All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 3 - 1918 -1932 - The Great Rebel Filmmakers

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

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

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

It's passion, innovation!

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

To discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of 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 meet
the dazzling filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein

and discover the glories
of Japanese films in the 1930's.

What great years for cinema
were the 1920s and early '30s.

Entertainment cinema was at
its most glittering.

Yet rebellious directors around
the world challenged its glitter.

This battle for the soul
of cinema made it splendid.

In entertainment,
romantic cinema of the '20s,

people looked like this:

soft lighting.

Shallow focus.

Make-up.

Dreamlike.

But, as we've seen, some
of the first rebels

were the great realist directors
who, in a scene like this,

scrubbed mainstream
cinema of its fantasy,

its gloss, even its make-up.

But this was only the
beginning of the revolution

against romantic cinema
in these years.

Around the world,
seven further sets of rebels

saw in film new
20th century ways

of getting beneath the surface
of what it's like to be alive.

Film was their laboratory.

The glory of '20s and
early '30s cinema

was the result of their
obsessions, ideas, and societies.

After the realists,
the second challenge

to conventional cinema in the '20s
came from this man, Ernst Lubitsch.

At first he acted in movies.
He's like an inept seducer.

Over-acting,
an adolescent almost.

In the films he directed,
he mocked the heavy-handed,

almost victorian way,
that sex and love

were shown in the
movies, and came up

with a style that
was all his own.

This scene from his early
film The Oyster Princess

shows Lubitsch's mocking,
subversive tone.

A capitalist smokes
a ridiculously fat cigar.

He has an army of stenographers.

And his assistants, of course,
are all black.

And few directors
anywhere in the world

were as visually daring
as Lubitsch.

In this film, The Mountain Cat,
[Die Bergkatze]

a girl falls in love with a lieutenant,
so he gives her his heart.

She eats it.

Snowmen come to life
and play music.

The film's a riot
of surreal production design.

Its screen masking
is even more daring.

Such virtuosity was noticed
by Hollywood, of course,

and The Mountain Cat was
Lubitsch's last film

before moving there.

American censorship meant
that Lubitsch had to be inventive

in how he portrayed
sexuality there.

Look at this scene in his
hugely successful American film,

The Marriage Circle.

A psychiatrist and his wife
are at breakfast.

We see a close up of an egg,
then of a coffee cup.

She stirs her coffee.

Then his hand disappears,
then hers.

The breakfast is pushed aside.

A more urgent urge than
that to eat has overtaken them.

Lubitsch films nothing of
their lovemaking of course,

but his use of objects,
is a cinematic equivalent

of a raised eyebrow,
far more daring

in his suggestion of sexuality
than Chaplin or Keaton or Lloyd.

Lubitsch went on to make more
sparkling comedies in America

in the '30s and '40s,
and ran the Paramount studio.

Billy Wilder, who made Double Indemnity
and Some like it Hot,

had this sign on his office wall,
"how would Lubitsch do it?"

Where Lubitsch was
innovative with film comedy,

the third assault
on the conventions of '20s cinema

came from this city, Paris.

The pioneering Lumi�re brothers
had been influenced

by impressionist painters.

And now filmmakers like Germaine Dulac,
Abel Gance, and Marcel L'Herbier

used cinema in an
impressionist way too.

Like this: our restless eyes
darting around, scanning, not cutting.

This showed how people
actually see things

and how mental images
repeat and flicker.

This film, La Roue,
is a grand work of impressionism.

It strangely begins with images
of its writer-producer-director,

Abel Gance.

Then tells the story
of a complex love triangle.

One of the men
in the triangle falls off a cliff.

The woman he loves
runs to save him.

We feel fear for him.

But then his own fear
makes images

of his beloved
flash in his inner eye.

We're inside his head.

The movie screen becomes
his inner eye.

Romantic cinema had many
cliffhangers of course,

but its images
always had to be readable.

Here, some of Gance's
shots last just one frame.

Far too fast for us to take
them in one by one.

They flash past, giving us
an impression of his final moments.

The poet and filmmaker
Jean Cocteau later said,

'there is cinema before
and after La Roue,

just as there is painting
before and after Picasso.'

The Soviet directors Vsevolod
Pudovkin, Sergei M. Eisenstein

and Aleksandr Dovzhenko
studied it in Moscow.

But Gance hadn't yet peaked.

In the following four years,
he wrote, directed, and edited

a 4-hour impressionist film
about the early life

of Napoleon Bonaparte, the
French revolutionary,

national leader, and militarist.

Portraying its main
character as a tragic hero

and making mainstream romantic
cinema look static in comparison.

To capture the dynamism
of the man, his fistfights

and horserides and
battlecharges and storms at sea,

Gance rethought
the camera's relationship to movement.

Gance had a fur-covered sponge

mounted around the lens
so that the boys

could punch right up
to it and not get hurt.

In the first scenes of Napoleon,
as a young man in Corsica,

Gance attached a compressed
air powered camera

to the saddle of a horse
to capture Bonaparte's kinetic energy.

How would Gance top such dynamism
at the climax of the movie,

when Napoleon enters Italy,
a landgrab which the film fails to condemn?

How would he outdo
the epic imagery

and grand sets of
Pastrone's, Cabiria,

and D.W. Griffith's, Intolerance,
which had come before?

Here's the answer.

He filmed with three cameras
mounted on top of each other,

each pointing
in a slightly different direction.

Audiences had to turn their heads
to see the whole spectacle.

Napoleon had its
world premiere here,

the Paris opera.

The Los Angeles times called it,
' the measure for all other films, ever'.

But, despite such acclaim,
it was shown infrequently.

In 1979, after a mammoth restoration
of the negative

by British historian
Kevin Brownlow,

Napoleon was triumphantly
screened here,

at the Telluride film festival
in Colorado.

Gance, then aged 89,
traveled to the screening,

and watched the film from his hotel room
across the street from the outdoor cinema.

The last time he saw his masterpiece
of impressionist filmmaking.

In Germany,
in the late 1910s and '20s,

the fourth innovative challenge
to mainstream romantic cinema emerged.

Directors wanted to show deeper
aspects of the human mind

than the French impressionism
of Abel Gance.

Influenced by the so-called
expressionist painters

and theatre designers, whose work
was jagged like a broken mirror,

they began making
expressionist films.

Less than 30 were made,

but they were exported
all around the world.

Germany had just been
defeated in an appalling war

but, because it closed its borders
to foreign films in 1916,

its home grown film industry
was stimulated.

The most influential of
the expressionist movies

was this one,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Directed by Robert Wiene,

which was made
before Chaplin's first feature,

or the accession
of emperor Hirohito in Japan.

It was full of fear,
haunting murders, graphic rooms.

Where studio filmmakers filmed indoors,
excluding daylight,

and Scandinavians
did the opposite,

director Wiene and his chief designer,
Hermann Warm,

found an apparently revolutionary
third way.

They flooded their set
with flat light

and then painted shadows
directly onto the walls and floor.

Cesare, a sleepwalker
on show at fairgrounds,

murders the enemies of his master,
Dr. Caligari, at night.

This story had a political edge.

Caligari represented
the controlling German state.

Cesare represented ordinary people,
manipulated by it.

But director Wiene,
and his producer Erich Pommer,

removed the film's political bite
by adding this ending

that showed that the whole thing
was the dream of a mad man, Feher,

and that Dr. Caligari's
not evil after all

and that the German state
doesn't control its people.

Filming took place here,
at the Babelsberg studio near Berlin.

The film's bizarre imagery took the
question of point of view in cinema

further even
than the French impressionists.

The film's spaces slice
like shards of glass.

Its jagged lighting showed
the extreme mental state of Feher.

Caligari has echoed
down the years.

This film, Charles Klein's
The Tell Tale Heart,

shows its direct influence.

The seminal British
director, Alfred Hitchcock,

who worked in Germany,
made his first important film

The Lodger, with some
of the shadowing and hysteria of Caligari.

But the most astonishing outgrowth
of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

came in Japan in the early '20s.

Former actor, Teinosuke Kinugasa,
saw it and Abel Gance's La Roue,

and then made this film,
A Page of Madness.

This is the opening scene.

A tempest.

An asylum.

Visual overlays, fast cutting
as in La Roue.

A woman dancing
in an art deco setting.

The woman's in the asylum.

In complex flashbacks
we find out

that she has tried
to drown her child.

Her husband takes
a job in the asylum to try to help her,

but then his mental state
deteriorates too.

A Page of Madness goes
further than Caligari

because it's not just the central
character who's psychotic,

the film itself, its editing and imagery,
seems psychotic too.

A Page of Madness

combined the fleeting techniques
of impressionism,

with the deep unease
of expressionism,

and is the second great Japanese film
that exists, after Souls on the Road.

Back in Germany, Fritz Lang,
the Viennese son of an architect,

started making films about
the deep structure of society

rather than the surface claims
it makes for itself.

Lang made the most iconic film
of the silent era,

a movie that might have been
made by an architect.

Metropolis,
set in the year 2000,

tells the story of clashes
between workers

and an authoritarian industrialist
in a giant city.

Like a fantasy New York.

Roads and railways in the sky.

Brilliant model shots.

A young woman, Maria,
inspires the workers

and is almost Christ-like,
but the industrialist builds a robot

that looks like her
to manipulate the masses.

The robot is a deco mannequin,
lit with flashing lights,

symmetrically framed.

The astonishing opening eyes
of the woman, enhanced by make-up.

But in the end Maria
and the industrialist's son

save the city, and workers
and owners are united.

In a scene that seems to take place
on the steps of a cathedral.

Lang's cityscapes and robotics,
exploitation and urban paradise,

were profoundly influential.

The Hollywood director,King Vidor,
loved Metropolis and, as a result,

there are expressionist echoes
of it in his city film, The Crowd.

Adolf Hitler liked Metropolis.

And the inmates of the
Nazi concentration camp, Mauthausen,

compared the huge ramp that they had to build
to this one from Metropolis.

Metropolis was shot here,
over a year and a half,

using 2 million feet of film
and 36,000 extras.

Cities were scary things in the '20s,
but poetic too.

In this expressionist masterpiece,
Sunrise,

a man and wife walk
through the world together.

So wrapped up in each
other they don't notice

the traffic around them.

The city becomes nature.

And then city again.

But then joy becomes tragedy.

On the way back from the city,
the wife seems to drown in a lake.

Grief stricken, the man blames the city,
and a woman from it.

A woman who tried to seduce him.

She showed him visions
of bright lights, of dancing.

She's a symbol of greed and speed.

Sunrise was made
by the German director F.W. Murnau,

one of the greatest directors
who ever lived.

This is him, the tall man
on the extreme right,

dancing in Sunrise.

Looking a bit awkward and shy,

as he did in real life.

This is where he lived.

Although, Murnau actually
made the film in Hollywood.

Unusually, he was offered
total freedom to do so.

He had this gigantic city set built.

And made the most
of the subtle lighting effects

available in Hollywood.

In the end, the city woman,
the symbol of modernity and avarice,

leaves and the life of the man and wife
becomes like a German romantic painting.

Sunrise was voted the best film
of all time by French critics.

The French poetic realists of the 1930s
considered Murnau their master.

He seemed to see into the human
heart more than other directors

and make haunting visual .

Murnau died in a car crash
in California in 1931.

This is his death mask.

In both Germany and France in the '20s,

movies had become
intellectually fashionable.

They were all the rage
in art schools.

And so it's no surprise
that experimental artists and filmmakers

pushed movies even further
away from the Hollywood norms

than German expressionism.

They were the fifth set of rebels
to challenge conventional cinema

in the '20s and '30s.

Walter Ruttman's Opus 1
looked like biology.

He painted on glass,
filmed the result,

wiped the wet paint,
added more, and filmed again.

One of the first abstract
animations.

Dada was an art movement
of mockery, anarchy, comedy.

In 1924 the dadaist, Francis Picabia,
commissioned this film, Entr'act

to play in the
interval in a ballet.

Rene Clair, the former journalist
who made it,

put the camera in places
that a conventional ballet

could only dream of.

Right underneath the dancer,
or at the barrel of a dancing Cannon.

Said Picabia of the result,
'it respects nothing

but the desire
to burst out laughing.'

Also in France, the Brazilian,
Alberto Cavalcanti,

made this haunting
experimental film.

It was about seeing
a city, its ordinary life,

the power of imagery
to reveal and evoke.

Nearly 20 years later,
the surrealist Salvador Dali

used its imagery of multiple eyes,
in a dream sequence

he designed for Alfred Hitchcock's
film Spellbound.

It seemed to be
a gambling house.

But there weren't any walls,
just a lot of curtains

with eyes painted on them.

Back in 1926, Dali had spent three years
talking about dreams and desires

with Luis Bunuel, a Spanish son
of landowners.

Inspired by this conversation,
they wrote a screenplay

for this film, Un Chien Andalou,
directed by Bunuel.

It starts with an image
of Bunuel smoking.

He has a cut throat razor.

He sees a cloud going
across the moon

and either he, or the film,
imagines it as something else.

The razor cutting a woman's eye.

A shocking free association.

An attempt to show
how the unconscious works.

Then a man, dressed as a woman,
falls off his bike.

He's been carrying a box.

This is the box.

The man appears to the woman
whose eye has been sliced.

Ants are coming out of his hand.

Dissolve to a woman's armpit
and then a sea urchin.

These last three shots are
again free associations:

holes, hair, maybe excitement
and fear about sex.

This was a wildly innovative way
of editing.

Un Chien Andalou
was a direct influence

on several later films including
David Lynch's Blue Velvet,

especially this strange erotic discovery
of an ant-covered ear.

Bunuel's next film, the feature length
L'Age d'or, is still shocking.

A man and a woman are trying
to make love in the mud.

A crowd of bourgeois people
and clergy stops them.

Then the man seems to have
an image of the woman, on a toilet.

The toilet roll seems to burn.

Dissolve to lava.

Back to the man.

The film was premiered here on
December the 3rd, 1930.

Members of the fascist league of
patriots hurled ink at the screen,

and attacked the audience.

A Spanish newspaper called
it, 'the new poison

which judaism and masonry
want to use in order

to corrupt the people.'

It was out of distribution
for 50 years.

If Bunuel and L'Age d'or
completely rejected the content

of romantic cinema,
our sixth set of dissidents

completely rejected its form.

They were the most manic
of them all.

In two revolutions,
Russia dashed

to what it thought
was modernity.

Tried to make society more equal,
and violently removed its old ruling class.

It set life in a spin.

One of the children of the revolution,
an early whizz kid, Dziga Vertov,

whose name means spinning top,
made this newsreel.

The camera attached to the train,
worshipping the work of peasants.

The new boss of the Soviet Union,
V.I. Lenin, said,

'of all the arts, for us,
cinema is the most important.'

Take a bow Sergei Eisenstein,
that art's most brilliant innovator.

This is his first film.

Actors perform,
mug for the camera.

Eisenstein was one of the most
complex people in the story of film.

He was a marxist on the outside.

And an engineer too.

And perhaps a Christian
inside that.

And Jewish.

And bisexual.

He made this film
about a mutiny on a battleship.

The mutineer's supporters
on land come to pay their respects.

Then the military opens fire.

Eisenstein asked himself how
he could show the horror of the murder.

It's said that he was eating
a cherry, and threw away the stone.

It's bouncing down steps
gave him an idea.

Steps, he thought, are like
the world tilted forwards,

to form a stage.

Eisenstein decided to film
the murder on such a stage.

He'd cascade the murdered people
down the steps.

He'd studied landmine technology
and so said that he needed

a moment to detonate the murder.

This is what he came up with.

A huge caption.

Three fast shots
of a women's head ricocheting.

An umbrella.

A fall shot
with a hand held camera.

The camera on a Dolly
beside the steps.

Shots lasting, on an average,
just 3 seconds.

In American cinema in the '20s,
shots averaged 5 seconds,

in Germany 9 seconds.

Eisenstein cast this boy,
asked him to fall.

In real life the boy was
a goal keeper, so was good at falling.

His mother realizes.

Her delayed reaction
of the horror.

Her face is a myth,
a mask, primal.

And then this horrific moment.

And then this strange shot.

She walks in
a corridor of light.

The camera's mostly been on the
left, near the bottom of the steps,

but then it's here.

Top right.

A mother out of D.W. Griffith.

Eisenstein adored Griffith.

Her pram teeters.

Her dying body pushes it.

It becomes
like the cherry stone.

Falls through the killing field.

It's hard to stop your heart racing
at the Odessa steps sequence.

It's panic.

Which is what Eisenstein wanted.

He called what we've just seen
the "montage of attractions."

When we look
at the Odessa step sequence on screen,

the army stepping
on the boy moves us.

It leaps from the screen to us.

Seeing the pram moves us.

The emotions come
from the screen to us.

In our heads the two things collide
and create the idea of innocence

slaughtered by the state,
the tzar.

1+1=3.

Eisenstein says that he ploughed
the mind of the audience.

Battleship Potemkin premiered
in this cinema.

Built in 1909.
One of the oldest in the world.

The film took the world
by storm.

Charlie Chaplin loved it.

This is Eisenstein's stuff.

Walt Disney admired Eisenstein.

62 years later, Brian De Palma paid
homage to the Odessa steps sequence

in his violent American
film The Untouchables.

The same pram,
a distraught mother.

We don't hear her screams,
as if the film is silent.

Splintered editing.

Shots only a few seconds long,
like Eisenstein.

Peril.

Shooting down a grand staircase.

Some say that Eisenstein's movies
justify violence.

But the keeper of his flame,
historian Naum Kleiman,

surrounded by Eisenstein's books,
disagrees.

What Eisenstein did also
with Potemkin

is not a kind of call
for revolutionaries.

It was a very vulgar interpretation
in the '30s.

That Eisenstein teaches
how to make revolution.

Just opposite for him,
brotherhood is a law for existence.

And this film is a result
of this idea of happiness

on the earth and
also peaceful life.

And of the "violence."

This is actually...
The film is against violence in any form.

And if propaganda
then for brotherhood, but not for hate.

The humanism of Eisenstein.

A humanism that's hard
to miss really.

Eisenstein spotted humanism
in another great Soviet director of the '20s.

One night he went to a premiere of a film
by this Ukrainian: Aleksandr Dovzhenko.

As the film finished, Eisenstein said,
"mama. What goes on here?!"

Here's what goes on in
Dovzhenko's film Arsenal.

It's set at a complex time
in Ukrainian political history.

There's a war.

Women stand motionless
in the sunshine in dead villages.

It's like the women can hear
the song of war inside their heads.

A German goes mad
with laughing gas.

An astonishing image of a soldier dead,
half buried but smiling.

Here's the greatest modern Russian director,
Aleksandr Sokurov, on Dovzhenko.

Here's the original screenplay
of Dovzhenko's film Arsenal.

It's still housed in VGIK,
the film school where Eisenstein taught.

In this very room.

Lenin died of course,
and Stalin came along,

and the spinning, winning brilliance
of Soviet editing died too.

Eisenstein went on
to create more masterpieces.

Then he died in 1948.

The seventh challenge to
the Hollywood bauble,

to romantic entertainment cinema
in the '20s and early '30s,

comes from a completely
different world.

The floating world.

Japan.

Japan fought most of the world
in the 1930s and '40s and,

in its arrogance,
killed millions.

As if to compensate,
as if in horror,

its movie makers made
the most humanistic films of their times.

The most challenging of the films
were made by the gentle rebel

who's buried in this grave,
outside Tokyo.

People cross the globe,
as we did, to get here.

As you can see
they leave whiskey and wine

because the person
who lies here was a drunk.

There's no name on the grave,
no date of birth or death.

Just the Japanese character 'mu',
nothingness, the void.

The man who's buried
here, Yasujiro Ozu,

was a kind of philosopher,
but more importantly,

perhaps the greatest director
who ever lived.

No interview footage
of Ozu exists.

He didn't marry, never worked
in a factory and didn't go to university.

Yet for 30 years he made films
about the calm lives of married people,

factory workers and students.

He's thought of
as a very serious director,

yet the first movie
in which his mature style emerged,

this one, I was Born, But...
[Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo]

is an exquisite, zingy comedy
about two boys: Brothers.

Naturalistic performances.

Filmed on a low tripod,
at the boys' height.

They move to a new suburb.

The existing gang of boys
squares up against them.

A battle of wills
in a boyhood universe.

The brothers think
that their dad's a great man,

but then they see him
in an amateur film.

Goofing for his boss.

An ordinary Joe.

Humiliated.

This turns their lives
upside down.

They go on hunger strike.

Legendary critic and filmmaker
Donald Ritchie:

I was born, but...
is a 1932 film

and it's a silent film
and they're very extremely rare.

Almost all the... I would say
about 90% of all silent film has

been destroyed in Japan
by natural causes: the earthquake,

or by unnatural causes
like the bombing of Tokyo.

Ozu said himself that
it was supposed to be a comedy

but it came out
sort of dark, says Ozu.

And so, this extraordinarily honest
film which tells a lot about society,

a lot about kids, a lot about fathers,
is something where the balance is so right.

That of course,
it's a masterpiece!

That's one of the many ironies
of the film is that the boys have adjusted.

The boys could adjust
to anything.

They adjusted to their empty stomachs
and they ate their breakfast.

They adjust
to their father's being an idiot.

They adjusted to that.

They are starting to adjust
to the ways of the adult world,

which is, their father's told them
is a false world to live in.

They'll probably
never question it again.

That's what we saw
is the last of their innocence.

They are becoming equipped
for society now.

"Which is heartbreaking?"

Yeah, because society
isn't worth all that.

And Ozu seems to be telling us

that this kind of innocence
exemplified by the boys,

is precious, and that would be one
of the reasons it doesn't last.'

The boys discover what Japan itself
was about to discover in World War II.

That the emperor is just
an ordinary man.

Ozu was the great de-throner.

Unlike Akira Kurosawa,
he didn't believe in heroes.

Very un-Hollywood.

The boys see that people
are merely decent.

Resignation and disappointment
are a part of growing up.

Ozu is brilliant at
what it feels like to grow up,

what the Japanese
call "mono no aware,"

the sadness of time passing.

Here's Kyoko Kagawa,
Japan's legendary actress,

who worked for Kurosawa,
Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Ozu,

who famously framed her in mid shot,
almost looking at the camera.

Kagawa played the youngest daughter
in Ozu's most acclaimed film, Tokyo story.

Late in the film, the mother takes ill
and the daughter fans her to cool her body.

Kagawa's story gets us
to the crux of Ozu.

He used film like
no other director before or since.

It was the norm in the '30s
to have the camera at this height.

Filming from hip height
rather than shoulder height

put the camera at the
body's center of gravity

and, therefore, gave the image
a better feeling of balance.

This seldom happened in cinema.

In the '70s, Belgian Chantal Akerman's
groundbreaking film Jeanne Dielman

was one of the few movies
which used Ozu's camera height.

And this was only the start
of Ozu's innovations.

As we have seen, actors' eye lines
in mainstream cinema were usually like this

but in Ozu movies
they were often here.

In conventional films
when actors talked to each other,

the camera would usually be
at this angle to them, about 45 degrees.

This, as we have seen,
was to make it look

as if the actor's eyes
connected across the cut.

Ozu put his camera right round
between the actors,

into the scene at 90 degrees.

The actors didn't seem
to quite look at each others,

but the compostion of the images
matched each other visually.

Ozu was very interested
in matching his shots,

whether they were of human beings
or , say, interiors, in a house,

looking down a corridor.

The more you watch, the more you feel
the order of the space in his movies.

His frames were windows
on very balanced pictorial worlds.

It follows that Ozu hated
the human body to break the frame

and so he filmed from far enough back
to ensure that if someone stood up,

their head didn't disappear like this.

And he used lenses of
about 50 millimeters,

so that faces or spaces
weren't overly bulging,

as happens on a 20
or 30 millimeter lens.

And he added pauses
in his films.

This boiling kettle,
doesn't just give the story a breather.

It gives the space
a breather too.

It adds a moment
of compositional emptiness.

"Mu," the void, just as it says
on his grave.

Ozu, like the renaissance artists,
was interested in centering

the human body, and, like the Buddhists,
in decentering the human ego.

And as a result,
his movies are far away

from the straining
emotional romanticism of Hollywood.

They're the most balanced
in movie history.

It's hard to imagine any American director
getting away with breaking the rules

of filmmaking so completely,
so how does Ozu get away with it?

Part of the answer lies in the fact
that the Japanese studio system

was in the 1920s and '30s,
director-, rather than producer-led.

These are the very rooms
in Toho studio where a future director,

Akira Kurosawa, planned his seminal film,
The seven Samurai, in the 1950s.

This man built some of his sets.

Studios like these were what Orson Welles
called the biggest train set in the world.

Ozu, not a producer, would have called
the shots in such spaces too.

Another of Japan's great innovative directors
who worked at the same time as Ozu,

and whose best work comes
from the '30s and onwards was Kenji Mizoguchi.

Mizoguchi's attitude was
bang up to date modern.

He attacked the arrogance of Japan,
especially the noble pretentions

of the samurai and focused
instead on Japanese women

whose lives were made a misery.

This film, for example, is about Ayako,
a telephone operator,

who for money reasons, is
forced into prostitution

and is employed as a geisha.

The topic was very personal
for Mizoguchi.

He grew up in real poverty
and his sister was sold to a geisha house.

What's striking here is the boldness
of the staging of the scene.

Ayako is in the extreme foreground,
yet there's action in the far background.

Such staging was very rare
at the time and comes 5 years before

Orson Welles' similar
staging in Citizen Kane.

The boy, Kane,
in the far background

but still in focus, is having
an idyllic childhood experience

in the snow that he'll
remember on his death bed.

The latter's visual boldness is rightly
praised, but Mizoguchi got there first.

Kyoko Kagawa worked
with Mizoguchi much later, in the 1950s.

In this film, Chikamatsu Story,
[Chikamatsu monogatari]

she plays Osan, who's married
to a pompous husband.

In this scene he thinks
she's having an affair

so says that she
should commit suicide.

A devastating moment.

In romantic cinema it would have been
shot close up and brightly lit.

But Mizoguchi cuts away
from the expressed emotion,

behind Kagawa,
so we can't see her distraught face.

Instead of weeping with her,
we feel moral indignation at her plight.

Kagawa's husband's in Chikamatsu Story
is so horrible that her character, Osan,

flees with another man, Mohei.

Mizoguchi was known
as a woman's director,

and Kagawa feels that she learn
much for him, especially in this scene.

Back in the '30s, Mizoguchi ended
the story of telephonist Ayako

with her on a bridge,
contemplating suicide

because she's been labeled
a delinquent woman.

It's a key moment
in the story of film.

Nearly a decade later,
in an American film called Mildred Pierce,

Joan Crawford finds herself
on a similar bridge,

contemplating a similar fate.

Because this was Hollywood
romantic cinema,of course,

the attempted suicide
is depicted beautifully.

Her face sculpted in light,
shallow focus emphasizing her eyes.

It would take well-nigh two decades
before the achievements of Mizoguchi

and those of Ozu, would be
discovered, so to speak,

by the romantic
cinema of the west.

One of the greatest oversights
in movie history.

The eighth and final alternative
to western mainstream cinema

in the late '20s and '30s
comes from here: China.

In 1931, Japan
brutally invaded China.

Life was already difficult
for most Chinese,

but the ensuing war
would see 13 million die.

And at this very moment,
Chinese cinema enters the story of film.

There'd been Chinese movies
since the 1910s,

this is typical, period costumes.
An Iris, used as in Hollywood,

to point out the suitor
coming over the roof.

But in the early 1930s, China evolved
a kind of leftist realist cinema

that challenged Hollywood fantasy and,
in a scene like this,

used inventive camera angles and symbolism
to show how some men really seduce women.

This city, Shanghai,
the Paris of the east.

One of the most Cosmopolitan
cities in the world at that time,

created that challenge.

Film studios sprang up, great
directors came to the fore,

and movie stars were made.

The greatest of them all,
was this woman,

Ruan Lingyu, often called
the Chinese Greta Garbo.

Here, she's a single mother
at her son's school performance.

Money's so tight that Ruan has
been forced to sell her body

to pay for her son's education.

A lovely tracking shot
shows the whispers of disapproval.

When the school hears of her prostitution,
it shuns her, and she's imprisoned.

Women in particular
identified with Ruan.

Ruan's movies were often set
in Shanghai back streets like this.

Though those shots were usually recreated
on Shanghai movie sets like this.

People say that realistic acting
began with Marlon Brando in America,

but look at Ruan here, her weariness,
her understated gestures, her body language.

This is decades before Brando.

When Maggie Cheung played Ruan
in the film Centre stage,

director Stanley Kwan
had her repeat this famous scene.

In this film, "New Women," [Xin n� xing]
Ruan played a real life actress

who committed suicide after
being hounded by the press.

And here's the kick
to this story.

The prurient Shanghai
tabloids trashed Ruan's name

because she was modern and realistic
in a city of sparkle and cheap sex.

In response, Ruan took an overdose,
like the character she played

and died in 1935, aged just 25.

Her funeral procession
was three miles long.

Three women
committed suicide at it.

The New York times
front page called it

"the most spectacular
funeral of the century."

Today, Ruan appears
in almost no film encyclopedias.

In the coming decades, Shanghai,

the city of sex and cinema,
would build on top of its past,

and the alleyway settings
of its great '30s films,

to become a Disneyland of
capitalist consumption.

It became something
like a movie set.

And by the '40s, a
small promontory

off the south eastern coast
of the mainland had become

the new center
of Chinese filmmaking in the south.

That promontory was called
Hong Kong.

And so we get to the end
of an era in film.

Looking back on the years
between the late 1910s and the early '30s,

it's clear that they were dazzling,
maybe the greatest period

in the whole of the story of film.

It was a time of fantasy cinema
and its brilliant alternatives.

Movies were on a high.

This sublime tension
should have lasted forever.

But there's something obvious
that we haven't yet mentioned.

We didn't hear Doug's shout.

We didn't hear
Falconetti's voice.

We didn't hear Cesare's
night-time victims' scream.

The energy or tenderness of these
made a huge impression on us,

but not as things
in the real world do.

Because they were silent.

What in France is called
"deaf cinema."

Subtitles synced and corrected
by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today