1 00:00:10,243 --> 00:00:13,870 In this chapter we meet the great film comedian, Charlie Chaplin, 2 00:00:14,124 --> 00:00:17,517 and discover the realist directors who threatened Hollywood. 3 00:00:21,297 --> 00:00:24,577 1918. WWI had just ended. 4 00:00:29,844 --> 00:00:31,937 Much of Europe was scorched earth. 5 00:00:32,637 --> 00:00:35,284 The seeds of Nazism had been planted. 6 00:00:35,810 --> 00:00:38,724 A few years later, the Surrealist Manifesto 7 00:00:38,795 --> 00:00:41,250 said that art should record dreams. 8 00:00:41,851 --> 00:00:43,364 But what dreams? 9 00:00:49,677 --> 00:00:53,290 In the hills of Los Angeles, the myth of Hollywood had just been born. 10 00:00:55,743 --> 00:00:57,737 The town had started to burnish itself. 11 00:00:59,210 --> 00:01:02,129 Starlets with the especial slenderness of youth 12 00:01:02,477 --> 00:01:05,157 were attracted by the bauble that is Hollywood, 13 00:01:05,237 --> 00:01:09,891 shiny and romantic, with its escapism and promise of perfection. 14 00:01:13,510 --> 00:01:16,749 This part of The Story of Film is about the strengthening of Hollywood, 15 00:01:16,944 --> 00:01:21,844 how it becomes an industry, a factory with which the world would fall in love. 16 00:01:22,663 --> 00:01:26,095 But, as we'll see, for all its strength and power, 17 00:01:26,770 --> 00:01:30,123 many inside the factory system of Hollywood seemed not to notice 18 00:01:30,148 --> 00:01:31,794 how fragile it was, 19 00:01:32,477 --> 00:01:33,664 how breakable. 20 00:01:36,971 --> 00:01:38,897 Before the 1920s were over, 21 00:01:39,077 --> 00:01:42,410 key filmmakers were trying to break the bauble. 22 00:01:44,797 --> 00:01:49,044 Investment in cinema increased tenfold in the late teens and 20s. 23 00:01:49,763 --> 00:01:51,644 Hollywood became an industry. 24 00:01:52,877 --> 00:01:55,657 The money often came from the East coast bankers. 25 00:01:56,431 --> 00:02:00,184 On the west coast, it was spent by a series of production bosses, 26 00:02:00,304 --> 00:02:02,624 working class, Jewish businessmen. 27 00:02:02,684 --> 00:02:06,228 Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian immigrant and fur trader, 28 00:02:06,284 --> 00:02:09,102 set up Famous Players, which would become Paramount. 29 00:02:12,344 --> 00:02:15,584 Four Canadian Polish brothers set up Warner Bros. 30 00:02:18,223 --> 00:02:21,930 A brash Russian called Louis B Mayer ran MGM. 31 00:02:23,677 --> 00:02:27,163 They built big boring bunkers called sound stages, 32 00:02:27,188 --> 00:02:31,834 so that filming could move indoors, into the dark, to control this: 33 00:02:33,923 --> 00:02:35,130 light. 34 00:02:38,970 --> 00:02:43,130 This scene in Citizen Kane shows that Hollywood could work wonders with light. 35 00:02:46,450 --> 00:02:49,037 The beams make the library look like a sepulchre. 36 00:02:49,563 --> 00:02:51,344 The documents gleam. 37 00:02:53,104 --> 00:02:54,484 Thank you, Jennings. 38 00:02:54,524 --> 00:02:57,037 Hollywood set up a production line system 39 00:02:57,190 --> 00:02:59,843 the way that the model T Ford motor car was assembled. 40 00:03:01,797 --> 00:03:05,777 In Japan at the time, directors led the production process, 41 00:03:06,310 --> 00:03:11,354 but in Hollywood it was production bosses like Zukor and Mayer and Warner. 42 00:03:12,437 --> 00:03:16,874 Below them, in the movie barns, writers would concoct stories, 43 00:03:17,464 --> 00:03:22,470 talent scouts would find new starlets in coffee shops or magazines. 44 00:03:23,070 --> 00:03:27,625 Set designers in the boring buildings would invent magnificent buildings. 45 00:03:30,090 --> 00:03:33,259 This is what legendary Hollywood designer William Cameron Menzies 46 00:03:33,284 --> 00:03:35,557 thought Baghdad might look like. 47 00:03:36,090 --> 00:03:39,370 Inhuman in scale. Elegant and decorative. 48 00:03:45,924 --> 00:03:49,284 Costume designers conjured lifestyles and selves, 49 00:03:49,903 --> 00:03:52,263 and got to know the bodies of their stars. 50 00:03:54,337 --> 00:03:56,490 This is one of Marilyn Monroe's dresses. 51 00:03:58,544 --> 00:04:03,644 Make-up artists came up with new types of foundation and eyelash and look. 52 00:04:04,384 --> 00:04:07,650 This is the room and table where Marilyn Monroe went blonde. 53 00:04:10,204 --> 00:04:12,764 Engineers devised new technology 54 00:04:14,204 --> 00:04:15,930 - lights to illuminate hair 55 00:04:16,371 --> 00:04:19,904 to make eyelashes cast shadows on the face of Marlene Dietrich 56 00:04:20,550 --> 00:04:21,857 in Desire. 57 00:04:24,190 --> 00:04:27,770 Dollies on which to move the camera, to make the image glide. 58 00:04:31,803 --> 00:04:33,850 The image glided in Gone With The Wind, 59 00:04:34,439 --> 00:04:36,110 as if blown by the wind, 60 00:04:36,270 --> 00:04:39,030 away from the lovers and the sunset. 61 00:04:43,984 --> 00:04:45,904 And new cameras themselves. 62 00:04:46,145 --> 00:04:47,727 Beautiful objects. 63 00:04:48,483 --> 00:04:50,610 This one, used in World War II, 64 00:04:50,991 --> 00:04:52,670 half camera, half gun. 65 00:04:53,610 --> 00:04:57,290 This one, from the 60s, portable and nosey. 66 00:04:59,904 --> 00:05:01,823 And then the money men thought, "Wait a minute! 67 00:05:01,829 --> 00:05:04,670 "Why don't we buy the screens as well so we can control 68 00:05:04,695 --> 00:05:07,224 "where the films are shown and when?" 69 00:05:08,824 --> 00:05:13,490 And so, things that were made in boring buildings, were shown in grand ones. 70 00:05:19,704 --> 00:05:22,830 The whole point was to standardise and control. 71 00:05:23,531 --> 00:05:27,550 Actress Joan Crawford's contract specified when she should go to bed. 72 00:05:28,530 --> 00:05:34,530 Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan contract fined him for every pound he weighed over 190lb. 73 00:05:36,404 --> 00:05:39,337 Novelist Henry Miller called Hollywood's production line 74 00:05:39,362 --> 00:05:42,924 "a dictatorship in which the artist is silenced." 75 00:05:44,183 --> 00:05:45,764 It was a dictatorship, 76 00:05:46,104 --> 00:05:48,710 and yet some say there was genius in it. 77 00:05:50,377 --> 00:05:52,670 A genius of sorts, Busby Berkeley, 78 00:05:52,928 --> 00:05:54,857 choreographed this fantasy. 79 00:05:55,084 --> 00:05:58,363 Girls in the snow, making patterns with their moves. 80 00:05:58,364 --> 00:06:01,010 Increasingly abstract. Geometric. 81 00:06:10,570 --> 00:06:12,670 Stanley Donen, who made Singin' in the Rain: 82 00:06:13,617 --> 00:06:15,250 The studio system, 83 00:06:16,852 --> 00:06:20,570 in my opinion, didn't really get into the film. 84 00:06:20,803 --> 00:06:25,910 The studio system was the garden where we all worked. 85 00:06:25,935 --> 00:06:31,014 I mean, there I was at MGM with a lot of enormously gifted people 86 00:06:31,570 --> 00:06:32,690 and... 87 00:06:34,036 --> 00:06:36,510 I often think about that, 88 00:06:37,126 --> 00:06:39,643 that idea of having a company 89 00:06:39,668 --> 00:06:44,732 which brought people together to make money is all they were doing. 90 00:06:45,025 --> 00:06:47,031 They weren't doing it for any other reason. 91 00:06:47,056 --> 00:06:49,900 What was behind it was an economic thing. 92 00:06:49,925 --> 00:06:53,231 They were a company making money, or hoping to make money. 93 00:06:55,476 --> 00:06:58,259 So the industry was a bauble but also a garden, 94 00:06:58,624 --> 00:07:01,683 which is what Agnes deMille called Hollywood a decade earlier. 95 00:07:03,110 --> 00:07:05,810 And what varied flowers grew there! 96 00:07:07,117 --> 00:07:09,665 MGM, for example, which was so proud of itself 97 00:07:09,690 --> 00:07:12,264 that it filmed its own neo-classical buildings, 98 00:07:12,944 --> 00:07:16,404 was said to have "more stars than there are in heaven". 99 00:07:17,744 --> 00:07:20,370 Its movies had an opulence and optimism. 100 00:07:21,511 --> 00:07:23,683 In this dance scene in Singin' in the Rain, 101 00:07:23,830 --> 00:07:25,896 even the shadows have light in them. 102 00:07:34,270 --> 00:07:36,110 Warner Brothers was more streetwise. 103 00:07:37,123 --> 00:07:39,904 Its stars were angels with dirty faces. 104 00:07:40,324 --> 00:07:42,777 Scenes like this one in The Maltese Falcon 105 00:07:42,802 --> 00:07:45,442 had a downtrodden hero, harder lighting, 106 00:07:45,684 --> 00:07:49,924 sharper shadows, gangster outfits, night time settings. 107 00:07:52,304 --> 00:07:55,277 Murder, melodrama, movie journalism. 108 00:07:56,323 --> 00:07:59,950 This scene from The Scarlet Empress shows Paramount's style. 109 00:08:00,217 --> 00:08:02,137 Sparkling, champagne-y, 110 00:08:02,397 --> 00:08:04,050 costumes on display. 111 00:08:04,197 --> 00:08:06,957 Feminine, Romantic, wry... 112 00:08:07,064 --> 00:08:09,390 More taken by the "veiled" and the east. 113 00:08:11,277 --> 00:08:12,617 Tell me, Alexei... 114 00:08:13,710 --> 00:08:15,381 Are you still fond of me? 115 00:08:15,877 --> 00:08:17,924 Yes, your imperial majesty, I love you. 116 00:08:18,837 --> 00:08:21,317 The studio system was a capitalist production line. 117 00:08:21,630 --> 00:08:23,416 It was copied around the world. 118 00:08:23,577 --> 00:08:29,130 In India, Mexico, Italy, Britain, China, Hong Kong, Korea and France. 119 00:08:30,550 --> 00:08:34,510 Each of those industries made formulaic, copycat movies. 120 00:08:35,477 --> 00:08:39,717 But the system also fostered expertise and taste, 121 00:08:40,637 --> 00:08:42,770 extravagance and brilliance. 122 00:08:43,570 --> 00:08:46,044 The ghost in the machine was art. 123 00:09:12,990 --> 00:09:14,277 Is it cold? 124 00:09:38,310 --> 00:09:42,743 By the mid '20s, the boring buildings were making 700 films a year. 125 00:09:45,010 --> 00:09:47,484 This is one of them. The Thief of Bagdad. 126 00:09:48,004 --> 00:09:49,770 It could stand for many of them. 127 00:09:53,837 --> 00:09:55,664 It states its theme up front - 128 00:09:56,164 --> 00:09:59,437 A holy man shows that "Happiness must be earned" 129 00:09:59,797 --> 00:10:01,737 - a tweak of the American dream. 130 00:10:02,717 --> 00:10:04,764 Then a wide shot of a street scene. 131 00:10:05,037 --> 00:10:08,447 We hardly notice the man lying at the head height of the merchants. 132 00:10:09,610 --> 00:10:11,884 But then we dissolve inwards to see him. 133 00:10:12,404 --> 00:10:13,744 We recognise him. 134 00:10:13,769 --> 00:10:16,324 He's the movie's star, Douglas Fairbanks. 135 00:10:17,084 --> 00:10:18,426 He's also its producer. 136 00:10:19,346 --> 00:10:23,579 He's asleep at the centre of the action, unaware that we're looking at him. 137 00:10:23,973 --> 00:10:25,632 And we dissolve in again. 138 00:10:26,466 --> 00:10:29,299 Soft lighting, shallow focus, make-up. 139 00:10:29,457 --> 00:10:30,917 A certain femininity. 140 00:10:31,910 --> 00:10:33,817 But then he steals a man's wallet. 141 00:10:34,284 --> 00:10:36,664 Our beautiful, dreaming hero is a thief. 142 00:10:36,997 --> 00:10:39,516 The passer-by exits screen right, 143 00:10:39,936 --> 00:10:41,643 notices his wallet is missing. 144 00:10:41,997 --> 00:10:44,324 Cut to Doug, who looks screen right. 145 00:10:44,824 --> 00:10:46,430 The camera doesn't cross the line. 146 00:10:46,883 --> 00:10:48,897 We know he's looking at his victim. 147 00:10:48,924 --> 00:10:50,157 Smiling. 148 00:10:50,703 --> 00:10:54,430 In just 90 seconds the film has told us its theme - 149 00:10:54,604 --> 00:10:56,117 Romantic and American 150 00:10:56,637 --> 00:10:58,303 - introduced us to a society, 151 00:10:59,874 --> 00:11:01,170 then a scene... 152 00:11:04,450 --> 00:11:05,757 ..then an individual, 153 00:11:06,190 --> 00:11:07,934 seduced us with style - 154 00:11:08,423 --> 00:11:09,854 the poetics of lighting 155 00:11:10,223 --> 00:11:12,110 - amused us with character 156 00:11:12,364 --> 00:11:15,072 - a likable rogue, a human being like us, 157 00:11:15,097 --> 00:11:17,490 but more glamorous and with a more exciting life. 158 00:11:19,837 --> 00:11:22,037 It makes the space very clear. 159 00:11:23,050 --> 00:11:25,270 We're not confused about where we are. 160 00:11:26,624 --> 00:11:28,317 The story kicks in, of course. 161 00:11:28,570 --> 00:11:30,630 The thief has broken into a palace. 162 00:11:31,003 --> 00:11:32,863 He hears that a princess is there. 163 00:11:33,196 --> 00:11:35,302 Glimpses her fairytale bed. 164 00:11:35,969 --> 00:11:38,236 Will he go down to look at her? No. 165 00:11:38,776 --> 00:11:40,004 No. 166 00:11:40,044 --> 00:11:41,264 Maybe. 167 00:11:57,970 --> 00:11:59,217 No. 168 00:12:05,004 --> 00:12:06,224 Yes. 169 00:12:07,083 --> 00:12:08,923 We can't wait to see her either. 170 00:12:13,660 --> 00:12:15,730 The curl of the fantasy balcony. 171 00:12:16,356 --> 00:12:18,930 The elegant attenuation of her mosquito net. 172 00:12:19,677 --> 00:12:21,637 His trousers are see through now. 173 00:12:25,844 --> 00:12:27,304 He looks through the net. 174 00:12:27,369 --> 00:12:28,504 His shadow. 175 00:12:28,897 --> 00:12:30,537 Hollywood cinema, the bauble, 176 00:12:30,562 --> 00:12:32,784 is brilliant at the anticipation of seeing, 177 00:12:32,809 --> 00:12:35,610 the desire to see, the pleasure of seeing. 178 00:12:37,484 --> 00:12:39,430 The thief falls in love, of course. 179 00:12:39,770 --> 00:12:42,617 And his love sets in motion the rest of the film. 180 00:12:44,184 --> 00:12:46,297 This sort of movie is usually called classical, 181 00:12:47,057 --> 00:12:49,144 but really it's Romantic. 182 00:12:53,924 --> 00:12:56,550 It became Hollywood's claim to fame in the '20s. 183 00:12:57,824 --> 00:13:00,864 It's what most people mean when they even say the word movie. 184 00:13:01,357 --> 00:13:03,656 It is the mainstream, the bauble. 185 00:13:05,024 --> 00:13:08,730 So Hollywood mainstream films in the '20s were entertaining and romantic, 186 00:13:09,063 --> 00:13:11,143 but our theme is innovation in cinema. 187 00:13:11,569 --> 00:13:12,896 Were they innovative? 188 00:13:13,324 --> 00:13:18,090 Some of the most popular films of the 20s the comedies, most certainly were. 189 00:13:19,597 --> 00:13:23,276 Three filmmakers - Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd 190 00:13:23,364 --> 00:13:26,177 - were the greatest of the American comedy directors. 191 00:13:28,150 --> 00:13:30,204 Before them, there was mostly slapstick. 192 00:13:31,763 --> 00:13:34,530 This sight gag on a fast moving train was typical. 193 00:13:34,784 --> 00:13:37,097 A good cheap laugh using a bucket of water. 194 00:13:40,003 --> 00:13:42,817 But then came Keaton, obsessed by the camera. 195 00:13:43,077 --> 00:13:46,464 In this scene from his film The Cameraman he shows that fascination. 196 00:13:51,317 --> 00:13:55,330 Keaton became the greatest comic image maker the cinema had yet seen. 197 00:14:02,704 --> 00:14:04,363 He thought like an architect. 198 00:14:04,511 --> 00:14:07,463 In this sequence in a short film he made in 1920, 199 00:14:07,577 --> 00:14:10,117 the house he's built becomes a playpen. 200 00:14:12,171 --> 00:14:13,690 It falls around him. 201 00:14:19,117 --> 00:14:21,603 Keaton helped define silent cinema. 202 00:14:22,084 --> 00:14:23,304 He just got it. 203 00:14:24,617 --> 00:14:27,050 We've already seen that he got that in editing, 204 00:14:27,097 --> 00:14:29,770 a cut replaces one space with another. 205 00:14:30,417 --> 00:14:34,104 Here he jokes about it, as if, as he's walking down a street, 206 00:14:34,263 --> 00:14:35,950 he's suddenly on a cliff top. 207 00:14:37,897 --> 00:14:39,543 But as this scene shows, 208 00:14:39,843 --> 00:14:42,343 he also got that movies are about looking. 209 00:14:48,124 --> 00:14:50,537 And he got that they're brilliant at dare-devilling. 210 00:14:50,857 --> 00:14:53,499 He begins this sequence with an overhead shot 211 00:14:53,697 --> 00:14:55,570 to make the building look really high. 212 00:14:58,944 --> 00:15:02,424 In the story, Buster must jump between the tall buildings. 213 00:15:03,277 --> 00:15:06,204 He had a set built above this Third Street tunnel in LA. 214 00:15:07,524 --> 00:15:10,490 Right at the very top of this old archive shot of the tunnel. 215 00:15:12,850 --> 00:15:16,604 Keaton's camera position makes him look far higher up than he was. 216 00:15:17,577 --> 00:15:19,837 There was a net just below, out of shot. 217 00:15:20,044 --> 00:15:24,184 Just as well because Keaton didn't make it and was badly bruised. 218 00:15:27,637 --> 00:15:31,857 Keaton's inventiveness was often highly planned, but sometimes spontaneous. 219 00:15:33,037 --> 00:15:36,299 Here, he saw a train arriving and so improvised a gag 220 00:15:36,324 --> 00:15:38,603 to make it look like he himself stopped it. 221 00:15:39,177 --> 00:15:40,524 Then started it again. 222 00:15:47,150 --> 00:15:51,510 One of his greatest movies, The General, was a comedy epic about a train. 223 00:15:51,535 --> 00:15:53,694 It's set during the American Civil War. 224 00:15:54,090 --> 00:15:58,583 Buster's a Southern train driver - a bit eccentric, obsessed by detail. 225 00:16:01,197 --> 00:16:04,843 In the first half of the film, he travels north to the captives' lair, 226 00:16:05,077 --> 00:16:06,843 and rescues his sweetheart. 227 00:16:11,677 --> 00:16:15,257 Every visual joke and set-up in the first half is repeated 228 00:16:15,282 --> 00:16:18,424 and amplified in the second, but in reverse order. 229 00:16:18,891 --> 00:16:20,290 We get the pattern. 230 00:16:20,403 --> 00:16:24,163 We see the next joke coming and we're laughing before it even starts. 231 00:16:28,144 --> 00:16:29,797 The climax of the film has been called 232 00:16:29,822 --> 00:16:33,317 "the most stunning visual event ever arranged for a comedy, 233 00:16:33,550 --> 00:16:35,550 "perhaps for any kind of film". 234 00:16:38,457 --> 00:16:40,237 The northern enemy's advancing, 235 00:16:40,743 --> 00:16:43,384 so Keaton sets fire to a bridge. 236 00:16:43,817 --> 00:16:46,584 Their train crosses. The bridge gives way. 237 00:16:47,643 --> 00:16:49,046 This is no trick shot. 238 00:16:49,450 --> 00:16:51,650 The locomotive and the bridge were real. 239 00:16:54,004 --> 00:16:56,477 The wreck of the train was visible for years to come. 240 00:16:58,417 --> 00:17:00,750 Such scale, such sublime, 241 00:17:01,377 --> 00:17:03,564 was a key element of silent film. 242 00:17:04,577 --> 00:17:07,730 Labour was cheap, Wall Street hadn't crashed, 243 00:17:08,710 --> 00:17:11,430 imaginations were extravagant and uncapped, 244 00:17:12,136 --> 00:17:16,029 studios were not yet afraid of the size of directors' dreams. 245 00:17:18,091 --> 00:17:20,997 Keaton's dreams outstripped his box office. 246 00:17:22,417 --> 00:17:24,497 He was eventually sacked by MGM. 247 00:17:27,390 --> 00:17:32,017 He hit the bottle and lived in a trailer in a car park beside his former studio. 248 00:17:40,004 --> 00:17:41,790 He was forgotten for years 249 00:17:43,064 --> 00:17:46,064 but as this rare archive footage of him shows, 250 00:17:46,317 --> 00:17:48,203 Keaton was joking till the end. 251 00:17:48,837 --> 00:17:52,883 This little cigarette routine shows he still had the urge to improvise. 252 00:17:54,309 --> 00:17:59,284 In 1965, at the Venice Film Festival, he got a standing ovation. 253 00:17:59,944 --> 00:18:01,657 He died the next year. 254 00:18:05,284 --> 00:18:08,297 Amongst the scores of filmmakers who were influenced by Keaton 255 00:18:08,524 --> 00:18:10,497 is Palestine's Elie Suiliman. 256 00:18:15,431 --> 00:18:19,637 This scene shows that Sulieman, like Keaton, filmed in deadpan. 257 00:18:20,217 --> 00:18:24,010 He keeps back from the action and finds grumpiness funny. 258 00:18:40,017 --> 00:18:42,510 Buster Keaton only once shared the screen 259 00:18:42,535 --> 00:18:46,144 with our next great silent film comedian, Charlie Chaplin. 260 00:18:46,804 --> 00:18:48,444 In this scene in Limelight, 261 00:18:48,524 --> 00:18:51,964 Chaplin shows that whilst he was less into the camera than Keaton, 262 00:18:52,237 --> 00:18:54,650 he was far more into body movement. 263 00:19:15,090 --> 00:19:17,497 Chaplin thought like a dancer and a vaudevillian. 264 00:19:18,844 --> 00:19:22,943 Here he rehearses a comic movement before filming it in costume. 265 00:19:47,924 --> 00:19:52,157 Actor and producer Norman Lloyd knew Chaplin and also Alfred Hitchcock, 266 00:19:52,397 --> 00:19:55,017 who was born not far from Chaplin in London. 267 00:19:57,550 --> 00:19:59,910 Hitch came from a middle class family. 268 00:19:59,935 --> 00:20:03,737 His father was a poultry dealer, fish and poultry, 269 00:20:04,257 --> 00:20:05,403 and... 270 00:20:06,765 --> 00:20:10,370 Hitch always had an aspiration to be part of that world. 271 00:20:10,877 --> 00:20:14,837 Charlie came out of the direst poverty that you can imagine. 272 00:20:15,097 --> 00:20:16,977 Unbelievable poverty. 273 00:20:17,891 --> 00:20:21,550 I mean stuff like, he and his brother, Sydney, who was his half-brother... 274 00:20:24,010 --> 00:20:27,270 ..stealing fruit, rotten fruit. 275 00:20:28,210 --> 00:20:31,484 They would know where the wagon was with fruit that was going to be dumped. 276 00:20:31,509 --> 00:20:33,910 They'd go and get that fruit, eat that fruit. 277 00:20:36,190 --> 00:20:39,579 His mother being put into an asylum. 278 00:20:40,123 --> 00:20:41,963 And out. In and out. 279 00:20:42,450 --> 00:20:44,224 I think his father was a drinker. 280 00:20:44,577 --> 00:20:47,717 Charlie had such an upbringing that 281 00:20:48,990 --> 00:20:50,250 it's in the movies. 282 00:20:51,324 --> 00:20:55,070 And never more so than in his first feature-length picture, The Kid, 283 00:20:55,095 --> 00:20:58,815 which recreated the rooms and relationships of Chaplin's childhood. 284 00:20:58,903 --> 00:21:01,295 Cold mornings. Worn out bedding. 285 00:21:01,577 --> 00:21:04,850 Life in a London garret, with a bath on the wall. 286 00:21:06,103 --> 00:21:08,930 Chaplin plays a version of his by now famous character, 287 00:21:09,070 --> 00:21:12,683 a penniless tramp who thinks he's a gentleman dilettante. 288 00:21:13,243 --> 00:21:15,444 He finds an orphan boy and brings him up. 289 00:21:19,937 --> 00:21:21,843 The boy starts to work for his dad. 290 00:21:21,844 --> 00:21:24,504 He breaks windows so his dad can fix them. 291 00:21:26,829 --> 00:21:30,370 Shot in America, of course, but English-style windows and doors. 292 00:21:42,330 --> 00:21:44,977 Eventually, the boy's taken to an orphanage. 293 00:21:47,264 --> 00:21:51,584 Chaplin coaxed a brilliant performance from Jackie Coogan as he's taken away. 294 00:21:59,097 --> 00:22:01,410 The film humanised comic cinema. 295 00:22:01,904 --> 00:22:04,477 It DW Griffith-ised it, you could say. 296 00:22:04,991 --> 00:22:07,817 It showed Chaplin's passionate empathy with the poor. 297 00:22:08,470 --> 00:22:10,524 It was a huge hit around the world. 298 00:22:11,184 --> 00:22:13,877 Chaplin was cinema's Charles Dickens. 299 00:22:22,124 --> 00:22:25,377 He built his own studio in LA in the English style 300 00:22:25,623 --> 00:22:27,804 and filmed it in time lapse. 301 00:22:28,217 --> 00:22:30,906 A rare thing to do, which shows his pride in it. 302 00:22:31,146 --> 00:22:33,099 He had final cut on his films. 303 00:22:33,944 --> 00:22:35,712 His premieres were mobbed. 304 00:22:36,663 --> 00:22:41,157 The studio today looks like a row of English houses plonked in a megalopolis. 305 00:22:48,210 --> 00:22:50,650 A deleted scene from his film City Lights 306 00:22:50,996 --> 00:22:53,003 that Chaplin made ten years later, 307 00:22:53,176 --> 00:22:54,936 shows how his mind worked. 308 00:22:55,663 --> 00:22:57,137 He's on a street corner. 309 00:22:57,270 --> 00:22:59,463 A piece of wood is stuck in an air vent. 310 00:22:59,923 --> 00:23:02,710 Chaplin begins to play with it. To improvise. 311 00:23:20,637 --> 00:23:24,877 The Soviets thought of him as a Marxist, but Chaplin was almost a Jungian too, 312 00:23:25,257 --> 00:23:27,777 a believer in play, inspiration, 313 00:23:28,049 --> 00:23:29,923 finding ideas within yourself. 314 00:23:35,817 --> 00:23:37,750 It's like he's strumming on the table, 315 00:23:37,854 --> 00:23:40,097 letting his unconscious do its work. 316 00:23:45,597 --> 00:23:48,557 60 years later, the British director Nicholas Roeg 317 00:23:48,670 --> 00:23:52,850 also seemed to try to show the unconscious lives of his characters. 318 00:23:54,817 --> 00:23:57,130 You could be right. Then again, why spoil the mystery? 319 00:23:57,897 --> 00:24:00,097 The people act cool with each other, 320 00:24:00,122 --> 00:24:02,484 but their hands, filmed in close up, 321 00:24:02,617 --> 00:24:04,883 suggest twitchy mental energy. 322 00:24:08,157 --> 00:24:13,150 Chaplin's deleted scene is a lovely little poem about daydreaming on street corners. 323 00:24:37,537 --> 00:24:40,784 Stanley Donen sees ideas in Chaplin too. 324 00:24:41,743 --> 00:24:45,990 To be wonderful choreography it has to have an idea 325 00:24:46,257 --> 00:24:50,298 which overwhelms the whole production, 326 00:24:50,323 --> 00:24:53,103 or dance, or whatever you'd like to call it. 327 00:24:53,497 --> 00:24:56,143 And that's what's hard to find - 328 00:24:56,168 --> 00:25:00,245 a great, wonderful, encompassing idea 329 00:25:00,270 --> 00:25:02,083 for the musical number. 330 00:25:02,180 --> 00:25:05,877 Well, the idea of the dictator kicking the balloon is a great metaphor 331 00:25:05,902 --> 00:25:10,301 because it's Adolf Hitler making the world his toy 332 00:25:10,417 --> 00:25:13,016 and the image is so spectacular 333 00:25:13,303 --> 00:25:15,996 that that's the kind of thing I'm talking about, 334 00:25:16,021 --> 00:25:19,660 if you can come up with that kind of idea. 335 00:25:19,867 --> 00:25:22,502 But it had to be, first he was going to make, 336 00:25:22,527 --> 00:25:24,003 I don't know how he thought of it, 337 00:25:24,028 --> 00:25:27,599 in what order, but he was going to make a film about Adolf Hitler 338 00:25:27,624 --> 00:25:29,577 and he was going to play Hitler. 339 00:25:29,657 --> 00:25:32,503 And how was he going to make a buffoon of him 340 00:25:34,130 --> 00:25:38,209 but not make him be the ogre that he was? 341 00:25:39,103 --> 00:25:42,182 And that's quite an accomplishment. 342 00:26:03,304 --> 00:26:04,937 Fascism and ballet. 343 00:26:05,284 --> 00:26:08,050 Who else would have thought up a scene like this? 344 00:26:10,964 --> 00:26:15,570 No-one else in the story of film combines entertainment, ideas, movement, 345 00:26:15,697 --> 00:26:18,910 improvisation and politics like Chaplin. 346 00:26:23,957 --> 00:26:27,596 In France in the 1940s, Chaplin inspired Jacques Tati, 347 00:26:27,824 --> 00:26:30,770 but Tati leant forwards and wore short trousers, 348 00:26:30,950 --> 00:26:33,685 where Chaplin leant backwards and wore long ones. 349 00:26:35,170 --> 00:26:38,245 In Italy, Toto became a huge star, 350 00:26:38,270 --> 00:26:40,379 wearing Chaplin's trademark bowler hat 351 00:26:40,430 --> 00:26:42,997 and with Chaplin's jabby, confident manner. 352 00:26:44,417 --> 00:26:46,437 And in the massive film industry of India 353 00:26:46,462 --> 00:26:49,637 this man, megastar and director Raj Kapoor, 354 00:26:49,950 --> 00:26:53,724 modelled his screen character, The Tramp, on Chaplin's. 355 00:26:54,083 --> 00:26:58,723 Streetwise, plucky, tipping his hat, stealing from the rich. 356 00:27:02,183 --> 00:27:07,037 And in America itself, the great director Billy Wilder saw Chaplin as his master. 357 00:27:08,077 --> 00:27:11,477 Gloria Swanson explicitly impersonates him in Sunset Boulevard. 358 00:27:18,577 --> 00:27:21,790 But even a moment like this in Chaplin's The Great Dictator... 359 00:27:28,004 --> 00:27:31,784 ..was reworked in this scene in Wilder's Some Like it Hot. 360 00:27:37,064 --> 00:27:39,777 Look at that! Look how she moves! 361 00:27:39,903 --> 00:27:42,083 Chaplin co-founded United Artists, 362 00:27:42,276 --> 00:27:44,316 the studio that made Some Like it Hot. 363 00:27:45,604 --> 00:27:48,557 The studio was one of the great foundation stones of Hollywood. 364 00:27:49,230 --> 00:27:52,110 Chaplin was in American cinema's bloodstream. 365 00:27:52,857 --> 00:27:54,377 But to the country's shame, 366 00:27:54,402 --> 00:27:58,257 it kicked him out in the '50s because he was a leftist. 367 00:27:59,470 --> 00:28:04,004 When you work with a man like Chaplin, or Renoir... 368 00:28:06,044 --> 00:28:07,317 ..you assimilate - 369 00:28:07,984 --> 00:28:09,637 you hope - their greatness. 370 00:28:09,831 --> 00:28:12,831 That is to say, you become part of their world. 371 00:28:13,890 --> 00:28:16,377 And you try to not only work on that level 372 00:28:16,683 --> 00:28:17,856 but you... 373 00:28:19,696 --> 00:28:21,383 absorb something from them 374 00:28:22,397 --> 00:28:26,050 and you begin to have the points of view that they have, 375 00:28:26,377 --> 00:28:28,610 not that you've disregarded your own, 376 00:28:29,073 --> 00:28:30,810 but what you bring... 377 00:28:33,183 --> 00:28:35,417 ..is the ability to... 378 00:28:37,937 --> 00:28:40,523 assimilate what they're doing. 379 00:28:44,044 --> 00:28:46,737 The comedian who was most influenced by Chaplin in the 20s 380 00:28:46,762 --> 00:28:50,504 was the Nebraskan son of a photographer, Harold Lloyd. 381 00:28:52,496 --> 00:28:54,576 At first Lloyd was too like Chaplin. 382 00:28:55,997 --> 00:28:59,624 Here he shrugs, wears a frock coat and sports a moustache. 383 00:28:59,704 --> 00:29:03,477 But then he and his producer tried him in big black-rimmed glasses. 384 00:29:04,197 --> 00:29:06,064 In those days this was a nerdy look. 385 00:29:06,783 --> 00:29:08,757 But add in Lloyd's athleticism, 386 00:29:08,924 --> 00:29:12,923 and the flinty courage that we see here and you get a ballsy dreamer, 387 00:29:13,097 --> 00:29:16,237 both aggressive and lyrical, a jock-nerd. 388 00:29:17,597 --> 00:29:20,156 Lloyd's most influential film, Safety Last, 389 00:29:20,250 --> 00:29:23,883 ends with one of the most famous sequences in '20s cinema. 390 00:29:24,703 --> 00:29:29,270 He plays a hick who pretends to his girlfriend that he's manager of a store. 391 00:29:30,316 --> 00:29:33,737 In the climax of the film, as a publicity stunt for the store, 392 00:29:33,964 --> 00:29:38,624 Lloyd, who had vertigo and a missing thumb and forefinger on one hand in real life, 393 00:29:39,150 --> 00:29:40,657 climbs the building. 394 00:29:41,484 --> 00:29:44,057 The sequence is a vertical obstacle race. 395 00:29:44,677 --> 00:29:46,897 A bird, a net, a plank, 396 00:29:47,037 --> 00:29:49,872 a clock, a rope, a dog, a mouse, 397 00:29:49,897 --> 00:29:51,730 a gun and a wind gauge 398 00:29:51,919 --> 00:29:53,257 get in Lloyd's way. 399 00:30:10,284 --> 00:30:14,350 When he finally reaches the top of the building, the action reaches a crescendo, 400 00:30:14,630 --> 00:30:18,124 and he swoops in an arc into the arms of his sweetheart. 401 00:30:19,337 --> 00:30:21,842 The climb is a beautiful idea on film. 402 00:30:41,183 --> 00:30:45,430 On the other side of the world, Japan's great director, Yazujiro Ozu, 403 00:30:45,590 --> 00:30:47,990 was influenced by the ballsy dreamer. 404 00:30:50,537 --> 00:30:53,930 The students in this film have been working out how to cheat at exams. 405 00:30:54,270 --> 00:30:58,512 They have Harold Lloyd's confident silliness, his man-boyishness. 406 00:31:03,023 --> 00:31:06,339 The comedies were the brightest, most entertaining and innovative things 407 00:31:06,364 --> 00:31:08,524 to come out of Hollywood in the '20s. 408 00:31:10,391 --> 00:31:12,819 They, and the extravagant romance of films 409 00:31:12,844 --> 00:31:15,070 like The Thief of Bagdad in all its splendour, 410 00:31:15,095 --> 00:31:17,010 its special effects and sweep, 411 00:31:17,657 --> 00:31:20,897 made Hollywood a major export industry for America. 412 00:31:23,577 --> 00:31:25,677 But something in its very flickering, 413 00:31:25,717 --> 00:31:27,896 the fact that the bauble was a fantasy, 414 00:31:28,088 --> 00:31:29,463 made it vulnerable. 415 00:31:30,777 --> 00:31:34,290 This architectural dream of Baghdad isn't the real Baghdad of course. 416 00:31:34,604 --> 00:31:36,350 This is the real Baghdad. 417 00:31:38,671 --> 00:31:41,257 To say so can shatter the bauble. 418 00:31:42,004 --> 00:31:43,984 Reality can break fantasy. 419 00:31:44,484 --> 00:31:45,904 And in the '20s, 420 00:31:47,057 --> 00:31:50,084 several filmmakers already realised this. 421 00:31:52,229 --> 00:31:53,810 They wanted to show this. 422 00:31:54,162 --> 00:31:55,358 Real life. 423 00:31:55,383 --> 00:31:57,130 Without the costumes and glitter. 424 00:31:57,710 --> 00:31:59,044 Non-fiction. 425 00:32:00,117 --> 00:32:04,036 In 1921, an Irish-American explorer, Robert Flaherty, 426 00:32:04,317 --> 00:32:07,923 made the longest non-fiction film so far in the story of film, 427 00:32:08,370 --> 00:32:09,896 Nanook of the North. 428 00:32:10,770 --> 00:32:15,630 It's set in Alaska. And has beautiful but conventional scenic shots like this. 429 00:32:15,877 --> 00:32:18,876 But then it focuses on one real Itivinuit man, 430 00:32:19,077 --> 00:32:20,904 Nanook, and his family. 431 00:32:21,624 --> 00:32:23,650 Nanook of the North was no travelogue. 432 00:32:23,817 --> 00:32:26,364 It stared into Nanook's face. 433 00:32:26,684 --> 00:32:28,387 It was about his psychology, 434 00:32:28,490 --> 00:32:30,870 his mythic struggle against the elements. 435 00:32:31,004 --> 00:32:32,857 Like Chaplin and DW Griffith, 436 00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:35,076 Flaherty was a romantic 437 00:32:35,417 --> 00:32:38,586 but, by using non-actors, non-stars 438 00:32:38,870 --> 00:32:41,097 - no Douglas Fairbanks or Garbo here 439 00:32:42,603 --> 00:32:45,004 - he made the audience look more ethically. 440 00:32:54,543 --> 00:32:57,523 As it happens, Flaherty staged this scene and others, 441 00:32:59,323 --> 00:33:02,749 but Nanook of the North was a huge hit around the world. 442 00:33:04,930 --> 00:33:06,564 People had seen a real man, 443 00:33:06,637 --> 00:33:09,970 a playful father with a sense of humour, on screen. 444 00:33:25,290 --> 00:33:27,903 You could buy Nanook ice cream bars. 445 00:33:28,490 --> 00:33:32,410 Nanook's death, two years later, of starvation, made headlines. 446 00:33:36,650 --> 00:33:39,557 And, so documentary, as an art form, 447 00:33:39,704 --> 00:33:41,970 as a viable genre, was born. 448 00:33:45,737 --> 00:33:48,630 Documentary is often thought of as merely information 449 00:33:48,764 --> 00:33:53,764 but in fact non-fiction cinema is amongst the most innovative in the story of film. 450 00:33:55,650 --> 00:33:58,864 Farough Farrokhzad's Iranian film, The House is Black, 451 00:33:59,137 --> 00:34:01,157 used beautiful tracking shots to turn 452 00:34:01,182 --> 00:34:04,708 a home for people with leprosy into a film poem. 453 00:34:14,863 --> 00:34:17,223 In this film essay, Sans Soleil, 454 00:34:17,464 --> 00:34:21,510 Chris Marker filmed real places in Japan and elsewhere, 455 00:34:21,770 --> 00:34:23,769 then wrote a fictional commentary 456 00:34:23,794 --> 00:34:28,540 in which an imaginary women quotes from made-up letters from the filmmaker. 457 00:34:29,330 --> 00:34:32,544 He wrote, "I'm just back from Hikida, the northern island, 458 00:34:33,383 --> 00:34:36,797 "Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane. Others take the ferry. 459 00:34:37,650 --> 00:34:40,190 "Waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. 460 00:34:40,784 --> 00:34:44,457 "Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war." 461 00:34:45,217 --> 00:34:48,976 Imagined words on top of non-fiction pictures. 462 00:34:49,423 --> 00:34:50,870 I think that's why I... 463 00:34:52,683 --> 00:34:54,824 I got into so much trouble when I got back. 464 00:34:57,577 --> 00:35:00,330 'Cos I was in the mindframe of, well... 465 00:35:01,337 --> 00:35:04,064 ..I've just come back from a place where everyone wants me dead. 466 00:35:04,884 --> 00:35:08,510 And director Brian Hill and poet Simon Armitage interviewed this man 467 00:35:08,535 --> 00:35:10,274 about his war experiences, 468 00:35:10,688 --> 00:35:12,788 then turned his words into poems, 469 00:35:12,915 --> 00:35:15,026 then had him speak the poems, 470 00:35:15,051 --> 00:35:17,283 to make his memories magical. 471 00:35:17,308 --> 00:35:19,521 ..exit wounds or burns to the face. 472 00:35:19,690 --> 00:35:21,322 You're just soft in the head. 473 00:35:23,557 --> 00:35:28,550 And the British Army isn't the place for a lying bastard or basket case. 474 00:35:36,984 --> 00:35:41,843 In the 60s, Jorgen Leth made this short documentary, The Perfect Human. 475 00:35:42,004 --> 00:35:44,597 In a documentary made nearly 40 years later, 476 00:35:44,837 --> 00:35:50,516 Director Lars Von Trier asked Leth to remake the original five times, 477 00:35:51,064 --> 00:35:54,335 each time with a startling new challenge. 478 00:36:00,904 --> 00:36:03,930 All these are innovative high points in the story of film, 479 00:36:04,990 --> 00:36:08,499 and show that documentary directors, from Flaherty onwards, 480 00:36:08,610 --> 00:36:10,370 were really co-directors. 481 00:36:10,630 --> 00:36:14,376 The other half of the directing team was real life itself. 482 00:36:18,063 --> 00:36:19,763 Back in LA in the '20s, 483 00:36:19,788 --> 00:36:22,550 maybe it was seeing documentaries like Nanook of the North 484 00:36:22,575 --> 00:36:27,655 that led our next filmmaker to use realism to undermine the Hollywood fantasy. 485 00:36:29,670 --> 00:36:33,150 A director called Erich Von Stroheim took on the establishment. 486 00:36:34,284 --> 00:36:37,763 Here he filmed himself square on, looming out of the dark. 487 00:36:38,097 --> 00:36:39,957 Grinning. Scarred. 488 00:36:40,317 --> 00:36:45,350 Eric Von Stroheim was one of the few legitimate geniuses 489 00:36:45,657 --> 00:36:48,510 of the early silent days. 490 00:36:49,090 --> 00:36:51,897 He was a man of such vision 491 00:36:52,124 --> 00:36:56,504 and he was so great a poet and an artist 492 00:36:57,744 --> 00:37:01,004 that he found nothing but trouble in Hollywood. 493 00:37:01,097 --> 00:37:04,889 Stroheim's drive to realism was more obsessive than Flaherty's. 494 00:37:05,103 --> 00:37:09,463 Here he even shows an actress how to do a simple thing like comb her hair, 495 00:37:09,743 --> 00:37:11,503 a small detail in the scene. 496 00:37:12,384 --> 00:37:15,870 This is his gigantic fifth film, Greed. 497 00:37:16,510 --> 00:37:18,270 The man on the right is a dentist. 498 00:37:18,400 --> 00:37:20,063 His wife wins the lottery. 499 00:37:24,757 --> 00:37:28,437 In the original prints, the money was hand-tinted yellow. 500 00:37:34,604 --> 00:37:39,203 As she gets obsessively greedy, so her husband becomes drunken and penniless. 501 00:37:39,484 --> 00:37:40,664 He beats her. 502 00:37:48,844 --> 00:37:51,804 Stroheim shows her agony, her smallness. 503 00:38:02,377 --> 00:38:04,296 Eventually the man murders his wife 504 00:38:04,404 --> 00:38:07,064 and, in this famous climax, shot in Death Valley, 505 00:38:07,430 --> 00:38:10,857 also kills a rival who put him out of business. 506 00:38:11,604 --> 00:38:13,965 By now the yellow, the colour of money, 507 00:38:14,230 --> 00:38:16,468 has flooded the whole world of the story. 508 00:38:21,990 --> 00:38:26,577 And, as the man is handcuffed to the body so he himself must perish. 509 00:38:34,150 --> 00:38:38,517 The story alone shows Stroheim's contempt for Hollywood romance, for the bauble. 510 00:38:39,397 --> 00:38:41,043 As did his techniques. 511 00:38:41,784 --> 00:38:46,843 He shot every scene of the novel by Frank Norris, on which the film was based. 512 00:38:47,304 --> 00:38:48,977 Nine months of shooting. 513 00:38:52,310 --> 00:38:55,290 Sometimes, as here, in baking heat. 514 00:38:55,677 --> 00:39:00,083 Actors pushed to their limits, a budget of $1.5 million. 515 00:39:07,551 --> 00:39:10,224 The finished movie ran 7 hours. 516 00:39:10,730 --> 00:39:14,764 Stroheim was the Emile Zola or Dostoevsky of cinema. 517 00:39:30,364 --> 00:39:32,123 Cinematographer Carl Brown: 518 00:39:32,417 --> 00:39:39,663 Early in his life, he was visited by such very great humiliation, 519 00:39:40,004 --> 00:39:43,550 such deep, inward, psychic wounds 520 00:39:44,410 --> 00:39:47,887 that there came in him an insane desire 521 00:39:48,623 --> 00:39:52,049 to use his genius as a weapon. 522 00:39:54,230 --> 00:39:56,750 MGM hated the results. 523 00:39:57,004 --> 00:39:59,583 Stroheim's ultra realism became a stigma. 524 00:39:59,964 --> 00:40:02,398 He didn't get to direct many more films. 525 00:40:02,531 --> 00:40:07,718 Here, in 1948, he returns to his home city of Vienna to direct a film, 526 00:40:07,844 --> 00:40:09,204 but nothing came of it. 527 00:40:09,610 --> 00:40:14,449 In 1950, he saw the cut version of Greed, and cried. 528 00:40:14,983 --> 00:40:16,864 He said that the film was dead. 529 00:40:19,924 --> 00:40:23,057 In the same year, Stroheim played the protective butler 530 00:40:23,124 --> 00:40:25,130 in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. 531 00:40:25,197 --> 00:40:26,590 Don't race upstairs. 532 00:40:26,737 --> 00:40:28,837 The musicians mustn't know what happened. 533 00:40:29,457 --> 00:40:30,990 In this famous scene, 534 00:40:31,015 --> 00:40:34,315 Wilder shows fictional movie star Norma Desmond 535 00:40:34,443 --> 00:40:36,481 watching one of her old movies. 536 00:40:37,350 --> 00:40:42,844 The clip is from a sublime, extravagant real movie from the 1920s, Queen Kelly. 537 00:40:43,457 --> 00:40:45,657 It was directed, way back then, 538 00:40:45,890 --> 00:40:49,889 by none other than the sublime, extravagant Erich von Stroheim. 539 00:40:50,096 --> 00:40:53,543 For complicated reasons, the movie never saw the light of day. 540 00:40:54,877 --> 00:40:56,283 We didn't need dialogue. 541 00:40:56,604 --> 00:40:58,884 Three years after Von Stroheim's Greed, 542 00:40:58,909 --> 00:41:02,122 another MGM film tried to portray '20s America 543 00:41:02,147 --> 00:41:05,147 with far more realism than Romantic cinema. 544 00:41:06,171 --> 00:41:08,804 It became the greatest pre-Wall Street Crash 545 00:41:08,829 --> 00:41:11,350 social problem picture of its time. 546 00:41:12,777 --> 00:41:16,610 The Crowd tells the story of an ordinary New York couple. 547 00:41:17,037 --> 00:41:19,070 They have a child, but she dies. 548 00:41:20,397 --> 00:41:22,117 In this heartbreaking scene, 549 00:41:22,142 --> 00:41:24,884 the father thinks his dead daughter is merely sleeping, 550 00:41:25,110 --> 00:41:27,350 and so tries to hush the street noise 551 00:41:27,655 --> 00:41:29,894 so that it won't disturb her slumber. 552 00:41:35,811 --> 00:41:39,397 The Crowd's director, King Vidor, met James Joyce in Paris. 553 00:41:39,637 --> 00:41:43,237 He adored DW Griffiths' ideasy epic Intolerance. 554 00:41:43,684 --> 00:41:46,790 He was that rare Hollywood beast, an intellectual. 555 00:41:48,404 --> 00:41:50,722 His films almost never feature villains, 556 00:41:50,919 --> 00:41:52,840 and were written mostly by women. 557 00:41:57,377 --> 00:42:00,864 Vidor pushed realism in acting beyond the Hollywood norm. 558 00:42:01,324 --> 00:42:05,097 Here he films the leading actress in The Crowd in static shot, 559 00:42:05,370 --> 00:42:08,490 a longish take, no fancy clothes or set. 560 00:42:08,957 --> 00:42:10,990 Just her growing despair. 561 00:42:46,450 --> 00:42:50,430 The Crowd was the first movie to use New York extensively as a location. 562 00:42:51,103 --> 00:42:53,043 Vidor used hidden cameras. 563 00:42:53,463 --> 00:42:57,630 He cast an unknown actor, James Murray, instead of a star. 564 00:42:58,890 --> 00:43:01,623 To show the scale of the office where the husband worked, 565 00:43:01,803 --> 00:43:04,397 he designed this magnificent sequence. 566 00:43:04,850 --> 00:43:10,477 An overhead studio crane shot finds John amongst the other identical desks. 567 00:43:12,131 --> 00:43:16,979 Billy Wilder repeated it in The Apartment, a bitter-sweet reworking of Vidor's film. 568 00:43:17,004 --> 00:43:19,477 '..31,259 employees without a serious traffic jam.' 569 00:43:19,502 --> 00:43:22,181 We dissolve through to Wilder's everyman, 570 00:43:22,284 --> 00:43:25,391 played by Jack Lemmon at the very centre of the frame. 571 00:43:25,416 --> 00:43:26,898 'Especially when the weather is bad.' 572 00:43:26,923 --> 00:43:30,064 And Orson Welles used the same visual idea in The Trial, 573 00:43:30,089 --> 00:43:34,211 exaggerating it by craning upwards and using small people 574 00:43:34,236 --> 00:43:36,764 and even dolls and smaller desks 575 00:43:36,931 --> 00:43:39,633 in the background to force the perspective. 576 00:43:41,597 --> 00:43:47,497 MGM was uneasy about The Crowd's refusal to romanticise ordinary New York life. 577 00:43:48,004 --> 00:43:53,004 They made Vidor shoot seven different endings in various shades of optimism. 578 00:43:53,830 --> 00:43:58,923 They say for a studio tuned to glamour pictures and happy endings 579 00:43:59,077 --> 00:44:02,062 - which it was for then, and many years afterwards, 580 00:44:02,087 --> 00:44:04,467 to have a realistic picture... 581 00:44:05,560 --> 00:44:08,819 which put the spotlight on marriage 582 00:44:09,167 --> 00:44:11,578 and on any kind of American life, 583 00:44:11,857 --> 00:44:14,456 and then you can't have a happy ending on that. 584 00:44:14,665 --> 00:44:16,198 It just wouldn't fit. 585 00:44:16,223 --> 00:44:18,982 But the studio didn't know. 586 00:44:19,676 --> 00:44:24,596 They were lost... what sort of-- how to end this picture happily? 587 00:44:24,924 --> 00:44:28,810 So we made actually seven endings and tried it out, 588 00:44:28,835 --> 00:44:31,514 seven previews with the various endings 589 00:44:31,830 --> 00:44:35,763 and finally I came up with the ending where he's lost again in the crowd 590 00:44:36,164 --> 00:44:38,957 and the camera moves back, back, back. 591 00:44:49,750 --> 00:44:53,497 The Crowd sums up a lot about cinema of the '20s and '30s. 592 00:44:53,804 --> 00:44:55,870 It showed mass society emerging. 593 00:44:56,110 --> 00:44:57,639 It focused on the everyman, 594 00:44:57,664 --> 00:44:59,270 as French films would do. 595 00:44:59,674 --> 00:45:02,677 And showed the kinetic energy of cities themselves, 596 00:45:02,710 --> 00:45:04,830 their rhythms and compositions, 597 00:45:05,384 --> 00:45:08,704 like the German movies of Fritz Lang and Walter Ruttmann, 598 00:45:11,124 --> 00:45:13,690 and the Soviet films of Dziga Vertov. 599 00:45:27,777 --> 00:45:30,144 In the Soviet Union itself in the '20s, 600 00:45:30,444 --> 00:45:35,437 this wonderful film played with the rebellious idea of realism and cities. 601 00:45:36,484 --> 00:45:38,023 We're on Mars. 602 00:45:38,541 --> 00:45:42,476 It's all angles, diagonals, modernist costumes. 603 00:45:43,911 --> 00:45:45,544 This is Queen Aelita. 604 00:45:46,157 --> 00:45:50,397 She's shown Earth for the first time and sees a city. 605 00:46:01,057 --> 00:46:02,284 A battleship. 606 00:46:07,850 --> 00:46:10,290 Then a focus pull to a balcony in Moscow. 607 00:46:15,784 --> 00:46:20,144 The queen has glimpsed something real - Earth - and she wants it. 608 00:46:33,583 --> 00:46:36,604 We'll get to the famous Soviet films of the '20s soon, 609 00:46:36,764 --> 00:46:38,404 but those by this director, 610 00:46:38,429 --> 00:46:41,530 Yakov Protazanov, are quite unlike them. 611 00:46:43,797 --> 00:46:48,030 Protazanov worked at the same time as the director of this film, Yevgenii Bauer. 612 00:46:49,050 --> 00:46:51,217 A scholar studies in his room. 613 00:46:52,084 --> 00:46:53,644 Handsome side lighting. 614 00:46:54,564 --> 00:46:56,524 The scholar's aunt arrives. 615 00:46:57,043 --> 00:46:59,910 Bauer uses an open door to create a slit on screen, 616 00:46:59,935 --> 00:47:01,384 like a Vermeer painting. 617 00:47:04,190 --> 00:47:06,470 Later, we're in the scholar's study. 618 00:47:07,597 --> 00:47:11,339 Daringly for the time, a main source light is in the shot, 619 00:47:11,617 --> 00:47:12,977 here in the foreground. 620 00:47:17,471 --> 00:47:18,890 Bravely natural. 621 00:47:20,331 --> 00:47:23,550 Later, the scholar sees a beautiful actress on stage 622 00:47:23,703 --> 00:47:25,343 then, astonishingly, 623 00:47:25,672 --> 00:47:27,156 gets a letter from her. 624 00:47:28,124 --> 00:47:29,510 Asking to meet. 625 00:47:30,717 --> 00:47:32,310 He waits for her in the snow. 626 00:47:32,737 --> 00:47:35,050 She arrives in the background of this shot 627 00:47:35,324 --> 00:47:38,337 - a daring composition, filmed in natural light. 628 00:47:59,590 --> 00:48:01,304 And then the actress dies, 629 00:48:01,417 --> 00:48:03,437 and the scholar begins to dream of her. 630 00:48:05,724 --> 00:48:09,590 Here, in a field, she walks into a beam of intense light. 631 00:48:28,637 --> 00:48:32,636 At the end of the film, on his death bed, exhausted with lamenting, 632 00:48:32,857 --> 00:48:34,984 the scholar's aunt consoles him. 633 00:48:36,804 --> 00:48:40,230 Then Bauer dissolves from night time blue to black and white. 634 00:48:41,130 --> 00:48:43,563 The ghost of the actress is in the room too. 635 00:48:43,950 --> 00:48:46,517 And so the scholar stirs once more. 636 00:48:47,510 --> 00:48:50,990 His aunt can't see the actress of course and becomes upset. 637 00:49:03,891 --> 00:49:06,524 Where Romantic cinema was usually optimistic, 638 00:49:07,077 --> 00:49:11,163 these early Russian films were laments, pessimistic in a way, 639 00:49:11,364 --> 00:49:14,983 about the realism of grief and loss and longing. 640 00:49:21,704 --> 00:49:25,770 You'd think that films like Nanook of the North and Greed and The Crowd, 641 00:49:25,911 --> 00:49:27,430 and those of Yevgenii Bauer 642 00:49:27,630 --> 00:49:30,923 would be the last word in realism in cinema of this time, 643 00:49:31,243 --> 00:49:32,343 but no. 644 00:49:34,297 --> 00:49:39,264 One profoundly serious Danish filmmaker challenged Romantic and fantasy cinema 645 00:49:39,624 --> 00:49:41,629 with such deeply felt realism 646 00:49:42,004 --> 00:49:44,190 that he was almost a one-man Reformation, 647 00:49:44,544 --> 00:49:47,863 undercutting the emotionalism of mainstream cinema 648 00:49:48,017 --> 00:49:50,043 with a spiritual spareness. 649 00:49:51,497 --> 00:49:54,090 Look at this scene from The Passion of Joan of Arc. 650 00:49:57,050 --> 00:50:00,617 Joan, the 15th century French Catholic girl, 651 00:50:00,884 --> 00:50:02,530 who was accused of witchcraft, 652 00:50:02,723 --> 00:50:06,363 has just signed a statement denying God, to save her life. 653 00:50:23,237 --> 00:50:25,037 The actress, Marie Falconetti, 654 00:50:25,204 --> 00:50:28,597 had never been in a movie before, nor would she again. 655 00:50:30,697 --> 00:50:32,704 She's filmed only in close-up. 656 00:50:34,050 --> 00:50:35,464 Wears almost no make-up. 657 00:50:35,804 --> 00:50:37,357 You can see her freckles. 658 00:50:37,924 --> 00:50:40,190 Her eyelashes are matted with tears. 659 00:50:41,430 --> 00:50:45,224 Falconetti's hair was cropped just before this scene was shot. 660 00:50:46,170 --> 00:50:47,983 The filming was done in silence. 661 00:50:48,323 --> 00:50:52,196 Such an atmosphere on the set that even some of the electricians cried. 662 00:50:53,217 --> 00:50:54,864 Look at the lighting and focus. 663 00:50:55,410 --> 00:50:56,916 No depth to the image, 664 00:50:57,144 --> 00:50:58,733 nothing in the background. 665 00:51:01,170 --> 00:51:02,844 No set or shadows. 666 00:51:04,263 --> 00:51:06,690 The walls were painted pink to remove their glare, 667 00:51:06,950 --> 00:51:09,890 so as not to detract from Falconetti's face. 668 00:51:11,797 --> 00:51:15,797 The set designer, Herman Warmm, painted the shadows in Caligari. 669 00:51:21,323 --> 00:51:25,123 The film was directed in France by a Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer. 670 00:51:26,150 --> 00:51:28,950 He was brought up in a strict Protestant family. 671 00:51:30,790 --> 00:51:33,010 Falconetti and the others are speaking. 672 00:51:33,877 --> 00:51:36,357 Dreyer had them say the actual words that were spoken 673 00:51:36,382 --> 00:51:39,288 at the trial nearly 500 years earlier. 674 00:51:39,684 --> 00:51:42,435 He thought this gave the scene conviction. 675 00:52:05,117 --> 00:52:07,337 The '90s maverick, Lars von Trier: 676 00:52:08,284 --> 00:52:10,163 Dreyer is fantastic. 677 00:52:11,904 --> 00:52:13,410 Why? He... 678 00:52:13,731 --> 00:52:17,410 Yeah, the same thing that he did with the décor, 679 00:52:17,435 --> 00:52:19,208 he also did with the script, you know? 680 00:52:19,233 --> 00:52:23,232 He started with a very thick script and then he kind of reduced and reduced. 681 00:52:24,257 --> 00:52:29,923 I don't know what he did but it had this monumental feeling of course, 682 00:52:30,530 --> 00:52:35,132 after reducing for many years. It's like a very good soup, you know, 683 00:52:35,157 --> 00:52:37,506 that's been reducing for a long time. 684 00:52:39,310 --> 00:52:44,797 I don't know why he's great but, you know, I think that goes for everybody. 685 00:52:44,822 --> 00:52:49,221 Why is Tarkovsky great? It's really difficult to say. 686 00:52:49,246 --> 00:52:53,405 But it was, for me, to see his films was kind of a revelation. 687 00:52:53,430 --> 00:52:55,246 So it's really... 688 00:52:58,117 --> 00:53:02,037 You should be thankful that it's difficult to say why people are great. 689 00:53:02,062 --> 00:53:04,775 Because it's just something that you... 690 00:53:05,842 --> 00:53:07,888 that you feel very strongly. 691 00:53:07,913 --> 00:53:11,208 And if you don't feel it strongly then they're not great. 692 00:53:13,804 --> 00:53:17,904 Dreyer was born out of wedlock, adopted, and brought up a Lutheran. 693 00:53:18,257 --> 00:53:19,477 He lived here 694 00:53:20,583 --> 00:53:22,363 and went to churches like this. 695 00:53:22,870 --> 00:53:24,377 Though he didn't believe in God, 696 00:53:24,402 --> 00:53:27,364 the purity and plainness of Lutheran churches 697 00:53:27,477 --> 00:53:30,343 seem to have formed Dreyer's inner eye. 698 00:53:30,916 --> 00:53:33,963 He's the master of pared-down décor. 699 00:54:50,764 --> 00:54:52,777 Even in his first film, The President, 700 00:54:53,091 --> 00:54:54,790 he seems to want to simplify 701 00:54:54,815 --> 00:54:58,215 and purify his images in a Protestant way. 702 00:55:08,450 --> 00:55:11,010 Sets at the time were usually cluttered, like this. 703 00:55:12,950 --> 00:55:15,477 Soon he started to film on misty days, 704 00:55:15,523 --> 00:55:18,453 or into the light to soften his imagery. 705 00:55:19,017 --> 00:55:21,590 His shots became paler, whiter. 706 00:55:25,063 --> 00:55:27,329 His haunting vampire movie, Vampyr, 707 00:55:27,657 --> 00:55:29,957 features shadows against a white wall. 708 00:55:37,524 --> 00:55:39,270 They have a life of their own. 709 00:55:45,043 --> 00:55:48,850 And in its famous ending, a vampire's accomplice dies 710 00:55:49,004 --> 00:55:51,364 by suffocating in white flour. 711 00:55:54,264 --> 00:55:58,019 Dreyer's utterly spare use of whiteness was wildy rebellious. 712 00:55:58,477 --> 00:56:02,643 Hollywood romantic cinema was supposed to be decorative, full of detail. 713 00:56:02,868 --> 00:56:04,103 Not blank. 714 00:56:06,250 --> 00:56:10,056 No other director in the Story of Film cared so much about whiteness, 715 00:56:10,356 --> 00:56:13,156 its simplicity, its spirituality. 716 00:56:13,977 --> 00:56:16,443 At the end of his film, Ordet, The Word, 717 00:56:16,797 --> 00:56:19,103 a woman comes to life in a white, 718 00:56:19,175 --> 00:56:21,323 entirely undecorated room. 719 00:56:43,304 --> 00:56:45,884 In Dreyer's last film, many years later, 720 00:56:46,263 --> 00:56:49,603 a woman believes so completely in the power of love 721 00:56:49,896 --> 00:56:54,217 that he films her as if through a white scrim, as if in heaven, 722 00:56:54,817 --> 00:56:56,350 and she says this.... 723 00:57:23,584 --> 00:57:26,030 Dreyer's seriousness was deeply unfashionable 724 00:57:26,257 --> 00:57:28,544 and, so, in the '50s, 725 00:57:28,777 --> 00:57:30,417 not getting his films made, 726 00:57:30,685 --> 00:57:32,290 he managed this cinema. 727 00:57:37,164 --> 00:57:41,124 The Danish Film Institute now has a study centre dedicated to his work. 728 00:58:04,924 --> 00:58:08,497 It's hard not to see Dreyer's radical reduction of set and decor 729 00:58:08,764 --> 00:58:11,710 in Lars Von Trier's completely setless film, 730 00:58:11,964 --> 00:58:13,064 Dogville. 731 00:58:14,980 --> 00:58:16,499 - Hey Martha. - Hello Tom. 732 00:58:16,524 --> 00:58:17,763 Listen, they're all coming. 733 00:58:17,764 --> 00:58:20,364 This was the opposite of romantic Hollywood cinema 734 00:58:20,617 --> 00:58:24,979 - a million miles away from the decorative splendour of The Thief of Bagdad. 735 00:58:25,004 --> 00:58:27,203 ..special permission from the regional director, Tom. 736 00:58:27,204 --> 00:58:29,523 Martha, and I repeat, we don't need the organ. 737 00:58:30,331 --> 00:58:32,926 We can be spiritual without singing or reading from the Bible. 738 00:58:33,857 --> 00:58:36,133 It's almost seven. Don't forget your bell now. 739 00:58:37,770 --> 00:58:41,004 This is the original screenplay from Dreyer's film, Joan of Arc. 740 00:58:43,270 --> 00:58:46,850 He sketched an idea for an image in the film in the margin. 741 00:58:52,770 --> 00:58:56,824 Dreyer had purged silent cinema of its spectacle, its decoration, 742 00:58:56,849 --> 00:58:59,157 its action, its bauble. 743 00:58:59,644 --> 00:59:02,697 What was left was a girl facing her god. 744 00:59:03,157 --> 00:59:04,410 Facing the camera. 745 00:59:05,830 --> 00:59:09,450 Years later, France's great maverick director, Jean-Luc Godard, 746 00:59:09,657 --> 00:59:11,970 had his lover and muse, Anna Karina, 747 00:59:12,137 --> 00:59:14,923 go to the cinema in his film, Vivre sa Vie. 748 00:59:15,697 --> 00:59:18,750 The film she saw was The Passion of Joan of Arc. 749 00:59:27,344 --> 00:59:30,010 Dreyer's Scandinavian spiritualism and fatalism 750 00:59:30,035 --> 00:59:33,430 was a universe away from this place, Hollywood. 751 00:59:34,850 --> 00:59:39,569 Escapist, romantic movies were what most people saw in movie palaces like these. 752 00:59:40,110 --> 00:59:43,567 Places you'd go after a hard day's work to forget your troubles, 753 00:59:43,810 --> 00:59:46,300 to see what utopia might feel like. 754 00:59:54,604 --> 00:59:58,190 The realist directors of the '20s hardly got a look in in these places. 755 00:59:58,737 --> 01:00:01,496 But they'd seen something brilliant in the movies 756 01:00:01,770 --> 01:00:03,810 - the ability to capture reality 757 01:00:04,081 --> 01:00:06,516 and make it splendid and moving. 758 01:00:07,597 --> 01:00:09,197 And this was just the start. 759 01:00:09,517 --> 01:00:13,516 Filmmakers in Germany, France, Russia, Japan and China 760 01:00:13,690 --> 01:00:16,206 would see other great things in the filmstrip. 761 01:00:18,170 --> 01:00:21,059 Their discoveries would make the 1920s 762 01:00:21,104 --> 01:00:24,297 the greatest decade in the story of film.