Original subtitles

At the end of the 1800s a new artform flickered into live.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them isn't box-office or showbiz.

It's passion, innovation!

So let's travel the world to find this innovation for ourselves.

To discover it in this man, Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Kyôko Kagawa

who was in perhaps the greatest movie ever made.

And Amitabh Bachchan, the most famous actor in the world.

And in the movies of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film, an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation across twelve decades,

six continents and a thousand films.

In this chapter we meet

the great film comedian Charlie Chaplin

and discover the realist directors who threatened Hollywood.

1918. World war I had just ended.

Much of Europe was scorched earth.

The seeds of nazism had been planted.

A few years later, the surrealist manifesto said

that art should record dreams.

But what dreams?

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

The town had started to burnish itself.

Starlets with the especial slenderness of youth were attracted

by the bauble that is Hollywood: shiny and romantic.

With its escapism and promise of perfection.

This part of the story of film is about the strengthening

A factory with which the world would fall in love.

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

many inside the factory system of Hollywood

seemed not to notice how fragile it was.

How breakable.

Before the 1920s were over, key filmmakers were trying to break the bauble.

Investment in cinema increased 10-fold in the late teens and 20s.

Hollywood became an industry.

The money often came from the east coast bankers.

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

working class, Jewish businessmen.

Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian immigrant and fur trader,

set up famous players, which would become Paramount.

Four Canadian Polish brothers set up Warner bros.

A brash Russian called Louis B. Mayer, ran MGM.

They built big boring bunkers called 'sound stages',

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

Light!

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

The beams make the library look like a sepulcher.

The documents gleam.

Hollywood set up a production line system

the way that the 'Model T' Ford motor car was assembled.

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

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

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

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

Set designers in the boring buildings would invent magnificent buildings.

This is what legendary Hollywood designer William Cameron Menzies

thought Baghdad might look like.

Inhuman in scale. Elegant and decorative.

Costume designers conjured lifestyles and selves.

And got to know the bodies of their stars.

This is one of Marilyn Monroe's dresses.

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

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

Engineers devised new technology. Lights to illuminate hair.

To make eye lashes cast shadows on the face of Marlene Dietrich in Desire.

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

The image glided in Gone with the Wind as if blown by the wind,

away from the lovers and the sunset.

And new cameras themselves. Beautiful objects.

This one, used in World War II. Half camera, half gun.

This one, from the 1960s: portable and nosey.

And then the money-men thought: 'wait a minute!

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

where the films are shown and when?'

And, so, things that were made in boring buildings,

were shown in grand ones.

The whole point was to standardize and control.

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

Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan contract fined him

for every pound he weighed over 190 pounds.

Novelist Henry Miller called Hollywood's production line,

'a dictatorship in which the artist is silenced.'

It was a dictatorship, and yet some say there was genius in it.

A genius of sorts, Busby Berkley, choreographed this fantasy,

Girls in the Snow making patterns with their moves.

Increasingly abstract. Geometric.

Stanley Donen, who made Singin' in the Rain:

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

The "studio system" was the garden, where we all worked.

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

and I often think about that.

That idea of having a company which brought people together

to make money, it's all they were doing.

They weren't doing it for any other reason.

What was behind it was an economic thing.

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

So the industry was a bauble but also a garden,

which is what Agnes Demille called Hollywood a decade earlier.

And what varied flowers grew there!

MGM, for example, which was so proud of itself

that it filmed its own Neo-classical buildings,

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

Its movies had an opulence and optimism.

In this dance scene in Singin' in the Rain,

even the shadows have light in them.

Warner brothers was more streetwise.

Its stars were angels with dirty faces.

Scenes like this one from The Maltese Falcon

had a downtrodden hero.

Harder lighting.

Sharper shadows.

Gangster outfits.

Night-time settings.

Murder.

Melodrama.

Movie journalism.

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

Sparkling.

Champagney.

Costumes on display.

Feminine.

Romantic.

Wry.

More taken by the "veiled" and the east.

Tell me, Alexei. Are you still fond of me?

Yes, your imperial majesty, I love you.

The "studio system" was a capitalist production line.

It was copied around the world.

In India, Mexico, Italy, Britain, China, Hong Kong,

Korea, and France.

Each of those industries made formulaic, copycat movies.

But the system also fostered expertise and taste.

Extravagance and brilliance.

The ghost in the machine was art.

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

This is one of them, The Thief of Bagdad.

It could stand for many of them.

It states its theme up front.

A holy man shows that happiness must be earned.

A tweak of the American dream.

Then a wide shot of a street scene.

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

But then we dissolve inwards to see him.

We recognize him.

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

He's also its producer.

He's asleep at the center of the action.

Unaware that we're looking at him.

And we dissolve in again.

Soft lighting.

Shallow focus.

Make-up.

A certain femininity.

But then he steals a man's wallet.

Our beautiful, dreaming hero is a thief.

The passer-by exits screen right.

Notices his wallet is missing.

Cut to Doug, who looks screen right.

The camera doesn't cross the line.

We know he's looking at his victim. Smiling.

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

Romantic and American.

Introduced us to a society.

Then a scene.

Then an individual.

Seduced us with style: The poetics of lighting.

Amused us with character.

A likable rogue.

A human being like us, but more glamorous

and with more exciting life.

It makes the space very clear.

We're not confused about where we are.

The story kicks in, of course.

The thief has broken into a palace.

He hears that a Princess is there.

Glimpses her fairytale bed.

Will he go down to look at her?

No.

No.

Maybe.

No.

Yes.

We can't wait to see her either.

The curl of the fantasy balcony.

The elegant attenuation of her mosquito net.

His trousers are see through now.

He looks through the net.

His shadow.

Hollywood cinema, the bauble, is brilliant at the anticipation of seeing.

The desire to see.

The pleasure of seeing.

The thief falls in love, of course.

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

This sort of movie is usually called classical,

but really it's romantic.

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

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

It's the mainstream, the bauble.

So Hollywood mainstream films in the '20s

were entertaining and romantic,

but our theme is innovation in cinema.

Were they innovative?

Some of the most popular films of the '20s, the comedies,

most certainly were.

Three filmmakers Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd

were the greatest of the American comedy directors.

Before them there was mostly slapstick.

This sight gag on a fast moving train was typical.

A good cheap laugh using a bucket of water.

But then came Keaton, obsessed by the camera.

In this scene from his film The Cameraman,

he shows that fascination.

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

He thought like an architect.

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

the house built becomes a playpen.

It falls around him.

Keaton helped define silent cinema.

He just got it.

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

a cut replaces one space with another.

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

he's suddenly on a cliff top.

But as this scene shows, he also got that movies

are about looking.

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

He begins this sequence with an overhead shot,

to make the building look really high.

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

He had a set built above this third street tunnel in L.A.

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

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

There was a net just below, out of shot.

Just as well because Keaton didn't make it

and was badly bruised.

Keaton's inventiveness was often highly planned,

but sometimes spontaneous.

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

to make it look like he himself stopped it.

Then started it again.

One of his greatest movies, The General,

was a comedy epic about a train.

It's set during the American civil war.

Buster's a Southern train driver.

A bit eccentric, obsessed by detail.

In the first half of the film, he travels north

to the captive's lair, and rescues his sweetheart.

Every visual joke and setup in the first half,

is repeated and amplified in the second,

but in reverse order.

We get the pattern.

We see the next joke coming and we're laughing

before it even starts.

The climax of the film has been called: The most stunning visual event

ever arranged for a comedy, perhaps for any kind of film.

The northern enemy's advancing, so Keaton sets fire to a bridge.

Their train crosses. The bridge gives way.

This is no trick shot.

The locomotive and the bridge were real.

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

Such scale, such sublime, was a key element of silent film.

Labor was cheap.

Wall street hadn't crashed.

Imaginations were extravagant and uncapped.

Studios were not yet afraid of the size of director's dreams.

Keaton's dreams outstripped his box office.

He was eventually sacked by MGM.

He hit the bottle and lived in a trailer in a car park

beside his former studio.

He was forgotten for years,

but as this rare archive footage of him shows,

Keaton was joking 'til the end.

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

In 1965, at the Venice film festival, he got a standing ovation.

He died the next year.

Amongst the scores of filmmakers who were influenced by Keaton

is Palestine's, Elia Suleiman.

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

He keeps back from the action. And finds grumpiness funny.

Buster Keaton only once shared the screen

with our next great silent film comedian, Charlie Chaplin.

In this scene in Limelight,

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

he was far more into body movement.

Chaplin thought like a dancer and a vaudevillian.

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

Actor and producer Norman Lloyd knew Chaplin

and, also, Alfred Hitchcock, who was born not far from Chaplin in London.

'Hitch came from a middle class family.

His father was a poultry dealer, fish and poultry,

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

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

Unbelievable poverty.

I mean, stuff like he and his brother Sydney,

who was his half-brother,

stealing fruit, rotten fruit.

They would know where the wagon was

with fruit that was going to be dumped.

They'd go and get that fruit. Eat that fruit.

His mother being put into an asylum and out.

In and out.

I think his father was a drinker.

Charlie had such an upbringing that it's in the movies.'

And never more so than in his picture, The Kid,

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

Cold mornings.

Worn out bedding.

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

Chaplin plays a version of his by now famous character,

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

Who finds an orphan boy and brings him up.

The boy starts to work for his dad.

He breaks windows so his dad can fix them.

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

Eventually, the boy's taken to an orphanage.

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

The film humanized comic cinema.

It D.W. Griffith-ized it, you could say.

It showed Chaplin's passionate empathy with the poor.

It was a huge hit around the world.

Chaplin was cinema's Charles Dickens.

He built his own studio in L.A. in the English style

and filmed it in time lapse.

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

He had final cut on his films.

His premieres were mobbed.

The studio today looks like a row of English houses,

plunked in a megalopolis.

A deleted scene from his film City Lights,

that Chaplin made ten years later, shows how his mind worked.

He's on a street corner.

A piece of wood is stuck in an air vent.

Chaplin begins to play with it.

To improvise.

The Soviets thought of him as a marxist,

but Chaplin was almost a Jungian too.

A believer in play.

Inspiration.

Finding ideas within yourself.

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

letting his unconscious do its work.

60 years later, the British director, Nicholas Roeg, also seemed to try

to show the unconscious lives of his characters.

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

The people act cool with each other,

but their hands, filmed in close up, suggest twitchy mental energy.

Chaplin's deleted scene is a lovely little poem

about daydreaming on street corners.

Stanley donen sees ideas in Chaplin too.

'To be wonderful choreography it has to have an idea

which overwhelms the whole production,

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

And that's what's hard to find.

A great, wonderful, encompassing idea for the musical number.

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

because it's Adolf Hitler making the world his toy

and the image is so spectacular that that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

If you can come up with that kind of idea.

But it had to be... First he was going to...

I don't know how he thought of it, in what order,

but he was going to make a film about Adolf Hitler

and he was going to play Hitler.

And how was he going to make a buffoon of him

but not make him be the ogre that he was

and that's quite an accomplishment.

Fascism and ballet.

Who else would have thought up a scene like this?

No one else in the story of film combines entertainment,

ideas, movement, improvisation and politics like Chaplin.

In France in the 1940s Chaplin inspired Jacques Tati,

but Tati leant forward and wore short trousers,

where Chaplin leant backwards and wore long ones.

In Italy, Toto became a huge star, wearing Chaplin's trademark bowler hat

and with Chaplin's jabby, confident manner.

And in the massive film industry of India, this man, megastar and director,

Raj Kapoor, modeled his screen character, "the tramp", on Chaplin's.

Streetwise.

Plucky.

Tipping his hat.

Stealing from the rich.

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

Gloria Swanson explicitly impersonates him in Sunset Boulevard.

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

Was reworked in this scene, in Wilder's Some like it hot.

Look at that!

Look how she moves!

Chaplin co-founded United Artists, the studio that made Some like it hot.

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

Chaplin was in American cinema's bloodstream.

But to the country's shame, it kicked him out in the '50s

because he was a leftist.

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

you assimilate.

You hope their greatness.

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

And you try to not only work on that level

but you absorb something from them.

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

not that you've disregarded your own, but what you bring

is the ability to assimilate what they're doing.'

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

was the Nebraskan son of a photographer, Harold Lloyd.

At first Lloyd was too like Chaplin.

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

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

In those days this was a nerdy look.

But add in Lloyd's athleticism, and the flinty courage

that we see here and you got a ballsy dreamer.

Both aggressive and lyrical.

A jock-nerd.

Lloyd's most influential film, Safety Last,

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

He plays a hick who pretends to his girlfriend

that he's manager of a store.

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

Lloyd, who had vertigo and a missing thumb and forefinger

on one hand in real life, climbs the building.

The sequence is a vertical obstacle race: a bird, a net, a plank, a clock,

a rope, a dog, a mouse, a gun, and a wind-gauge get in Lloyd's way.

When he finally reaches the top of the building

the action reaches a crescendo, and he swoops in an arc

into the arms of his sweetheart.

The climb is a beautiful idea on film.

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

was influenced by the ballsy dreamer.

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

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

The comedies were the brightest, most entertaining and innovative things

to come out of Hollywood in the '20s.

They, and the extravagant romance of films like The Thief of Bagdad

in all its splendor, its special effects and sweep,

made Hollywood a major export industry for America.

But something in its very flickering, the fact that the bauble was a fantasy,

made it vulnerable.

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

This is the real Baghdad.

To say so can shatter the bauble.

Reality can break fantasy.

And in the '20s,

several filmmakers already realized this.

They wanted to show this: real life.

Without the costumes and glitter.

Non-fiction.

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

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

Nanook of the North.

It's set in Alaska.

And has beautiful but conventional scenic shots like this.

But then it focuses on one real Itivinuit man,

Nanook, and his family.

Nanook of the North was no travelogue.

It stared into Nanook's face.

It was about his psychology, his mythic struggle against the elements.

Like Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Flaherty was a romantic,

but by using non-actors, non-stars, no Douglas Fairbanks or Garbo here.

He made the audience look more ethically.

As it happens, Flaherty staged this scene and others,

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

People had seen a real man, a playful father

with a sense of humor, on screen.

You could buy Nanook ice cream bars.

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

And so documentary, as an art form, as a viable genre, was born.

Documentary is often thought of as merely information

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

Forugh Farrokhzad's Iranian film, The House is black,

used beautiful tracking shots to turn a home

for people with leprosy into a film poem.

In this film essay, Sans soleil, Chris Marker filmed real places

in Japan and elsewhere.

Then wrote a fictional commentary in which an imaginary women

quotes from made-up letters from the filmmaker.

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

Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry.

Waiting. Immobility. Snatches of sleep.

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

Imagined words on top of non-fiction pictures.

That's why I go into so much trouble when I got back.

'Cause I was in the mindframe of well, just come back

from a place where everyone wants me dead.

And director Brian Hill and and poet Simon Armitage

interviewed this man about his war experiences,

then turned his words into poems,

then had him speak the poems to make his memories magical.

Exit wounds or burns to the face. You're just soft in the head.

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

Watch him now. Watch him all the time.

In the '60s, Jørgen Leth made this short documentary

The perfect Human.

In a documentary made nearly 40 years later,

director Lars Von Trier asked Leth to remake the original

five times, each time with a startling new challenge.

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

and show that documentary directors, from Flaherty onwards,

were really co-directors.

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

Back in L.A. in the '20s, maybe it was seeing documentaries

like Nanook of the North that led our next filmmaker

to use realism to undermine the Hollywood fantasy.

A director called Erich Von Stroheim took on the establishment.

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

Grinning.

Scarred.

Eric Von Stroheim was one of the few legitimate geniuses

of the early silent days.

He was a man of such vision and he was so great a poet and an artist

that he found nothing but trouble in Hollywood.

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

Here he even shows an actress

how to do a simple thing like comb her hair.

A small detail in the scene.

This is his gigantic fifth film, Greed.

The man on the right is a dentist.

His wife wins the lottery.

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

As she gets obsessively greedy,

so her husband becomes drunken and penniless.

He beats her.

Stroheim shows her agony, her smallness.

Eventually the man murders his wife

and, in this famous climax shot in death valley,

also kills a rival who put him out of business.

By now the yellow, the color of money,

has flooded the whole world of the story.

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

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

As did his techniques.

He shot every scene of the novel by Frank Norris,

on which the film was based.

Nine months of shooting.

Sometimes, as here, in baking heat.

Actors pushed to their limits.

A budget of $1.5 million.

The finished movie ran 7 hours.

Stroheim was the Emile Zola or Dostojevski of cinema.

Cinematographer Carl [...] : 'Early in his life he was visited

by such very great humiliation.

Such deep, inward, psychic wounds that there came in him

an insane desire to use his genius as a weapon.

MGM hated the results.

Stroheim's ultra-realism became a stigma.

He didn't get to direct many more films.

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

but nothing came of it.

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

He said that the film was dead.

In the same year, Stroheim played the protective butler

in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

In this famous scene, Wilder shows fictional movie star Norma Desmond

watching one of her old movies.

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

It was directed, way back then, by none other

than the sublime, extravagant, Erich Von Stroheim.

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

Three years after Von Stroheim's Greed, another MGM film

tried to portray '20s America with far more realism than romantic cinema.

It became the greatest pre-Wall Street crash

social problem picture of its time.

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

They have a child, but she dies.

In this heartbreaking scene, the father thinks his dead daughter

is merely sleeping, and so tries to hush street noise

so that it won't disturb her slumber.

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

He adored D.W. Griffiths' ideasy epic Intolerance.

He was that rare Hollywood beast, an intellectual.

His films almost never feature villains, and were written mostly by women.

Vidor pushed realism in acting beyond the Hollywood norm.

Here he films the leading actress in the crowd in static shot,

a longish take, no fancy clothes or set.

Just her growing despair.

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

Vidor used hidden cameras.

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

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

he designed this magnificent sequence.

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

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

We dissolve through to Wilder's everyman,

played by Jack Lemon at the very center of the frame.

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

exaggerating it by craning upwards and using small people,

and even dolls, and smaller desks in the background

to force the perspective.

MGM was uneasy about the crowd's refusal to romanticize ordinary New York life.

They made Vidor shoot seven different endings

in various shades of optimism.

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

which it was for then, and many years afterwards.

To have a realistic picture which put the spotlight

on marriage and on any kind of American life.

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

It just wouldn't fit. But the studio didn't know.

They were lost.

What sort of how to end this picture happily?

So we made actually seven endings and tried it out.

Seven previews with the various endings and finally I came up

with the ending where he's lost again in the crowd

and the camera moves back, back, back.

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

It showed mass society emerging, it focused on the everyman,

as French films would do.

And showed the kinetic energy of cities themselves.

Their rhythms and compositions, like the German movies

of Fritz Lang and Walter Ruttmann.

And the Soviet films of Dziga Vertov.

In the Soviet Union itself in the '20s, this wonderful film played

with the rebellious idea of realism and cities.

We're on Mars. It's all angles, diagonals, modernist costumes.

This is queen Aelita. She's shown earth for the first time and sees a city.

A battleship.

Then, a focus pull to a balcony in Moscow.

The queen has glimpsed something real, earth, and she wants it.

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

but those by this director, Yakov Protazanov, are quite unlike them.

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

Yevgeni Bauer.

A scholar studies in his room. Handsome side lighting.

The scholar's aunt arrives. Bauer uses an open door

to create a slit on screen, like a Vermeer painting.

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

Daringly for the time, a main source light

is in the shot, here in the foreground.

Bravely natural.

Later, the scholar sees a beautiful actress on stage,

then, astonishingly, gets a letter from her, asking to meet.

He waits for her in the snow.

She arrives in the background of this shot: a daring composition.

Filmed in natural light.

And then the actress dies and the scholar begins to dream of her.

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

At the end of the film, on his deathbed,

exhausted with lamenting, the scholar's aunt consoles him.

Then Bauer dissolves from nighttime blue to black and white.

The ghost of the actress is in the room too.

And so the scholar stirs once more.

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

Where romantic cinema was usually optimistic,

these early Russian films were laments.

Pessimistic in a way, about the realism of grief

and loss and longing.

You'd think that films like Nanook of the North

and Greed and The crowd

and those of Yevgeni Bauer would be the last word in realism

in cinema at this time, but no.

One profoundly serious Danish filmmaker challenged romantic and fantasy cinema

with such deeply felt realism that he was

a one man reformation.

Undercutting the emotionalism of mainstream cinema

with a spiritual spareness.

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

Joan, the 15th century French catholic girl, who was accused of witchcraft,

has just signed a statement denying God,

to save her life.

The actress, Marie Falconetti, had never been in a movie before,

nor would she again.

She's filmed only in close up.

Wears almost no make-up.

You can see her freckles.

Her eyelashes are matted with tears.

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

The filming was done in silence.

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

Look at the lighting and focus.

No depth to the image.

Nothing in the background.

No set or shadows.

The walls were painted pink to remove their glare,

so as not to detract from falconetti's face.

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

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

He was brought up in a strict protestant family.

Falconetti and the others are speaking.

Dreyer had them say the actual words

that were spoken at the trial nearly 500 years earlier.

He thought that this gave the scene conviction.

The '90s maverick Lars Von Trier:

Dreyer is fantastic.

Why?

He... The same thing that he did with the décor,

he also did with the script, you know?

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

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

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

that's been reducing for a long time.

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

Why is Tarkovsky great?

It's really difficult to say, but it was, for me,

to see his films were kind of a revelation.

So it's really... You should be thankful that it's difficult to say

why people are great, because it's just something

that you feel very strongly and if you don't feel it strongly

then they're not great.

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

He lived here and went to churches like this.

Though he didn't believe in God, the purity and plainness

of Lutheran churches seemed to have formed Dreyer's inner eye.

He is the master of pared down décor.

Even in his first film, The president, he seems to want to simplify and purify

his images in a protestant way.

Sets at the time were usually cluttered, like this.

Soon he started to film on misty days.

Or into the light to soften his imagery.

His shots became paler, whiter.

His haunting vampire movie Vampyr, features shadows against a white wall.

They have a life of their own.

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

by suffocating in white flour.

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

Hollywood romantic cinema was supposed to be decorative.

Full of detail.

Not blank.

No other director in the story of film cared so much about whiteness,

its simplicity, its spirituality.

At the end of his film Ordet, (The Word) a woman comes to life

in a white, entirely undecorated room.

In Dreyer's last film, many years later, a woman believes so completely

in the power of love that he films her as

if through a white scrim, as if in heaven,

and she says this:

Dreyer's seriousness was deeply unfashionable

and, so, in the '50s, not getting his films made,

he managed this cinema.

The Danish film institute now has a study center dedicated to his work.

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

in Lars Von Trier's completely set less film Dogville.

This was the opposite of romantic Hollywood cinema.

A million miles away from the decorative splendor of The T hief of Bagdad.

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

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

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

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

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

Dreyer had purged silent cinema of its spectacle its decoration,

its action, its bauble.

What was left was a girl facing her God.

Facing the camera.

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

had his lover and muse, Anna Karina, go to the cinema, in his film Vivre sa Vie.

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

Dreyer's Scandinavian spiritualism and fatalism was a universe away

from this place: Hollywood.

Escapist, romantic movies were what most people saw

in movie palaces like these.

Places you'd go after a hard day's work

to forget your troubles.

To see what utopia might feel like.

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

But they'd seen something brilliant in the movies,

the ability to capture reality and make it splendid and moving.

And this was just the start.

Filmmakers in Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and China

would see other great things in the filmstrip.

Their discoveries would make the 1920s the greatest decade in the story of film.

Subtitles corrected and synced by Job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today