Original subtitles

NARRATOR: At the end of the 1800s, a new art form flickered into life.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are a multibillion 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.

We'll discover it in this man, Stanley Donen,

who made 'Singin' in the Rain'...

..and in Jane Campion in Australia...

..and in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,

who isn't perhaps the greatest movie ever made...

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

and in the movies of Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee,

Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to The Story Of Film: An Odyssey,

an epic tale of innovation

across 12 decades, six continents and a thousand films.

1944, World War II, the Normandy beaches.

A bunch of Allied troops have just plunged underwater

to stop being shot by German machine guns.

(METAL CLANKING)

Above the water's hell...

..bullets tinkle on iron.

Cameras all over the place.

This scene was actually shot on a peaceful beach in Ireland.

But director Steven Spielberg brought bullets and blood

and bones to that beach.

A lie to tell the truth.

This is filmmaking...

..the art of making us feel that we're there.

(GUNSHOTS)

(FLUTE PLAYS)

A young woman in Paris has her eyes closed

to feel the warmth of the sun on her face.

At the same time, unseen by her,

this little street drama takes place.

White light floods the screen,

links the young and old woman.

We want to reach into the screen to help the old lady.

This is filmmaking, cinema as an empathy machine.

The Normandy beach scene and the French lady

show that, in its use of sound and light and truth,

cinema can be great.

The story of film is the story of that greatness.

It's a story full of surprises.

At first thought, you'd guess that The Story of Film

will be about scenes like this one from 'Casablanca',

full of yearning, story and stardom,

because 'Casablanca' is a Hollywood classic.

Ingrid Bergman is lit like a movie star,

highlights in her eyes.

It's all filmed on a studio set.

But films like 'Casablanca' are too romantic

to be classical in the true sense.

Instead, Japanese films like this are the real classical movies.

Romantic films are always in a rush but this moment,

in 'Record of a Tenement Gentleman', is a pause in the story.

(CLOCK CHIMES, KETTLE HISSES)

A cat, a chiming clock, a kettle quietly coming to the boil,

the almost square frame filled with smaller squares and rectangles.

Calm, emotionally restrained,

like a little classical Greek temple.

So, Hollywood's not classical, Japan is.

With all its talk of box office,

the film business would have us believe that money drives movies...

Ticket sales...

..marketing, glamour, premieres, red carpets.

..but it doesn't.

Money doesn't drive cinema.

The money men don't know the secrets of the human heart

or the brilliance of the medium of film.

But if money doesn't drive movies, what does?

Here's the answer -

ideas.

Watch how a shot of bubbles becomes an idea in movie history.

This is a scene from British director Carol Reed's

1946 movie, 'Odd Man Out'.

A guy's in a mess,

sees his troubles reflected in the bubbles of a spilled drink.

Now look at another close-up of bubbles in a drink.

Again, a character is in trouble, self-absorbed.

This film's director, Jean-Luc Godard,

knew and admired Carol Reed's work.

So he's probably thinking about 'Man Out' when, 20 years later,

he filmed this moment.

Now look at Martin Scorsese's film 'Taxi Driver' of 1976.

Scorsese loves the films of Carol Reed and Jean-Luc Godard,

and so used the same idea that a character looking into bubbles

can see their own troubles and also, somehow, the cosmos.

Visual ideas, more than money or marketing,

are the real things that drive cinema...

..innovating with those ideas.

It doesn't always seem like it but sitting in the dark,

it's images and ideas that excite us,

not money or showbiz.

But if the business people don't control film, who does?

Who knows how to get inside your head?

David Lynch does,

and Baz Luhrmann does

and in a different way, Samira Makhmalbaf does.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a global road movie

to find the innovators, the people in films

that give life to the sublime, ineffable art form cinema.

And here's a third surprise - in the '70s,

you would guess that moments like this...

..a camera racing through space like a bullet,

the scream of tyres on the road as a car chases a train,

would be the big story.

(TYRES SCREECH)

New American cinema was wonderful but Dakar in Senegal

was as exciting as Los Angeles in the '70s, movie-wise.

A surprise indeed.

Much of what we assume about the movies is off the mark.

It's time to redraw the map of movie history that we have in our heads.

It's factually inaccurate and racist by omission.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey could be an exciting, unpredictable one.

Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

New Jersey, East Coast America.

A mum and two daughters are going to the movies.

Why are we here?

Because something extraordinary happened here.

In the 1890s movies were born here.

Lyon, France.

Two college friends are going to the movies.

Movies were born here too, maybe even more so than in New Jersey.

So, what is there to discover about movies in New Jersey?

We find this man, Thomas Edison.

Edison was a manic, passionate inventor.

Here's his office where he invented the light bulb and the phonograph.

Here's his desk, full of compartments, full of detail,

obsessive, like he was.

Here's Edison's factory.

The beauty of Victorian engineering, the care and detail.

Look at this quotation on the wall of the factory

from the painter Joshua Reynolds.

"There's no expedient to which a man will not resort

"to avoid the real labour of thinking."

Edison loved it and moved it around the factory

so that his colleagues wouldn't get used to seeing it in one place.

So Edison's factory was an ideas factory.

Before Edison, there had been fun fairs, circuses,

magic lantern shows, magicians' acts.

Still images were reflected on mirrors or spun in a box.

This happened not in fancy cities in the world...

..but places like this - Leeds in England.

The American George Eastman came up with the idea of film on a roll.

Edison and his colleague W.K.L. Dickson egged each other on

to find that if you spin these images in a box...

..they give the illusion of movement.

And then look at this, invented by Edison.

It's called the Black Maria.

Edison and many of the other manic ideasy inventors of cinema...

..realise that beyond the equipment and machines...

..what you needed most for movies was light.

It probably didn't occur to them

that cinema would become the art of light.

But somehow, in building this box on wheels

that turned to follow the sun,

whose roof opened by turning this wheel,

Edison took the first steps in that direction.

He had a hunch that cinema was a dark room where light mattered.

He shot little movies here.

This couple kissing, for example.

A little moment that everyone could understand.

But to see these films, you had to look inside something like this.

That wasn't enough.

It was too private and small.

Cinema had to be bigger and it became so

here in Lyon in this house

in the minds of these passionate men -

Louis Lumiere and his brother Auguste.

The brothers were as ideasy as Edison.

Louis in particular was technically brilliant.

He realised that the grab advanced mechanism of a sewing machine

would allow the strip of film to be advanced, paused, exposed,

advanced, paused, exposed.

This is one of the very first Lumiere cameras.

Open its back,

shine a light through it and it becomes a projector.

Count Leo Tolstoy called the result

'the clicking machine, like a human hurricane.'

One of the first films the Lumieres shot was this one...

..a short documentary of everyday life,

their workers leaving a factory, the Lumiere factory.

This is the factory today.

The place of the first movie, the source of the Nile.

But it wasn't enough for the Lumieres to make such home movies.

They wanted to show them,

not just in a box to one person at a time like Edison,

but to groups.

On 28 December 1895,

in this building on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris,

the Lumiere brothers projected film.

Light shone through it onto a screen bigger than life.

It's hard for us today to picture how enchanting it was.

This is one of the very first films that the Lumieres shot

and showed on the Boulevard des Capucines.

It's said to have unnerved the audience.

They thought the train was coming at them.

This is laughable today.

But look at this.

Light projected on a building in 21st-century Lyon.

The effect is startling.

Digital imagery of a type we haven't seen before.

The shock of the new, just like the Lumiere train.

Something that had already happened,

light from a distant star came back to life for the very first time.

Neither the Lumiere brothers nor Edison

nor the other inventors of cinema

could have known how big the movies would become...

..how they'd make us want to escape,

play with our erotic imaginations...

..fail to film the Nazi gas chambers,

make us want to be a princess or a hero or a cowboy.

Neither the Lumieres nor Edison could foresee

that the movies would invent flashbacks...

There are no flashbacks in Shakespeare.

..that they'd glamorise war...

..capture the horror of the D-Day landings...

..give us an image bank to flick through in our heads

when we're bored or happy or sad.

Movies would become the world's greatest mirror

and sometimes, a hammer too that would bash reality into shape.

By the end of 1896,

much of the globe knew about this new invention, movies.

But almost at once it was seen as lowbrow, for the working classes.

Its jokes and jolts were unsophisticated

and soon became boring.

So, from about 1898, the earliest filmmaker inventors

turned their minds from the machinery of cinema

to shots and cuts.

Things started to get exciting.

In Paris, for example, a theatre illusionist called George Melies

who had been at the Boulevard des Capucines that first night...

..filmed on a street - films now lost but here is what happened.

His camera jammed then started again.

When he looked at the results, streetcars seemed to disappear,

just like these people seem to disappear.

Cinema's first magic trick.

In this scene, he used the same technique to make a man appear,

rather than a streetcar disappear.

Innovation by accident, you could say...

..but it drove the medium forward.

Where the Lumieres were cinema's first documentarists,

Melies was its first special effects director.

His film 'The Moon at One Metre' astonished people too.

In Lyon today, in the Festival of Lights,

a moon rises over the city, as if in tribute to Melies.

Lumiere, the name of the brothers, means 'light', of course.

And where other countries saw movies as a sideshow in these years,

France took them seriously.

Film historian Jean-Michel Frodon.

FRODON: France has been doing something completely different

with cinema because of the French Revolution

and because of this dream

to project something to the world and to itself

like what we would call the Lumiere

and this is the Lumiere advanced cinema.

Before, they were Lumiere in the sense of the French Revolution,

of the 'Encyclopedie', of Kant, etc.

In the decades to come,

France believed that cinema was such a beacon,

almost an element of foreign policy,

that it funded French filmmaking like no other country in the world.

Also in France, the world's first female director, Alice Guy Blache,

became as interested in magic as Melies.

And Brighton in England was a buzzing place

in Victorian times too.

Maybe the buzz and the light explains why local photographer

George Albert Smith became one of the movies' early innovators.

He was one of the first to film from the front of a train,

creating a ghostly tracking shot

which became known as 'the phantom ride'

as if a ghost was floating through the air.

There was a magic in such shots.

In this great documentary about the Holocaust,

Claude Lanzmann filmed shots of the same train lines

that took the Jews to the gas chambers,

the phantom ride at its most morally serious.

And in a completely different way, director Stanley Kubrick

used a phantom ride scene near the end of '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

The camera seems to zoom through the coloured light of the cosmos,

as if the main character, or the film itself,

is tripping or having an out-of-body experience.

In 1900 Smith used one of the first close-ups in cinema.

Filmmakers usually kept their camera wide

because they hadn't considered other options

or assuming that if they went close,

it would confuse or disrupt the audience

but then G.A. Smith did this.

He wanted to show us the cat eating in more detail.

The cut between the wide and close not only worked,

it seemed natural and so close-ups were born.

The films of some of the greatest directors

are hard to imagine without them.

In this incredible moment in Sergei Eisenstein's film 'October',

the government raises a bridge

to stop revolutionary workers storming a city

but it's the close-ups of a dead woman's hand and hair

being pulled off the raising bridge

that give the real sense of movement and tragedy.

In Sergio Leone's 'Once upon a Time in the West',

it's only when Charles Bronson looks, in big close-up,

into the eyes of Henry Fonda

that he realises that Fonda is the murderer

he's been searching for all his life.

(MUSIC BUILDS TO CRESCENDO)

Back in America, Enoch J. Rector extended film in another way.

He filmed a boxing match,

not with the standard size of film, 35mm,

but with a negative that was 63mm wide.

The broader image showed more of the action.

Widescreen cinema was born.

It's the norm now but would not become commercially so until 1953.

Film had already come far.

It was born as a sideshow, a novelty, quick fun like fast food.

But almost at once, it became clear that it was also a language -

a new language, a language of ideas.

The early 1900s were a remarkable time to be alive.

The first aeroplane flight.

Albert Einstein announced that light,

the flickering stuff of cinema, is the only constant in the universe.

Here in Copenhagen, other physicists expanded his ideas.

The Titanic sank.

World War I began.

Compared to all of this,

the changes in movies might seem tiny but they aren't.

By 1903, filmmakers had developed

many of the key elements of the shot.

But they still had to learn how to do this...

..cut.

Editing made cinema.

To see how, look at 'The Life of an American Fireman'

made in 1903 by a Pennsylvanian dynamo of a man

called Edwin Stanton Porter.

A fireman arrives outside a blazing house

to rescue a mother and her child.

We see the street action first.

Then the same action again from inside.

Some years later, Porter recut the film.

This time, after the fireman arrives,

we cut inside the house to see the first rescue,

then outside again to see her being brought down the ladder,

then inside again to see him rescue the child, then back outside again.

The audience follows the story of the rescue

despite the fact that one space - the street,

suddenly disappears from the screen

and is magically replaced by another space - the room.

This could never happen in theatre.

The earlier version of the film,

which you could call the theatrical version, doesn't fragment the space

but repeats the time, like an action replay.

The intercut version has a continuous timeline.

We see everything in the order in which it was done

but the space is fragmented.

Cinema was learning, experimenting, thinking, even.

It could now show the flow of action from one space to another.

This made chase sequences possible.

It liberated movies. It emphasised movement.

Nearly every scene in The Story of Film

will in some way use this most basic of storytelling devices -

continuity cutting,

the editing equivalent of the word 'then'.

This was a landmark.

Theatrical cinema was giving way to action cinema

and Porter?

He lost everything in the Wall Street Crash of the '20s

and died forgotten in 1941.

It's easy to forget what a conceptual jump editing was,

but 21 years after 'The Life of an American Fireman',

the comic genius Buster Keaton shot a scene using double exposure

which reminds us.

Keaton plays a film projectionist.

He falls asleep, dreams of cinema,

climbs into a film.

And then bam! A cut.

The world around him is suddenly replaced by another world

instantly, magically.

In 1907, cinematic innovation went up a gear.

Look at 'The Horse that Bolted' by the Frenchman Charles Pathe.

A man leaves his horse on the street

as he delivers food to an upstairs customer.

The horse spies something to eat and tucks in.

Cut to the man climbing the stairs.

Then cut back to the horse, which isn't doing a new thing.

It's still eating.

Then back to the man just a second later.

Then back to the horse.

In 'The Life of an American Fireman',

the cuts showed what happened next.

Here, they're showing what's happening at the same time.

This isn't continuity editing, it's parallel editing.

It doesn't say 'then', it says 'meanwhile'.

Great filmmakers have used this 'meanwhile editing' ever since

to contrast events, build tension or advance two storylines at once.

And soon after continuity and parallel editing were invented,

another remarkable editing technique was born.

This woman is looking towards us,

as if she's on stage and we're in the audience.

But what if she does this?

In the earliest movies,

people seldom turned their backs to the camera like this.

This film, made in 1908, was one of the first in which this was done.

But if directors were to give actors

the freedom to turn their backs to the camera like this,

then it occurred to them

they could point the camera in the opposite direction

to see what would eventually be called the reverse angle shot.

Directors were putting their cameras into the action,

freeing themselves to film from any angle.

This new freedom was an exhilarating break with theatre

and seemed entirely natural to cinema, central to it.

So, in the '60s in France,

when Jean-Luc Godard refused to bring his camera round

to show the face of Anna Karina at the start of 'Vivre Sa Vie',

the effect was shocking.

Combine this with this -

G.A. Smith's close-up and the actor rather than the set

began to be the thing that was filmed.

And just as the movie buildings were changing,

the movies themselves took another leap forward.

A look back at 'The Life of an American Fireman' shows why.

Audiences watching this film

felt concerned for the safety of this woman.

But they knew nothing about the actress who played her,

not even her name.

If they had known about her life or recognised her from other films,

they'd care even more.

Then enter into the movies this actress,

dressed in white, wearing a hat.

She was known semianonymously as the 'Imp Girl'

but in 1910, her producer, Carl Laemmle,

announced in the press that she had died.

She hadn't.

And when she miraculously showed up in a scene like this,

very much alive, anxious and looking around,

Laemmle then told the newspapers

that the crowds were so hysterical that they tore her clothes off.

This wasn't true either

but the furore burned her name into the public consciousness.

Florence Lawrence.

Lawrence became famous.

She earned $80,000 in 1912 then her career fizzled out.

In 1938, aged 48, she committed suicide by eating ant poison.

Florence Lawrence was the first movie star

and set a pattern for stardom - hype, fame, tragedy.

Here in Denmark, this actress, Asta Nielsen,

became even more famous.

There was less censorship in Europe.

Actors could be more sexual.

He's tied up, she's hip-grinding in her slinky black dress.

Hollywood learned from Nielsen's fame and instead of sex...

..as this reveal of Gloria Swanson shows,

it trowelled on the luxury and costuming.

Hollywood was adding an element of sublime to stardom.

Almost every aspect of cinema was affected by the star system.

As the adoring public became more and more interested in Lawrence,

Nielsen or Swanson,

so moviemakers started to show their faces more clearly.

Except it wasn't really their faces,

it was their thoughts that audiences became interested in.

The star system meant

that psychology became the driving force of films,

especially American ones.

And through these years - 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910 -

small movie theatres, places for working-class people, emerged.

In America, they were called nickelodeons.

This one, Tally's, was on Spring Street in LA.

This is the same spot now.

This little cinema, built in 1914, is in Leeds in England.

And on this famous corner, the first nickelodeon in New York was built.

(CHURCH BELLS TOLL)

In the early 1910s, the best filmmaking in the world

was taking place here, in Scandinavia.

Maybe it was the northern light, how it changed,

or maybe it was the sense of destiny and mortality

in Scandinavian literature

that made Danish and Swedish movies more graceful and honest.

By 1912, for example,

the most innovative use of film light in the world

was in the work of Benjamin Christensen.

Christensen studied at this theatre in Copenhagen

then made this film, 'The Mysterious X', in 1913.

Gorgeous photography, crosscutting, a dream drawn on film.

One of the most daring debuts in film history.

Later he built a vast studio here in Hellerup,

in the suburbs of Copenhagen, to make 'Haxan',

a masterpiece about witchcraft through the ages.

The light sources were multiple, the effects, complex.

Christensen himself played the naked devil.

This telegram in the Danish Film Archives

says, "Your masterful film 'Haxan'

"had its first screening to a full house

"with a standing ovation."

In Sweden, director Victor Sjostrom was just as great an early director

and was more influential than Christensen.

Sjostrom started by selling doughnuts

but soon found himself here, Svenska Bio,

Sweden's first major film studio.

His 1913 film, 'Ingeborg Holm', had naturalism and grace.

But seven years later, still at Svenska,

Sjostrom made one of the great multilayered films

of the silent era - 'The Phantom Carriage'.

It had stories within stories, moods within moods.

In tinted blue evening light, an alcoholic, David Holm,

tells a drunken story about a phantom carriage

which arrives at New Year to collect the souls of the dead.

Here on the right, Sjostrom plays Holm himself.

Later in the story, David dies.

Sjostrom re-exposes the film to show the separation of his body and soul.

The carriage driver arrives

and shows him how horrible his life has been,

a wasted life wrapped in a haunted myth.

And Sjostrom was brilliant at women.

His strong mother died when he was young.

Sjostrom ended his days in this cottage by the sea,

west of Stockholm.

Christensen and Sjostrom became star directors and,

as was to become the pattern for European talents,

they were seduced by what would be, in the years to come,

the centre of the movie world - a place called Hollywood.

They sailed there,

as a certain Swedish movie star called Greta Garbo did,

and later, another called Ingrid Bergman did.

As a result of their departures,

Scandinavia would not be central to the story of film again

until the 1950s.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away from Scandinavia...

..there was a garden that didn't know what was about to hit it.

Sagebrush in the rain. The eucalyptus in the rain.

You see, the spring was such a marvellous thing there.

The garden was about to be invaded, built upon.

It was about to bring in artists and business people

from around the world to paint clouds to look like real clouds...

..to create people to look like real people.

The sort of place

where you would wear costume jewellery in the daytime.

The sort of place that invented youth and glamour...

..where Marlene Dietrich could wear black feathers

and be framed in a train window

and be lit in a lattice of shadows and somehow look believable.

Youth and glamour came out of its test tubes.

No-one was supposed to be plain here, or sad or old

or racially equal or sexually different.

What denial. What eugenics.

And yet, it attracted people, selves,

ideas, styles, shape-shifters.

It became a bauble, this place, shiny, perfect, brittle,

something you could see yourself in.

Movies started to be in the air here.

Of course, this place is called Hollywood...

..a fantasy name because one of the things that won't grow here

is this - holly.

Why did movie people come here?

Because of weather, sunlight...

..and because on the East Coast,

New Jersey and New York,

the film process had been patented, copyrighted.

Take this example of copyright.

For years, film running through viewing machines had snapped

because of the tension in the spool.

Then the Latham brothers and people around Thomas Edison

had the brainwave of creating this simple loop

which created a bit of slack which would allow the machine to stop,

project an image and then move on again without tearing the film.

This so-called Latham loop

was patented by its East Coast inventors.

You had to pay people to use it and other discoveries.

But California was very far away from those rights owners

so you could break the law there.

This is South Spring Street in 1897.

Here's the same spot today.

Things moved quickly.

The first studio was built in 1911.

It was like an outdoor tent.

It was built here.

The first feature-length movie ever made, 'The Story of the Kelly Gang',

was filmed in Australia, outdoors, available light, head-on framing.

Seven years later, Cecil B. DeMille

shot the first Hollywood feature here.

Here it is - 'The Squaw Man'.

In it, we can see another crucial element of filmmaking

that fell into place in these years.

A decent man is trying to decide whether to do a good deed.

He looks right through a window

and sees a young woman who will benefit from the deed.

Their eyes meet for a second.

He feels her pain and decides to do the good deed.

But imagine if DeMille and his cameraperson

had lifted their camera from here,

brought it round to the far side of this room

and filmed the young woman from over there.

The shot of her would have looked something like this...

..as if she was looking away from the man, rather than towards him.

And the scene wouldn't have had the same power.

It's because their eyes match across the cut,

him looking right, her looking left, that they connect emotionally.

Filmmakers in these years were discovering

that to make it look like people in different shots

were looking at each other,

or that armies were marching towards each other...

..the camera had to stay on the same side of an invisible 180-degree line

drawn between the two people looking at, or talking to, each other.

Because this rule was new,

filmmakers in the late 1910s sometimes broke it by mistake.

Later in 'The Squaw Man', DeMille made such a mistake.

A man is dangling from a cliff.

He's looking right. The cliff is on the right.

But then DeMille goes to the bottom of the cliff to show the man's fall.

But he films from the wrong side of the man

so it looks like the cliff has switched to the left of the screen.

The shot would have been more spatially clear if it was like this.

And to make matters worse, his friends come to the rescue,

leaving screen left but entering the next shot screen right,

as if they have taken a detour to the pub.

Once this discovery was made, it was used throughout mainstream cinema.

This scene from 'The Empire Strikes Back',

an old-style movie made 60 years later,

shows how enduring the discovery was.

Darth Vader is on the left of screen, looking right.

His underling, to whom he is speaking, is in a separate shot,

looking left.

Because of the 180-degree rule,

we completely believe that they're looking at each other.

Set your course for the Hoth system.

General Veers...

Crucial to the inventiveness of American cinema before the 1920s

was how female it was.

Film historian Cari Beauchamp.

Hollywood was built by women, immigrants and Jews,

people who would not be accepted in any other profession at the time

so Hollywood became this magnet for people who wanted to work,

who were incredibly creative

but wouldn't be accepted in other professions.

Well, half of all films written before 1925 were written by women

so that shows you how just comfortable women were

in the business then.

Perhaps the first woman to direct a film

and the first female studio boss was Alice Guy Blache.

Most of the film companies focused on the machinery

and Gaumont started to make actual films

and Alice Guy was a secretary there

and they let her play with the cameras after hours,

as long as she'd gotten her secretarial work done.

And Alice Guy was not only one of the first female directors,

she was one of the first directors.

She was one of the first

to actually put film together into a story with an arc.

Up until then, we'd had the sneeze, the wave,

individual actions.

But Alice created some dramatic arc films for the very first time.

Here is an example of Guy Blache's touching poetics.

A little girl overhears a doctor say that her sister will die

before the leaves fall from the trees

so she goes outside and starts to tie them back on.

One of the most innovative directors of the time was Lois Weber.

Here, she also plays the lead in her film 'Suspense'.

A woman's at home with her child.

She hears an intruder, looks out the window,

sees him in this remarkable sideways POV shot.

She calls her husband.

Weber users a split screen

to show the husband, the intruder and herself all in the same moment.

The husband jumps in a car and tries to race to save his wife.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS)

He's chased by the police,

who Weber shows in this inventive shot of the wing mirror.

The intruder climbs the stair.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS)

And again, Weber's camera position emphasises the approach, the threat.

In the end, the police and husband arrive and save the day.

The film was, for years, credited to a male director, D.W. Griffith.

Frances Marion was an even more significant figure.

Well, Frances Marion was the highest-paid screen writer,

male or female, from 1915 to 1935.

That's an incredible accomplishment right there.

She also is the only woman ever to win two Oscars for writing

and she won her Oscars for 'The Big House',

the seminal prison film,

and 'The Champ', the classic boxing film.

What I love about that is it just, right there,

puts the lie to the idea,

"Well, these women writers were writing the matinee weepies

"or the women's films," quote, unquote.

No. They were writing every conceivable genre of film.

Women like Frances, Adela Rogers St. Johns,

Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos.

I mean, these were the creme de la creme of the writers,

the ones that the Thalbergs and the Mayers went to

when they had big productions they knew they needed to count on.

Marion's screenplay for the film 'The Wind'

was about a woman living in a shack.

The wind is incessant. Sand's everywhere.

It seems to blast the visual image.

An aggressive man forces himself on her.

She shoots him then buries him in the sand

but the wind blows the sand away.

The corpse is exposed, just like her fear,

just like her unconscious mind.

'The Wind' was an epic tone poem,

cut like a thriller but filmed like a dream.

Hollywood films like it

showed female audiences things they'd probably felt

but never seen.

Most people in America

did not go further than 20 miles from their home

from when they were born till they died.

So, you have this incredible country

that really only lives in this bell jar of their own community

and as films start coming out,

as movie theatres are being built...

By 1920, there's over 15,000 theatres in this country.

So, all of a sudden, you can go around the corner,

put down your nickel or your dime or your quarter

and have this entire world open up to you.

And it's not just they're seeing Paris for the first time,

they're seeing New York City or San Francisco.

They're seeing women's fashions.

They are seeing women acting in ways that nobody would dare do.

With talking films, the price of making movies skyrocketed

and so, with talking films,

Wall Street really entered the business for the first time.

And when money entered into it, the jobs started paying more.

It was taken seriously as a business and men wanted those jobs.

If the great women filmmakers of the 1910s are underremembered,

you could say that this man, lanky,

here in a stagey family scene with a painted skyline, is overremembered.

People say that D.W. Griffith invented close-ups or editing,

which isn't true.

But he did something far more valuable for the art of cinema.

He said it needs to show this - the wind in the trees.

Before Griffith, film had a tendency to be stagey like this.

Airless.

He brought the wind in the trees to cinema...

..a sense of the outside world.

The delicacy of Lillian Gish's performance here

matches the delicacy of the light, the visual softness.

Decades later, the critic Roland Barthes

said that some images have unplanned natural details in them

that move us.

Barthes called this the 'punctum',

the thing that pricks our feelings.

Griffith's work is full of the punctum, the wind in the trees.

This scene, from 'Way Down East', is set on a treacherous, thawing river.

Griffith could never have planned that Lillian Gish's right arm

would push ice off the adjacent ice flow...

..but we notice the realness of the moment.

Griffith worked with one of the best cinematographers in the business,

Billy Bitzer.

Bitzer disliked the hard edge of the film image

so put a collar around the lens hood

to make the edge of the image go slightly darker,

adding class to the picture, as Bitzer himself put it,

and influencing the look of film in America for a generation.

Griffith and Bitzer understood the psychological intensity of a lens.

They used visual softness and backlighting,

which gave a halo to hair

and made actors stand out against backgrounds.

What Griffith and Bitzer did in 1914 and 1915,

with all their talents,

their haloed imagery, their splendid tracking shots

and feel for the outdoors

is one of the great shocks in The Story of Film.

They made this deceitful state-of-the-nation movie

that raised a racist flag

which showed the power of cinema and its danger.

The 'Birth of a Nation'

looks like it was shot in Griffith's native Kentucky...

..but it was actually filmed here, near Los Angeles.

It showed the American Civil War.

Griffith mixed the epic with the intimate.

A southern officer returns home.

He goes to his mother.

Her arms come out of the doorway to enfold him.

We don't see the rest of her.

Such subtlety made the racism all the more dangerous.

Black senators were shown as drunk and unclean.

('RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES' BY WAGNER PLAYS)

In this scene, Griffith used Wagner music.

The Cameron family are being attacked by black soldiers.

They're rescued by the clan, heroic and thrilling.

After some screenings,

black audience members were attacked with clubs.

The Ku Klux Klan had been disbanded in 1869

but by the mid-1920s, its membership was back up to 4 million.

Talk about the wind in the trees.

More than 80 years later, DJ Spooky sampled and played

with the toxic scenes of 'Birth of a Nation',

almost as if he were scribbling on them.

The year after the 'Birth of a Nation',

Griffiths saw this, the epic Italian film 'Cabiria'.

He was stunned, particularly by these moving dolly shots.

Inspired by these moves

and production designs such as this, using elephants to suggest scale...

..and also by the novels of Charles Dickens,

he made a 3.5-hour film, 'Intolerance',

about love's struggle through history.

The film showed human intolerance in Babylon...

..and the life of Jesus Christ tinted in sepia...

..and the massacre of St Bartholomew in medieval ages.

Violent scenes tinted blue...

..and in modern gangsterism, all shiny cars and jazz outfits...

..and then intercut these.

Griffith said, "Dickens intercuts, so so will I."

He took storyline A so far then jumped to storyline B,

advanced it a certain amount then went back again to A

and picked up where he had left off.

Previously, a cut from one shot to the next meant, as we've seen,

'then' or 'meanwhile'.

Griffith's cutting between time periods wasn't saying either.

It was saying, "Look,

"these very different events from different eras

"all show the same human trait - intolerance

"or the failure of love,"

editing as an intellectual signpost

asking people to notice not something about action or story,

but about the meaning of the sequence.

Soviets such as Eisenstein wrote about this editing

and as far away as Japan in 1921,

Minoru Murata made this film, 'Souls on the Road'.

Two storylines intertwine.

In the end of the film, they come together.

Two ex-convicts from one storyline

here find a son from the other storyline in the snow.

Their story has been one of hope but the son has died.

A pioneering use of parallel editing in Asia.

This made 'Souls on the Road' the first great Japanese film.

In LA today, a shopping mall on Hollywood Boulevard

where the Oscars take place

has partially rebuilt the massive Babylonian gate from 'Intolerance'.

The original was here, a mile away from the shopping mall.

It was demolished when Hollywood didn't care much

about its own history.

But what history, what ideas,

filmed with a dolly on a crane

and even on a balloon to get high enough up into the wind

that flaps these vast hangings.

Cinema was just 20 years old when this shot was filmed.

A new art form had been born.

Scandinavian directors had made it an art of light.

Nickelodeons had given way to movie palaces,

places built like cathedrals...

..or Egyptian temples...

..or Chinese pavilions.

A garden called Hollywood started to pump fantasies out into the world.

Film editing captured the fragmented experiences of modern life.

New creatures called movie stars

became the most famous people in the world.

They lived in places of rapture and escape.

The story of film seemed to have reached its climax.

But in fact, it was only just beginning.

Supertext Captions by Red Bee Media Australia www.redbeemedia.com.au