All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 13 - 1990-1998 - The Last Days of Celluloid

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

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

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

It's passion, innovation!

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

To discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Ky�ko Kagawa

who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.

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

And in the movies
of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film,
an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation
across twelve decades,

six continents
and a thousand films.

In this chapter we discover that
in the days before digital fantasy films,

directors had a final love affair
with real emotions

in movies like In the mood for love
and Japanese horror.

This is the story
of the end of an era.

For a 100 years movies
had been shot on this: celluloid.

Paper thin.

Shiny.

Perforated.

A medium so sensitive that it could
capture the subtle colors in snow.

But in the '90s the digital image
and Terminator 2 came along

and reality got less real.

In these last days before that happened,
as if to stave off the moment

when the link between reality
and the movies would finally be broken,

filmmakers around the world
made passionate movies

about emotions,
not spaceships or other worlds.

The story starts here
in snowy Iran.

Take this extraordinary film,
The Apple, [Sib] based on a true story.

A handheld camera moves
into the enclosed world of this girl.

Her father thinks that the outside world
is so scary and dangerous

that he's done something remarkable
to her and her sister.

The film's director
Samira Makhmalbaf:

This is the scene where the girls
come blinking back out into the real world.

They taste it.

They're shy.

Makhmalbaf captures
the gentleness of the moment.

It's remarkable that she didn't judge
the parents for doing this to the girls.

But what's even more remarkable is
that these aren't actors playing the girls.

The girls and the dad
play themselves.

Not in a straight documentary
about what happened,

but in a kind of self-role play
or re-enactment.

A risk that worked because the family
found the process therapeutic.

And the film feels
like an extraordinary intimate myth

about modern parental love
gone wrong.

The real life event
was so fertile, so moving,

that Makhmalbaf used film
to double back over it.

This doubling back so that
the real experience can fertilize the film,

was unique
to Iranian cinema of this time.

This is Makhmalbaf's dad, Mohsen,
in exile from Iran in Paris.

He double backed on reality too.

His film, A Moment of Innocence
[Nun va Goldoon],

is even more remarkable
than his daughter's.

In the early '90s, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
put an advert in a newspaper

asking for non-professionals
to come to a casting call.

Nothing unusual in that.

But one of the people who showed up
to audition for a part in Makhmalbaf's film

was a policeman, who Makhmalbaf
had stabbed way back in the '70s

when Makhmalbaf was a teenager
fighting the shah's regime.

Makhmalbaf loved this.

He scrapped his planned film and decided,
instead, to make one about the stabbing.

He recreated the events on camera from his,
the attacker's, point of view,

and, even more unusually,
he asked the policeman,

who of course had never
made a film before,

to recreate them from his,
the victim's, point of view.

Here's a scene from the film,
directed by the policeman,

who films himself, he's the taller
of the two guys here,

telling a young actor
who is playing him in the '70s,

how to behave.

The policeman films
in a panning shot from far away

and has cast quite a handsome actor
as his younger self.

Already, he is trying to make what happened,
a touch more glamorous.

Again we have doubling back
on the found experience

to imbue it
with extra intensity.

In this case the doubling back revealed
something unexpectedly moving.

In the days of the stabbing,
the policeman was in love with a girl

and he thought
that she might love him back.

During the shooting of the film,
20 years later, the policeman discovered,

to his dismay, that she was only pretending
to like him to distract him

because she was a revolutionary too,
and in cahoots with Makhmalbaf.

Here's Makhmalbaf's restaging
of the moment when

the real policeman discovers
that the love was not real.

An actress playing the girl
walks quickly with the actor

playing the young Makhmalbaf.

The real policeman has now seen
that she was with the young Makhmalbaf,

and upset, he puts his hand in front
of the camera to stop the filming.

He's carried a flame for her
all these years and it's just gone out.

Makhmalbaf ends this film about life,
reworked exquisitely.

Beautiful close ups, haunting music,
the girl asks the policeman the time.

Will he be stabbed?

Will he shoot her?

A moment of innocence.

Then, Makhmalbaf improves
on what really happened in the '70s,

he offers "flowers for Africa " as he put it,
and " bread for the poor."

A Moment of Innocence is the single
greatest work of autobiography in cinema.

It brilliantly shows
that not only fantasy films,

like The Matrix, are fascinating but,
fasten your seat belts,

because the story of reality in the last days
of celluloid is about to get even more complicated.

In the '90s, this Iranian filmmaker,
Abbas Kiarostami,

seemed to worship reality in a way
that few artists ever did.

He started by trying to reduce all falseness
from the process of filmmaking.

This film, Where is the Friend's Home?
[Khane-ye doust kodjast?]

is a triumphant result
of Kiarostami's filming

like a football coach.

He selected a great young player actor,
Babek Ahmed Poor,

put him in a world that he knew,

this ordinary courtyard house
in northern Iran.

Kept the camera on the sidelines,
and asked Babek to do scenes

he could understand.

Here he talks to his mother
about his homework book.

Where is the Friend's Home?
was one of the greatest films

about childhood and friendship.

But then tragedy struck.

A terrible earthquake hit the region where
Where is the Friend's Home? was filmed.

50,000 people died,
including 10,000 kids.

Kiarostami and his crew drove
there at once, in tears, to look for Bebak.

Instead, when they got there,
they found something else: human resilience.

In looking for one thing,
they found another.

And so, Kiarostami decided
to make a film about them

going to an earthquake zone
to look for the boy.

Reality doubling back
on itself again.

It was called: And life goes on.
[Life and Nothing More...] [Zendegi va digar hich]

This man is playing Kiarostami.

In this shot, it was Kiarostami himself
who was behind the camera talking to the man.

The second film's mostly set
in the car.

On the second shoot,
Kiarostami met a man called Hussein,

who had a passionate story
about life going on.

Hussein got married
just days after the earthquake.

Kiarostami loved this.

Here in the second film,
using a static camera

and naturalistic dialogue,
Kiarostami depicts himself

meeting Hussein
and hearing this story.

Whilst filming this small scene,
Hussein, despite being married,

became rather infatuated
with the woman playing his fianc�e.

She, however,
did not return his feelings.

Kiarostami was fascinated
by this.

His response to it was unique
in movie history.

Two years later, he made
this whole third film

about the feelings during
Hussein's small scene in the second film.

The same actors, the camera's still static,
but it's further back this time.

We see a director who's playing
the man who was playing Kiarostami.

Hussein goes upstairs
to try to woo the new woman.

An objective frontal shot.

And then Kiarostami films
from her position,

and then his point of view.

Through the olive trees
[Zire darakhatan zeyton]

was about Hussein's infatuation
but also, you could say,

about Kiarostami's love of his love
and how he tried to film it,

and how cinema can film
the complex layers of reality.

And how cameras
can change lives.

This complex trilogy
about the circle of life and love

had started 7 years earlier
with this reserved boy

filmed from the sidelines.

Seven years later
filmed from a car.

Kiarostami's favorite way
of looking at the world.

Bebak suddenly appears again,
taller, but still serious.

He was still alive after all.

A country that didn't invent cinema,
that wasn't rich enough

to have a major film industry.

A country, whose religion, Islam,
was in some way suspicious of imagery,

was, in the last days of celluloid,
using film devotionally, as if it's sacred.

As if what it films is sacred.

One critic said, "we're living
in the era of Kiarostami."

Just as the Lord of the Rings
movies were coming at us,

like an express train,
Kiarostami's love of simple reality

captured the spirit
of his times.

Far away from the snowy north of Iran,
film was also being used to transfigure,

to focus on real people
not hobbits or virtual reality.

So far in the story of film,
Hong Kong has been associated

with action movies of Bruce Lee
and what came after.

But one team of Hong Kong
new wave filmmakers

made films with
such an intoxicating look and texture,

that they seemed to be celebrating
the sheen of celluloid itself,

and the romantic melancholia
of real life.

To watch even a few frames of
Days of Being Wild,
[Ah fei zing zyun]

the first distinctive film of Wong Kar-Wai,
his designer-editor muse, William Chang,

and their cinematographer,
Chris Doyle,

is to notice the soft shadowing
and shallow focus and gorgeous colors.

The beauty
of the sad, lonely people.

Wong trained
as a graphic designer.

He found the martial arts
films of the Shaw brothers

too bright eyed
and bushy tailed.

Young people
were sadder than that.

Fluorescent light, saturated color,
and the landscape of faces,

together, create
the beauty of the Wong world.

To travel around Hong Kong today

is to feel Wong's sense of time,
and color, and composition.

Time drags its heels.

This exquisite film,
In the Mood for Love,
[Faa yeung nin wa]

sums up the night-time
celluloid vision of Wong's team.

Time's slowed down.

A woman slaloms past a man.

He glances.

We're in Hong Kong in 1962.

Music in 3/4 time.

Suddenly it rains
like in a movie.

Steam and rain.

We feel the sultry heat.

The man and the woman
are in separate marriages but are unhappy.

Lonely.

Heads lowered.

They're in the mood for love.

As in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
and Terrence Davies,

hope has left the building,
so rapture has migrated

into the imagery and sound.

Maggie Cheung and Wong's team
had created

one of the most striking personas
in world cinema.

Soon, Cheung was playing
a silent movie icon in France.

In a telling comment on what directors
sometimes do to actors,

the director, Olivier Assayas,
literally scribbled on the celluloid.

And in neighboring Taiwan,
moviemakers seemed haunted by slow,

photographic truths, and real,
not fantasy worlds, too.

Bernardo Bertolucci said
that this Taiwanese director,

Tsai Ming-liang,
reinvented film language.

Tsai is influenced
by Taiwanese history.

Along with Edward Yang,
Hou Hsiao-hsien

used film to stare intensely
at Taiwanese society.

This is his movie,
A City of Sadness.
[Bei qing cheng shi]

It's the late 1940s.

An uneasy moment of stasis
in Taiwan's turbulent history.

Hou captures this stasis
by using long static shots.

They average more
than 40 seconds each.

Hou said that holding a long shot
has a certain kind of tension.

The pleasure and intellectual distinction
of Hou's films lies in their rigor.

Take this scene for example.

One of the brothers in the story
is treated in a local hospital.

The story takes us back
to the hospital several times.

An ordinary director might want
to vary the shots on each return

but Hou shoots
from the exact same camera angle.

Reality, doubling back
on itself again.

Not a reverse angle
or alternative shot.

If A City of Sadness
is about national recall,

Hou seems to suggest that we
remember places in just one way.

Hsiao-hsien revered the other master
of special rigor: Yasujiro Ozu.

His frames within frames,
square on imagery, no camera moves.

Like Ozu, Hou seldom
uses big close-ups.

Space in Hou is not something
to move through at speed,

as it was for most '80s directors
and, later, films like The Matrix.

This makes Hou the great classicist
of cinema's modern era.

Hou's bold seriousness
paved the way for Tsai.

Tsai's second film,
Vive l'Amour,
[Ai qing wan sui]

is about the loneliness
of life in modern cities.

At its end, a young woman
walks to a park bench and cries.

We don't know exactly why.

Waves of emotion cross her face
as the sun comes out.

Tsai's camera remains static.

A scene that's the opposite
of fantasy cinema like "Terminator 2."

Tsai believes in the fascination
of the human face.

James Cameron's, Avatar,
was coming soon and was great fun.

But Tsai's focus on real human bodies
was timely indeed.

Move from Taiwan
to Japan in the '90s,

and you find movie makers
who were using film in the opposite way

to those we've met so far
in the last days of celluloid.

Many of Japan's best directors
used film to scare us.

Their movies were so distinctively made,
and so often re-made by Hollywood,

that a new term,
"J-horror," was coined.

To get under the skin of '90s J-horror
let's start with one of its pioneers,

this man, Shin'ya Tsukamoto,
Japan's movie cyberpunk.

In Tsukamoto's film, Tetsuo,
an ordinary Japanese man

starts to turn into metal.

The handheld, punky,
black and white imagery,

captures the man's terror
and disorientation.

And in the sequel to Tetsuo,
in which a man is transformed into a gun,

Tsukamoto used 43 seconds
of single frame images

of biology and women and space.

The technique of Abel Gance
way back in 1923.

One-thousand images to represent

the flickering decay
in the man's cellular life.

Tetsuo's wild energy
was a brilliant expression

of modern life's fear
of machinery and computerization.

But then came
Hideo Nakata's, Ringu.

The most influential
horror movie of its time.

Imagery colored Navy blue,
a haunted young woman,

industrial noise,
and screeching.

It was Japan's biggest ever
international box office hit.

In the last days of celluloid,
in the country of Sony and Panasonic,

the object of fear
was the video image itself.

A human emotion
about a digital future.

The scary thing, the girl, climbed
out of the video image into our homes.

Nakata saw and loved
The Exorcist.

He borrowed its domestic setting,
innocent girl possessed by the devil,

it's banging
and sudden violence.

Alright, let's see
what the deal is.

And he borrowed, too, the eerie calm
of the dreamlike female ghost

with the long black hair
in Ugetsu Monogatari.

Nakata put this demonism
and grace into his film,

which was about people
who die after watching a videotape.

The sound in the videotape combined
a remarkable 50 tracks FX.

Real sound doubling
back over itself.

Ringu's scenes of the dead
walking amongst us

and its avoidance
of the Christian idea of the human soul,

made it distinctly Asian.

Takashi Miike's film,
Audition, [�dishon ]

also seemed to take place
in a floating world.

A TV producer
has advertised for actresses.

A shy young woman
with long black hair shows up.

Echoes of Ugetsu Monogatari
and Ringu.

The camera
is as stable as Ozu's.

Miike uses such blankness and minimalism
to wrong foot us before the terror.

We visit the woman's apartment.

She is waiting
for the TV producer to call.

He does.

She smiles.

In the background
of the shot is a sack.

Horrific realization
that she has tied someone in it.

Japanese directors of the '90s
were using stillness

as a counter point to violence
in an almost Buddhist way.

This and a chain
of Japanese fears

of the atomic bomb, of machinery,
of video, and of women,

had led to the most distinctive
horror films in a generation.

If the Iranian's worshipped reality
in the last days of celluloid

and the Japanese
were scared of it,

here in Copenhagen, movie makers
made a revolutionary manifesto about it.

They wanted to get back to the basics
of filmmaking and to human nature

and to distance themselves
from fantasy cinema.

A group of filmmakers who work in
this sleepy looking, former army barracks

outside Copenhagen,
led the revolution, carried the banner.

These filmmakers had won scores
of international awards.

They call this wall
their wall of shame, not fame.

They only hire lawyers if they can
also play a musical instrument.

They swim naked
in this unheated pool.

They've quotations
from chairman Mao on their walls.

This editing table, which belonged
to the world's most quietly spoken filmmaker,

Carl Theodor Dreyer,
sits like a shrine in their corridor.

What sort of filmmakers
live here?

Hippies?

Punks?

Provocateurs?

Yes, yes, and yes.

And their leading light
is this man, Lars Von Trier.

Von Trier works
in this former ammunitions bunker,

backed up against the world.

In 1995, he and Thomas Vinterberg,

took a leaf out of the books
of Bresson and Pasolini,

by arguing that cinema
had to become primitive again.

They said that the new wave
had turned to muck.

In their manifesto, they pledged
a "vow of chastity"

to the following daunting rules:

The camera must be
taken off the tripod.

The shape of the screen
must not be wide.

No sets should be built.

Real locations should be used.

No props should be brought
to those locations.

No music should be used.

No lighting can be added.

No flashbacks, and the director
must not take credit.

All reminiscent of what Abbas Kiarostami
was doing at this time in Iran.

A celebration of the primitive in cinema,
in the days before computer generated imagery.

I know you love me.

Von Trier's best film of the '90s,
Breaking the Waves,

broke many of the Dogma rules,
but was revelatory and fresh.

It's about the suffering
of this naive young Scottish woman, Bess.

Von Trier follows her
with mostly handheld shots

as life does its worst to her.

Is there anything
I can do for you?

Anything at all?

I'd like you to go to Jan
and pray for him to be cured,

and to rise
from his bed and walk.

The actors were free
to move anywhere.

Trier did take after take.

Then edited together
the moments of each take,

which seemed to him most true,

even if they were out of focus
or broke the 180 degree axis rules.

The ultimate movie roughness.

We saw a thing on an American
television thing, called Homicide,

which I'm sure you know that was kind
of a "ground-breaker" so to say.

There was a lot of time cuts
and no continuity and all this stuff.

And that was really
a burden to be freed of, I think.

And I've kind of toyed around
with that ever since.

- Are there people like Goddard
had done something similar?

Yeah, but that was kind of
more in a stylized way,

and this was kind of more to...
kind of be free of the whole thing

and more like, you know,
if you cut a documentary

you don't care if the cigarette has,
you know, is as long as in the other shot.

Or you know, you don't care.

And if you film, when you film these
jet planes coming flying into twin towers,

you know, you don't care
which side of the axis you are.

And nobody in doubt of where the planes
are coming from or you know.

It was, for me, anyway,
very nice to get rid of.

At the end of Breaking the Waves,
Bess dies, and then this happens.

The most audacious moment
in the whole of world cinema of the '90s.

Bess' partner realizes
she's gone to heaven.

Then the camera is
suddenly in heaven.

A static shot with heavenly bells
on either side of the screen.

Most movies are secular,
but Breaking the Wave's ending was Christian.

The good thing about going too far,
you know, is that if you kind of...

If you see films that are going too far
you kind of...

...you kind of make a mark,
"how long did I stay with it?"

Right?

A lot of people didn't stay
with the bells.

And they... But they... some of them said
that it was a good film, the rest of it.

In Breaking the Waves,
and in this later Von Trier film, Dogville,

he sometimes operated
the camera himself,

often touching Nicole Kidman
during a scene like this.

This intimacy between director
and actor was new in film history.

Dogville was even more innovative
than Breaking the Waves.

Trier used no sets,
buildings or props.

A technique as daring
as it must have been scary.

No, I was not scared, no, no.

Because I've...

...you know, if you go back
to the '70s there was a lot of...

People did much more strange things
and they worked.

You know?

So, I was... No, I was pretty sure
that it would work.

But it only of course works
if you want it to work, as an audience.

And no, I was not... I remember,

one of Nicole's friends, Russell Crowe,
came to the set and he said

"this demands an explanation!"

And I said, "not from me!"

You know?

No, no. I'm very pleased
with "Dogville".

Again we follow the suffering
of a woman.

This time in an America village.

The villagers start
to enslave the woman.

In the end they shackle her,
like a dog.

It was quite unlike "Dogville" to restrain
its indignation on any point.

Perhaps things
had turned out well after all!

Good morning, Mrs. Henderson

Oh! Morning.

I would have come earlier
but I overslept

Oh, never mind.

Liz put her back into it
this morning.

Von Trier again breaks the
editing rules.

Like his Scandinavian heroes,
Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer,

many of Von Trier's films
are about suffering women.

But whereas in most movies
the women are distant objects of desire,

Von Trier's women
seem to be versions of himself.

I think I must admit that I'm...
That it's very much me in the women.

I don't know
why it has become this way.

But first of all, for me,
it's much easier to work with actresses.

Whereas men, I think...

Or can be more difficult because
they want to confront you, you know?

And want to discuss which way
we're going which is something

that's difficult because sometimes
you don't know,

you just have a feeling, which is something
that actresses for some reason has...

It's easier for them to accept,
I think.

Or, it's easier for them to accept
that they...

...cannot give in to the project
in another way.

Von Trier once said that a film
should be like a pebble in a shoe.

No, I... The films that I like,
they hurt a little bit.

A lot of films are, you know,
reproductions.

And I don't believe so much
in doing that.

A lot of people do that,
so I'm trying to make something...

...that in some sense makes
a little mark or a little pain.

The primitive radicalism
of the Dogma manifesto

and the searing,
sometimes mocking emotions of Von Trier

made it and him amongst the most talked
about artists of their time.

In the days before wizards
and hobbits,

the Dogma films showed
human nature, warts and all.

Jump from Copenhagen
to this train in France in the '90s,

and you find a bunch
of French language directors reacting,

like Lars Von Trier,
against glossy fantasy cinema.

Celebrating truth and celluloid,
but doing so with more working class

and ethnically diverse characters.

This film, La Haine, was shot
in contrast-y black and white.

It's sometimes static camera
stared at its blank characters.

It was filmed here.

Not in fancy Paris
but in the banlieue,

the housing estates on the outskirts,
at the end of the train line.

Director Mathieu Kassovitz,
took as his starting point,

the real life shooting
whilst in police custody of a black teenager.

Kassovitz shows us the day
in the life of several youths.

The first we meet, Said,
is Islamic.

Not for Kassovitz the hand held,
unplugged cinema of Lars Von Trier.

He tracks into Said, in slow-mo.

Then cranes over his head,
like Sergio Leone.

The beauty of old style film techniques
in the last days of celluloid.

Then we meet Vinz,
we see him dancing.

It turns out to be
a dream sequence.

Vinz is filmed in deep space,
like Orson Welles or John Ford.

Vinz gets up
and goes to the bathroom.

Kassovitz uses two actors
mimicking each other.

There's no mirror.

If there was we'd see
the camera reflected in it.

There are two sets of toothbrushes
to enhance the illusion.

Then Vinz starts to mimic
Robert de Nero in Taxi Driver.

Kassovitz had been influenced
by Spike Lee's, Do the Right Thing,

whose precise framing and heightened color,
showed that films about street life

didn't have to be hand held,
or without style.

Far from it.

The street was style, form, grace.

La Haine used the old beauty
of film to show new truths

about multicultural,
working class France.

This film, Bruno Dumont's L'Humanit�,
is also about working class France

but its film style
is totally different.

It's shot in color.

Its camera hardly moves.

None of the craning
of La Haine.

This opening shot shows
a distant police man

walking across a landscape.

But then, we see him
on the ground.

He's been traumatized
by something.

A girl has been raped.

The blank face of people
in Robert Bresson films.

The film has a cold stare,
like marble.

It's as un-glossy
as an early silent film, shot on celluloid.

Later, astonishingly,
the man seems to levitate.

Dumont has the shot
framed far back

so we just clock that his feet
are off the ground.

Maybe he's a Saint.

And in the very last image
the man is filmed in medium long shot,

turned away from us,
and we glimpse handcuffs on him.

Could the policeman
be the rapist?

Or maybe he's a simple, innocent man
who's suffering for all our sins.

As devoted to real, not fantasy people,
were the Belgian, former documentarists,

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

Like Kassovitz and Dumont,
they took as their subject

disenfranchised life
in contemporary Europe.

Rosetta was
about this feral teenage girl

who's desperate for a job.

The brother's brilliantly
simple stylistic innovation

was to have her run throughout the film
and follow her with a hand held camera.

Like Dumont they seldom used
the shot-reverse shot techniques

which were established
in the movies by about 1913.

Always moving forward with their camera,

gave a unique sense
of being at the shoulder of the girl

as she runs through the world
looking for work.

It's a very easy thing
to learn, you know.

Perhaps the greatest French language
director of celluloid in the '90s and since

has been this woman:
Claire Denis.

She worked with Wim Wenders,
and is thought of as an art movie director,

but insists
that film is universal.

I would love, in a second life,

to be a sort
of James Cameron, you know?

For me there is no difference

between a James Cameron
and a Claire Denis, you know?

I want to make film.

Denis grew up in Africa
and greatly admired this film,

in which the rebellious young man
slaughters oxen

then puts their horns
on his motor bike.

Old and new Africa
in a single image.

I saw "Touki Bouki"
which for me, it still is,

one of the greatest films
I've seen about hope.

Teenage hopes, you know,
something like that.

I am a white person who grew up in Africa
and it's a very powerful experience.

We, people, growing in a country
possessed by white people

but knowing
we were not from there,

and it was wrong, make us immensely
not willing to be giving lessons.

This is Denis's extraordinary
African film, Beau Travail.

Its colors are beautiful,
burnt umber earth, azure sea.

Jean-Luc Godard said
that the history of cinema

is the history of men
photographing women.

But in "Beau Travail,"
a woman photographs men.

French legionaries,
intrinsically.

Here they walk around each other
like they're in a classic western gunfight,

but Denis is more interested
in the choreography than the aggression.

They fight.

Denis films the fight minimally
without testosterone.

A single punch, slow motion.

The main character
decides to kill himself.

Close-ups of his body.

We see the blood pumping
in his veins.

The rhythm of his life.

And then,
apparently after his death,

we see a final scene,
this extraordinary dance sequence.

He's filmed full height,
as Fred Astaire was in Hollywood musicals.

The last days of disco.

The last days of celluloid.

This scene, it was written in the script
that he was going to the night club.

Empty.

Dancing a goodbye
to his life of a legionnaire.

Dance to death.

And then, in the script after, in Marseilles,
he was killing himself, you know?

But I shot the dance scene in Djibouti
before shooting Marseilles.

And when we did it, I was so moved,
and Denis was moved too.

We were all moved.

Only one take, you know?

I thought, "My God. How can I have
that scene before?"

Him, in his bed, taking the gun
to shoot himself down, you know?

I think it's not fair,
it's better if the gun, the last scene,

comes before and I keep
this dance scene

as his last dream or as his last...

The last moment he remembers, you know?

Something... Plenty of life.

Denis compared this last dance scene
to ending of Ozu's film Late Spring.

In that case the father alone.

He is peeling his apple like a lonely man
instead of sharing the apple.

And the way he's peeling the apple
is also an elegant gesture, you know?

Like the dance of Denis Lavant
at the end of "Beau Travail".

It's very close in a way,
you know?

It's... You're very sad,
it's the end of something and, yet,

to show something that is, like
this beautiful loop who is the apple skin.

And I think, of course
it's the way Ozu touch us deep.

Deep in where we cannot resist.

Claire Denis was using celluloid
in a non-masculine way in the 1990s

and so was the Polish director
of this film, Dorota Kedzierzawska.

We're on a boat.

This little girl's been kidnapped
by an older girl

who's always ignored by her mom.

This is the older girl.

She's pretending
to be a mum herself.

Kedzierzawska uses old fashioned,
almost square frames.

She keeps the filmmaking
as simple as possible

in order not to distract the girls to get
these touchingly naturalistic performances.

The film's color coded in
yellows and greens.

Crows [Wrony ] is a movie
about the human face,

the very thing that the coming digital age
will struggle to depict.

And this film boldly shows the simple fact
that photographing human beings

is one of cinemas great strengths.

We're in St. Petersburg.

Director Viktor Kossakovsky,
has tracked down every single person

who was born in the city
on the day that he was.

Wednesday,
the 19th of July, 1961.

He follows a man
as he walks the street.

Films others
as they stand in traffic.

This person as he makes music.

And this woman
as she gives birth.

All photographed naturally,

documentary style.

In just 93 minutes, we feel we meet
a whole generation, a huge range of people

even though each is on screen
on average for less than one minute.

Wednesday [Sreda]
was a celebration

of real human beings
in the last days of celluloid.

This man, Michael Haneke,
saw them as dark days.

In this documentary we see him tell
the actor how to hit an actress.

The threat of violence in his work,

and he's always consulting
his marked up screenplay,

which shows how
meticulously planned his films are.

Haneke studied philosophy
and started making films in 1989.

Here is his film Code Unknown.

This is one of the first shots
which lasts over 11 minutes.

No cut and the camera starts
to move complexly, like in a... film.

A white lad throws rubbish
at a Kosovan refugee who's begging.

A black man confronts him.

A very unsettling scene of tension
and conflict in modern life.

But Haneke makes his point,
that we don't connect as human beings

in European cities,
with a brilliant stylistic coup.

Each long shot goes to black
before the next comes onto the screen.

Even the shots don't touch.

This was revolutionary.

But it's this earlier film by Haneke,
Funny Games,

which really sums up
the last days of celluloid.

The anxiety, the sense
that something is on the brink,

that human beings
are becoming unreal.

Two youths visit their neighbors
to borrow eggs.

The neighbors
are a nice middle class family.

The boys are dressed in white
and wear white gloves

like archivists, or thieves,
or angels of death.

They brutally
terrorize the family.

Calmly, often off screen.

The power of suggestion.

The violence
that's potentially in all of us.

To break down the barrier
between them and us,

Haneke has the boys wink
at the camera, the audience.

This is unsettling,
but it's not ground-breaking.

But this scene
is ground-breaking.

The boys take a TV handset
and press rewind.

The TV in the film doesn't rewind,
the film itself does,

the sort of thing that people sometimes do
in the privacy of their own homes,

something that would never happen
in the age of celluloid.

Haneke is saying that we might
be enjoying vicariously the violence.

He's saying: "Go on, you know you want to,
you're a degenerate, we all are."

The film rewinding
is as shocking as this scene

in Ingmar Bergman's Persona,
where the film melts.

In both cases, we're suddenly
at a new level, in a new position.

The spell is broken
and we're woken up.

To what?

Something massive
to get our heads around.

A digital world, where seeing
is no longer believing.

Where suddenly the people
on screen are avatars,

or Neo in The Matrix,
or Harry Potter, or hobbits.

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