All language subtitles for 2 Martin Scorcese - A Personal Journey part 2

To tell a story, to implement his vision,
the director has to be a technician...

and even an illusionist.

This means controlling and
mastering the technical process.

Our palette has expanded tremendously...

through a century of
constant experimentations.

The movies grew from silent to sound;
black and white to Technicolor;

standard screen size to CinemaScope;

35 millimeter to 70 millimeter.

The American industry, it seems, never failed
to embrace new technological developments.

Somehow, it moved faster and
more decisively than its foreign rivals.

As King Vidor said, "The cinema...

is the greatest means
of expression ever invented,

but it is an illusion
more powerful than any other,

and it should therefore be in the hands
of the magicians and the wizards...

who can bring it to life."

Here, Buster Keaton, an aspiring cameraman,

is showing his footage to MGM executives...

in the hope of getting a job.

Unfortunately he has double exposed the
film, and the screening is a disaster.

However, as every director will experience,

accidents can be the source
of extraordinary poetry...

and beauty.

What Keaton's cameraman needs is to
learn and master the language of film.

Interestingly, most
of the early film pioneers,

including D. W. Griffiith,
had no formal education.

They were self-taught and often shared
the prevailing prejudice...

that the cinema was
a minor form of entertainment.

The American film probably
came of age in February, 1915,

when D. W. Griffiith opened
his first feature-length epic,

The Birth Of A Nation.

According to Raoul Walsh, who was one
of Griffiith's assistants at the time...

and who played the role
ofJohn Wilkes Booth,

it took The Birth Of A Nation
to convince Americans...

that films were an art
in their own right...

and not just the illegitimate offspring
of the theater.

How did Griffiith achieve this triumph?

Essentially through his composition
and orchestration of the shots.

As Walsh put it,
"The high and low angled shots...

turned a good picture into a great one."

One close-up was worth a thousand words.

Erich von Stroheim,
also one of Griffiith's assistants,

said that he was the pioneer of filmdom,

the first to put beauty and poetry into
a cheap and tawdry sort of amusement.

I've always felt that visual literacy is
just as important as verbal literacy.

And what the film pioneers were exploring
was the medium's specifiic techniques.

In the process, they invented a new
language based on images rather than words.

A visual grammar, you might say.

Close-ups, :

irises, :

dissolves, :

masking part of the screen for emphasis, :

dolly shots, :

tracking shots.

Now these are the basic tools
that directors have at their disposal...

to create and heighten
the illusion of reality.

When Lillian Gish called D. W. Griffiith
"the father of film,"

she used the same analogy.

She said,
"He gave us the grammar of filmmaking."

He understood the psychic strength
of the lens.

Half a century later, Stanley Kubrick
may have had Griffiith in mind...

when he remarked that what is
truly original in the art of filmmaking,

what distinguishes it
from all the other arts,

may be the editing process.

Watch how Griffiith developed,
two years before The Birth Of A Nation,

the technique of crosscutting.

He shows you two events
happening at the same time...

and intercuts them to increase
the tension of the suspense.

Now, at that time, Griffiith
had to fight his distributors,

who feared that audiences
would be confused by this innovation.

It was in the great epics
of the silent era...

that the illusionists learned to use
special effects and visual wizardry...

to conjure up some of
their most compelling visions.

The American tradition
of the great spectacle...

was born around 1915...

when D. W. Griffiith saw Cabiria,

an Italian super-production.

Watched it twice in one night.
It inspired him.

Gave him the audacity
to create his masterpiece, Intolerance.

Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria
had all the right ingredients:

adventure, melodrama, pageantry, religion,

extraordinary production design...

and striking camera angles and lighting.

To film this scene,
they actually dragged...

Hannibal's elephants up onto a mountaintop.

Intolerance.

Much has been made of
its extravagant budget,

real-size sets and thousands of extras.

The achievement is all the more extraordinary
because Griffiith worked without a script.

It was all planned in his head,
not on paper.

But Griffiith went even further.

Intolerance was a daring attempt at
interweaving stories and characters...

not from the same period,

but from four different centuries.

Freely crosscutting
from one era to another,

he blended them altogether
in a grand symphony devoted to one idea:

passionate plea for tolerance.

Griffiith's passion for history
was balanced by his passion...

for simple people, the victims of history.

In modern day America, a young woman
is deemed an unfit mother...

because her husband is in jail.

Oppression is represented
by society matrons,

Puritan reformers who want
to place her baby in an orphanage.

Griffiith's distressed heroines
carried with them...

the heart and soul of the picture.

For them, he composed
his most eloquent close-ups.

Like Griffiith, Cecil B. DeMille
liked to paint on a big canvas.

His ambition was to tell
an absorbing personal story...

against a background
of great historical events.

His first Biblical epic was
inspired by one simple belief.

You cannot break the Ten Commandments, :
they will break you.

Watch DeMille's masterful staging
of the exodus from Egypt:

the visual contrasts
between the pharaoh's war machine...

and the simple caravan of the Israelites, :

his sense of wonder, :

his attention to details,
even in big crowd scenes.

His miniatures were
as powerful as his frescoes.

DeMille even used an early two-strip
Technicolor process here.

However, the grandiose set pieces were
always subordinate to the story.

DeMille knew that spectacle alone
would never make a great picture.

He spent much more time working
on dramatic construction...

than on planning photographic effects.

"The audience,"he said, "is interested in
individuals whom they can love or hate."

DeMille believed that he could translate the words
of the Bible in the medium of film literally.

To achieve this, he devised
extraordinary technical effects,

such as the parting of the Red Sea.

DeMille insisted that every detail
be seen with equal clarity.

Here, for instance,
notice the rocks and seaweed...

scattered on the sand to make the beach
look like the bottom of the sea.

It was a last-minute inspiration
on the part of DeMille,

who led his army of extras into the surf...

and showed them how to gather the kelp.

Of course, I never saw
DeMille's silent films when I was a boy.

His later epics are the ones
that made an indelible impression on me.

Before the dawn of history,

ever since the first man
discovered his soul,

he has struggled against the forces
that sought to enslave him.

He saw the awful power of nature
parade against him,

the evil eye of the lightning,

the terrifying voice of the thunder,

the shrieking, wind-filled darkness,

enslaving his mind with shackles of fear.

Fear bred superstition...

And then there was DeMille's own
remake of The Ten Commandments,

which I have seen countless times.

- Look!
- Look! There!

- Where he struck the river, it bleeds.
- The water turns to blood.

DeMille presented such a sumptuous fantasy
that if you saw his movies as a child,

they stuck with you for life.

The marvelous superseded the sacred.

What I remember most vividly
are the tableau vivant,

the colors,

the dreamlike quality of the imagery...

and, of course, the special effects.

God is a unique flame,

but the flame is a different color
to different people.

These were the words of Rama Krishna which
DeMille quoted to define his own faith.

Sokar, great lord of the lower world...

The great illusionists
of the past, Cecil B. DeMille,

D. W. Griffiith, Frank Borzage, King Vidor,

were conductors.

They orchestrated visual symphonies...

what Vidor called "silent music."

It would fade away
as Hollywood embraced sound.

But the legacy of
the silent era was remarkable.

American movies had matured
into a sophisticated art form...

with elaborate camera moves, long takes,

deep focus, expressive lighting,
miniatures, et cetera.

I mean, in the late '20s,
the most exciting experiments...

were taking place at the Fox Studios,

where the German master, Frederick Murnau,

was given carte blanche on the strength
of his European triumphs.

His film, Sunrise,
became the most expensive art film...

made in Hollywood.

Rather than a plot, Murnau offered visions,

a landscape of the mind.

His ambition was to paint
his characters"desires...

with lights and shadows.

This is how the frenzied city girl
tempts the young farmer:

with a kaleidoscope of images.

She wants him to leave everything behind:

his land, his wife, his child,

the peace and innocence
of the country life.

The vamp has planted a deadly thought
in the young husband's mind.

Murnau calls Sunrise
"a story of two humans."

This song of the man
and his wife is of no place.

You might hear it anywhere at anytime.

They don"t have a name,

but you experience every idea,
every emotion that visits them.

He had George O"Brien's shoes
weighted with 20 pounds of lead...

to give the actor
a more threatening presence.

Murnau was called "a cerebral director"
by his Hollywood peers...

because he demanded that
his actors fully understand...

the mind of their character.

He said, "I talked to an actor
of what he should be thinking...

rather than what he should be doing."

"The camera,"said Murnau,
"is the director's sketching pencil.

It should be as mobile as possible

to catch every fleeting mood.

It must whirl and peep and move from place
to place as swiftly as thought itself."

Later in theirjourney,
the broken couple is reunited.

Fear and guilt fade away.
They become invulnerable.

Nothing can harm them anymore,
not even the city's hustle and bustle.

Magically, subjective perceptions
take on an objective reality.

A superimposition could serve
as an inner vision...

or an inner monologue.

What Murnau is projecting
onto the environment...

is their dream, their common dream.

At least for a brief moment.

In Sunrise, love and death are
intertwined like day and night.

But in Seventh Heaven,
love negated death itself.

Both films starredJanet Gaynor,

who commuted between the two sets,

working with Murnau during the day
and with Borzage at night.

She is a street angel.

She's saved by Charles Farrell,
a street sweeper.

Reluctantly, he takes her to
his lofty garret above the city.

He works in the sewers of Paris but
insists that he lives near the stars.

Borzage was not a highly educated man,

let alone an art historian like Murnau.

His approach to the medium
was more instinctive.

He was a maestro of the pantomime.

What inspired him was
the sheer power of emotions.

This was the great mystery
that elevated his melodramas...

into pure songs of love.

Directed by Borzage,
Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell...

formed a unique couple,

at once vibrant with sexual passion...

and wrapped in a mystical aura.

Their romance would lift them
from the physical to the spiritual.

War rips them apart.

But as Borzage once stated, "Souls are
made great through love and adversity."

Even when he's blinded in the trenches,

the lovers remain in
daily telepathic communication.

Borzage deeply believed in
the transcendent power of love.

Time and space can be
surmounted and abolished.

Because Diane refuses
to accept Chico's death...

she's able to bring him back from the dead.

For the lovers,
reality itself is immaterial.

The art of the pantomime
had reached its zenith.

But the era of sound had arrived.

And for the silent film directors,
this was a time of painful transition.

Even a script conference
called for new skills.

We were so imbued and so living in,
in pantomime...

that a fellow would come in
and tell a story to, uh,

say, to Thalberg at MGM...

a comedy story, particularly...
or, say, Mack Sennett...

He"d tell the whole damn story
in pantomime.

He comes in and... Aah! And then, sock!

And, you know, everything was like that.

It looked like cartoon strips.

So all of a sudden
we"re dealing with dialogue.

So, I had, from the time I was...

12 or 14 or something,

thought entirely in terms
of images and pictures and movement.

Movement. I very much...
What's an interesting movement?

So here we are with words.

The studios bowed to
the tyranny of sound experts...

who knew little about filmmaking.

At first, they had the cameras
enclosed in a soundproof booth...

or ensconced in a blimp.

As William Wellman put it, "Creaking
floors received more attention...

than creaking stories."

Actors were kept anchored
within the range of microphones.

Now, these had to be hidden
sometimes in rather obvious props...

like this lantern in Anna Christie.

- Pretty, eh?
- Gives you the creeps, though.

Film historians insisted that
at that time movies stopped moving.

But the myth of the static camera
has been dispelled...

now that so many films of the period
have been rediscovered.

There were directors who refused
to be shackled or paralyzed.

Directors such as
Rouben Mamoulian, Frank Capra,

William Wellman, Tay Garnett,

all of whom can be credited with
getting the camera moving again.

Most Tay Garnett pictures
of the early '30s...

feature fluid camera moves
and even very long takes.

Two gins for Frankie.

Watch how skillfully the camera follows
the tray across the dance floor.

The choreography looks effortless.

But believe me, this shot
must have been very hard to achieve.

The dreamlike world of
the silent film was no more.

With the talkies a more
naturalistic approach seemed to prevail.

But in fact, sound encouraged
the illusionists to heighten reality.

Here, in The Big House,
the sound effects alone suggest...

that the convicts are anonymous robots.

"Our Father, Who art in heaven,

hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done..."

But in the chapel, as soon as you hear
their voices, they come alive.

"Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses...

as we forgive those
who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil."

They are given an identity and a purpose...

when their actions contradict
the chorus of prayer.

"...forever and ever. Amen."

A most effective counterpoint.

- Sound can enhance the drama tremendously,
- Not bad, huh?

Particularly when it depicts
an event that you"re not shown.

Just watch this one.

In Scarface, Howard Hawks demonstrated
that sound and visual effects...

can blend into a deadly metaphor.

Sound can tell the whole story,

as Wild Bill Wellman proved repeatedly.

Apoet of stark images
and brutal understatements,

he loved to jolt, deceive
and even frustrate his audience...

by depriving them of a spectacular scene.

Here, in The Public Enemy,

he dared to stage the film's climax
and the hero's comeuppance offscreen.

Three-strip Technicolor.

In the mid-'30s
this dramatically improved process...

was a wonderful gift
bestowed on the illusionists.

- How's that for an entrance?
- Perfect.

What's happened to you?

You"re deliberating whipping yourself
into a fiit of hysterics.

Oh, no, I mustn"t do that.

It might disturb Mother and Ruth
or wake up Danny.

In the old two-strip Technicolor,
the one DeMille used...

in the silent Ten Commandments,

the color blue couldn"t be reproduced.

But now the three-strip process
covered the entire spectrum.

Extra-wide cameras could expose
three negatives simultaneously,

each recording one of the primary colors.

This is Gene Tierney, an angel face
with the darkest of hearts.

Leave Her To Heaven was a fascinating
hybrid, a film noir in color,

with the neurotically possessive woman...

destroying anybody who might come
between her and her husband,

even the unwanted child she's carrying.

We wouldn"t be separated for long.

- Just a few weeks.
- No, I "d... l"d rather wait.

Her husband's younger brother,
a paraplegic boy, was in her way too.

Now you have to remember that color was
rarely used for contemporary drama then.

- Think you can make it, Danny?
- Aw, it's a cinch.

It was more associated
with period pieces and musicals.

John Stahl's direction
and Leon Shamroy's cinematography...

conjured up
an unsettling superrealist vision.

Don"t worry about your direction.
I'll keep you on your course.

- Okay!
- This was a lost paradise.

Its beauty ravished
by the heroine's perversity.

I... I think I'm gettin' tired.

Take it easy. You don"t want to
give up when you"ve come so far.

Okay. I'll get my second wind in a minute.

Oh!

The wa... water's cold.

Colder than I thought.

Oh! I ate too much lunch.

I got a stomachache. Ellen!

It's... It's a cramp.

Ellen! It's... It's a cramp!

Ellen, it's... Ellen, it's...

Help me!

Danny!

Danny!

Danny!

Rather than encourage realism, the
Technicolor palette went even further...

and added flamboyance to the melodrama.

The illusionist always knew
that color itself...

can actually play a dramatic role.

This is what Nicholas Ray
attempted in Johnny Guitar.

- Joan Crawford was Vienna,
- Are you satisfiied they"re not here?

- No!
- the outsider,

persecuted by the so-called
respectable citizens...

because of her ties to a band of renegades.

In this truly offbeat western,

Nicholas Ray reversed
the genre's traditional iconography.

Black was the color of
Mercedes McCambridge and the vigilantes,

while the outcasts were endowed with
rich colors or even pure white.

We came for the kid and his bunch.

I'm sitting here in my own house,
minding my own business,

playing my own piano.

I don"t think you can make
a crime out of that.

You"re only a boy!
We don"t want to hurt you!

Just tell us she was one of ya,
Turkey, and you'll go free!

Come on, Turkey. Tell us.
I'll give ya my word ya won"t hang.

What should I do?
I don"t wanna die! What do I do?

Save yourself.

Well, was she?

You can mirror emotions with color.

Vienna's gambling house was designed and
adorned like the set of a baroque opera.

Colors were deliberately distorted
or thrown off balance.

Blue was toned down in favor
of deep, saturated colors.

When an insane jealousy compels McCambridge
to destroy Joan Crawford's palace,

the palette alone suggests
a fury from hell.

Now, the size of the screen itself needed
to grow. It couldn"t be contained.

In the mid-'50s it spilled over its
boundaries into something much grander.

And I still remember one
of the great experiences I had...

in, in fiilm-going back in 1953.

I was ten or eleven years old
when I went to the Roxy Theater,

and the curtain began to open
and continued to open and open...

on the biggest screen I"d ever seen.

It was the fiilm The Robe.

It was the first CinemaScope picture,
shot in 1953.

Rome, master of the earth.

Originally, the new aspect
ratio was a commercial gimmick...

designed to give the film industry
an edge over its rival, television.

From the foggy coasts
of the northern sea...

Yet many filmmakers
resisted the innovation.

"It's only good for funerals
and snakes, "pronounced Fritz Lang.

It was a new canvas,
and directors were put to the test...

as they learned to master
the new proportions.

At first, Elia Kazan disliked them.

But East Of Eden showed that CinemaScope
could suit an intimate family drama...

as well as vast frescoes.

You were not limited
to landscapes or processions,

horizontal lines or diagonal movements.

Watch how Kazan plays with
the configuration of his set,

whenJames Dean dares to enter his long-lost
mother's bordello for the first time.

Will ya let me talk to ya?

Please. I gotta talk to ya.

Joe! Joe!

Get out of here. Joe! Tex!

Actually, Kazan combined the old and
the new proportions in his composition,

introducing narrower frames,
such as doorways and corridors...

within the wide format itself.

I wanna talk to ya! I wanna talk to ya!

I wanna talk to ya!

Talk to me! Talk to me! Please! Mother!

Few were as skilled as Vincente Minnelli...

in using CinemaScope for dramatic effect.

Here in the tragic finale
of Some Came Running,

the actors seem to blend
into their surroundings.

They have a lot of souvenirs
and a lot of free prizes for ya.

I got one of them, uh,
them grammar books from the library.

I got it from that teacher who...

whom... whom is the objective...

- Whom says so?
- Hmm?

The suspense actually derives
from their integration...

into the environment.

You don"t know if and when
the killer and his unsuspecting prey...

will come together in the same space.

CinemaScope allows Minnelli
to deploy a more complex,

and therefore more threatening image.

The more open the frame,
the greater the impression of depth...

and the more striking
the illusion of reality.

We"re presented with
a vibrant, chaotic canvas...

and it's up to us
to explore and interpret it.

The impact of the wide screen
was particularly signifiicant...

on such genres as the western and the epic.

When he started Land OfThe Pharaohs,

Howard Hawks was nervous
about the new format.

He complained, "It's good only
for showing great masses and movement.

It's hard to focus attention,
and it's very diffiicult to edit."

However, his approach proved masterful.

Three million
of such stones would be needed...

before the work was done.

Three million stones of
an average weight of 5,000 pounds.

Every stone cut precisely to fit
into its destined place...

in the great pyramid.

It was the composition of
the shots that helped us appreciate...

the human efforts and technical feats...

that the filmmakers attributed
to the pyramid builders.

What is that stone, Father?

That's the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh,

the stone that will hold
his body after death.

Where does it go to?

Into a great chamber in the pyramid,
but where that is, you must not know.

This was like a documentary made
on location 2,800 years B.C.

The wide screen gave the sense
we were really there.

This is the way people lived and worked.

This is what they believed,
endured and achieved.

I just shot it the way you see a thing.

I shoot straightforward, too.

I don"t use any camera tricks or anything.

Camera usually is at eye height.

And the audience sees just what we see.

Today, a film like
The Fall OfThe Roman Empire...

has the poignant beauty of a lost art,

for this was the autumn
of the great American epics.

They simply became too expensive to make.

Like Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann had been
a master of the western.

The Fall OfThe Roman Empire
offered a multilayered drama...

which was as intense
as any of the director's westerns.

His sense of space and dramatic
composition has never been more evident.

Throughout the film, you could hear
the gods laugh in the background,

a cruel laugh that spelled
the doom of all the protagonists...

and of the Roman Empire.

So, is the grand old tradition started
by Cabiria and Intolerance obsolete?

Well, it would seem so. I mean,
today there's no need to drag...

Hannibal's elephants up the Alps anymore.

They... They can be generated
by the computer.

So is this the end of epic cinema
or the dawn of a new art form?

Nobody can afford to buy
3,000 or 4,000 extras.

It's just not economically
feasible anymore,

"cause you have to costume them,
you have to transport them,

you have to feed them.

Uh, and it... You move very slowly...

when you"re trying to direct
a large group of people like that.

So doing that today is,
is next to impossible.

But doing it digitally, which
is, you get a small group of people,

say, 100 people, and you replicate
them, you move them around.

You can have exactly the same effect
for a tenth of the cost.

We"ve changed the medium
in a way that is profound.

It is no longer a photographic medium.

It's now a painterly medium,
and it's very fluid,

so that things that are in
the frame you can take out,

move, put them over here.

And so, it's almost like going
from two dimension to three dimension...

in the dynamic that's been
created at this point.

There is a misconception that
we are surrendering something of art...

to a technology that will do it for us.

That... That is never the case.

But cinema itself is technology.

And to say that, oh, well,
it can"t be an art...

because it's a mechanical device
rushing celluloid through it...

is as naive as to say,
well, you can"t create...

because now it's a computer
rushing numbers through it.

The technology is always
an element of creativity.

But it never is the source
of the creativity.

And, so, my attitude is
to embrace technology as it comes...

In any kind of art form
you"re creating an illusion...

for the audience to look at reality
through your special eye.

The camera lies all the time.

It lies 24 times a second.

In other words, we"re all
the children of D. W. Griffiith...

and Stanley Kubrick.

Take 2001, the first film to link
the camera and the computer...

in the creation of special effects for the
spaceship's journey into the unknown.

This was a breakthrough
in technical wizardry.

Every frame of 2001 made you aware...

that the possibilities for cinematic
manipulations are indeed infinite.

Like Griffiith's Intolerance,
like Murnau's Sunrise,

it was at once a super-production,

an experimental film and a visionary poem.

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Whether the illusion is created
through high-tech...

or low-tech wizardry doesn"t really matter.

The magic will only be effective
if it is carried by a strong vision.

And it can be achieved in so many ways.

Fifty years ago when he was assigned to
a small "B" film called Cat People,

directorJacques Tourneur
had practically no budget...

and, of course,
none of today's new technologies.

But he knew that the dark
had a life of its own.

He decided not to show the creature
threatening his protagonist.

He"d only suggest a presence.

And to do that, he simply conjured up
an ominous shadow play.

Help!

Help!

Help!

It was a sleight of hand
that an early film magician...

could have performed
at the turn of the century.

What is the matter, Alice?

Sorry to have disturbed you, Alice.

I missed you and Oliver, and I thought
you might know where he is.

We waited for you at the muzeum.
You'll probably fiind him at home.

If you don"t mind then, I'll run on.

Could I have my robe, please?

Sure.

Gee whiz, honey, it's torn to ribbons.

Now, we talked about the rules, about the
narrative codes, about the technical tools,

and we"ve seen how Hollywood filmmakers
adjusted to these limitations.

They even played with them.

Now's the time to look
at the cracks in the system.

And what slipped through these cracks
has always fascinated me.

I mean, there were opportunities,
there were projects...

that allowed for the expression
of different sensibilities,

offbeat themes
or even radical political views,

particularly when
the fiinancial stakes were minimal.

Less money, more freedom.
I mean, the world of "B" fiilms was...

often freer and more conducive
to experimenting and innovating.

The '40s directors found that they could
exercise more control on a small-budget movie...

than on a prestigious "A" picture.

Also, they"d have less executives
looking over their shoulder.

They could introduce unusual touches,
weave unexpected motifs...

and even transform routine material
into a much more personal expression.

So in a sense, they became,
um, they became smugglers.

They cheated and somehow got away with it.

Style was crucial.

The first master of esoterica
was Jacques Tourneur,

who began making his mark
in low-budget, supernatural thrillers.

On Cat People he had
a good reason not to show the creature.

He said,
"The less you see, the more you believe.

You must never try to impose
your views on the viewer.

But rather, you must try to let it
seep in little by little."

This oblique approach perfectly defines
the smuggler's strategy.

Climb on, sister.
Are you ridin "with me or ain"t ya?

You look as if you"d seen a ghost.

Did you see it?

The son of pioneer Maurice Tourneur, Jacques
Tourneur had the good fortune to find...

an extraordinary oasis
of creative subversion...

in producer Val Lewton's unit at RKO.

Lewton, a former story editor
for Selznick, was once described...

as "a benevolent David Selznick."

Lewton worked extensively on all
of the scripts that he produced.

But he never set foot on the set and
left the director to his own devices.

Look at that woman. Isn"t she something?

A "B" film like Cat People
only cost $ 134,000.

Looks like a cat.

But it touched a chord in America...

by exploring a young bride's fear
of her own sexuality.

Moia cectra?

Moia cectra?

Now wait a minute.
It can"t be that serious.

- Just one single word.
- She greeted me.

She called me sister.

When her deepest feelings
for her husband are aroused,

the heroine is overwhelmed
by shame and guilt.

She seems to be consumed
by a malevolent spirit.

Or if you will, by her inner demons.

You were saying, "The cats..."

They torment me.

I awake in the night,

and the tread of their feet
whispers in my brain.

I have no peace,

for they are in me.

Tourneur's films undermined
a key principle of classical fiiction:

"In me"? "In me"?

The notion that people
are in control of themselves.

Tourneur's characters were moved
by forces they didn"t even understand.

Their curse was not fate
in the Greek sense.

It was not an external force.

It dwelled within their own psyche.

So in its own way, Cat People was
as important as Citizen Kane...

in the development
of a more mature American cinema.

In Tourneur's second film
with producer Val Lewton,

I Walked With A Zombie,

the heroine is a nurse assigned
to a catatonic woman in the West Indies.

She's drawn into a parallel world...

when she seeks the help of sorcerers
to cure her patient.

Jacques Tourneur was a modest craftsman.

He compared his work to that of a carpenter
who simply carves a chair or table...

that he's been hired to build.

But years later, at the end of his career,

Tourneur confessed that he had always been
passionately interested in the supernatural.

A bit of a psychic himself,
he made films about the supernatural...

because he believed in it...

and had even experienced it firsthand.

How did he smuggle this contraband?

Tourneur relied on
the imagination of the audience.

He said, "When spectators are
sitting in a darkened theater...

and recognize their own insecurity and
that of the protagonist on the screen,

then they will accept
the most unbelievable situations...

and follow the director
wherever he wants to take them."

Tourneur's twilight zone was a labyrinth.

His were perilous journeys
into the unknown...

and sometimes the occult.

Reality remained opaque and rarely were
people what they appeared to be.

They stood at the frontier
of a hidden world,

a shimmering canvas
of distant murmurs and deep shadows.

- She doesn"t bleed.
- Zombie.

Common to all of Tourneur's films
was a muted disenchantment,

a strange melancholy,

the eerie feeling of having embarked
on an adventure...

from which there was no return.

It seemed only a few days
before I met Mr. Holland in Antigua.

We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian.

It was all just as I had imagined it.

I looked at those great, glowing stars.
I felt the warm wind on my cheek.

I breathed deep,
and every bit of me inside myself said,

- "How beautiful."
- It's not beautiful.

You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland.

It's easy enough to read
the thoughts of a newcomer.

Everything seems beautiful
because you don"t understand.

Those flying fiish,
they"re not leaping for joy.

They"re jumping in terror.
Bigger fiish want to eat them.

That luminous water, it takes its gleam
from millions of tiny dead bodies,

the glitter of putrescence.

There's no beauty here,
only death and decay.

You can"t really believe that.

Everything good dies here, even the stars.

After Tourneur opened Pandora's box,
things were never the same.

It may have gone unnoticed at fiirst, but a
strange darkness crept into American fiilms,

a feeling of insecurity,
disorientation and foreboding,

as though the ground could suddenly
give way under your feet.

When my father was alive,
we traveled a lot.

We went nearly everywhere.
We had wonderful times.

I didn"t know you traveled so much.

- Oh, yes.
- Perhaps we"ve been to some of the same places.

No, I don"t think so.

- We"re in Venice.
- Yes, we"ve arrived. Now, where would you like to go next?

- France? England? Russia?
- Switzerland.

Switzerland. Excuse me one moment
while I talk with the engineer.

Again, appearances were as deceptive
as they were beautiful...

in Max Ophuls's elegies.

- You and the lady, are you enjoying the trip?
- Very much.

- We"ve decided on Switzerland.
- The romantic decor was a trap.

- There you are. Thank you.
- Oh, thank you!

Switzerland!

Switzerland!

This was a carnival of illusions,

an imaginary journey
for an imaginary romance.

Ophuls was an angel in exile in Hollywood.

The Viennese maestro suffered
years of unemployment...

until producerJohn Houseman
gave him a chance...

to adapt Stefan Zweig's novella,
Letter From An Unknown Woman.

Now, you know far too much about me already,
and I know almost nothing about you, huh?

- It was his valentine to Vienna, -
Except that you"ve traveled a great deal.

And a farewell to the culture of his youth.

Ophuls's camera and his heroine
moved in unison.

The fluid visual choreography
allowed you to experience...

Joan Fontaine's every heartbeat.

- Stefan, the train is leaving.
- Just a minute.

For a brief moment,
happiness appeared within reach.

How long have you been standing here?

But Stefan will always remain unattainable.

I don"t want to go. Do you believe that?

I'll be here when you get back.

Say "Stefan"
the way you said it last night.

Stefan.

It's as though
you"ve said it all your life.

- Better hurry, sir.
- Yes! Good-bye.

- Stefan!
- Yes! Good-bye.

Cold reality sets in at the train station.

Won"t be long.
I'll be back in, in two weeks.

The real one.
Lisa will never travel with Stefan,

the frivolous pianist
on whom she has projected her passions.

She's left behind, pregnant with
a child conceived that magical night.

Ophuls was just one of
the European expatriates...

most of them refuges from Fascism...

who were largely responsible for the
exploration of these new darker territories.

The others were well-known directors
such as Fritz Lang,

Alfred Hitchcock,
Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder.

But also lesser known names
such as Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak,

Edgar Ulmer, Andre De Toth.

To them, crime was a source of fascination.

It allowed them to probe
the nature of evil.

Monstrosity was
something banal, almost natural.

The criminal world cannot be conveniently
isolated or circumscribed...

within the urban underworld
as in the old gangster film.

Hello, Adele. I dropped over
to the butcher shop like you told me to.

I got a nice piece of liver.

It was everywhere,
lurking under the surface.

Every man was a potential criminal.

How long have you known Katherine March?

Answer me!

I don "t know what you" re talking about.

How long have you known her?

Don"t get excited.
Let me help you off with your coat.

You"re the one that's excited.

Get away with that knife.
Do you want to cut my throat?

The common man falling in a trap...

Why"d you come here?

As he succumbs
first to vice, then to murder.

- To ask you to marry me.
- What about your wife?

I haven"t any wife. That's fiinished.

- For cat's sake...
- Her husband turned up. I'm free.

This was Fritz Lang's favorite plot:
reality turning into a nightmare.

I don"t care what's happened.

L-I can marry you now.

L-I want you to be my wife.

We... We'll go away together.

Way far off
so you can forget this other man.

Don "t cry, Kitty. Please don"t cry.

I'm not crying, you fool. I'm laughing.

Kitty.

Oh, you idiot. How can a man be so dumb?

Kitty.

L"ve wanted to laugh in your face
ever since I first met you.

You"re old and ugly, and I'm sick
of you. Sick, sick, sick!

- Kitty, for heaven's sake.
- You killJohnny? I"d like to see you try.

Why, he"d break every bone
in your body. He's a man.

You wanna marry me? You?

Get out of here! Get out!

Get away from me! Chris! Chris!

Get away from me! Chris!

Chris!

Violence has become, in my opinion,

a defiinite, uh, point, in a script.

It has a dramaturgical reason to be there.

You see, I don"t think
that people believe in the devil...

with the horns and the forked tail.

And therefore, they don"t believe
in punishment after...

they are dead.

So, my question was for me,

what are people...

In what belief people...
Or, what are people fearing is better.

And that is physical pain.

And physical pain comes from violence.

And that, I think, is today the only,

uh, uh, uh, fact which people really fear,

and therefore it has become
a-a defiinite part of life...

and naturally also of scripts.

The phrase "film noir"
was coined by the French in 1946...

when they discovered the Hollywood
productions they had missed...

during the German occupation.

Did you ever want
to cut away a piece of your memory...

or blot it out?

You can"t, you know.
No matter how hard you try.

You can change the scenery,
but sooner or later...

you'll get a whiff of perfume...

or somebody will say a certain phrase
or maybe hum something,

then you"re licked again.

This was not
a specifiic genre like the gangster film,

but a mood which was best described
by this line from Ulmer's Detour.

- Mr. Haskell.
- "Whichever way you turn...

Mr. Haskell.

Fate sticks out its foot to trip you."

Mr. Haskell, wake up. It's raining.

Don"t you think we oughta stop
and put up the top?

In Detour, down-and-out pianist Tom Neal...

hitchhikes his way west
to join his fianc�e.

His life starts unraveling when the man
who has given him a lift falls asleep.

Until then I"d done things my way,

but from then on
something else stepped in...

and shunted me off
to a different destination...

than the one I had picked for myself.

But when I pulled open that door...

Mr. Haskell, what's the matter?
Are you hurt?

Are you hurt, Mr. Haskell?

Doom was written on Tom Neal's face.

He was bewildered
and afraid to go to the police.

Keeping the dead man's car and cash
was definitely a mistake,

but an even bigger mistake was
picking up a female hitchhiker.

A few hours more, and we"d be in Hollywood.

L"d forget where I parked the car
and look up Sue.

This nightmare of being
a dead man would be over.

Where did you leave his body?

Where did you leave the owner of this car?

You"re not foolin' anyone.

This buggy belongs to a guy
named Haskell. That's not you, mister.

It just so happens
I rode with Charlie Haskell...

all the way from Louisiana.

He picked me up outside of Shreveport.

Detour was shot
in six days for only $ 20,000.

Vera, open the door. Please, open the door.

If you don"t open the door,
I'm going to kick it down, Vera.

The director could
only rely on his resourcefulness.

Vera, don"t call the cops. Listen to me.

I'll break the phone.

In fact, his idiosyncratic style...

grew out of such drastic limitations.

This is why Ulmer has become
such an inspiration over the years...

to low-budget filmmakers.

Vera.

Here we find Tom Neal...

after a second outrageous twist of fate.

The world is full of skeptics.

I know. I'm one myself.

In the Haskell business,

how many of you would believe
he fell out of the car?

Now, after killing Vera
without really meaning to do it,

how many of you would believe
it wasn"t premeditated?

Ulmer couldn"t even afford
any special effects.

He simply let the shot
go in and out of focus repeatedly,

an appropriate reflection of the
character's disoriented mental state.

Vera was dead, and I was her murderer.

Murderer!

The hitchhiker's journey...

turned into an ironic morality play.

Film noir showed how quickly
an ordinary man could lose it all...

when he strayed from his path.

Lured by the prospect of sinful pleasures,

he ended up suffering hellish retribution.

Film noir.

I don"t know, you know,

when I make a picture, I never classify it.

If this is a comedy,
I wait until the preview.

If they laugh a lot,
I say this is a comedy.

Or serious picture or fiilm noir.

I never heard that expression
in those days.

I just made pictures
that I would have liked to see.

And if I was lucky, it coincided with, uh,

with the taste of the audience.

I killed Deitrichson.

Me, Walter Neff.

Insurance salesman, 35 years old,
unmarried, no visible scars.

Until a while ago that is.

Yes, I killed him.

I killed him for money and for a woman.

Film noir revealed the dark underbelly...

of American urban life.

Its denizens were private eyes,

rogue cops, white-collar criminals,

femmes fatale.

As Raymond Chandler said,

"The streets were dark
with something more than night."

This is not the right street.

Why did you turn here?

What"re you doing that for?

What"re you honking the horn for?

You couldn"t take
anything for granted anymore.

Not even suburbia.

Not even the supermarkets
of Southern California.

I loved you, Walter, and I hated him.

But I wasn"t going to do anything
about it, not until I met you.

You planned the whole thing.

I only wanted him dead.

And I'm the one that fiixed it
so he was dead.

Is that what you"re telling me?

And nobody's pulling out.

If we went into this together,

we"re coming out at the end together.

It's straight down the line
for both of us. Remember?

Life is a betrayal,

and, you know, sometimes you betray
yourself, too, you know.

Let's have the guts to admit it.

There isn"t anybody born here lately...

who didn"t play dirty sometime,
somewhere in his life.

So, why to hide it?

Truth, honesty,
that's my key to fiilmmaking.

Do you have any identifiication?

Sure.

Andre De Toth was
one of the most persistent...

of the expatriate smugglers.

In Crime Wave
he undermined the old clich�...

that in America you can always get
another break.

A second chance.

Phone.

- Hello.
- Steve?

- Yeah.
- Steve Lacey?

Gene Nelson plays
an ex-convict trying to go straight...

Hello, this is Lacey.

Who is haunted by his past.

Hello.

They"re always passin' through town,

tryin' to put the bite on me
for this or that.

I told you how it"d be.

And I didn"t mind, did I?

I love you. I wanted you.

And now that I"ve got you,
I care a lot less.

I can"t fiigure it.
What do you see in a guy like me?

I see a guy who's swell.

Sterling Hayden
portrays the relentless cop...

who presumes he is guilty.

Lacey's kept pretty straight
since he got out.

Yeah, I know. Sober, industrious,
expert mechanic on airplane engines.

A pilot before they sent him up,

- now works at a private airport in Sunland, right?
- Right.

Call him.

Don"t answer it, Steve. Let it ring.

They'll just want what they all want.

Let "em think you"re away, that you"re
not here, and they'll leave you alone.

Once you"ve done
a bit, nobody leaves you alone.

- Somebody's always on your back.
- Steve.

No answer.

There, you see?

I told ya.

Doesn"t look so good for Mr. Lacey.

Even a sympathetic
parole offiicer can"t save him.

You stay on your side of the fence.
I'm looking for a cop killer.

I'm on my side.
I don"t take things for granted.

I check and recheck.
Lacey's made good with me.

I have faith in him.

- Once a crook, always a crook.
- That's nonsense.

Sick men get well again.

Yeah? And you hate to lose a patient.
Well, you"re gonna lose this one.

Stay here and fiind that dough.

Don"t worry about wrecking the joint.
Just fiind it.

Right.

All right, hot shot.

Put out your hands.

How long one has to pay for a mistake?

For a misstep in their life?
When is enough enough?

You don"t like that, do you, Mrs. Lacey?

It can happen to you, too,
if you"re covering up for this guy.

So don"t try to walk out.
You"re a material witness.

Don"t stay here, Ellen. Forget about me.

Get out of town!

You fiinished, Mr. Lacey?

There's no reprieve in film noir.

You just keep paying for your sins.

Ida Lupino often used film noir visuals,

but for her own very specifiic purposes.

In Lupino's films, it was young women
who went through hell...

when their middle-class security was
shattered by a traumatic experience.

Bigamy, parental abuse,

unwanted pregnancy, rape.

Taxi! Taxi!

Lupino would force the audience
to experience from the inside...

the ordeal of her heroines.

Please! Please! Somebody help me!

In Outrage, she presents
the ultimate female nightmare...

not as a melodrama,
but as a subdued behavioral study...

that captures the banality of evil...

in an ordinary small town.

In an unusual move, actress Ida Lupino
had become a director in 1949...

because she"d been
suspended by Warner Bros.

She seized the opportunity
to form a production company...

with her husband Collier Young.

They developed their own projects,

making a policy
of discovering young talent...

and tackling unglamorous subjects...

such as the rape in Outrage.

I couldn"t move.

I couldn"t move!

How tall was he, dear?

Take him away!

Beyond the horror of the crime,

Ida Lupino illuminates
the changes in the psyche of the victim,

a wounded young woman
who's about to be married...

but now has to learn how
to overcome her pain and despair.

Go on! Take a good look!

Go on, all of you!

Hey, Annie.

I'm asking you to marry me now.

Or didn"t you hear me?

Yes, I heard.

Well?

No!

Anne! Hey!

InJoseph Lewis" Gun Crazy,

the focus was not on the victim,

but on the criminals themselves.

You were compelled to share their fear...

and even their exhilaration.

The audience was pulled into the action
and became an accomplice.

You can"t shoot a man
just because he hesitates.

Well, maybe not, but you can sure scare
him off, like that hotel clerk.

- No, Laurie, I just don"t...
- Oh, Bart, you know something?

- What?
- I love you.

I love you more than
anything else in the world.

Of course
the fascinating pair of Gun Crazy...

belonged to the outlaw tradition
of the '30s.

- Help! Help!
- The tradition that would culminate in the "60s...

- with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde.
- Laurie, Laurie, don"t!

Come on. Get in!

But in Lewis"landmark film,
the renegades were wild animals.

Sex and violence were totally intertwined.

- You were gonna kill that man.
- He"d have killed us if he"d had the chance.

Shoot! Why don"t you shoot?

Shoot!

- Shoot. Do you hear me?
- All right!

Get "em?

Yeah.

First and foremost, film noir was a style.

It combined realism and expressionism,

the use of real locations
and elaborate shadow plays.

Here ace cinematographer
John Alton deserves a mention.

The Hungarian-born master
painted with light.

This was the title of his 1949 textbook...

which we were still using
as students in the 1960s.

Extreme black and white contrasts, :

isolated sources of lighting, :

Pass key! Pass key!

Ominous camera placement, :

deep perspective.

The most striking examples
of Alton's work...

are found in Anthony Mann's early films
such as this film, T-Men.

And in the same year, Raw Deal.

Five or ten minutes, we'll be pullin"out.

Pullin"out for a new country,

leaving everything behind.

Maybe, maybe we can make
a different life...

for ourself in South America.

A good life.

Why didn"t he stop talking?

When the clock stopped moving,

he was singing everything
I"d ever wanted to hear.

All my life,
the lyrics were his, all right.

But the music... Anne "s, Anne"s.

And suddenly I saw that
every time he kissed me...

he"d be kissing Anne.

Every time he held me,
spoke to me, danced with me,

ate, drank, played, sang
it would be Anne, Anne.

Anne!

These were small B-productions...

where Alton was free to experiment...

and often took unusual risks.

Busy little man, eh, snooper?

Almost had ya, all of you.

Tony!

And you, Vanny, so smart.

Top-drawer crook.
Lived with me and never caught on.

"There is no doubt in my mind...

that the prettiest music is sad,"
he remarked.

Knew all the angles...

'And the most beautiful photography
is in a low-key with rich blacks."

Sucker.

The paranoia of film noir
reached its high point...

with Robert Aldrich's film Kiss Me Deadly.

Out of the dark, a haunted woman
appears to private eye Mike Hammer.

She's running away from a mental
institution and an unbearable secret.

She's not mad, though.

Merely innocent,
destined to be a sacrifiicial lamb.

- If we don"t make that bus stop...
- We will.

If we don"t,

remember me.

Stylized lighting and composition
conveyed a deranged world.

There was no moral compass anymore.

Aldrich even turned Mickey Spillane"s
detective Mike Hammer...

into an ambiguous figure, a guy who"s
treated like dirt by everybody...

and is even described as
a "sleazy, despicable bedroom dick."

Aldrich's point, an important one
during those McCarthy times,

was the end neverjustifiies the means.

- She's passed out.
- I'll bring her to.

If you revive her,
do you know what that would be?

Resurrection, that's what it would be.

And do you know what resurrection means?

It means raise the dead.

And just who do you think you are
that you think you can raise the dead?

At the end of Kiss Me Deadly,

the duplicitous woman who stole this package
from a secret government project...

was like the wife of Lot
who refused to heed the warnings.

Aldrich's tale led to
a few cryptic, threatening words:

Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity.

This time opening Pandora's box...

meant universal annihilation,
the apocalypse.

Of course, not all smugglers
operated within film noir.

In Part 3, as we continue our journey,

I"d like to show you how they
worked around more wholesome genres...

and even, at times,
big Hollywood star vehicles.

We'll also look at
a different breed of directors,

those who attacked the system head on...

the iconoclasts.