All language subtitles for The.Story.of.Film.An.Odyssey.15of15.DVD.x264.AC3.MVGroup.Forum

The 21st century came
and movies filmed it.

Nature still looked lovely,
cities looked even more.

Lots happened
in innovative cinema in recent years.

One of the most surprising things
was that editing lessened.

Slow cinema came to the fore.

But deep down,
21st-century movies

had been about
what movies started out to be about.

The clash between
reality and dreaming.

This is the story of that clash.

The story starts way back here
with "Laurel and Hardy."

They're pulling a piano
in the Swiss alps.

A studio set
and painted backdrop.

We know something'll go wrong.

It always does.

But what?

What'll happen next?

That's the question
the filmmakers asked and will always ask.

They racked their brains.

In those days, there was a guy
on the set called "the wildy."

The wild man, often drunk, whose job
was to come up with the bizarre ideas.

In this case the wildy suggested
that they should meet a gorilla.

And here it comes.

Silly but funny.

Everything's okay.

From now on
it's going to be easy sailing.

The wild man had innovated.

The gorilla was his innovation.

The story of film
is the story of innovation.

The story of the gorilla.

And then look at this scene

from one of Hollywood's most surreal films
Blonde Venus.

We're in a nightclub.

A frame densely packed.

Soft, top lighting.

The sort of lighting used
to photograph Marlene Dietrich.

And then the reveal.

It is Marlene Dietrich.

She shed her skin
and the sparkles of the dresses soften

because of a diffusion filter
on the lens.

Hollywood at its most playful,
absurd, new.

So since the new millennium,
what's been new in cinema,

what's come at it,
what's been the gorilla?

At first it looks like there
hasn't been a gorilla.

That it's been
business as usual.

The movies started
with this documentary in 1895.

Workers leaving a factory,
filmed square on.

But the big movie story
of the new millennium

was that the reality came back.

At first, in the form of documentaries,
which were suddenly big box office.

The first time
in the whole story of film

that non-fiction cinema held
its own on the big screen.

This happened in part
because of what used to stand here.

When the twin towers fell,
history got bigger.

The camcorder footage of 9/11
out-hollywooded Hollywood, image wise.

Fiction cinema looked
a bit old hat in comparison

and reality was
more dramatic than escapism.

This film, Fahrenheit 9/11,

was one of the biggest box office hits
in the history of documentary.

It told a story about two families
called Bush and Saud.

President Bush was being filmed as he heard
about the attacks on the twin towers.

All director Michael Moore
had to do was show the footage,

add a commentary and a clock
in the corner of the screen

to make 2004's most memorable movie moment
about power and indecision.

When the second plane hit the tower
his chief of staff entered the class room

and told Mr. Bush,
"the nation is under attack."

Not knowing what to do,
with no one telling him what to do,

and no secret service rushing in
to take him to safety,

Mr. Bush just sat there and continued
to read "My Pet Goat" with the children.

Nearly 7 minutes passed
with nobody doing anything.

As Bush sat in that Florida classroom,
was he wondering if maybe

he should have shown up
to work more often?

Fahrenheit 9/11 took over a quarter
of a billion dollars at the box office,

something remarkable
was happening in the story of film

because that's as much
as this fiction entertainment film,

The Bourne Supremacy,
released the same year.

But look at The Bourne Supremacy

and you notice how,
like a documentary, it's trying to be.

Its director
came from documentary.

These shots could have been much steadier,
glossier, but rough documentary imagery

had become exciting and new
in the 21st century,

so fiction films hitched a ride on it.

Documentaries held the screen
for some years.

This film, Être et avoir, which came a bit
before Fahrenheit 9/11, was a classic.

Observational, character based.

It's the end of the year
in a rural school.

The teacher, Mr. Lopez,
is retiring.

It's the last time
he'll see the kids.

The camera is at the child's height,
then, tilts up to capture his sadness.

Where heroes in fiction cinema
often have to strike out

and fight the world,
Mr. Lopez just stands there.

And yet he was one of the most vivid
human beings on screen in 2002.

And Douglas Gordon's
and Philippe Parreno's,

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait,
also a documentary,

was one of the most
innovative films of its time.

It used extra-long lenses
to film a football match,

but it didn't follow
the story of the match,

so much as one, hypnotic,
roving presence within it.

The presence, footballer Zinedine Zidane
became almost mythic,

we heard his breathing, and his thoughts
were subtitled even though he didn't speak.

At times he's so isolated
and blown up that,

as in an Antonioni film,
he almost dispersed.

Like a pointillist
impressionist painting.

He had two incompletely healed bullet holes
in his chest and another in his thigh.

But it wasn't only in documentaries
that reality bounced back

in the new millennium.

Look at this film, The Assassination
of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Look at its photography: Sepia.

Shallow focus.

No attempt to sex up the image,
or make it look 21st century.

Or computer-y.

The defocusing of the edge of the image
was done in part by a computer.

But if the way this famous face
is photographed reminds us of anything,

it's the delicate photo-realism
of a face like this:

Lillian Gish, softly lit.

Talk about coming full circle.

And where was
all this post 9/11 realism heading?

In the direction
of an intimate scene like this.

It's in Climates, [Iklimler]

one of the most innovative fiction films
of the 21st century.

We're in Turkey now
and a new master director,

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has had Climates,
shot digitally.

A hotel room.

A wife, in close-up.

A drip of water
on the sound track.

We cut to her older husband,
director Ceylan himself.

Shallow focus
and his face half obscured.

Sad eyes.

Then a similar framing.

Each plane of focus
so carefully chosen.

Then this focus pull
and the pores on his forehead.

No dialogue or music.

Then this shot.

Where is the focus here?

The hand shows us.

Up close.

The camera's now lower
than the bed.

And mysterious focus again.

The search for it makes us feel
as if we are on the bed.

In the head
of this sad marriage.

We think of Ingmar Bergman's
sad films about marriage.

And then a naked light,

like a scene
in an Italian Neo-realist picture.

And then it's over,
whatever it was: sex?

The greatest use
of focus in cinema.

Realist time stood still.

The gorilla, the sparky new idea
in 21st century movies

was a very old idea,
that real people still matter.

That tender realism
is beautiful.

This honesty flowed
from Turkey to Romania,

where great new honest pictures
like this one emerged.

Welcome to new Romanian cinema.

This is Mr. Lazarescu.

We've followed him all night,
from hospital to hospital,

which have all been full
because of a bus accident.

We've watched him
get worse and worse.

Now he's dying.

The woman in orange is a paramedic
who's helped him all night.

Director Christi Puiu said that he wanted
to use camerawork like the TV series ER.

Hand held, shooting in the round,
dowdy greenish fluorescent lighting.

He used these techniques
to show a long night's journey

into day and death, and the human
decency of the paramedic.

The Death of Mister Lazarescu
[Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu]

was one of the most moving works
of film realism of the new century.

It passionately showed that we're
all in this scary new century together.

Argentina's films in the new millennium
boldly confronted reality too.

This is The Headless Woman
by Lucrecia Martel.

Veronica is a well to do dentist.

Her phones goes.

Bam!

She's hit something.

Usually car accidents in movies
are done with fast editing.

Here there's none.

Veronica's been crying.

Light rock music
as counterpoint.

She tries to calm down,
static camera, shallow focus.

Then she drives on.

We see what she hit.

A tense, tragic mysterious moment
that gives the film its tone.

Then she stops.

She's probably concussed.

And as we see in the rest
of the film, she keeps secrets

from her family
and from herself.

You'd think the camera
would go with her but it stays here.

Thunder then rain.

Then she's out of focus.

Headless.

A woman who's lost her head.

Veronica's isolation is brilliantly shown
in this haunting, un-glossy movie.

One of the best ever made
in South America.

And in Mexico in the 21st century,

cinema was brilliantly honest
about human beings too.

Look at this scene.

A close up of a dark hand
holding a light skinned one.

Then cut to this angle,

made famous by a renaissance painting
of Christ by Mantegna.

The woman's thin,
rich, privileged.

The man's her chauffeur.

Poorer, darker skinned, fatter.

Then the camera rises.

Music like at a funeral.

A blank room
like a funeral parlor.

We get a god's eye view.

Or a Karl Marx eye view.

The social gap between them
is so profound.

The only way of bridging it
is through touch.

In this case sexual touch.

A moment ago they had sex
and the camera did this.

Went out into the world

in this single uncut crane shot
of more than three minutes,

to show workers
taking down a TV aerial.

A Marriot hotel for tourists
and rich people.

The back story of Mexico City.

The inequalities in Mexico
are epic in scale,

and director Carlos Reygadas
uses an epic crane shot,

to dramatize the enormity
of the problem, the standoff.

Cinema, coming full circle,
to show that sometimes there's a world

between two people,
even as they cling to each other.

And if the realism of the new millennium
wasn't rich enough,

Korean cinema suddenly darkened it
and gave it a strange brutality.

The result was called
"new Korean cinema."

There'd been good Korean movies
since the 1920s and a golden age in the '60s.

But in the year 2003 alone, three movies
show how daring it had become.

This is Lee Chang-dong's film,
Oasis. [Oasiseu]

We're at a family party.

A man who's just out of prison
is dominating the conversation,

talking nonsense.

He's anti-social.

He's brought with him
an uninvited guest.

This young woman in the foreground
who has cerebral palsy.

The situation is awkward.

More so when we hear
that the woman is the daughter

of the man he's supposed
to have killed.

And when they first met,
he raped her.

And yet, somehow,
these people have a friendship.

Maybe it's because both
are spurned by their families.

New Korean cinema
was transgressive.

Here's the ending
of another 2003 Korean film,

Bong Joon-ho's,
Memories of Murder.
[Salinui chueok]

The film is set
in the late '80s.

A serial killer has murdered
ten Korean women,

a true story
that scandalized the country.

This policeman's been trying
to find the killer.

He's stopped his car
and goes to look one last time

at the gulley where
one of the victims was found.

Flat, deserted, yellow land,
like the crop dusting scene

in Hitchcock's,
North by North West.

POV Camera approaching
the dark space.

Somehow we think
of David Lynch films.

The tunnel seems haunted
by the memory of the murder.

And then this: A girl.

But she reveals
that she's probably seen the murderer.

A conversation, simply shot.

All through the film the detective
has been hoping for such a breakthrough,

but now that it happens
it's so ordinary.

A stare into camera.

Maybe the murderer is us.

More transgressive still was
this new Korean film: Old Boy.

We're in a dark, stylized world.

This man was locked up
for 15 years and not told why.

Now he's out and angry.

Almost comically angry.

He wants revenge.

The film was based on a Japanese
manga cartoon book and it shows.

The man has found the place
where he was imprisoned.

He's going to bash
this security guard with a hammer.

And, as in a cartoon,
he sees the hammer's trajectory.

Once he's in the prison we get
this remarkable stylized fight scene.

We're in the prison corridor.

The wall nearest to us
has been taken away.

A bit like in one of those
wildlife programs

in which we see moles
in their burrows underground.

The shot is far back
and makes the scene look

like a cell in a cartoon.

Our man fights 14 other men.

Almost comic odds.

The camera keeps its distance
on a Dolly.

Not handheld in the fight.

This isn't the realism of the early movies
of the Lumière brothers.

New Korean cinema
in the year 2003

was also doing something
like the opposite to realism.

Stylized, dreamlike,
magical almost.

Like this film, George Méliés,
The Moon at one Meter,

one of the first
science fiction films.

Theatrical.

Wearing it's dreaminess
on its sleeve.

Movies in the new millennium
were dreamlike as well as realistic.

The gorilla, the innovation
in 21st century cinema

was dreamlike
as well as naturalistic.

Film history coming
full circle again.

In the most famous American
movie about a dream,

The Wizard of Oz,
a girl goes over a rainbow,

meets people from her real life,
clicks her Ruby slippers together,

and discovers
that there's no place like home.

The best dream film of the new millennium,
Mulholland Drive,

is as if someone dreamed
The Wizard of Oz dream.

It's about a girl who wants
to climb the hill of movie stardom,

Mulholland Drive,
where all the movie stars live.

But, instead, falls asleep
and dives down into her own consciousness.

Down in that consciousness we hear
of this dance in Ontario,

when she was a girl.

Her moment of innocence.

People jitterbug,
shot against purple.

Their own shadows create
moving digital windows

through which we see
more layers.

This is the girl, luminous
and smiling.

But then the girl grows up,
falls in love with another girl,

and then gets so jealous of her
that she asks this hit man to kill her.

Director David Lynch has the scene
filmed conventionally,

shot-reverse shot, almost natural light,
medium close ups, in a café called Winkies.

But out of the corner of her eye

the girls sees this man.

He looks at her
as she arranges the murder.

Bang.

It's like he sees her commit the crime,
the thought crime.

And so, in her long dream
we see him, not her,

confronting something awful
behind a wall at the back of Winkies.

Handheld camera.

A roar on the soundtrack.

A shock so great
that everything goes silent.

The monster seems to be her terror
at planning the killing.

She doesn't dream of herself confronting it
but of the man who looked at her doing so.

And this place, Club Silencio,
also in Diane's sub conscious,

is like Oz in The Wizard of Oz.

Diane's dream comes
to a climax here.

She shakes because
her subconscious is flooding.

A wizard conjures blue lights,
disappears.

Light like we're under water.

Mulholland Dr. was so innovative
because it was The Wizard of Oz

plunged into the black night of film noir
and the rabbit hole of David Lynch's brain.

And then in the new millennium,

there was an astonishing dream film of
sorts, Requiem for a Dream.

Anybody want to waste some time?

It looked with piteous recognition
at people on drugs.

Angel says that this is the time,
we should do it now.

Shit, I'm going
to call Brody tomorrow.

Who's Brody?

That's my sweet connection.

He's got some unbelievable shit.

Righteous!

It was the great distortion movie
about how drugs distort the world.

Speed it up,
give it a fish eye lens.

Shit, man!

Then we get us
a pound of pure and retire.

You know what that means?

No more hassle.

We get off hard knocks
and be on easy street.

Shit.

What's the catch?

Here's the catch.

This woman wanted to be on TV
so took far too many weight reduction pills.

Now she's scared
by her own apartment.

It flickers, floats around her
like a gyroscope.

Darren Aronofsky's film was
a paranoid dream in a fearful century.

So if the story of film
in the new millennium

has been the story of realist
films and dream films,

that story is as old
as movies itself.

There's nothing new there.

But in the new millennium,

film also combined reality
and fantasy in new ways.

The line between them blurred.

They got closer to each other.

Look what we find here,
in Stockholm.

The unique films of this man,
Roy Andersson,

combine reality and dream
in a new way

that few have ever done
in the story of film.

You know, I was growing
up in a worker family

and I grew up with that...

Impressions that people really humiliated
each other and themselves also.

In Andersson's film,
Songs from the Second Floor,

this man in the middle, covered in ashes
has burnt down his business.

A serious social theme.

And the color in this shot
is a drab green.

But suddenly the movie becomes
heightened like a musical fantasy.

Unhappiness, it's not only the result
of poorness,

without money, it's also the result of:
What is richdom in life?

Is it money or...
how to be happy so to say?

And I think that nowadays,
in the last 30 years, people have been...

They are lost. They are lost.

In the extraordinary ending of
Songs from the Second Floor,

symbols of religion are being dumped
into a wasteland beyond the city.

We built the road of wood
and we put in pieces to the right

so that you get the impression
that there is a huge modern city there.

It's like the end of the world
and then minutes into the uncut shot.

People who have been there
the whole time,

stand up from the land,
like the day of judgement.

It's a theme that I'm very,
very interested in.

Namely the question of guilt.

Personal guilt and,
even, collective guilt.

We are carrying a guilt,
a collective guilt,

as representatives
of the human being or mankind.

We are responsible and we have
to get that feeling of guilt,

we have to get it reconciliated,
to get rid of it.

And I think it's infected,
it infects the society,

it infects our time, and I have that theme
in Songs from the Second Floor.

And Andersson found
a striking visual style

to show the humiliation, guilt
and comedy of modern life.

He muted color.

Favoring grays and greens.

He loved plunging perspectives
and flat Nordic light.

A bleak dream.

And his camera seldom moves.

I really don't want a single frame
in my movie that is indifferent.

Visually indifferent.

And I mean that the modern
way of filmmaking

contains a lot
of indifferent frames.

Because they are built
up to concentrate

on a very specific situation,
most of the time killing or...

Yeah, on stupid situations.

Why can't movie
has the same qualities as painting,

so you are fascinated by very...
each single frame.

But what makes Andersson
so significant for modern cinema

is that he combines this exactitude
with a real sense of humor.

He's a fan of
"Laurel and Hardy."

The simplicity of the way
this scene is shot for example.

Square on, symmetrical.

And they are so tragic
and so funny at the same time.

And it's two losers.

They want to be accepted
by the middle class or upper class.

And they try so hard
to get that, to come in to this,

to be accepted but they fail
all the time, all the time.

It's not only simple jokes,
it's also social tragedy,

political tragedy, of course.

It's the underdog's efforts to be accepted,
to reach a higher level in society.

Andersson gets the gorilla,
the innovation.

He partially funds his films himself,
a one man movie studio.

A one man film history.

No-one has quite combined
reality and dream like this before.

Twenty-first century cinema
built on the past combining worlds.

In the '60s we saw how Stanley Donen,
director of Singin' in the Rain,

used this split screen,
to get around censorship

by making it look like two lovers
are in bed together.

He filmed with two cameras
at the same time and combined the shots.

Jump forward
to the new millennium,

to this scene in Roger Avery's the
Rules of Attraction.

Saturday morning
on an American campus.

We've just watched, for several minutes,
these two students get up and go to class.

Like Donen, Avery uses split screen,
but has his characters look to camera,

to us, rather than each other.

Typical.

Never seen you there before.

We feel in the middle
of this flirtatious moment.

Yeah.

You've got bad timing.

Saturday's suck ass.

I don't have to put up
with this shit.

I'm dropping this fucking class!

Yeah, me too.

Really?

Mmhm.

I think I'm going to change...

But then she says,
"show me your eyes."

And a hand takes
his glasses off.

Show me your eyes.

And it's not his hand.

Then the cameras each pull out
and swing round and the two world combine.

We go from inside the moment,
to an outside observer.

Each camera's move
was computer programmed

and the two images
were digitally stitched together.

Movies have always tried
to make people meet in memorable ways.

Few meetings are as memorable
as this one.

And in this film, Avatar,
computers also helped create

new 21st-century syntheses
of reality and fantasy.

In real life this character
is a marine, who,

because he's in a wheelchair,
can't walk or run.

But here he's on a mission
to the planet Pandora

and has been transformed
into an attenuated creature

who enjoys the sprint,
moves like a dancer.

Canadian director James Cameron
has his camera flow,

the creature move,
he feels the soil between his toes.

Hey, marine!

Grace?

Well, who did you expect,
Numbnuts?

Think fast.

Everything about this scene
was animated on computers,

as you'd expect,
except the most important thing.

The facial expressions.

This energetic documentary shows

that the faces
were filmed with mini-cameras.

The set of a modern Sci-Fi film
looks like a factory.

Bright lights, computers,
no hint of an enchanted planet.

Director James Cameron is excited
by the process.

You know, there's a carbon fiber boom
that comes out

with a little camera
on the front of it.

And that camera shoots the face
in a nulled out close up.

So, even though the actor
is moving all around,

running, jumping, yelling,
screaming, jumping off stuff,

jumping over logs, you know,
running flat out, whatever.

We're getting that facial
performance absolutely locked off.

This split screen in the documentary
shows the after and before.

Twenty-first century cinema
managed to insert the mystery

of human feeling into a digital
and electronic universe.

But far away from Hollywood,
in Thailand in the new millennium,

Apichatpong Weerasethakul did
something even more inventive.

Look at this scene from
Tropical Malady.

A Thai soldier, Keng,
and his farmer friend Dong.

Two shy young men in Thailand,
filmed in natural light,

in long takes,
in the languor of summer days.

A backdrop so still
that it looks almost painted.

Then, about half way through the film,
it seems to break down.

There's black,
and then the story starts again.

This time we're in a forest.

A soundtrack full of the night chorus
of insects, frogs, and cicadas.

This time soldier Ken
is lit by moonlight.

He sees a tree
full of fireflies.

It's like the Eiffel Tower
lit up.

We hear that his friend, Dong,
has become a tiger.

He must hunt him.

Director Weerasethakul films the spirit
of a water buffalo leaving its own body.

Keng's breathless, agog.

Seeing life and death
and the gaia.

The spirit takes him
into the forest.

Not only has the farmer
been re-incarnated as a tiger,

but the film seems to have
been re-incarnated,

from a naturalistic tale of friendship,
to a mythic tale of hunter and hunted.

Seldom in the whole history of cinema
has such a bold story shift happened.

The wild man, the gorilla.

Our last examples
of wildly inventive cinema

in the new millennium come from this man,
Alexander Sokurov.

This is his film,
Mother and Son.
[Mat i syn]

We're in a Russian cottage
in the countryside.

A mother's dying.

Her son tends her.

She's happy to die
in her son's arms.

The pearly light
is in the trees outside.

They whisper to each other.

Utter peace.

Sokurov explains his approach.

Mother and Son
is one of the defining movies

in what would come to be called
"slow cinema."

Director Sokurov's imagery is as beautiful
as his teachers, Andrei Tarkovsky's,

but also derives from painting.

And, in shots like this,
Sokurov had the image stretched diagonally

as if it was made
of rubber, to change how we see it.

Many critics felt that Mother and Son
was one of the best films of its time.

But then Sokurov made this film.

Perhaps the most inventive
ever made.

The greatest gorilla
in film history.

We're in the Hermitage museum
in St. Petersburg,

at the end of the 19th century.

These tsarist aristocrats
have been partying all night

and now they're flowing
down the steps, like a river.

But the revolution is coming.

This will be the last
of the great balls.

Soon they will be dead.

Sokurov saw the film
as the single last breadth

of this civilization and so, astonishingly,
he filmed the whole movie in a single take.

There hasn't been one cut
in the whole film.

This shot has travelled 1,300 meters,
through 33 galleries, filming 867 people:

Cavaliers, museum officials, spies, great
balls, and portents of the horrors to come.

Over 90 minutes.

Sokurov and his team rehearsed
for 6 months.

Filming took place on 23rd December,
when there are only 4 hours of daylight.

This allowed for just two takes.

Take one had to be abandoned
after five minutes.

Then take two, this one unfolds.

Unbelievable tension.

The steadicam so heavy that the operator
almost buckles at the knees in pain.

Here's documentary footage
of the moment the filming finished.

Their breath's show
how freezing it was.

The handheld camera
captures the relief.

Tears of joy that something entirely new
in the story of film had taken place.

TV cameras to capture
this moment.

The camera mills around
with the people.

Moved, tired, exhilarated.

Sokurov is one of the most serious
filmmakers of the 21st century

and one of the most
stylistically daring.

He and the filmmakers like him
suggest that the future of cinema

is in provocative hands.

If the history of film
has been the story of innovation,

of passion, of breaking the mold,

what's its future?

Maestro di Angeles,
here in the Roman film studio, Cinecitta,

made props for Fellini
but long after he's gone,

will people still be breaking
the movie mold?

Maybe in the year 2046,

movie going will be like
Christopher Nolan's film Inception.

It's an innovative Sci-Fi film
about layers of reality

but maybe it's a metaphor, too,
for what film going could become.

Look at this scene.

Leonardo DiCaprio
and his friends wake up in a plane.

They've just been
dreaming together.

The camera glides.

Greens and blues.

Atmospheric beds of music.

They're groggy.

Embarrassed almost at the intimacy
of the dream they've just shared.

They dreamt they were in this van,
falling ultra-slowly off a bridge.

Shot at maybe
1,000 frames per second.

No natural sound.

But in it, they dream
a dream within a dream,

in which they're in a hotel
whose gravity is on the blink.

It's color coded orange.

The camera floats.

The actors are on wires.

And in that dream within a dream,
they dream a fourth layer.

They're in a James Bond style battle
in a snow lodge.

Now the camera's handheld.

The action's edgy.

The sound natural.

The dominant color's white.

They live and die together.

Maybe this is what movie going
is like in 2046.

Playing a game
of living and dying together.

Plunging into
an underwater YouTube.

Or maybe something
awful happens.

Look at this scene in
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Former lovers Joel and Clementine
are running through grand central station.

People start to disappear because
they are undergoing a brain washing process

where their memories
of their relationship are being removed.

Then the brain washing
becomes a nightmare.

It's shot like
a TV crime program.

The camera's roving around,
with a light on it.

Their past, their stories,
disappearing.

She no longer has a face.

You're erasing me from...

I don't know.

You got this thing.

I'm in my bed.

I know it.

My brain!

I'm part
of your imagination too, Joel.

How can I help you from there?

I'm inside your head...

The eyes on another face
are upside down.

What if the same happened
to film?

Maybe there'll be
some digital or ideological storm

and cinema will be
wiped or banned.

And it will be impossible
to see it.

Except in a hidden bunker or room
like this

where all its treasures
are kept, in secret.

If so, then those of us
who loved the movies

will have to remember them,
talk about them, tell the story of them.

Of the people who made them.

The places where they were made.

The objects
that appeared in them.

Even the places
where the great filmmakers sat and thought.

Or maybe movies will take up
a bigger part in our lives.

This is what the city of Ouagadougou
in Burkina Faso looked like in 2011.

At the very center of the city
is this huge monument to cinema.

Maybe more cities will do this.

Back in 2011, filmmakers
from around the world

gathered at this monument,
held hands in the sweaty heat

and walked around it
three times,

in tribute to the filmmakers
who had died in the previous year.

And, to the movies.