s Studio System came to an end – new dawn: the 70s – the rising sun of the new decade brought fresher air and new honesty – explicitly personal films of the 60s and a film school awareness of European cinema and film history gathered momentum and gained confidence – the garden started to bloom again.New American Cinema fell into three separate types:1) Satirical MoviesBuck Henry mocking societyCounter-culture – too late to salvage society, so let’s satirise itDuck Soup (1933, dir: Leo McCarey)- Marx Brothers comedy satire - people wait for the President but he comes in the wrong way – freeze frame of the ceremony as the President wanders around sy turvy world – 60s psychologist R.D. Lang suggested that sanity is a bit insane and vice versa – made the world feel even more like a Marx Brothers movie – Buck Henry, Robert Altman, Milos Forman – new satirical bite to US film.Artists and Models (1955, dir: Frank Tashlin)Tashlin found consumerism vulgar and offensive – made lurid films – cartoon colour and brash style meant to show that society is fake, manic and infantile Tashlin made a kids book showing a happy possum in a tree – passers-by see the possum but mistake his smile for a frown because he is hanging upside-down – they then take him on a tour into the city through the air to make him happy – to give him an adventure – he sees the world and doesn’t like it – scary and crumbling – people return him to his tree – he looks to them like he’s smiling but of course, as he’s upside down, he’s frowning – lovely parable about upside-downness – in order to be funny, you need to think sad first.Buck Henry is a master of the ‘upside-down’ – of satire.Catch 22 (1970, dir: Mike Nichols)- Buck Henry responsible for the scriptwriting adaptation.- adaptation of Joseph Heller novel – one of the great movie satires – WWII bomber pilot tries to get out of flying – damned if you do, damned if you don’t – stuck in the air, it’s a Catch-22 – upside-down world representation – bribed into medals on the condition of good PR for the soldiers – Orson plays the general.MASH (1970, dir: Robert Altman)- another war – army surgeons on appalling imagery – overlapping dialogue fostered in post-production – upside down camaraderie during atrocity – Altman used zooms or long lens – actors did not know if they were on camera or not.0-254000The Graduate (1967, dir: Mike Nichols)- Bucky Henry responsible for the scriptwriting adaptation.- disillusioned graduate Benjamin – floats in a Californian swimming pool on an inflatable lilo over his bourgeois LA parents – a world of beer and boredom – expressionless and inert – Benjamin has an affair with one of his parents’ friends – Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack – our generation’s sense of loss – we were all Benjamin – walks like a robot and dresses anonymously – blank sheet.- Mrs Robinson studied Art – surprises Benjamin – ‘I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years then’ – pacing the scene – turning lights on and off.Milos Foreman’s The Fireman’s Ball (1969).One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975, dir: Milos Forman)- Mental institution – naturalistic light, close-ups of actors’ faces – Jack Nicholson’s character has dodged prison by pleading insanity – quarrels with nurse over medication – world of the story upside-down.2) Dissident FilmsCharles Burnett challenging the conventional style in cinemaThe Last Movie (1971, dir: Dennis Hopper)- radical – follow-up to the success of Easy Rider – in Peru – American film crew filming a Western – mockumentary – a fictitious ‘making of’ – Hopper dressed in red plays a production manager on the film – Hopper stays on – the locals make icons out of the film equipment with bamboo – the film as a kind of god who visits them – unaware that the scenes were fake, the Peruvians recreate the punch-ups with real violence – anarchy ensures – Hopper was drunk for much of the shoot – The Last Movie was a brilliant, daring hate letter to America – a movie exploitation – the stupid critics called it a fiasco and it bombed – Hopper is said to have cried every night.019621500McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971, dir: Robert Altman)- radical – anti-Western – as in MASH, Altman’s camera roams – the lenses are long – the colours are muted – Julie Christie is a savvy madam who helps a na?ve opportunist man to run a brothel – they ultimately fail in their aims – no heroes here – just characters lost in the snow – Altman’s low contrast imagery – out of their depth and uncertain about the world – no heroes, no villains – visual uncertainty to match a 70s uncertainty about what American History even means.Francis Ford Coppola started as a dissident – there was something of the Orson Welles about him. Success of The Godfather allowed him to direct a more radical film-635571500The Conversation (1974, dir: Francis Ford Coppola)- a film about a new type of sound equipment – a professional surveillance expert (Gene Hackman) is in his lair – surrounded by new equipment allowing him to eavesdrop in things far away – accidentally records a conversation between apparent lovers – he can’t see them but Coppola shows us them (dramatic irony – knowing more than the characters) – filmed in long lens (the visual equivalent of the man’s distant microphone) – the man becomes obsessed with the mystery on the tape – in doing so, he almost has a breakdown – “he’d kill us if he had the chance” – this film is about getting lost in the fragments of other peoples’ behaviours that your own life dissolves.Martin Scorsese surmised the agenda of New Hollywood Cinema – “we were fighting to open up the form” – brought up on the streets of NY’s Little Italy – poorly in his early life – found himself observing rather than participating in life on the streets.Mean Streets (1973, dir: Martin Scorsese)- scene in a church with tracking camera – whole idea was to make a story of a modern saint in society, but his society happens to be gangsters – as if to show his desire for sainthood, the character holds his finger in a flame confessing his sins.0-381000Taxi Driver (1976, dir: Martin Scorsese)- a Vietnam veteran driving around NY in a taxi – in slow motion, the taxi glided through the steamy night like an iron coffin – set in Hell’s Kitchen with junkies and porno theatres – this world disgusted the taxi driver – filmed by Paul Schrader who drank heavily like his main character Travis Bickle who lived in his car, whose self-obsession was festering like Bickle’s – motivation of Taxi Driver were existentialism – two books: Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, and L’Etranger by Albert Camus – Bickle’s world is one of booze and porn, he walks around with the blue light at dawn – finds it painful to be alive – makes a phone call to a woman he is obsessed by – camera tracks away from Bickle always in embarrassment – modernist technique – the scene was too embarrassing for Scorsese to film head on – emotional wisdom of the camera’s eye was close to Mizoguchi’s Chikamatsu Monogatari – turned his camera away from raw emotion, not showing the camera their faces.Taxi Driver was a huge success – so Scorsese, De Niro and Schrader pushed harder.019367500Raging Bull (1980, dir: Martin Scorsese)- self-destructive Catholic boxer who is on a downward slope who reaches rock bottom before finding redemption – documentary style, black and white, flat lighting and staging, long lenses – visually influenced by documentaries Scorsese had made about his parents.- boxing scenes – slow motion shots – like bloody statues of Christ in a baroque cathedral one minute – then fast-cutting wide-angle lens and tracking like Orson Welles the next – at the end, the boxer recites Marlon Brando’s lines in On The Waterfront – the most reflective moment in the film – never before had such explicit Italian Catholicism been the theme of an American film – ethnicity and the specifics of ghetto life were one of the things that Romantic cinema had screened out – you could feel Scorsese’s nervous system in these films and their metabolic rate.Italianamerican (1974, dir: Martin Scorsese)- sofa shot in living room – table lamps and domesticity.Schrader: “The existential glimmer ‘should I exist?’ and the postmodern answer “what does it even mean to exist?” – as a result, we live in a mash-up world – a lot of things that we thought were the ‘standards’ – artistic: harmony, balance, beauty – meta-cinema has no centre like this – it becomes a collection and pastiche. American Gigolo (1980, dir: Paul Schrader)- Schrader had a fascination with religious grace – a male prostitute floating through the world – 80s red lighting – Pickpocket intertextuality.Light Sleeper (1992, dir: Paul Schrader)- about a drug dealer floating, peeping at the world in night-time blue – each man is spiritually empty – in both films, Schrader wanted to show their rescue from emptiness – how? – astonishing solution – consider: Bresson’s Pickpocket – borrowed the ending – man in prison is visited by a women – her touch incurs the heavenly grace into and from the world – pastiche.One of the founding films of America, The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffiths in 1915 was famously racist – black senators were portrayed as drunks – Charles Burnett got to counter this – one of the first black directors in modern US cinema – UCLA introduced Third World cinema where screening African films inspired Burnett (early 70s) – wanted a discourse in how to live in a post-colonial society – drama out of mundane everyday life like Ozu films.05207000Killer of Sheep (1977, dir: Charles Burnett)- kid’s point of view – Burnet filmed in black & white – often shooting details of kids playing – Paul Robeson music – wanted to write about the dystopia of the school system – poetic moments and absurdities highlighted.Innovation – many movie moguls were Jewish like Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder – would Jewishness be central in American film – Jewish characters were more likely to found around the edges of stories like in Lubitsch’s The Shop Around The Corner (1940) where Anglo-Saxon protestants play the main roles whilst the Jewish characters play the kernel of the narrative.0-381000Annie Hall (1977, dir: Woody Allen)- Explicitly Jewish intellectual, Alvie, centre of the frame, centre of the film, talking directly to the camera – Ingmar Bergman fan – about as far away from Hollywood beefcake as you can get – falls in love with a Midwestern girl – Diane Keaton – the joke is that New York Jewishness is just about as alien to everywhere as except New York itself – in a funny scene, Annie and Alvie are trying to cook lobsters – cooking isn’t very NY and boiling lobsters certainly isn’t – single shot kitchen scene, no cut – the kitchen light is hit by mistake – one of the funniest moments in American cinema – Charlie Chaplin played the lead role in his films too like in City Lights (1931) – this film inspired Annie Hall – Chaplin is the butt of his own jokes too but makes a blind girl see – Allen makes Keaton’s character believe in herself – does a montage to show her magic moments – both are Pygmalion myths – unfortunate reminder of how few women are making films as directors in American cinema.0-127000Manhattan (1979, dir: Woody Allen)- from the freeform style of Annie Hall to the compositional rigeur of Manhattan –the intro: a city symphony – widescreen images in love with the built world – Allen’s Jewish character at the centre of the story.All these filmmakers of ‘dissident cinema’ were against old-style Hollywood – they were about the modern truths – about people and places – NYT article complained that recent films were about self-hatred and there was no room for decency or nobility.3) Assimilationist MoviesRobert Towne where old studio genres were reworked with new techniquesPeter Bogdanovich – friend of Orson Welles and John Ford – a film historian.- no way that he could be totally against the ‘old guard’.058420000The Last Picture Show (1971, dir: Peter Bogdanovich)- this film shows how Bogdanovich mixed old and new – Old Texan town with young people driving at night – old movie style (black and white) – conventional reverse angle editing – actor in John Ford movies cameos – country music plays – at first look, this could be a John Ford Western like My Darling Clementine – a woman is agonizingly lonely, having an affair with Timothy Bottoms – finds out that he has dumped her for the local beauty – he’s too inarticulate to apologise – the woman does the forgiving – slow 16 second dissolve like Orson Welles – tracking and panning in time – ghost town with idealism gone – a rotten place to live – closed down movie theatre where romantic films were once shown.American assimilationists weren’t as interested in opening up the form as restoring its power as applying it to edgier more thoughtful content – they worked in the clear light of the new day of 70s cinema – their films were spatially clear but tense – almost all central characters were male.The Wild Bunch (1969, dir: Sam Peckinpah)- Peckinpah took and stretched Leone’s neo-realist idea of extending time to slow down a scene – doing so revealed the scene’s constituent agony and beauty.Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid (1973, dir: Sam Peckinpah)- beautiful widescreen film shows how torn Peckinpah was by the mid 70s and about American history – the film is set at the end of the 1800s – the Wild West has been commercialized – idealism has long flowed down the river – Sheriff Pat Garrett sees a family on a barge drifting by – pointlessly, Garrett and the man on the barge point a gun at each other – the macho West – cattle barons have hired Garrett to kill his former friend, the outlaw Billy the Kid – both are part of the past, ghosts – when Garrett finally kills Billy, he quickly shoots himself in the mirror as Peckinpah once did – as if he couldn’t face himself, the void, the shame – before: meets coffee maker in half-light as if he’s been there the whole time (like Garrett’s conscience) – Peckinpah hated producers and was temperamentally against the system as Eric von Stroheim was in the Silent Era – Peckinpah was too Romantic to detest the myth of the West.Badlands (1973, dir: Terrence Malick)- Malick was too Romantic to detest the myth of the outsider – young man with James Dean hair and 50s denims and his young girlfriend, asleep like a child – he climbs a tree, drops her an egg – they are like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – they play war games like he’s in Vietnam – Martin Sheen would later star in Apocalypse Now – these characters are so needy they are almost mentally ill – film made by one of the most reclusive figures in film history, Terrence Malick – Malick studied Philosophy.05651500Days of Heaven (1978, dir: Terrence Malick)- on a Texan estate – a golden world – the camera flows – camera attached to the cameraman’s body (early days Steadicam) – pan-a-glide – 80s cinema onwards use this technology to create a floating feeling – migrant worker – Malick cuts between him and landscape shots – he’s trying somehow to apprehend the infinite – trying to capture the beautiful natural light of D.W. Griffiths films – Malick shot scenes after the sun had dipped below the horizon: also known as the ‘magic hour’ of filming – sometimes lasts only 20 minutes – panic to capture it – to simulate a locust storm, Malick dropped peanut shells from a helicopter whose rotor blades to make them whirl, then reversed the shot to make the locusts appear to swarm upwards – actors and extras had to walk backwards so that when the film was reversed, it would appear normal – climax of film: wheatfields on fire – only the light from the flames was used – some of the shallowest focus in cinema history – cave-light darkness worked with film’s mythic ambitions - Griffith said that ‘film is the wind in the trees’. Malick loves to film the wind in various ways – echoes Tarkovsky’s The Mirror – wind is nature coming alive – Malick’s films are love letters to life.Cabaret (1972, dir: Bob Fosse)- one of the greatest films of the 70s to mix old techniques with new – clean-cut young man singing a musical song – many close-ups – Nazi swastikas abound – faces become impassioned – shivers run down our spine – decadent Berlin in 1930s – Fosse was steeped in Broadway – choreographed using the best of old techniques – Old Hollywood and non-conformist 70s politics combined.The Godfather (1972, dir: Francis Ford Coppola)- amoral tale – most successful upgrading of a gangster film – shot like a Rembrandt painting – no helicopter shots, but many trendy lenses – Gordon Willis as cinematographer – created shadows in Brando’s eye sockets – the eyes of the dawn – north lighting was rare in American cinema and was not used well since lighting Marlene Dietrich – low lighting levels meant that shallow focus was used – actors minimalized movement and gesture – internalized performances – 30s gangster films were about the rise and fall of individuals, The Godfather showed a network of relationships – Robert Towne contributed to its screenplay – involved in structuring the arc.05651500Chinatown (1974, dir: Roman Polanski)- Old Hollywood style – film noir – also baking in 70s New Hollywood Cinema.- based on a true story of how the head of LA’s department of water and power, William Mulholland, redirected water from the Owen’s Valley, depriving farmers of water in order to expand LA and fill its swimming pools – a rape of the land – the dark shadows of a dreamlike, laissez-faire, seeming utopia – widescreen, muted 30s colour – starred Jack Nicholson as a puzzled Private Eye (Jake Gittes) driving around LA who unknowingly stumbles into the story of the theft of the water – endemic corruption of LA discovered – killer right in front of your eyes, but takes the entire exploration of the film to realise – John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon a major influence – Huston cameos as a businessman who steals the water and rapes the daughter – the corruption of LA opened like a raw, grotesque wound – the presence of evil – the false bon homie and pleasantness – film directed by Roman Polanski – his wife had been murdered 3 years earlier whilst his parents died in concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland – tragic early life – stripped of delusions about people – Polanski’s life had far too much amplitude to even countenance the shallow pleasures of escapist Romantic cinema – nor did he have any time for the fleeting, impressionistic lightness of French New Wave films like Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) – wide angle lens, bright lights and precise framing – like an MGM musical except the movie was about rape, incest, power and greed – Polanski ensured the darkness remained with the birth of an incestual child and the woman shot in the eye – the tragic ending: the tunnel at the end of the light – Old School laced with new truths.The Story of Film: An Odyssey [DVD4][1969-1979]Radical Directors of the 70s Make State of the Nation MoviesIs it the era of Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas? Beyond the heat shimmer of LA and the urban canyons of New York included a world of exciting cinema opening up in the 70s.In the 70s, so much to deplore and rethink – German cinema was about identity and history.Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and R.M. Fassbinder wanted to create a new German film.Massive gap between Baby Boomers and their parents – parents voted for Adolf Hitler – economic boom in West Germany managed to numb the guilt about the Holocaust – new right-wing tabloid newspapers placed contentment over everything – German filmmakers did not want self-satisfied cinema, but were looking for a balance.Fox and his Friends (1975, dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder)- naked in front of the camera, displaying his personal life – make the film as beautiful as America’s but move the content to other areas – influenced by Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) – woman shunned for having romance with younger, working-class gardener – remade it as a far less glossy and less beautiful:Fear Eats The Soul (1974, dir: R.W. Fassbinder)- tracking shot to show prejudice at German woman’s decision to marry an Arabic man – shunned for racist reasons.07874000The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972, dir: R.W. Fassbinder)- story of famous clothes designer who lives with her assistant, Marlene, who is really her slave – haunted and exhausted – Fassbinder was having an affair with Marlene in real life and treated her appallingly – body language in the film expresses its tragedy – the cruel artifice of stilted fashion, make up and design – Fassbinder influenced by Macnkiewicz’s classic All Above Eve (1950) – a film about two women controlling each other, fueled by alcohol and all dolled up – lesbian affair with sexual politics favoring one over the other – the agony of love ruins Petra – spit drips from her mouth – she is alone in her room waiting for the phone to ring – sneering at the lies of Hollywood about identity and love – women in confined spaces.America’s utopianism was Wender’s jumping off point.Alice in the Cities (1974, dir: Wim Wenders)- unforgettable road movie – camera cranes down under a boardwalk to reveal Rudy Geverde, a journalist who’s drifting and numb – Wenders saw himself in him – Geverde meets a woman on top of the Empire State Building – using an iconic American location – shoots in natural light – Geverde is drifting, melancholic – a world away, An Affair To Remember (1957, dir: McCarey) – Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant at Empire State Building – multi-coloured, precise, controlled – Wenders’ eye roams, long lens, unsure of what it is looking for – it is as if Wenders is saying, remember what it was like to feel.Gods of the Plague (1979, dir: R.W. Fassbinder)- gender study – Margueritte von Trotta, a kind of German Julie Christie – becomes a director and made The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978) – the title character Christa robs a bank – one of the least tense or macho robberies ever filmed – no shouting, just mellow music – Trotta instead focuses on the relationship between a robber and a bank clerk – film’s climax – Christa is caught by the police and is confronted by the clerk – the clerk has been hunting her throughout the movie – camera eyeline close-ups – intimacy and equality between two women – bank clerk does not snitch on Christa when asked who robbed the bank – impressionist footprints of intimacy in violent times.[East German Cinema]Burden of Dreams by Les Blank in 1982 – Herzog speaking passionately in Spanish – Herzog was a Romantic like Pasolini – was not interested in the feminism of von Trotta or the Americana of Wenders – far more taken by primeval life – after John Ford, he is the most important landscape filmmaker.If I don’t want to be what my parents are, what am I?Italy was haunted by its fascist past too. The nation’s cinema in the 70s chose to explore sex – Pasolini was still the most radical here.Sets Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life films in the past as a rejection of the commercialization of Italy.Arabian Nights (1974, dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini)- adaptation of the classic novel – sexually explicit depiction.In contemporary history, he believed such fun was not possible – consumerism had ruined everything – he was murdered by a male prostitute in 1975.Bernado Bertolucci started off as Pasolini’s assistant became the greatest European filmmaker of his time.The Spider’s Stratagem (1970, dir: Bernardo Bertolucci)- camera tracks right to reveal a piazza and a man standing in it – walks to reveal a statue of his father, an anti-fascist hero – camera again moving right – man visiting an old girlfriend of his father – she stands still and walks also as if she’s been static for decades and has suddenly been switched on by camera’s tracking – film sweeps into past and finds out his father was not a hero – he collaborated with the fascists – what sort of identity does that give his son? – an identity 70s film with a rare concern for visual beauty – dusk deep blue skies, man in corn fields with a yellowy petroleum hand-lamp – cinematographic eye – echoed paintings by Rene Magritte.0254000The Conformist (1970, dir: Bernardo Bertolucci)- masterpiece about fascism and identity – bold compositions and plunging perspectives – camera sweeps with the leaves blown by the wind like in a Gene Kelly musical – beauty in 60s cinema was seen as too Hollywood, too shallow – Bertolucci was bringing beauty back to Italian cinema – Godard and Bertolucci met but were two different cinematic schools of thought – a scene in Taxi Driver with a blood splattered Bickle pointing his finger to his head to mimic a gun – beautiful and haunting all at once – influenced by The Conformist – an ugly event turned into gorgeous forum.[Identity in British Cinema] – Ken Russell – Britain’s Federico FelliniWomen in Love (1969, dir: Ken Russell)- long lens lovemaking scene – sideways dance defying gravity – its strangeness reminds us how horizontal and not vertical cinema normally is.Performance (1970, dir: Nicolas Roeg)- about a London gangster who checks himself repeatedly in the mirror.- Mean Streets made 3 years later is also about another narcissist – mirror – clothes, gangster’s uniform – display.- hiding out after shooting a gangster – hides in pop star’s house, played by Mick Jagger – camera moves behind his head then dissolves through it until we are in his POV looking at the person he is talking to – echoing sound – two main faces dissolve into each other – identity merging – influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.- mobsters comfort him – last job is to murder him, possibly because he has shown too much of himself – bullet travels through Turner’s brain and a picture of the Argentine writer Borges appears – crashes through a mirror, then back to London – most imaginative shooting in story of film – led away with gangsters – heads off to likely death – film about blurred identity.[Australian 70s Cinema]Walkabout (1971, dir: Nicolas Roeg)- white city girl in the outback – father has just shot himself – woman and child are scared – wide angle lenses to stretch the space of the outback before them – contrast between nature and city, sea and swimming pool – raw and cooked – later we see a tower block and correlated swimming pools – girl is married and in clean middle class kitchen dolled up with make up like a mask – remembers a past swimming naked with an Aborigine in the outback, a life less ordinary – memory instigated via dissolve – dream time – sense of loss is overwhelming – man-made versus natural.Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, dir: Peter Weir)- long white Victorian dresses worn in the Australian outback – juxtaposition – fish out of water – filmed in slight slow motion to create a sense of mystery – girls about to disappear – Weir’s plan to explain disappearance at the end of the film – they were to be discovered and brought home on stretchers – editor Max Lemon instead repeated earlier picnic scenes in slow step motion – camera roaming, no sync sound as if girls are ghosts – white Australian identity evaporating in the heat.My Brilliant Career (1979, dir: Gillian Armstrong)- set in Victorian times – about a woman’s relationship with nature and with men – main character has overview – Sam Neill is glamorized and filmed in dabbled light, not her – the female point of view showed how gendered Ozzie cinema would become with the films of Jane Campion and Baz Luhrmann – Sam Neill was in more women’s films than most actors – a certain sensibility – post-colonial society beginning to wake up to women’s issues.[Japanese 70s Cinema]Minamata, The Victims and their World (1971, dir: Noriaki Tsuchimoto)- one of the greatest documentaries ever made – 17 years to make – packed annual general meeting of Japanese chemical company – over many years, it dumped methylmercury into fishing waters causing hundreds of deaths and biodeformities – the company denied all responsibility – its bosses sit at long tables on the stage – families of the dead and those injured by the effects of dumped methylmercury are present – protesting for directors to take responsibility for their actions – director knew the protesters – small 16mm camera allowed him to be the centre of these explosive moments – jostling handheld camera and torrent of words make fiction film look staid – ferocious anecdotal explanations from the victims families to coax empathy out of the businessmen – sublime and rigorous documentary.The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, dir: Kazuo Hara)- meeting brother and sister of a friend of his who disappeared – a soldier who he fought in World War II – documentary film, handheld camera, follows participants as they arrive at house – Old commander lives here – they want to find out what happened to the soldier – this visit doesn’t reveal the truth – siblings drop out of the investigation – Okuzaki hires two actors to go behind him to pretend to be the siblings – using emotional blackmail to try and get to the truth of what happened – Okuzaki realizes that his friends were probably cannibalized by the commanders – Okuzaki is in the commander’s house – Okuzaki is angry now, we hold our breath – “you’re saying that the execution occurred off the base?” – Okozaki attacks the commander – “how dare you!” – slow motion used – director not knowing what to do when he got angry – unreal incident – unpalatable truth in life is buried under layers and layers.[Senegal and West African cinema] – manifesto of Third World Cinema identifies three main types of cinema:Commercial Entertainment – Hollywood CinemaModernist Art Movie Genre – European CinemaPost-colonial identity – Political Non-Western CinemaThese ideals were the rocket fuel for South American, African and Middle Eastern film.Burkina Faso – film festival in tens of thousands – making films is crucial to peoples’ identities – The Black Girl was the bold start of Black feature film in 1960s – Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941) is an unrealistic representation of Africa – more realistic = La Nouba (1973) – Arabic music, poorly preserved film, dreamlike quality, backward tracking shot – feminist film.Xala (1975, dir: Ousmane Sembene) about the move from colonial to post-colonial identity – funny and rude – starts in Chamber of Commerce in Dakar – kicking out the symbols of the French state – mockery of briefcases in the board room – anti-religion, hoping for cinema to gain a radical enlightenment – home of the ‘unbeliever’ metres away from a mosque – radical type of African cinema – Third Cinema.Badou Boy (1973) – caustic themes – uncertainty – abstract style – variety of camera angles – standing up and down by a carriage – disorientation – you either engage in stylistic research and just record reality – punky quality.0381000Hyenes (1992, dir: Djibril Diop Mambety)- masterpiece- woman half made of gold – man who loved her spurned her – she is as rich as the world bank now – she treats the villagers to luxuries and consumer goods – the villagers love these and become greedy – they want more – the village becomes like a shopping channel – a fun fair to celebrate the joys of capitalism – then devastatingly, the woman says that can’t have more luxuries –there’s a price to pay – she must kill the man who spurned her – so hooked on capitalism, they do kill him – the mob closes in – Mambety had become as angry about consumerism as Pasolini.Kaddu Beykat (1974, dir: Safi Faye)- mid-sized framings, everyday scenes – film is a show and tell to the outside world.Harvest: 3000 Years (1976, dir: Haile Gerima)- story over 3 millenia – history as if it’s just 1 day – low contrast black and white, long lens to telescope land – we feel distant – trilby hatted armchair tyrant – story told by a madman about the Queen of England – colonial power told almost like a myth – 2 hours in – tyrant landowner battered- voices flood soundtrack – people begin to talk to each other – a key idea in Third World cinema.[Popular radicalism of Third Cinema]Hope (1970, dir: Serif Goren Yilmaz Guney)- ripped clothing shows how poor he is – Kurdish Sean Connery – illiterate man searching for treasure to feed his family – has almost gone mad.Yol (1992) – man released from prison for five days – happy, free, running with dog, wide open spaces – smiles in village – then the smile dies on his face, the village is cowering – the state military are here – still life shots of confrontation – no words needed – people look imprisoned in their own windows and doorways – remarkably, the co-director was in prison for the whole of the shoot – in time for post-production – gave notes on how shots should be filmed – falsely accused of killing an anti-Communist.The Battle of Chile (1973, dir: Patricio Guzman)- Salvador Allende – identity and betrayal – Marxist democratically elected leader – September 11 1973 – his last radio broadcast – military led by Pinochet moves in – documentary of action – shooting for months during the violent coup – Battle of Chile – here’s what we are, here’s what we’re losing.The Holy Mountain (1973, dir: Alejandro Jodorowsky)- identity movie – outrageous Chilean born director – near naked thief climbs a tall tower – below him is a mad world of fascists and religious obsessives who have used his body as a mould to make images of Christ – Third Cinema setup – when the thief gets to the top of the tower, it looks like something out of the Technicolor Wizard of Oz – rainbow corridors – thief advances, meets a man dressed in white surrounded by goats and a naked woman with a camel – Jodorowsky studied mime in Paris – he believed in Zen Buddhism – the idea that people should dethrone themselves – studied Carl Jung – a man climbing into the maze of his own mind – rediscovers strange images and archetypes that he shares with other human beings – Indian music plays – Jodorowsky’s man in white is an alchemist – he asks the thief if he wants gold – he does – the manner of his making is extraordinary – he must defecate and give the alchemist his own sweat – the thief’s spiritual awakening begins – in the end, his own excrement becomes gold – Jodorowsky certainly had a sense of humour – journey to the holy mountain of self-discovery and self-loss is only just beginning – nudity, primary colours, egg shapes – very 70s production design – “you are excrement, you can change yourself into gold” – thief’s journey of self-discovery mirrors 70s cinema – political, innovative filmmakers that strips cinema naked – symbolism about selfhood turned into gold – used movies to ask who are we – nationally.[1970s onwards] - Innovation in Popular Culture Around The WorldBox-office successes: Jaws, Star Wars, The Exorcist, Bruce Lee Hong Kong movies, Sholay – the best of the mainstream films were innovative too.No city except NY has been more filmed than Hong Kong. ‘Cinema of the migrant’.[1950s Gold Rush Hong Kong Cinema]Louis B. Mayer built the largest private film studio in the world in Hong Kong – studio known as: The Shaw Brothers - the Shaw Brothers employed 1400 staff in 25 departments – Asia’s dream factories – 4000 years of Chinese history were acted out here.Kingdom and the Beauty (1962, dir: Li Han Hsiang)- feminine, studio set, highly coloured, musical with perfect trees and clothes.0-381000A Touch of Zen (1971, dir: King Hu)- masculine martial arts cinema – wider screen, more aggressive – faster, swish camera and swords – gravity bending – exquisitely engineered combat cinema – the ballet of combat.- Buddhism – transcendental methods practiced by monks Shaolin Temple – on the temple’s crumbling, surviving monks formed secret societies – folk tales and myths, legends and fantasies were spun – kung fu cinema was born.- from action film, to ghost story, to a reverie – sunlight cuts like a sword – sounds like steel – the Buddhist monks levitate – a social film turns into a transcendental film – daring Chi – part of film history – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers pay homage to King Hu’s classic.Enter the Dragon (1975, dir: Robert Clouse)- attack, sweat and rage of Bruce Lee’s fighting – he experienced racism and wanted to get even – muscular hyper-realism of his body.- camera work patiently recorded the action despite the physical martial arts dynamism of Bruce Lee himself – camera stays out of fight – not much editing – images stayed still and wide.Theories are that the shift to masculinity in cinema was due to cultural catalysts – 1960s: Hong Kong’s economy changed – rise in manufacturing and light industries allowed women to take up roles that weren’t traditionally theirs – they abandoned domestic life for factory work – able to spend money and become factory workers – office ladies and factory workers admired glamour – liked musicals with singing and dancing heroines – liked love stories - 1970s: economy of Hong Kong boomed – audiences became younger – parents allowed their children to go to the cinema to watch a film – The Shaw Brothers studio made films of many types – eventually, more muscular films about male bonding – in the style of Chang Cheh, stood out – decrease in average age of Hong Kong cinemagoers.A Better Tomorrow (1986, dir: John Woo)- black market business of Hong Kong tribes – 80s suits and clothes – hedonism – story about male bonding, loyalty and betrayal – style of movie was a change – influenced by Kurosawa and Peckinpah films – filmed shootouts with several cameras, used slow motion, and use of dolly and tracking shots – aesthetic of the glance – scenes broken down into fragments – sequels followed fast – amoral gangster wave of films made.Hong Kong imagery looked different – non-linear editing approaches pioneered by Woo.The Iron Monkey (1993, dir: Yuen Woo-ping)- Woo-ping directed and choreographed – fast cutting, numerous camera angles – fight choreographed – Woo-ping spun his characters into the air – introduction of wirework – storyboards not used – innovation impressed Hollywood – inspired The Matrix.The Matrix (1999, dir: The Wachowski Brothers)- infuse special effects sequences with Chinese/Hong Kong/Kung Fu techniques to create a brand new look – gravity defying of Hong Kong, the fast punching and feet flying of Bruce Lee – meticulous design of the film – computer designed demos – four months martial arts training – used wires to help them do the moves – design the martial arts action based on character – fixed storyboards – more freedom in Hong Kong cinema than US for Woo-ping.Once Upon A Time In China (1991, dir: Tsui Hark)- Jet Li plays a legendary Kung Fu master – the Europeans are invading China – enemy advancing by sea – Westernised woman intrigues the protagonist throughout the film – puts character on roof, sees woman because he has slipped down the thatch – dramatic high angle – films her from low angle – interesting meet cute – slapstick element – two buckets of paint fall down roof, man chases but ends up crashing into movie camera held by Westernised woman – hits ground in slo-mo – both woman and man share dramatic look, then the paint falls on the woman’s head (punchline) – then another bucket on the man’s head.Dragon Inn (1992, dir: Tsui Hark)- Maggie Cheung owns inn in the desert – unsettled by the character Bridget Lynn – they fight – whirlwind in the room – dance and erotic, graceful spinning, use of garments as weapons – hyperactivity of Hark makes for hyperactive and innovative cinema – made cinema spin.[Bollywood]- grew in scale and inventiveness – biggest film industry in the world Mughal E Azam (1960, dir: K. Asif)- took more box-office than The Sound of Music in the West – sparkling scene in courtyards, mirror sets – crown Prince who will marry beautiful veiled woman – director wanted to make the film in colour – recently restored using contemporary colouring effects – process that’s normally looked down upon, but the effect here is superb – pink and pistachio – mother of pearl.70s Bollywood got bigger and shinier – in 1971, India made 433 films – Mainstream Hindi entertainment cinema was magnetic.From Devi (1960, dir: Satyajit Ray), understated – to – Mausam (1975, dir: Gulzar), glitzy and colourful – musical drama – Gulzar is the box-office director of 70s Indian cinema – film influenced a generation of Indian women – sci-fi element – older Kumar appears, looking back on his romance (a happier younger self) – past and present all in the same scene – masterstroke of storytelling.Differences between Hindi (loquacious, fast paced, glossy, Bollywood) and Bengali cinema (slow, artful, purposeful, diasporic).Zanjeer (1973, dir: Prakash Mehra)- director has made more than 150 films – Bashan as an honest cop – zooms, freezes, close-ups – fears, rage – whirlwind of a scene with realization of crimes thanks to a series of symbolic clues.Person who rose up against the gutter and raising their voice against the system and becoming a great hero.019812000Sholay (1975, dir: Ramesh Sippy)- innovative colossus – widescreen titles like an epic, landscape like a Western, music like an adventure film – greatest Bollywood of its time – influential in the story of film – Urdu poet and screenwriter tried to capture the spirit of the times with this screenplay – politically, 1970s India, capitalist idealism was shattering – mainstream commercial cinema was affected by this – protagonist: angry young man who wanted to look after himself – Sholay captured the spirit of its time – played in one cinema for 7 years – gun shot freeze frames – family of policeman is brutally gunned down – slow motion deaths – squeak of a swing – this trauma electrifies this film and gives operatic emotions – the killer – one of cinema’s psychotic characters – influenced by The Magnificent Seven and Once Upon A Time In The West – full of conventions from other movies – Sholay’s revolt is in its fearlessly inventive shifts in tone – movie finds room amidst gunshots to have a carefree, blissful, singing in the sunshine open road sing-song between friends on a motorbike with a carrier – then, the festival of colour like a big Bollywood production – purple dust in the air, camera on a ferris wheel – the rapture is blasted away by an invasion on horseback – frenetic action – thatched houses set on fire – killer has girlfriend dance for the protagonist’s life – broken glass is scattered under her feet as she dances – one of the grimmest dance scenes – bleeding feet – denouement: the law is supreme – the cops show up – message: ultimately, we are all in the hands of the law – most attractive part of Indian cinema: you get poetic justice in 3 hours.[Middle Eastern cinema] 0000The Message (1977, dir: Moustapha Akkad)- biopic about Mohammed – as messenger of God – looks like conventional Biblical epic – 4 months to build sets, prepare crowd scenes, use period costumes – widescreen shot – “we have to defend ourselves, you are the messenger of God” – Antony Quinn talks to the camera – “I know how you hate the sword, but we have to fight” – walks away – we expect a reverse angle to the person he is talking to, but it doesn’t come – the camera raises up and walks towards him – we don’t see the person, because the person is the prophet Mohammed, his nephew – not after the prophet has ascended to Paradise, but whilst he is still here on earth – Islam does not allow the visual depiction of the prophet, so cinema, this visual medium, refuses to picture him – Akkad even leaves gaps in the soundtrack where Mohammed’s voice would be.- film also shot in Arabic – Mohammed: Messenger of God (1977, dir: Moustapha Akkad) – could have dubbed the film – he felt that Western and Arabic acting styles are so different, that he should make two versions – Akkad was a calm hard worker in the 70s.Akkad went on to produce the famous Halloween horror films – he and his daughter were killed by an Al Qaeda suicide bomber in a hotel in Jordan in 2005.[Egyptian 70s cinema] The Sparrow (1972, dir: Youssef Chahine)- stunning account of a terrible moment in Arab history – Egypt losing territory to Israel in a 6 days war – famous ending: Bahia runs out on streets – collective outrage and rioting on streets – anti-authority political polemical film.[US 70s cinema] – Blockbuster cinema launched and on a rollercoaster – changed American and World Cinema – fantasies: monsters, devils, spaceships, dinosaurs, sinking of Titanic – the promise of thrill and sensation lured people back to the cinema – ‘want/see’ – the birth of multiplexes.The Exorcist (1973, dir: William Friedkin)- took $200 million – believable middle class home – scream of evil – rush of fear – slapping horror cinema in the face of realism – a girl possessed by the devil – the devil’s voice was throaty, cigaretty, phlegmy – method performance in order to create the demon – the voice of the young girl played by another woman (drank liquor, ate raw eggs, smoked cigarettes to perfect sound of voice) – innovative vocal performance – Friedkin used traditional techniques (straight story) – no nonsense approach – influenced by veteran director Howard Hawks (Friedkin was going out with his daughter) – audience reactions were severe – Friedkin: “I have my finger on the pulse of America” – complexity of New Hollywood.063500Jaws (1975, dir: Steven Spielberg)- took $260 million – TIME called Spielberg the most influential director in cinema history – Spielberg was influenced by A Guy Named Joe (1943, dir: Victor Fleming): an apparition, her ex-lover who died sets her free to fall in love with another man – “I was truly the heart of the establishment” (Spielberg) – camera close to the sea – on boat: nerdy scientist (left), salty seen-it-all fisherman (central), green-around-the-gills police chief (right) – three very different men filmed in a three-shot like in a Howard Hawks film – Spielberg wanted realism – scientist crushes a paper cup to mock the machismo of the fisherman crushing a beer can – interviews: Spielberg speaks vividly about the POV of his shots (like Hitchcock) – working on visual idea using colour and lenses – The Making of Spielberg’s Jaws (1995) – people walking by the camera allowed a seamless cut between shots of the lifeguard watching the sea from his perch on the beach – shot/reverse shot of sea and lifeguard – suspense/fear developed – responsibility to protect the public – dollied in and zoomed out simultaneously to create a queasy shot to reveal the lifeguard’s reaction to a shark attacking a young boy – Hitchcock used this shot in Vertigo (1958) as James Stewart climbs the stairs of the tower and looks down – Nausea actualized visually.Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, dir: Steven Spielberg)- filmic signature – the awe and revelation scene – wide shot and dolly of characters looking at something – we want to see what they see – the scene builds: they get out of the car, but the director does not cut to what they’re looking at yet – delayed pay off for dramatic suspense and atmospheric crescendo – track and rise – camera pans gradually over – music rises – revelation over the horizon – the big reveal – same technique for first sighting of the dinosaurs in his film Jurassic Park (1993) – Sam Neill takes off hat, sunglasses, stares agasp, stands up in car out of roof – focus on the characters staring incredulously, delayed payoff of the subject – camera and music rises to reveal the subject: a diplosaurus – masterclass in the desire to see.Spielberg was not interested in the elites – he cared about suburbs, kids without dads, the underdogs – the most successful Romantic director in the story of film.Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977, dir: George Lucas)- took nearly $500 million – film starts like a fairy tale – “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way….’ – words drive backwards into deep space – soundtrack in Dolby stereo which seems to travel like in deep space – felt as if cinema shook – full spectating immersion – models of spaceships glided past wide angle lenses – they plunged into perspective too – looked enormous – camera moves were programmed by computers – film introduces us to Luke who is a knight who will save the universe – in the realm of myth – film’s design conjures the myth – interiors look like caves, kitchens or spaceships – talk of mystical force – Luke dresses like a Samurai – metallic odd couple (R2D2 and C3PO) influenced by Kurosawa’s own odd couple in The Hidden Fortress (1958) – optical message projected from R2D2 of a princess asking for help – we hear of an evil emperor who Lucas saw as the shamed American President, Richard Nixon – most absurd plot in the story of film yet the movie charms – draws richly from film history – spears of Kurosawa’s films became light sabers whilst soft wipe edits were used by both directors – evil characters were filmed in a similar way to Riefenstahl’s depiction of Nazi soldiers in Triumph of the Will – climax of Star Wars, Luke is attacking the Death Star – Lucas has the camera plunge like a phantom ride from silent cinema – fast-cutting, music crashes like waves – Luke uses computer to find his target – Luke hears voice of his hero, Ben Kinobi – told to “use the force” – Luke puts away computer – “the force is strong in this one” – Luke learns to feel and think with instinct – this is a metaphor for US 70s cinema – learn to create by instinct.Maybe Baby Boomers were tired of activism and wanted to switch off for a bit – escapism was an antidote to the everyday – the cinema of sensation rather than contemplation.[The 1980s] - Moviemaking and Protest Around The World The US voted for actor Ronald Reagan to become President, Chinese people protested in Tiananmen Square – moviemakers got their banners out.1980s = greed is good mantra – Reagan and Thatcher are in power – Conservative ideologues tell false stories about life and love – innovative filmmakers speak back against false narratives. It heralded the rise of 80s protest – the story of speaking truth to power started in China.China – both traditional and corporate – clash between ideals – Mao’s cultural revolution had stamped out moviemaking in China during their Communist era closing film academies – 1950s lecture notes – 1982 Fifth Generation filmmakers – most distinguished ever to spill out of a film school.The Horse Thief (1988, dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang)- spoke truth to power – un-Maoist subject – at a traditional burial – horse thief’s son has died – we see Buddhist monks – vultures eating the corpses – Tian was interested in the mystical traditions of his characters – these were banned under Mao – having eaten the body, the vultures take the spirit into the sky – Tian’s films looked different – what to talk about? Image, plot, characters, sound effects, pictures, colours – widescreen frame – blue filter – Scorsese called The Horse Thief the best film of the decade.Maoist films are about patriotic and exemplary types – Fifth Generation were challenging their time about individuality psychology – during the Cultural Revolution, the Fifth Generation interacted with society, villages, cities, politics – an eclectic range of family issues over a 12 year period.Yellow Earth (1985, dir: Chen Kaige)- greatest village film made in China in the 80s – far away from modernity and big cities – static shots, muted yellows and greens – the bare scale of the landscape – Communist soldiers collecting folk songs in their notebooks – soldier meets 14 year old girl – about her gentle, confident femininity – questions soldier but doesn’t look at him – Maoist women were supposed to be strutting and heroic – framed imagery like Chinese painting – the horizon much lower in the frame with the sky filling the canvas – male and female stood together – neither Maoist (not enough action or conflict) nor Confucian (not male centric – girl wants to join army) – used emptiness within the frame as a compositional element – saw maleness within femaleness and good within bad – more associated with another Asian philosophy – Taoism. 1980s China was complex.0571500Raise The Red Lantern (1991, dir: Zhang Yimou)- rigorous beauty in aesthetic composition – boldly symmetrical with orange/red colour palette – a precursor to the luscious House of Flying Daggers (2004) by the same director – studied Chinese painting and its ultra-widescreen compositions – gravity-defying Buddhist sense of the grace of movement – a pictorial masterclass – imagery in Chinese cinema was as beautiful as anywhere in the world.Pro-democracy protests were killed by their own government in China in Tiananmen Square – one of the greatest images ever of speaking truth to power – a man standing in the way of a sea of tanks in the munist authorities in 1980s Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union started losing their grip – filmmakers told stories about taboo subjects – Repentance (1984, dir: Tengiz Abuladze)- created a sensation – tells in a comic-book manner about a dictator with a Hitler moustache – but like Stalin is Georgian – woman imagines that he and her man are buried – alludes to Dovzhenko’s classic Arsenal (1929) – haunting static shot of a smiling dead soldier – dictator eventually dies – woman digs up body – corpse propped up on the tree – surreal – symbol that atrocity cannot be buried – Stalinist genocide stinks of death.Gorbachov approved the film for release – a period of new openness in the Soviet Union – a rare example of film actually changing the world.019050000Come and See (1985, dir: Elem Klimov)- astonishing Soviet film – in Belorussia in 1943, Nazi bombs have exploded – into the frame comes the teenage boy of the story who is fighting the Nazis – boy seems to get smaller because of wide angle lens – peak of cap seems to reach out to us – the bomb has given him tinnitus – the whistle conveyed by the film’s non-diagetic sound – meets a girl – they go to his village – they can’t find his family – they run to look for them – girl looks back, she sees a host of dead bodies, he doesn’t see – wide angle lens tracks as if it’s the awful thing she’s just seen – they struggle through a boggy marshland – acting to the limit of endurance – we hardly hear their screams – the absurdity of a Viennese Waltz on the soundtrack – no film is more physical – morally serious – greatest war film ever made.Klimov became Head of the Soviet Film Union in the 1980s – he and politicians discussed censorship – the digging up of the past, as well as films that had been banned because of anti-Soviet sentiments – spoke truths other than the sanctioned ones.Long Goodbyes (1971, dir: Kira Muratova)- middle-aged woman – jump cuts – she talks in train over son – strange high-pitched voice on soundtrack – no sound of train itself – mother and son never eye-to-eye – opposite each other – she nags him – match cut to a man in the sun – boy has cut on his hands – man replaced by older man – splintered cuts – then in an airplane watching kids running in the fields with flowers – mum and son in long lens not looking at each other – theme: the way people can suffocate each other – psychological bondage – was banned because authorities were unnerved by the form of the film – banned – maybe they thought that the long lens camera angles were commenting on Soviet surveillance – re-released to acclaim after Klimov’s emancipation of Soviet censorship.A Short Film About Killing (1988, dir: Krzysztof Kieslowski)- 20 year old in an 80s Polish city – yellow/green imagery – jaundiced – sees a rock – drops it from a height onto a dual carriageway – if he can do this, he can do anything – gets in a taxi – he’s going to kill the taxi driver – taxi driver stops to let kids cross the road, echoing a car scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – people who don’t know that they’re about to die – the dirt and sickness of fear – foot comes out of sock, taking forever to die – scene lasts 3 minutes 45 seconds – 35 shots – real time – man’s saliva smears on the window – the cinematographic masking is so heavy it looks like night – the man’s false teeth – the man reduced to a sock, spit and dentures – extraordinary innovation – character sentenced to death for his crime – the ugly fury of death – hanged for his crimes – shit drips from his body – physical things to rage against the dying of the light – so influential that it changed the death penalty in Poland – talking truth to power indeed.[African 80s cinema] – a rethink of the purpose of African cinema –Wend Kunni (1983, dir: Gaston Kabore)- orphan boy has been found in the bush – herds goats, doesn’t speak – Kabore’s camera follows him - complex timeline for the narrative arc – flashback within a flashback – postmodern technique.Yeelan (1987, dir: Souleymane Cisse)- tracking down a sorcerer father – tracks around the protagonist like in a Sergio Leone shootout – faces his father – extreme close up of eyes – water buffalo in slow motion – a sci-fi roar on the soundtrack – Cisse tracks up the body of the protagonist and his stony look – then his father becomes a mythic elephant and Yankaro becomes a lion – then mystical rods seem to channel the brightness of the cosmos – brightness starts to blind the characters – a magic realist film – a complex work of art.[US 80s cinema] – power on Wall Street where greed was good – Reagan said that the money would ‘trickle down’ to the working classes – it didn’t.Video Killed the Radio Star (1979, dir: Russell Mulcahy)- MTV generation – screens within screens, fast cutting.Flashdance (1983, dir: Adrian Lyne)- music video influenced film – fast editing, provocative choreography – impressionistic Gun (1986, dir: Tony Scott)- the 80s was mostly a male Reaganite dreamland – Tom Cruise flying above the Persian Gulf – flies upside-down – Cold War film fantasy – pop promos and advert style scenes – an advert for new masculinity, new American Dream.Blue Velvet (1986, dir: David Lynch) - float into David Lynch’s film like a spaceship landing on earth – firemen wave as they glide past – a subversive Sirk style 50s America with a glossy veneer and dark underbelly – white picket fence, children go to school in slow motion - aesthetics – the film rails against the rationality and understandability of everyday life – works with unconscious material the way a carpenter works with mood – isle of the ducks scene – man sings with 50s microphone ‘I close my eyes’ – the beauty of Roy Orbison’s song collides with Hopper’s intoxication – disturbing atmosphere – the beauty hurts - like Reagan, Lynch had an almost abstract fear of the outside world.The Elephant Man (1980, dir: David Lynch)- dark world of Victorian England – sympathetic to the deformed man – Anthony Hopkins sheds a tear of sympathy – surrealism of Lynch’s imagination – bulbous shapes on man’s skull – visual rhymes abound in the aesthetics of the film.Staring at it with a brilliant frame – the window on the world closes – 80s cinema.03937000Do The Right Thing (1989, dir: Spike Lee)- hot day like a pressure cooker in a racially fraught community – warm colours – tilted camera angles – a technique borrowed from The Third Man (1949) – the imbalance of the world of the story – striking moment of protest in 80s American cinema – picks up a trash can, camera tracks with him – rushes with the can and throws it through the window of the pizzeria – pairs a quotation between two quotes – one by Martin Luther King denouncing violence and one by Malcolm X advocating it in self-defense.[Radical 80s Independent Movement in US] – State of the Nation filmmakers – Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980, dir: John Sayles)- group of college friends 10 years after they’d been arrested at an anti-war demonstration – skinny-dipping and jumping in the lake from heights – film felt truthful because it wasn’t edited in a flashy MTV way – camera patiently observed and listened to adult conversations about politics – “what do I see in life around me that I don’t see on the big screen?” – complex protagonists with flawed characteristics – paying attention, taking time, engaging with characters – did not compromise on Independent sensibilities.French films seemed to want to kick protest films in the teeth – now interested in popular culture and post-modernism – a reaction against seriousness – Subway (dir: Luc Besson)- pop promo specialist who lived in US – rollercoaster has snatched a handbag, running away from cops – wide angle shots to make the space deeper.Les Amants Du Pont Neuf (1991, dir: Leos Carax)- Public Enemy plays, fireworks in the capital, Juliette Binoche skanking on the edge of a bridge – this could be a modern dance about high class people – but they are homeless people who sleep rough on the bridge – he’s a drunk – most expensive French film ever made – glossy and wasteful – plight of homelessness treated in the same way as Vincente Minnelli’s An American In Paris (1951) – colour splashed across the screen – Romantic ecstacy and agony.Labyrinth of Passions (1982, dir: Pedro Almodovar)- Spain in the 80s – protest had a sex change – camp and goth Pedro – purple 80s lighting – dictator Franco had died – Spain’s underground culture was transgressive – anarchic – antics of A Hard Day’s Night present – celebration of pop music, youthful surface and inclusive camerawork – provocative scenes: porn shoot with male prostitute – cheap not classy style: kitsch – Almodovar’s signature was the comic grotesque – challenged the old fashioned Spain with sex and style.The Quince Tree Hill – weeks of painting – delicacy of the moment – Spain under Franco was all about lies, this film was a return to the truth.[British politics in 80s Cinema] – right-wing government brought protest to the streets –0127000My Beautiful Launderette (1985, dir: Stephen Frears) - London – middle class Pakistani businessman – opening a launderette – right-wing government liked entrepreneurs, immigrants less so – he dances with white woman – entrepreneur’s nephew has gay sex with a white man – dribbles champagne into the mouth of the nephew – homosexuality, race, politics – white bloke is a neo-Nazi – the warts of multi-cultural Britain – a knee in the balls to the right-wing government – a provocation like Bunuel’s films to Franco’s Spain.Gregory’s Girl (1981, dir: Bill Forsyth)- Romantic film – young people and the ordinary places where they fall in love – tilts camera for a touch of poetry.Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)- family terrorized at home by brutal father – memory images – camera tracks down empty hallway in house round to show the front door – distant voices, no-one in frame – slow dissolve – symmetrical filming – influence of Vermeer on his work – slow forward tracking shot influenced by Intolerance by D.W. Griffith – you have to feel different towards the subject by the end of the tracking shot according to Terence – Young at Heart (1954, dir: Gordon Douglas) – another influence – Hollywood musical crane shot – character has killed himself – glides into perfect world – Davies uses a combination of youth and passion – his youth was often painful – transcends the pain with beauty – a cinematic way of speaking truth to power.A Zed and Two Noughts (1986, dir: Peter Greenaway)- likes perfectly symmetrical frames – goes further – threesome to make sex symmetrical – only lack of symmetry – woman has one leg – for perfect symmetry, she has other leg cut off.The Last of England (1988, dir: Derek Jarman) - ruined landscape – like in an Italian rubble movie after WWII – intercut fast 80s style with men with machine guns and Morris dancers as a symbol of genteel village England – like an ideological storm – Jarman’s rage at values could not be clearer – Nazi speech juxtaposed with horrific imagery – magic, dance, frenzy – thunderbolt – provocative.Videodrome (1983, dir: David Cronenberg)- man watching TV alone at night – TV throbs – giant lips on screen – idea that the screen is sensual – the sexualisation of our solitary relationships with the screens.Crash (1996, dir: David Cronenberg)- J.G. Ballard adaptation – boundary between hard and soft skin and metal in modern life – the eroticism of metallic objects – we are all more down and dirty than we pretend.Neighbours (1952, dir: Norman McLaren)- blasting hypocrisy – stop-frame animation – two neighbours fight over a single flower in their garden – Pablo Picasso called it the best film ever made.Jesus of Montreal (1989, dir: Denys Arcand)- assault on hypocrisy and 80s consensus – group of actors stages a passion play with the audience following/travelling to the action – make the audience feel uncomfortable by pointing out their voyeurism – speaks truth to power – the moral turpitude of the audience – we lie to ourselves about our bodies, our sex, our values.The Story of Film: An Odyssey [DVD5][1990-1998] - The Last Days of Celluloid: Before The Coming Of Digital- The digital image in Terminator 2 – reality broken.The Apple (1998, dir: Samra Makhmalbaf)- based on a true story – handheld camera moves into enclosed world of girl.- father thinks outside world is so dangerous that he has sheltered her completely.- locked up two daughters at home for 11 years – girls grew up like wild animals.- deprived of any social contact – if you don’t judge, you can’t love them.- blinking back out into the real world – shy, gentle – these aren’t actors.- self-roleplay re-enactment like a documentary but not.- they found the process therapeutic – so it was helpful.- Makhmalbaf used film to double over it – reconstruction with actors involved.0-254000 A Moment Of Innocence (1996, dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf)- double-backing – Samra’s dad Mohsen is in exile from Iran (in Paris).- advertised for non-professional actors – a man who auditioned was a policeman.- M previously stabbed this policeman back in 70s as a teenager fighting the Shah’s regime.- Mohsen scrapped his initial film plan – he decides to make one about the stabbing.- recreated the events from the attacker’s point of view.- he asked the policeman (who had never made a film before) to create from victim’s POV.- meta-documentary – the film is essentially a therapeutic ‘making of’ re-construction.- turns out that the woman who he was besotted with was in cahoots with Mohsen.- the real policeman quits the production as a result.- single greatest work of autobiography in cinema.Abbas Kiarostami worshipped reality – wanted to remove all falseness from filmmaking.“I try to reduce the use of technical devices” – light, clapperboard, travelling shots, dolly shots, similar devices – tries to eliminate the director but not the author – director is like a football coach – select the players, train them, but when the game’s on, you sit on the sidelines – you’re just like the fans – you get stressed out, edgy or happy about the way it goes, but you can’t interfere with the players’ performance.Where is the Friend’s House? (1986, dir: Abbas Kiarostami)And Life Goes On (1992)Through The Olive Tree (1994)- tragedy struck – 50,000 died from an earthquake near the film – searching for star, Babak.- Kiarostami decides to make a film called And Life Goes On (1992) – went looking for the boys but found something more important – the passion for life – man gets married days after the earthquake – testament of human resilience – static camera, naturalistic dialogue – reconstructs scene of first conversation with the man, with an actor playing Kiarostami – Hussein became infatuated with the woman playing his fiancé in the film – she did not return his feelings – Kiarostami was fascinated by this – Through The Olive Tree (1994) – two years later – feelings about Hussein during the second film – reconstruction of him trying to woo the woman – Kiarostami’s love of his love – complex layers of reality.We are living in the era of Kiarostami – simple reality – spirit of times captured as an antithesis to hyper-reality in Blockbuster cinema.[Hong Kong New Wave Filmmakers]Days of Being Wild (1990,dir: Wong Kar-Wai)- soft shadowing, shallow focus, gorgeous colours – beauty of sad, lonely people.- fluorescent lights, saturated colours and the landscape of faces together create the beauty of the Wong world.- the travel around Hong Kong today is to feel Wong’s sense of time, colour and composition – time drags its heels.07747000 In The Mood For Love (2000, dir: Wong Kar-Wai)- exquisite film – night-time celluloid vision of Wong’s team – time slowed down, a woman slaloms past a man – he glances – Hong Kong, 1962 – music in ? - rain begins lit by a small street lamp – steam and rain – we feel the sultry heat – man and woman are in separate marriages but unhappy – lonely – heads lowered – they’re in the mood for love – like Fassbender and Davies movies, hope has left the building – rapture has migrated into the imagery and sound – Maggie Cheung had created one of the most striking personas in World Cinema.Irma Vep (1996, dir: Oliver Assayas)Cheung playing a silent movie icon in France – telling comment on what directors sometimes do to actors – Assayas scribbles on the celluloid like a director metaphorically vandalizes the performance of the actor.Taiwan – haunted by slow photographic truths.Bertolucci rates Hou Hsiao-hsien as one of the key directors reinventing film language.In the early 80s, the political situation changed rapidly – more open society allowed work about historyCity of Sadness (1989, dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien)- intense lens on Taiwanese society – 1940s – moment in stasis in turbulent history – long, static shots (40 seconds on average) – holding a long shot has a certain kind of tension.- Rigeur – one of brothers treated in a local hospital – story takes us back to the hospital several times – an ordinary director might want to vary the shot on each return – but every return has the same frame and angle – reality doubling back on itself – no reverse angles or alternate shots – national recall – who suggests that we remember places in just one way.- Hsai-hsien as master of spatial rigeur – his frames within frames, square on imagery, no camera moves, echoes Yasujiro Ozu with films like Tokyo Story – space is not something to move through with speed – the great classisist of Taiwan’s modern era.Vive L’Amour (1994, dir: Tsai Ming-liang)- about the loneliness of life in modern cities – young woman walks to a park bench and cries – thousands of park benches surround her – we don’t know why she is crying – waves of emotion cross her face as the sun comes out – Tsai’s camera is static – opposite of fantasy cinema – Tsai believes in the fascination of the human face – prolonged 7 minute shot – according to Ming-liang: modern people have a quest for material things, and reject real emotions in favour of one night stands - he thinks human beings are still full of tenderness – they aren’t stones but need to be reminded in order to rediscover their tenderness.- films people drinking water, pissing, crying – our bodies are like containers – they hold material things like water but also desire, feelings and power – bodies are entrusted as temporary places for our souls.[1990s Japan] – J-horror (to get under the skin)TETSUO (dir: Shinya Tsukamoto)- ordinary Japanese man starts to turn into metal - handheld, punky b&w imagery starts emphasizes the man’s terror – off kilter framing shots tilted – kinetic, abstract camera movements with extreme close-ups and a sense of disturbing and chaotic eroticism – inspired by David Cronenberg – played a part in the birth of cyberpunk.Videodrome (1983, dir: David Cronenberg) – surrealist horror influence.Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992, dir: Shinya Tsukamoto)- man transformed into a gun – 43 seconds of single-frame biological images – technique of Abel Gance in 1923 – flickering decay in man’s cellular life – wild energy as expression of modern life’s fear of machinery and computerization.La Roue (1923, dir: Abel Gance)- single-frame kinetic shots – pre-cursor to MTV generation.Ringu (1998, dir: Hideo Nakata)- most influential horror movie of its time – industrious noise, screeching – young girl with long hair covered over her face – extreme close-up of demonic eye through her hair – soundtrack crescendo like strained violin strings – Japan’s biggest ever international box office hit – the girl climbs out of our video image into our homes – fear of television, technology – fused a paradox of demonism and grace into a surreal horror – premise: people who die after watching a video tape – sound in the film added 50 tracks and effects – real sound doubling back over itself.The Exorcist (1973, dir: William Friedkin)- demonic possession as an influence on Nakata’s horror.Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, dir: Kenji Mizoguchi)- Nakata also borrowed from the eerie calm of the dreamlike ghost in Mizoguchi’s Japanese classic.Audition (2000, dir: Takashi Miike)- woman with long black hair and a ghost-like complexion (echoes of Nakata’s and Mizoguchi’s characters) – man auditions for actresses – blankness, minimalism to wrong foot us – stillness as a counterpoint to violence in an almost Buddhist way – she becomes a psychopathic killer after seeming like a quiet, sweet character.Dogme 95 – Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg (took a book out of Bresson and Pasolini’s ideals that cinema had to become primitive again).DOGME 95’s VOW OF CHASTITY:Shooting must be done on location.?Props?and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).The sound must never be produced apart from the images or?vice versa. (Music must not be used unless?it occurs where the scene is being shot.)The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).Optical work and filters are forbidden.Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now).Genre movies?are not acceptable.The film format must be?Academy 35 mm.The?director?must not be credited.Kiarostami and Von Trier celebrate the primitive in cinema – the days before computer generated imagery (CGI).Breaking The Waves (1996, dir: Lars Von Trier)- broke many of the Dogme rules but was revelatory and fresh – suffering of this na?ve young Scottish woman, Bess (Emily Watson) – Von Trier follows her with mostly handheld shots as life does its worst to her – the actors were free to move anywhere – Trier did take after take, then edited them together so that to him they seemed most ‘true’, even if they were out of focus or broke the 180 degree axis rule – the ultimate movie roughness – end of the film: Bess dies – audacious denouement – Bess’ partner realizes that she has gone to heaven (as the bells play) – cameras in heaven – static shot of two heavenly bells either side of the screen looking down on the building site of the characters who were looking up – most movies are secular, but Breaking The Waves ending is Christian – if films go too far, how long did I stay with it – a lot of people didn’t stay with the bells.Homicide: Life on the Street (1993, dir: Tom Fontana)- no continuity, jump cuts – burden to be freed of – Von Trier has toyed around with that since.Godard’s jump cuts and 180 degree axis rule breaking was more stylized.Von Trier was interested in a freedom from style - 024130000 Dogville (2003, dir: Lars Von Trier)- sometimes, LVT operated the camera himself – intimacy between actor and director was new in cinema – Dogville was even more innovative than Breaking The Waves – Trier used no sets, buildings or props – daring and scary technique – whole film on theatre stage – rooms marked out by chalk lines to represent a village – it only works if you want it to work as an audience – Russell Crowe said that this demands an explanation, Von Trier said “well, not from me!” – American village – village starts to enslave visiting woman (played by Nicole Kidman) – in the end, they shackle her like a dog – Von Trier breaks the editing rules.Like Bergman and Dreyer films, many of Von Trier’s are about suffering women.In most movies, women are distant objects of desire, Von Trier’s women seem to be versions of himself – Lars writes himself in the women’s role – easier to work with actresses according to Von Trier – he believes actors are more confrontational – actresses are more accepting of the transient process of the project.Von Trier once said that a film should be like a pebble in a shoe – films that he likes hurt a little bit – he thinks that most films are reproductions – he prefers to make a mark, or pain.The primitive radicalism of the Dogme manifesto – searing and mocking emotions of Von Trier – one of the most talked about artists of their time – human nature, warts and all.Many French directors reacting against glossy fantasy cinema – with working class and ethnically diverse characters:-635571500 La Haine (1995, dir: Mathieu Kassovitz)- shot in black and white, sometimes static camera – staring at blank characters – filmed in dire housing estates – Kassovitz shows us a day in the life of several poor youths – first we meet is Said (Islamic) – trakcs into Said in slo-mo, then cranes over his head to reveal police authorities with attack dogs – second meet: Vinz – see him dancing in a dream sequence – filmed in deep space (Wellesian filming trait) – gets up, goes to the bathroom – two actors used for mirror scene (back of Vinz’s head is a double – open mirror gap used with Vinz actor on the other side) – otherwise, we would see the camera – illusion created – Vinz starts to mimic Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver.- effective depiction of multicultural, working class France.Do The Right Thing (1989, dir: Spike Lee)- Kassovitz was influenced by this – precise framing, heightened colour – street life was style, grace – static camera applicable.L’Humanite (1999, dir: Bruno Dumont)- also about working class France but with a totally different style – shot in colour – static camera – none of the craning of La Haine – distant policeman walking across landscape – we see him on the ground traumatized by the rape of a girl – he has a cold hollow stare – later, astonishingly, the man seems to levitate – long shot with feet off the ground in a garden of sporadic flowers and shrubs in an isolated location surrounded by fields – last image: man is filmed in medium/long shot – turned away from us – we glimpse handcuffs on him – is the policeman a rapist or is he a simple man suffering for all our sins?Rosetta (1999, dir: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)- former documentarists – disenfranchised life in contemporary Europe – feral teenage girl desperate for a job – have her run and pace throughout the film – handheld camera.Claire Denis worked with Wim Wenders – insists film (whether art or mainstream) is universal.Touki Bouki (1973, dir: Djibril Diop Mambiety)- man slaughters oxen and puts their horns on his motorbike – great film about teenage hopes – Beau Travail (1999, dir: Claire Denis)- extraordinary African film – burned earth by sea – inverts gender – woman photographing men rather than vice versa – walk around each other like a classic Western gunfight – choreography more important than aggression – minimal without testerone – single slow motion punch – main character kills himself – close up of body, blood pumping in veins – rhythm of life – after his death – final scene: dance sequence (prior his suicide by after in the film’s linearity) – solo protagonist with cigarette dramatically swirling – long shot (last days of disco) Astaire-like – dance to parison to Ozu’s final scene of Late Spring (1949) – father alone peeling an apple like a lonely man – elegant gesture like the final dance in Beau Travail – Ozu gave a depth that we cannot resist.Crows (1994, dir: Dorota Kedzierzawska)- celluloid in a non-masculine way – on a boat, kid kidnapped by an older girl who is always ignored by her mum – older girl is pretending to be a mum herself – old fashioned almost square frames used – keeps the filmmaking as simple as possible – naturalistic performances – girl lies saying she is her mummy – the film is colour coded in yellows and greens – the film is about the human face, which the digital age will struggle to depict.Wednesday (1997, dir: Viktor Kossakovsky)- photographing human beings is one of cinema’s great strengths – Kossakovsky has tracked down every single person who was born in this city on the day that he was – Wednesday 19th July 1961 – films a man as he walks the street, films another as he walks through traffic, another as he makes music on an accordion, woman as she gives birth – photographed documentary style.24 Realities a Second (2004, dir: Nina Kusturica Eva Testor)- Haneke saw contemporary times as dark days – the threat of violence in his work – meticulously planned films – studied philosophy.Code Unknown(2000, dir: Michael Haneke)- first shots – 11 minutes, no cuts – complex camera movement – boy throws rubbish at homeless man – black man confronts him – tension and conflict in modern life – we don’t connect as Europeans.Funny Games (1997, dir: Michael Haneke)- disconnected society – ‘the last days of celluloid’ – human beings becoming unreal – visit neighbours to borrow eggs but gradually terrorize the family until taking them hostage – the power of suggestion.- breaking the fourth wall – direct address towards camera.- boys take a TV handset and press rewind after the denouement of the hostage situation goes wrong – the film itself rewinds rather than a TV in the shot – this wouldn’t happen in the age of celluloid – this is a digital phenomenon (or home viewing phenomenon) – Haneke is saying that we might be enjoying vicariously, the violence – he’s saying ‘go on, you know you want to, you degenerate’.Persona (1966, dir: Ingmar Bergman)- the film melts – we’re in a new position – the spell of vicarious immersive spectatorship and escapism is broken – the wall of the artifice is revealed (Brechtian).Heralding a digital world where seeing is no longer believing – people on screen are suddenly avatars that subvert notions with reality and give the impression of breaking the fourth wall between performer and audience.[The 1990s] -The First Days of Digital:Reality Losing its Realness in America and AustraliaGladiator (2000, dir: Ridley Scott)- CGI helicopter panning establishing shot to the Coliseum.- has reality lost some of its realness.The set design of Intolerance would not need to be literal puters became central to cinema in the 1990s – rows of 1s and 0s digital information.Imagery could be made of tiny rows of picture information – scanned at incredible speed.Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, dir: James Cameron)- a liquid metal representation of a person which metamorphoses into photographed actor – Cameron’s design and technical teams scan the photographed image into the computer then they drew shiny surfaces and movements to make the man look like mercury – Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) – 3D beginnings.Anchors Aweigh (1945, dir: George Sidney)- 2D nature despite ground-breaking nature.Jurassic Park (1993, dir: Steven Spielberg)- hyper-realism of CGI – from texture to presence to reflections.Titanic (1997, dir: James Cameron)- shots filmed in deep space to show the height and length of the boat.70s cinema was about what we wanted to see – Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars.90s cinema had become about synthesized reality.The inventiveness of CGI.Toy Story (1995, dir: John Lasseter)- entirely made with a computer – rendering shadows, dynamic deep staging and see compositions that would be difficult for real cameras to shoot from – pricey end of CGI.Innovation doesn’t need to be expensive.The Blair Witch Project (1999, dir: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez)- shot on lo-tech digital video and marketed on the internet.- it had the look and sound of camcorder video footage – voices close to the camera recorded by the internal mic – the whites in her face burn out – video effect.1999 – digital cinemas opened up in US, Korea, Spain, Germany, Mexico.2001-2 – George Lucas shot Star Wars Episode II entirely without celluloid.[Asian filmmakers] were even more innovative.House of Flying Daggers (2004, dir: Zhang Yimou)- blind dancer with a dancing gift – man flicks a bean against drums as a challenge – can she identify which drum the bean has hit and in what succession – to create sounds around her, the camera rushes forward with the bean – bean is CGI, motion blur between drums also CGI – her sleeve garment picks up a CGI sword – man throws CGI plate at her – she’s seeing and not seeing but then so are we – images doing things that they could never do before – all with brilliant Chinese choreography and grace – remarkable innovation – the theme of the story of film.90s – digital tape rather than celluloid transition.In front of the camera changed too (but regressively so) – reality began to lose some of its realness – from modern to post-modern and playful – Schindler’s List, LA Confidential, Silence of the Lambs – serious 40s genre pictures in new guises – but the real flavor of the times were irony and post-modernism – the idea that there are no great truths – everything is recycled – filmmakers started playing games with old genres – films about films, intertextuality and quoting from previous films in pastiche, homage and parody.Goodfellas (1990, dir: Martin Scorsese)- master of 70s cinema started doing this too – gangster film – this gangster looks right into the camera – very postmodern thing to do – then, out of nowhere, Joe Pesci shoots right down the lens – intertextual reference to The Great Train Robbery (1903, dir: Edwin S. Porter) – Scorsese knew this shot and repeated it – film quoting film – very 90s thing to do.90s films were full of playful twists on old films – Robert Siodmak’s classic film noir The Killers (1946) – dark lighting, shadows from German expressionism, little dialogue – compare to this:0-254000Pulp Fiction (1994, dir: Quentin Tarantino, A Band Apart)- gangster film – bright lighting, LOTS of talking (trivial and everyday) – not exactly Humphrey Bogart – breathed new life into American screenplay writing – they stopped the story and opened up the discourse – the shot also owes much in framing to Ozu’s Tokyo Story – out of character/in character – as if to emphasis the dialogue, the shot remains static behind the two guys – we listen rather than look – the emphasis on the surrealism of everyday talk became known as Tarantinoesque – meant both ‘more real’ and ‘less real’ at the same time – not just significant to film dialogue – he was also a hyperlink to film history – he championed little known Hong Kong director Yuen Woo-ping (Iron Monkey) – he choreographed Kill Bill scenes.Reservoir Dogs (1992, dir: Quentin Tarantino)- long lens, wearing black glasses, Harvey Keitel shots the police with two guns – clear intertextual reference to Ringo Lam’s City on Fire.- climax – three jewel thieves pull guns on each other – a death triangle – a warehouse – a police mole is bleeding – wide shots then close ups – the thieves have just done a failed heist – also an intertextual reference to Ringo Lam’s City on Fire – déjà vu – moviemaking about the story of film.City on Fire (1987, dir: Ringo Lam)- Hong Kong film – Danny Lee in Black glasses shoots the police with two guns.Bande a part (1964, dir: Jean-Luc Godard) – one of Tarantino’s favourite films.- title sequence: fast-cut close ups of the main characters – the letters of the film title coming up graphically (superimposed) on the screen – Tarantino used this title ‘A Band Apart’ for his own production company.Natural Born Killers (1994, dir: Oliver Stone)- Tarantino’s post-modernism was in his writing – made by Stone from Tarantino’s screenplay – visually, Tarantino was a traditionalist – glide-cam engraved green (cinematography) – POV shot on film in full colour – handheld video – mash-up of styles is post-modern – no-one type of image could capture the ‘truth’ – reality was multiple and fragmented.[Fourth strain of 90s Postmodernism] – Joel and Ethan Coen – kooky, technicalMiller’s Crossing (1990, dirs: Joel & Ethan Coen)- a hat falls into the foreground, trees are out of focus – the wind blows the hat and the focus follows it – the forest comes into focus – then the story begins.- Coens were masters of visual and story precision.The Hudsucker Proxy (1994, dirs.: Joel & Ethan Coen)- Coens had honed their comic, kooky worldview – Capraesque – ‘the little man caught up in events he barely understands’ – novice mailroom worker who becomes a chief executive – cheap cigar to show for it – films shot in blues and navies – the novice is pure Coen brothers – gormless, asexual man out-of-his-depth – Sturges, Capra, Hawks worlds.O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000, dirs.: Joel & Ethan Coen)- Clooney plays a wide-eyed, clueless man – golden cinematography.The Big Lebowski (1998, dirs.: Joel & Ethan Coen)- wide-eyed Jeff Bridges high on drugs – bowling shoes handed out by Saddam Hussein – war in Iraq was on and the Coens wanted to refer to it – dance sequence was a reference to the Busby musical – brilliant marriage of slacker dudeness with surreal design and Old Hollywood in the context of 90s politics – Coen’s affection for men gave their postmodernism heart.One of the most daring postmodern filmmakers of the 1990s – Gus Van Sant – influenced by a wide range of styles, movies, periods – refers to them as he talks.0254000My Own Private Idaho (1991, dir: Gus Van Sant)- about a young, narcoleptic hustler – metaphorical imagery for his orgasm from a blowjob from another man – image of a barn falling from the sky on an open road in the sun – imaginative sex scene – camera pans down, he zips up just in time as money is thrown on his abdomen to suggest that he is a gigolo of sorts.- film was full of empty landscape shots, golden light, the open road – Van Sant showed other images to show what the hustler felt as he lost consciousness.The barn falling as a singular image like the blood falling out of the elevator in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) – one standalone special effect – tried this in MOPI to symbolize another kind of falling (his orgasm). Elephant (2003, dir: Gus Van Sant)- also about a fall from grace of young men – no film of this era was more complexly connected to film history – the film was a response to the shootings at a school in Columbine – film was shot in the unfashionable 4:3 screen ratio – Van Sant follows young me with a Steadicam – little dialogue, violence in unexplained.Intertextual reference / arguable adaptation of Alan’s Clarke’s ‘Elephant’ – Van Sant says HBO was the only company interested in not making Columbine, but remaking Alan Clarke’s ‘Elephant’ – Van Sant paralleled subtly, the Columbine shooting with extremism in Northern Ireland – abstract statement – like a video game – ‘Tomb Raider’.Elephant (1989, dir: Alan Clarke)- 14 years earlier – British director Alan Clarke – Steadicam used to show the driven, trance-like walking of gunmen in Northern Ireland.Gerry (2002, dir: Gus Van Sant)- like in ‘Tomb Raider’ – continual walking without cuts – cinema without cuts – Satantango (1994, dir: Bela Tarr) – the Hungarian auteur – litter in the wild – tumbleweed in the wind of ‘Gerry’.Last Days- inspired by the death of the rock star, Kurt Cobain – DP recommended fixed shots over the travelling shots of Van Sant’s previous works – consider Jeanne Dielman by Chantal Akerman as an influence – shots in Last Days are remarkably similar – reworking of Ozu and Hitchcock.Psycho (1998, dir: Gus Van Sant)- remake of the Hitchcock horror classic - addition of clouds in the shower/knife sequence – Anne Heche’s pupils dilate on her death – in the 90s, you could show more nudity – Van Sant couldn’t quite keep his instinctive surrealism in check – different from Hitchcock’s – the soul of the filmmaker is different despite making it a near play-by-play of the original – dark underlying tensions – you can’t really copy something.Gus Van Sant creating and relating to film structurally – film is a language of its own – the language itself being what the film is about – they can have subjects, but in the end, the language is the true subject.Cremaster 3 (2002, dir: Matthew Barney)- director used to be a sportsman – just like a sportsman who used to build up their sweat, so Barney works up a sweat making a film – Barney plays an apprentice artist working hard at his art – film named after the cremaster muscle which makes human testicles rise and fall – Barney rises but other things fall – setting: Guggenheim museum in New York – Barney’s film represents a human vagina – New York’s Chrysler building represents a penis – one character in pink Scottish tartan – in 1992, he did a drawing of a bagpipe (5 pipes) – to represent a place where he would film – one of the places was New York – maybe it sounds like the film is overloaded with symbolism – but it has the beauty and determination of Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923) with Barney’s climbing – he encounters obstacles like Lloyd in his climb – his climb is a vertical storyline of little incidents – apprentice has reached the top of the Guggenheim – we encounter his master, the sculptor Richard Serra in dark clothes – melting Vaseline which will trickle down the corkscrew of the building – rise and fall – Barney the surrealist loves the texture of Vaseline – on lower levels remains a punk band who have impeded Barney’s climb - Early days of digital film were full of references to other films but few looked from such a great height as Barney’s – 5 Cremaster films.[Innovative satires] – 80s and 90sRobocop (1987, dir: Paul Verhoeven)- bringing violence into the boardroom – comment on the Reagan era – businessmen want to make money by launching a new police robot – fast cutting, steely blue colours – tension of the violence would come out in a laugh – businessmen try again and come up with a more liberal policing machine: RoboCop – dead cop brought back to life – satirical mock of the happy talk and propagandist nature of TV news – satirical writing echoing The Graduate and Catch-22.Era of marketing and the corporate Blockbuster era – the four quadrants premise – everyone to like the film, almost regardless of culture.058483500Starship Troopers (1997, dir: Paul Verhoeven)- 10 years later – satirical postmodern film based on a rabidly right-wing novel about the threat to humans by alien bugs – the battle scenes are as exciting as Star Wars – bugs were entirely computer generated – the look was bright and shiny, the soundtrack was explosive and bombastic – the confrontation of the brain bug – “you may be smart but I’ve got a gun” – the politics went deeper than making fun of macho soldiers – Verhoeven wanted to set the film in Germany, 1935 – young people excited before they even know it was wrong – subtle characterization of Nazi undertones “we are in this for the species” – the patriotic of the soldiers is subtly undermined – combination of sci-fi and politics to create the spiciest entertainment of their times.Jane Campion NZ director – to make great movies, you must get your unconscious juices flowing – the unconscious mind is like a shy pet – set conditions where it trusts that you will feed it and not scare it – create a safe environment with your unconscious selves and the actors’ unconscious selves – room to make mistakes – here to play – subtle leadership rather than megaphone style – create a relaxing and forgiving atmosphere.Jane Campion = the Ingmar Bergman of Australasian Cinema – deft human psychology.An Angel at My Table (1990, dir: Jane Campion)- shy woman with lively unconscious mind – everyone is looking at her as a trainee teacher – freezes, has a panic attack – melts down into a fixed stare onto a piece of chalk – her world crunched into that piece of chalk.The Piano (1993, dir: Jane Campion)- subjective images and sound to suggest the inner world of a girl growing up – POV shot of girl looking through her fingers – like red curtains red to open up into life – not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice – the only film directed by a woman to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival – after silent cinema – female directors were marginalized by the patriarchal Studio System.About 3% of mainstream directors are women despite there being 50% population of women around the world – extreme disparity.“One of the great betrayals of females is that they want to see themselves through male eyes” – Jane CampionBaz Luhrmann = Australasia’s flamboyant Vincent Minnelli – postmodern 90s auteur defining the first days of digital.A meteor shower of references – everything from Shakespeare to Bollywood – in common – blindness to taste and style imposed ideals about art – engagement with as many human beings as possible to be moved and touched by story – a big idea through an emotional experience.[Participatory cinema]0-317500Romeo + Juliet (1996, dir: Baz Luhrmann)- Luhrmann used these all-encompassing ideas about emotion and art – what he called participatory cinema – hyperactive version of Shakespeare’s tragedy – captions, fireworks, splintered edits, flash-forwards, choirs, kitsch, gangsterdom – recontextualised into contemporary times but retaining medieval language – the romantic lead (Leonardo DiCaprio) as Romeo – sunrise, long lens, Radiohead’s Talk Show Host – transported Romeo into Miami life instead of a town square - equivalent = gas station – ironic quotations of the world of cinema – Sergio Leone Western shootout in high comedy style recontextualised at a gas station – swords and daggers become guns – knights have become streetkids in Hawaiian shirts – Leone widescreen composition.- Romeo + Juliet’s first meet – through the fish tank they see each other.Academic methology and process combined with responding to the world around us.Moulin Rouge (2001, dir: Baz Luhrmann)- took ideas further – camera sweeps through CGI shots of Montmartre in sepia – grey, dank alleyways – garrant of a port, through a window to the protagonist slumped with a battle, tear stained – cinematography goes from sepia to colour.- the Moulin Rouge – frenzied world – soundtrack from Nirvana to All Saints to the can-can – song, love, space – pop culture references abound – meticulous brash mise-en-scene.- mash up of Sergio Leone, MTV, Hispanic tele-novellas, fashion, cross-dressing, kaleidoscopic 90s Hong-Kong cinema – reality had lost its realness in Bazland – the very definition of the first days of digital.- visually – pure Romantic cinema – moonlight, two shots, rooftop tryst, reverse-angle editing.- music – wild 90s mash up of pop songs used almost like dialogue as if reality had been remixed by a DJThe first of the Red Curtain Trilogy – Strictly Ballroom (1992)- Luhrmann is the antithesis to Von TrierLUHRMANN’S RULESWe need to know the story up-front – a foreshadowing introduction to the story.Heightened cinematic experience – dance, frenzy, excess, song.Extremely linear story – cause/effect – expand key moments but stay chronological.[2000 onwards] - Film Moves Full Circle: And The Future of Movies[Innovative Cinema – return of Slow Cinema] – the clash between reality and the dream.Swiss Miss (1938, dir: Blystone & Roach)- story of 21st century starts back with Laurel & Hardy – a piano on a drawbridge in the Swiss Alps – the background is actually a backdrop – something will go wrong – it always does – but what will happen next – silly but funny – a gorilla.The story of film is the story of innovation – the story of the gorilla.Blonde Venus (1932, dir: Josef von Sternberg)- one of Hollywood’s most surreal films – gorilla costume worn by Marlene Dietrich – the reveal – diffusion filter on the lens – Holywood at its most playful and absurd.What has been the gorilla in 21st century cinema?Movies started with Lumiere’s Employees Leaving The Lumiere Factory (1895) – filmed square on.Big story of millennium – reality came back – non-fiction cinema held its own on the big screen.When the Twin Towers fell, history got bigger – the act of terrorism and its camcorder footage out-Hollywooded Hollywood – 9/11 in 2001 – fiction seemed old hat – reality was more dramatic.Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, dir: Michael Moore) – took quarter of a billion in the box office equaling the box office of the pseudo-realist action film of the same year The Bourne Supremacy (dir: Paul Greengrass)- one of the biggest box-office hits of the non-fiction genre – story of the Bush family and Bin Laden family – Bush was filmed as he heard about the attack in the Two Towers – the dramatic suspense of Bush’s real life indecision on hearing the news of 9/11 in a primary school classroom – 7 minutes passed.Rough documentary imagery was exciting – fiction films hitched a ride on documentary film techniques.Etre et Avoir (2002, dir: Nicolas Philibert)- classic observational character-based documentary in a rural school with the primary school teacher retiring that year – after goodbyes to pupils, the camera tilts up to capture the teacher’s sadness – heroes in fiction cinema have to strike out and fight the world, Mr Lopez just stands there yet he was one of the most vivid human beings on screen in 2002.Zidane – A Portrait in the 21st Century (2006, dir: Gordon & Parreno)- documentary – innovative – extra long lenses to film a football match – did not follow the story of the match – it focuses solely in one of the best football players of all time, Zinedine Zidane for the full 90 minutes, played out in real time with a great post-rock soundtrack created by Mogwai in the background – one hypnotic roaming presence – his thoughts were subtitled on the screen – a modern day soliloquy – extreme close-ups with a lessening of image quality compression isolates Zidane, dispersed like in an Antonioni film.The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, dir: Andrew Dominik)- reality bouncing back – photography: sepia, shallow focus – no attempt to sex up the image for the 21st century of make it computery – defocusing of the edge of the image was done in part by the computer – cinematography and framing of Brad Pitt alludes to the delicate photorealism of D.W. Griffith films like Way Down East (1920) – Lilian Gish softly lit – cinema coming full circle.Where was all this post-9/11 realism heading?Climates (2006, dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan)- intimate scene – extreme close up of head of hair and a hand stroking it and a lovers’ face appearing slightly in the edge of the frame – shallow focus in a domestic lower middle class home – shot digitally.- drip of water on the soundtrack – cut to: older husband (played by Ceylan himself) – over-the-head shot – Ceylan’s eyes peeping over half-obscured – sad eyes – each plane of focus so carefully chosen – pull focus – poetic – search for focus with cryptic shots makes us feel like we are on the bed part of this sad marriage – alludes to Ingmar Bergman’s sad films about marriage – naked light – like in an Italian muralist picture – then, it’s over, back to the two shot – sex inferred – time stood still.The gorilla metaphor.Tender realism is beautiful – Turkey to Romania – honest pictures.The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005, dir: Christi Puiu)- Mr Lazarescu – we’ve followed him from hospital to hospital all night – bus accident – we’ve watched him get worse and worse – now he is dying – parademic has helped all night – Puiu wanted to use camerawork like in US TV show ER – handheld, shooting around, overwhelmed by fluorescent lighting – he wanted to show a long night’s journey into day and then death – the human decency of the paramedic emphasized – one of the most moving works of film realism in the 21st century – compassionately showing that we’re all in this scary new century together.[Argentinian cinema]The Headless Woman (2008, dir: Lucresia Martel)- bold confrontation of reality – Veronica is a wealthy dentist – whilst driving, the car abruptly bounces – she’s hit something – car accidents are usually done with fast editing in contemporary movies – here there was none – Veronica has been crying – rock music on the radio as a counterpoint – she tries to calm down – static camera, shallow focus – then she drives on after putting sunglasses on – we see what she hit – a tense, tragic, mysterious moment that gives the film its tone – then she stops – probably concussed – later in the film, she keeps secrets from the family and herself – camera stays in the car as she steps out and leaves the camera frame – see her walk back into frame in the distance – then back out – thunder then rain – picture is out of focus – head out of frame (relevant to film title) – a woman who has lost her head figuratively – Veronica’s isolation is brilliantly shown in this haunting unglossy movie – one of the best made in South America.Battle in Heaven (2005, dir: Carlos Reygadas)- extreme close up of holding hands – interracial – angle of feet – two naked bodies lying down, one man, one woman – their genitals showing at an unattractive angle, the man’s slightly obese belly protruding – in the style of a Renaissance painting – the woman is thin, rich, privileged, white – camera rises – funeral style music – blank room like funeral parlour – God’s eye view or a Karl Marx eye view – the social gap between them is so profound – the only way to bridge it is through touch – sexual touch – a moment ago they had sex – instead of gratuitously focusing on the act, it cranes out until they are out of shot to show workers taking down a TV aerial – a Marriott hotel for tourists and rich people – the backstory of Mexico city – the inequalities of Mexico are epic in scale – Reygadas uses epic crane shots to show the enormity of this inequality.Cinema going full circle as there can be a world between each other even as they cling to each other.If realism of the new millennium wasn’t rich enough, Korean cinema suddenly darkened it and gave it a strange brutality – the result was called – New Korean Cinema.Korea – good 20s films, Golden Age 60s films, 2003 had 3 movies that showed how daring it had become.Oasis (2002, dir: Lee Chang-Dong)- family party – man who is just out of prison is dominating the conversation talking nonsense – shot of character with cerebral palsy – the man is being anti-social (he is in the background), the disabled woman is in the foreground – she is an uninvited guest not part of the family – the situation is awkward – the woman is the daughter of the man the ex-prisoner is supposed to have killed – when they first met, he raped her – and yet, somehow, these people have a friendship – maybe because both are spurned by their families – New Korean Cinema was transgressive.Memories of Murder (2003, dir: Bong Joon-ho)- film is set in the late 80s – serial killer has murdered 10 Korean women – true story that scandalized the country – this policeman has been trying to find the killer – he stopped his car to have a look one last time at the gulley where one of the victims was found – flat, deserted, yellow land like the crop-dusting scene in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest – POV camera approaching the dark space – somehow we think of David Lynch films – inspects the gulley – takes his glasses off – tunnel seems haunted by the memory of the murder – camera inside the tunnel tracking back away from the policeman as he looks through – cut back to his POV down the stretch of the tunnel – cut to: young girl asking ‘is anything in there’ – policeman surprised, turns around – this girl has probably seen the murder – she recalls essentially speaking to the murderer reminiscing in the same location – cut back to a long shot of the two talking – yellow fields – close up of man’s face – “did you see his face?” she nods – “what did he look like?” – breakthrough is ordinary – stares at camera – maybe the murderer is us.Old Boy (2003, dir: Park Chan-wook)- most transgressive of all – dark stylized world – man locked up for 15 years and not told why – now he’s out and almost comically angry wanting revenge – like a Japanese comic book – he is going to bash the security guard with a hammer – superimposed illustration of the hammer’s expected trajectory (comic book style) with whimsical sound effects (ironic, satirical, subversive, transgressive) – prison shot – stylized fight scene – packed prison corridor – takes down multiple prisoners – animalistic – like a cell in a cartoon – fights 14 men – comic odds – this isn’t the realism of the Lumiere Brothers – stylized, dreamlike.La Lune a Un Metre(1896, dir: Georges Melies) – one of first sci-fi film – dreams on its sleeve – theatrical – The Wizard of Oz – dream film.The gorilla in 21st century cinema was dreamlike as well as naturalistic – film history coming full circle.0444500Mulholland Dr. (2001, dir: David Lynch)- As if someone dreamed the Wizard of Oz dream – about a girl who wants to climb the hill of movie stardom – Mulholland Dr. where all the movie stars live – instead, she falls asleep and dives down into her own consciousness – jitterbug dance scene, purple back projection – as an innocent girl: lucid projections of fragmented memories spotlight almost manically happy – then the girl grows up, falls in love with another girl, then gets jealous of her and asks a hitman to kill her – shot/reverse shot, medium close-ups shots in a café, almost natural light – almost conventional – corner of her eye – girl sees man who seems telepathic and perceives the ‘thoughtcrime’ – in her dream, we see him and not her confront something awful – behind the back of the café – a decomposed witch-like body confronting him – handheld camera, roar on soundtrack – he has a seizure of sorts, soundtrack sounds become muffled as if inside his semi-comatosed state – shock so great, everything goes silent – the monster seems to be her terror at planning the killing – she doesn’t dream of herself confronting it, but the man who looked at her – Club Silencio – also in Diane’s subconscious – her dream comes to a climax here – she shakes because her subconscious is flooding – the wizard conjures blue lights, disappears like we’re underwater.Mulholland Dr. was so innovative because it was The Wizard of Oz plunged through the black night of film noir and the rabbit hole of David Lynch’s brain.Requiem For A Dream (2000, dir: Darren Aronofsky)- looked with piteous recognition of people on drugs – it was the great distortion movie of about how drugs distort the world – speeded up, given a fish-eye lens – the catch: a woman wanted to be on TV and took far too many weight-reduction pills – now she’s scared by her own apartment – it flickers, floats around her like a gyroscope – film was a paranoid dream in a fearful century.If the story of 21st century film has been the story of real films and dream films, then that story is as old as movie itself – 21st century film combined reality and fantasy film in new ways – blurred lines.Roy Andersson combined reality and fantasy in a new way.07239000Songs From The Second Floor (2000, dir: Roy Andersson)- man in the middle covered in ashes in a busy train carriage – burned down his business – serious social theme – colour in shot is a drab green – movie becomes heightened into musical fantasy – everyone sings operatically around him – surreal – extraordinary ending – symbols of religion are being dumped – like the end of the world – suddenly, loads of people get up (viewer is unaware until last moment) – they have been there the whole time – image like the last day of judgment – the question of guilt – personal and collective – collective responsibility for mankind.Andersson oeuvre - Striking visual style to show the humiliation, guilt and comedy of modern life – muted colours (green and grey), plunging perspectives, flat Nordic light – a bleak dream – wants to eradicate indifferent frames – blending exactitude and humor – fan of Laurel and Hardy – tragicomedy.Why can’t movie have the same quality as painting – fascinated by each frame.The underdog’s efforts to be accepted – to reach a higher level in society failing humorously and tragically.21st century built on the past – combining worlds.05461000Rules of Attraction (2002, dir: Roger Avary)- split screen shot of James Van Der Beek and Shannyn Sossamon – Saturday morning on a liberal US campus – characters look to camera – they are talking to each other but it is breaks the 180 degree rule – it looks like two people just staring at us next to each other – illusion – we feel in the middle of this flirtatious moment – she says ‘show me your eyes’ – her hand takes his glasses off – each camera pulls out and swings round – images match up so that the split screen blends into a single frame – the poster in the background links up and says “where do you fit in?” – from inside the moment to an outside observer – this scene was digitally stitched together.Avatar – synthetic reality – mission to planet Pandora – computer programme – camera flows, creature moves, feels soil between toes – the reality of this fantasy world surprises the protagonist – indicative of 21st century – reality and fantasy are so blurred – CGI – facial expressions were filmed with mini-cameras – Cameron is a technological director – mystery of human feeling added to the electronic universe.[Innovative Thai Cinema]0-63500Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weeresethakul)- two shy young men in Thailand filmed in natural light, long takes and the languor of summer days –backdrops are so still it looks almost painted – halfway through film – seems to break down – cut to black – story starts again – from utopia to dystopia – tree full of fireflies in the night – like the Eiffel Tower lit up – his friend Dong has become a tiger – we must hunt him – we see the spirit of a water buffalo leaving its own body – King is breathless and agog – the spirit takes him into the forest – the farmer reincarnated as a tiger – haunting images – awesome lighting – mythic tale of hunter and hunted – such a story shift – the wild man and the ‘gorilla’.A fusion of realism in the first half and spiritual drama/fantasy in the second.0314261500Mother and Son (1997, dir: Alexander Sokurov)- cottage in the countryside – the mother is dying – happy to die in her son’s arms.- pearly light in the trees outside – they whisper to each other.- Sokurov –“in history we talk about what happened, in art, we talk about what might have happened – all encompassing love might not exist in real life – but art says it might exist” – one of the defining films in what would become to be called “Slow Cinema”.- influenced by Tarkovsky films and German Romantic art of the 19th century – favourite: Caspar David Friedrich – the colour palette of the film has been articulated by Friedrich’s art aesthetic – soft colours, a bit washed out like watercolour.- some scenes were shot in the very places he painted – the same locations – “painting is a long road – filmmakers want to do everything quickly – some things you can’t do quickly – if you do something quickly all you get is quickness, there is nothing behind it…there is a psychological aspect, relating to the emotional experience, when the image is complex, the audience feels a sense of unease and to try to understand this, the audience begins to look more carefully, to get closer to the image.”- Sokurov had the image stretched diagonally to echo Friedrich’s painting style – as if made of rubber, to change how we see it - Sokurov’s high concept film – Russian Ark – the greatest gorilla in film history – one cut – elaborate tracking through a museum – multiple action. – the bourgeois on the cusp of the revolution about to be executed, enjoying a last celebration – a single last breath – 33 galleries, 1300m, 867 people, cavaliers, museum officials, spies, great balls, portents of the horrors to come – 6 month rehearsal for 90 minute single take.Heavy Steadicam – almost buckles at the knees in pain – documentary In One Breath – freezing conditions – celebrations and tears of joy when complete.A symbol of Russian hell – no civilization, culture or art could prevent the destruction of millions – not the Orthodox church, Christianity, not art, not education – nothing could stop millions of Russians killing their compatriots.Future of cinema in provocative hands.Epilogue – the year 2046 – Inception (layers of reality, metaphor for what film-going could become) – playing a game of living and dying, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (memory removal – brainwashing like a nightmare) – what if film was wiped into oblivion?How do we keep the story of film going? ................
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