All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 4 - 1930s - The Great American Movie Genres

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 master-directors

Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchkock.

And explore the beauty of French cinema

of the 1930's.

America. The end of the 20s.

The world is changing fast.

The wall street crash.

The great depression,
which would last for 12 years, begins.

The movie world upended
at the end of the 20s too.

Sound cinema was taking off.

Talking pictures sold ten million
more tickets a year than silent cinema.

There was money in sound.

So movie theatres like this one:

the Palace Theatre in Time Square,
New York, wired for sound.

Filmmaking with sound was
a whole new way of making movies.

Real locations were hard to use now
because someone was bound

to start hammering metal
or digging a road.

So filmmakers were forced back into studios
like this that were re-named sound stages.

What happened in such stages?

This scene from the 1931 film
Her Dilemma [Confessions of a Co-Ed]

shows what happened.

Because recording sound
was suddenly the main thing,

picture became secondary.

When we cut to the close
up of singer Bing Crosby,

the violinist is still playing,
in the exact same position,

slightly awkwardly framed
beside Crosby's face.

This is because it's shot with two cameras,
filming at the same time,

for sound reasons, like TV.

If the close up had been shot single camera
the violinist could have been moved

and the close up would have
looked less cluttered.

And notice the lighting.

It's flatter and more overhead than
we've seen in Hollywood movies so far,

like lighting in
a TV soap opera.

This is because, if you shoot a close up
and a wide shot at the same time

you can't light
them differently.

So at the start of the sound era,
cinema became far less cinematic.

But, again, the story of film
is full of inventive people

with ideas who
overcame these limitations.

Rouben Mamoulian directed opera
and was impatient

with static cinema
and naturalism.

In 1932, Mamoulian made a musical
that was so explosively inventive

that it makes most other films
from the time look creaky.

Love me tonight
is set in Paris.

Mamoulian is so excited
by the new possibilities of sound

that he depicts the morning awakening
of Paris as a kind of emerging symphony

of everyday noises.

Then we meet our main character,
this plucky tailor who will fall in love

with a Princess
who lives in a chateau.

The tailor sings,
isn't it romantic.

This is overheard
by this customer...

Romantic da da dad a da

Taxi!

Oh no, I need some air

Isn't it romantic?

And then picked
up by this composer.

At last I've got a fair!

Railroad station!

A, b, a, b

Who writes it down
as sheet music.

A, b flat

isn't it romantic

da da da da da

And then, turned into
a marching song by these soldiers.

Isn't it romantic...

Then it becomes fiddle music.

And finally, reaches the ears
of the stranded Princess herself.

This was sound
unifying a sequence.

Sound as a metaphor for travel.

Sound as the thing
that cinema follows.

Sound calls, image responds.

Isn't it romantic

music in the night

a dream that can be heard

But Mamoulian was
more inventive yet.

He put the sound of yappy dogs
onto a shot of old ladies to mock them.

He substituted real sound
for metaphorical sound

and, in doing so, helped free directors
from sonic literalness.

So, sound made money for the movie world
and brought new styles to cinema.

But it also helped to standardize films
into types, with recognizable stories,

styles and pleasures.

There were
six such movie genres.

They became the familiar staples of
entertainment cinema for decades to come.

There'd been horror movies
since the 1920s.

The best were German.

This one, The Golem, has
daring diagonal compositions

and beautiful expressionist design.

The Golem has been made
of clay, by a rabbi,

to protect the Jews
from persecution.

James Whale's film Frankenstein,
made in the Universal Studio

in Hollywood in 1931,
borrowed heavily from The Golem.

It realizes that borrowing the
look of German expressionism,

would give popular Hollywood horror
a striking style and mood.

Frankenstein tells the story
of a scientist who makes a monster,

who's then shunned by society
because he's visually repulsive.

In the original novel by Mary Shelly,
the monster speaks frequently.

Whale and his screenwriters
had him hardly speak at all.

Take care,
herr Frankenstein, take care!

Boris Karloff's tender
performance made Frankenstein

studio cinema's
greatest essay in prejudice.

Horror became Universal Studio's trademark,
as its back lot tours for tourists today show.

The success of Frankenstein
added fear to the pleasures of movie going.

The best horror directors
used this fear imaginatively.

In the French film Eyes without a Face
for example, a surgeon's daughter

has a disfigured face,
so she wears a mask.

Emotionless, she seems to float.

We're desperate to see
what's behind the mask.

Horror cinema is often
about the dread of the unseen.

And in the Japanese film Audition
[Odishon] an eerily calm young woman

is angry at an older man
who's been trying to make her his wife.

Her phone rings and then this.

One of the greatest shocks
in cinema.

Our nervous system spasms.

Horror movies get closer
to our nervous systems

than almost any other genre.

Another genre that came of age
in the 1930s was the gangster picture.

Unlike horror films,
these had no European roots.

Alcohol was illegal in America
between 1920 and 1933.

So, gangs of entrepreneurial lawbreakers,
gangsters, ran it between country and city.

Often of Italian or Irish decent.

They structured
their empires like families.

One of the first great gangster pictures
was this one, Public Enemy.

Made just two years
after sound came in.

James Cagney is a sparky, rat-a-tat opportunist,
who's made money running liquor.

This is him and his childhood buddy.

They're always on the alert.

But then the buddy's gunned down
from an opposite building,

beautifully staged
in deep focus.

Cagney runs for cover

but then emerges,
almost smirking.

No grief here.

Cagney, a former dancer,
had charm.

Many organizations in America denounced
the film for indulging this charm.

This was the start
of the moral debate about gangster films

that continues to this day.

Also in the 1930s,
journalist Ben Hecht wrote

and Howard Hawks directed
Scarface, the Shame of the Nation

turning the gangster genre
into Greek tragedy.

This is the end of the film.

A lover's clinch.

And yet they're not lovers,

they're brother and sister.

Why didn't you shoot?

I don't know maybe it's
because you're me and I'm you.

It's always been that way.

Paul Muni is the ultra-violent,
not very bright gangster

with a thick Italian accent,
as if he's just arrived in America.

His eyebrows were thickened
to make him look almost apelike.

She's shot.

He says he's nothing
without her.

You're all I got left!

Little boy, he's gone.
Angelo, he's gone.

I'm no good without you,
Jessica.

I'm no good with myself.

Jessica!

Jessica!

They're out there. They want to get me.
They're all there.

Jessica, they won't give me a chance.
Please!

The tragic neediness
beneath the macho surface.

The smallness of the big man.

Jessica don't go.
Please, Jessica.

Scarface was remade,
with cold brilliance, in 1983.

This time Oliver Stone wrote
and Brian De Palma directed.

He used his
trademark crane shots.

Camonte's now called Montana.
He's again a recent immigrant.

Now, a Cuban thug
dealing cocaine.

The film chimed well
with the consumerist 1980s.

Shiny buildings
and flashy pop music.

In the original film Camonte
dies under a sign that says,

The world is yours.

De Palma takes this moment
and turns it into a baroque scene

in the middle of his film.

His craning camera points
to the irony.

The world is not Montana's.

The world is over for Montana.

Hollywood made 70 gangster films
in the 3 years after 1930 alone.

They influenced cinema
on every continent for decades.

In Japan, in 1954,
The seven Samurai mixed gangster themes

with a traditional Japanese story
of swordsmen and villagers.

Scenes like this,
that were lashed with rain,

looked like they were
drawn in charcoal.

And The seven Samurai

became one
of the most influential films of all time.

Once upon a Time in America

was perhaps
the best gangster film of the lot.

This character, Noodles,
played by Robert De Niro,

had, in his downward look,
the dismay of the movie gangster.

His fascism, victim-hood,
hubris, style, and enigma.

A complex set of ideas.

All deriving from America cinema
of the 1930s.

Musicals, horror films,
and gangster pictures

all exploded in the 30s.

But it was the western
that had been going

from the first decade of cinema.

Most are set between
1860 and 1900.

This scene, from John Ford's
The iron Horse,

shows so much
about the western genre.

It's a landscape film of course,
not a cityscape.

The camera is moving fast,
in a chase scene, a staple of westerns.

Whereas, in gangster pictures,
the camera was often static.

The Iron Horse of the title is,
of course, the railway.

The coming of modernity.
A big theme in westerns.

Ford actually films from the train,
using it as a camera Dolly.

And, of course, the drama is a shoot-out
between white settlers and indigenous Indians.

Nearly all the mob films are
about lawbreakers, in a cynical age.

Many of the best westerns are
about lawmakers, in an idealistic age.

In this much later western by John Ford,
Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp.

Here sitting on the right, who's become
Marshall in Tombstone to create the law.

I'm leaving in 30 minutes,
see you around.

The town, society,
is just being born.

For white people at least.

Fonda surveys the town
as if it's virgin territory.

The light's clean and white.

In gangster movies, of course,
the town, the city, is dying.

The world is dark.

No one remembers
the law being made.

Comedy, which had been
the greatest genre

in silent American cinema,
changed course with the coming of sound.

It became feminized.

The first of these new farcical female films
was this one: 20th Century.

A down-at-heel theatre producer
tries to convince his former lover,

who's now a Hollywood star, to return
to Broadway, to revive his career.

But there's only one problem.

They hate each other.

A film of hilarious rows.

$10,000-$15,000 in front of your nose,
your mouth would begin to water,

you'd start drooling and squealing,
gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.

That's right, Oscar. Now get out
before I have the porter

throw you off the train.

You'll see who's going
to be thrown off this train.

John Barrymore, who played the producer,
was a distinguished dramatic actor,

but made a complete idiot
out of himself in this picture.

Wild gestures, mad eyes,
unkempt hair.

Carole Lombard was ever better.
Natural, but fast.

Very fast.

The film's director said:

I told Lombard
that if she acted, I'd fire her.

She would just throw lines at him so fast
that he didn't know what to do sometimes.

It was so fast,
I didn't know what to do sometimes.

This speed was new in cinema.

Bringing up Baby, by the same director,
took the speed, the mayhem, further.

A scientist wants
to buy a dinosaur bone.

A millionaires will help him,
if he travels with her and her pet leopard.

Yes, leopard, called baby.

I don't believe you, Susan.
But you have to believe me.

I've been the victim
of your unbridled imagination once more.

That'll teach you to go round
saying things about people.

Again, a feeble man.

Again, a brassy dame.

Her apartment is
almost entirely white,

so the two characters
and the leopard stand out visually.

Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn
overlapped each other's dialogue.

This had never been done
so emphatically before.

It added to the realism
of film acting thereafter.

Realism and surrealism.

A sparky new combination
in sound cinema.

20th Century and Bringing up Baby
were both made

by one of the most talented studio directors
working in the 1930s, Howard Hawks.

Hawks' nickname was
"the old grey fox",

plainly spoken and slightly gruff
as this interview shows.

I never believed in staying
under contract or being under contract.

I've never been under contract.
Consequently, I can choose.

Or if I like a story that a studio
has, I can say to them in advance:

"I'm going to change it."

And they say, "well, go ahead."

And if you get lucky the way I did, well,
they let you do what you want to do.

And he did.

He made movie icons
that people still remember.

As well as the screwball comedies,
Hawks directed Scarface for Howard Hughes,

The big Sleep, one of the definers of film noir
and with Red River and Rio Bravo,

he became a maker and baker
of rich and beautiful character westerns.

He helped shape
the popular movie genres.

Maybe because he was such
a mix of personalities.

One critic called Hawks, 'the greatest optimist
the cinema has produced'.

Another refers to his
'distinctively bitter view of life.'

Somehow, he's both.
He's at a motocross bike race here.

A very male world.

Living simply.

Sitting on a box.

His son's at the race.

When Hawks heard that his oldest son
was badly injured in a car accident,

he apparently just
kept on filming.

Some say he was anti-semitic,
others that he was bisexual.

Whatever the complexities of his life,
Hawks was a studio director of the purest kind.

Its poster boy.

Its patron Saint.

We've already seen examples of
the fifth Hollywood sound genre

of the 1930s: the musical.

This scene from Gold Diggers of 1933
was choreographed

by one of the most innovative people
in musicals, Busby Berkley.

He'd been in the army.

He loved its marching patterns
and theatricality.

So, in his film, he has soldiers
marching in the rain.

On moving walkways,
to emphasise this theatricality.

The second source of his ideas was this:
he took a 30-minute hot bath every morning.

Looked at the geometry
of a bathroom.

Dreamt up dance routines.

And once he used to love me
I was happy then.

In the finale of Gold Diggers of 1933,

a chorus girl sings
about the forgotten men.

Ex-soldiers, who had come back from war,
traumatized.

And who were then hit
by the depression.

A double whammy.

Most Hollywood films of the time
were seen from a man's point of view.

Here, a woman sings about
the humiliation of a generation of men.

Social comment is married with patterned
images, erotic longing, and filmic display.

One of the most innovative moments
in 30s cinema.

A sixth type of film
made in Hollywood,

took the world by storm
in th 1930s: the cartoon.

There'd been animated films
from 1906.

Like this one, drawn in pencil,
black and white, flickering, comic.

And in Germany, 20 years later,

Lotte Reineger used Victorian cutout techniques
to create this remarkable movie

The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

The little metal hinges on this original cut-out
shows how she created the movement.

But Walt Disney turned animation
into an internationally popular art form.

He loved Robert Louis Stevenson
and Charlie Chaplin.

In New York, he started working
with a brilliant Dutch draftsman, Ub Iwerks.

They decided to create
a new, likable cartoon character.

Disney decided on a mouse.

This is their first Mickey Mouse film,
Plane Crazy.

Black and white.

Simple line drawings.

Mickey, agog, magically changes
a car into an aeroplane.

In 1937, Disney had a worldwide box office hit
with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

As snow white was a human character,
not an animal, Disney filmed a real actress

in costume and transcribed
the individual images of her on to paper.

This was a first.

The sort of thing that's done today
with what's called motion capture.

Snow white danced
like a real girl.

Gracefully, no jerky action
or distortions of her body.

The result got
standing ovations.

Reviews were raves.

It was painstakingly drawn in buildings
long gone from this street corner.

Disney, it seemed,
could do no wrong.

But gradually his work
became less innovative

and he became more conservative.

After World War II, Disney testified
at the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts.

His production process changed,
so that drawings were, in effect,

"photocopied" onto film.

This was cheaper but meant
that the dog, window, and cushion

in this scene in 101 Dalmatians
had black lines around them.

The early Disney films had
touches of surrealism

and were technically innovative.

But, as the decades went on,
surrealism and innovation

were gradually replaced by more
conservative techniques and messages.

Horror movies, gangster pictures,
westerns, comedies, cartoons,

Hollywood was agog.

In love with itself
and the world was in love with it.

Here in the most luminous city of the 1930s,
Paris, there were standardized films too.

But the best directors extended cinema
in both the magical direction

of Georges M�li�s and beyond
the realism of the Lumi�re Brothers.

The greatest magician
of French cinema,

the poet, and artist Jean Cocteau,
was born here.

In the grand leafy outskirts
of Paris.

In Cocteau's, The Blood of a Poet
[Le sang d'un Po�te]

a statue tells a young artist
that to get out of his studio

he must go through a mirror.

So he does.

This unnerving scene where Cocteau
has voices shout as he plunges in.

Not something
that could have been done in silent cinema.

Beyond the mirror he finds
the hotel of dramatic lunacies.

A world, perhaps his unconscious mind,
where gravity doesn't apply.

Cocteau was influenced by Picasso,
the impresario Diaghalev,

and by smoking opium.

In this corridor scene, the set was shot
on its side and the action was reversed.

The simple techniques
of early cinema and surrealism.

Eighty years later, this
scene in Christopher Nolan's

Inception, was under its spell.

This time the corridor was built
in a huge barrel and spun.

As inventive as Cocteau
and even more about youth,

and far more political, are the astounding
30s films of French director Jean Vigo.

Look at this scene, for example,
from Vigo's zero de conduite.

It seems to be snowing inside.

Boys in a repressive boarding school
are having a pillow fight in their dormitory.

Vigo slows the action.

Like Cocteau,
Vigo plays with sound.

His composer wrote this piece
of music to be played backwards.

Again, a brilliant innovation
that came with sound.

The boys riot.

The shoot was fun and chaotic.

The film was seen as
an attack on French schools

and banned until the mid-1940s.

It inspired Lindsay Anderson's film
If, which combined Vigo's radicalism

with the British class structure.

Anderson had his students rebel
from a rooftop too.

But he set his film
in an elite school.

And rather than throwing buckets and books,
Anderson's students had machine guns.

Vigo's next movie, l'Atalante,
had the same non-conformism.

The same wonder.

It's about a woman, Dita Parlo,
who marries a young man.

Joins him on his barge.

Parlo is like a child,
discovering the poetry of the world.

Tenderness and humour.

Vigo filmed on this canal
in Paris.

Halfway through the shoot it snowed,
causing continuity problems.

So, Vigo had his brilliant
cameraman, Boris Kaufman,

the brother of Soviet
director Dziga Vertov,

point his camera upwards,
so we see Parlo against the sky.

Parlo soon gets bored
and sets off for the bright lights of Paris.

Her husband swims
in the canal because he's heard

that if you swim
under water and open your eyes,

you see the one you love.

Like Z�ro de Conduite,
the response to L'Atalante was turbulent.

But Vigo's aim remains clear.

Many admired its visual beauty
but wanted a more conventional story.

Like Ozu and, later, the French
comedy director Jacques Tati

and the Scottish director Bill Forsyth,
Vigo wasn't interested in plot.

He wanted to show the joyous,
fascinated, uncensored way

in which this woman
was opening up to life.

Alas Vigo's own life
was closing down.

He had leukaemia and died in1934.

Aged just 29, in a building
that used to stand here.

This canal in Paris that Vigo used was
also one of the favourite filming locations

of a writer/director team,
Marcel Carn� and Jacques Pr�vert.

The innovative Carn�-Pr�vert films
of the 30s were about forgotten people

encountering each other
in the bleak morning or evening light.

Coming alive for a moment
in each other's company,

but then retreating
into themselves and their pessimism.

Unemployment in France stood
nearly 1/2 million in 1935.

There was political instability.

Then, of course,
the Nazis marched into Paris.

And the film industry
itself was unstable.

The haunting Carn�-Pr�vert films that
resulted are often called "poetic realist".

Le Quai des Brumes, is one
of the signature poetic realist films.

Jean Gabin is a deserter from the foreign legion,
whose whole life has been bad luck.

He wants to leave France.

Start again.

He gets a lift in a truck
to a port.

It's night time.

The truck's headlights light up

the gloom.

The mist and the dusk
make the world look weary.

Carn� had this scene shot
with diffusion on the lens.

Gabin has an expressionless face,
like Humphrey Bogart.

He's alone, except for a dog
that befriends him.

It's a beautiful mood piece.

A film with its eyes lowered.

Where Hollywood characters
looked optimistically upwards

to a new dawn,
writer Pr�vert's world was tragic.

Quai des Brumes so defined
the mood of France in the 30s,

that a spokesman of the Vichy government,
which sided with the Nazis, said,

"if we have lost the war
it's because of Quai des Brumes".

Director Carn� retorted that you
"can't blame a storm on the barometer".

He was a master filmmaker.

As at home in this studio
in Joinville near Paris.

As Howard Hawks
was in Hollywood.

Behind these walls.

And here, at the former Path� studios,

Carn� and his great designer,
Alexander Trauner, conjured worlds.

None was greater, grander than
Les Enfants du Paradis.

Les Enfants du Paradis is set
around a 19th century Parisian theatre.

Its story sweeps through the lives of many
people, including this courtesan, Garance,

who's accused of stealing the watch
of the rich man on the right here.

Baptiste, a mime, sees that she's innocent
and shows what really happened.

Suddenly, Carn� introduces music
to the mime.

A street scene becomes theatre.

Jean-Louis Barrault, all in white,
is brilliant at the mime.

And there's a political edge.

His wordless eyewitness account
shows that the rich man is lying

and saves the beautiful
but lowly courtesan.

The mime falls in love with her.

As France was under Nazi control
at the time of its production,

Les Enfants du Paradis
couldn't refer to contemporary reality.

It was enforced escapism,
as it were.

This man knew Carn�
and owns the theatre

where some of
Les Enfants du Paradis was shot.

The title of the film,
The Children of Paradise,

refers to the cheap seats in
"the gods of the theatre",

where the poor people are.

From up here you have
a realistic overview of life,

which matches the overview
of Carn� and Pr�vert.

If Carn� was a realist and a romantic,
this man, Jean Renoir,

was a great humanist
of French cinema of the '30s.

The veteran actor Norman Lloyd
worked with Renoir in the 40s.

What he wanted
and what you get from his pictures,

we're talking about Renoir, is
the great sense of humanity,

of people vis-a-vis one another.

And something comes off the screen
that you don't see with any other director.

And actually, while Jean had a great visual sense,
a lot of the stuff is just very simply shot.

This scene shows what Lloyd
means about the humanism in Renoir.

It's from his most famous film,

The Rules of the Game.
[La r�gle du Jeu]

We're in a drawing room of a
chateau, owned by aristocrats,

who know about nothing real life.

These two old friends
discuss love.

Renoir himself plays Octave,
the one in the suit, an unemployed playboy.

The framing, the lighting,
the camera angles are not innovative.

Renoir's camera just seems to observe
the decline and fall of this civilisation.

But then, Renoir delivers
the film's famous lines.

And how would this help you?

This would help me having nothing,
not having to search anymore

knowing what's good, what's evil.

Tu comprends, sur cette terre,
il y a quelque chose d'effroyable,

c'est que tout le monde
a ses raisons

On the eve of World War II, with the Nazis
breathing down France's neck,

this was remarkable.

Film historian, Jean Michel Frodon:

The most meaningful sentence
from Renoir is

"everyone has his own reasons."

Meaning that it's not about good and bad,
future and past, you know, things with capital.

There is no capital letters
in Renoir vocabulary.

And this is what makes
this film so alive

but also so difficult
to deal with to a certain extent,

because you cannot rely
on solid basics like, you know:

who are the good guys
and who are the bad guys?

You know that
there is a fight to be fought

and where we are headed to
and why we are heading there?

No.

Renoir was born in this mansion
in Montmarte in Paris.

His father was the French impressionist painter,
Pierre August Renoir.

Renoir's La grande Illusion,
is all about human balance.

A French officer in a German
World War I prison camp

is befriended by his enemy.

That typecast monster of silent cinema,
Eric Von Stroheim,

who's the German camp commander.

They're the same dying,
aristocratic class.

Renoir frames them equally.

But Stroheim treats
the prisoners decently too.

They're French soldiers,
of ordinary background.

They have equal weight
within the frame also.

War films and most genre films
of the 30s usually stereotype

goodies and baddies but Renoir
saw good in each of the pairs of men

and, also, respect
between their very different classes.

He said that he wanted to
"constantly to insert wedges" in his films.

Their design, their world.

As you would
under a wobbly table.

Like Vigo, Renoir disliked
a straight story.

He liked his films to zigzag,
to go off on tangents.

One famous tangent is this scene
in La grande Illusion,

in which the men talk
about Jewish generosity.

Renoir had stopped his plot

for a moment to have the soldiers
discuss decency and goodness.

Having travelled in India,
he had an Asian philosophy.

He said that people create
a veil in their lives

that screens them off
from the joy of the real world.

Jean Renoir films
try to let us glimpse this joy.

But it wasn't only France that was making
great non-genre films in the 1930s.

In 1930 itself, South America made
its first surviving innovative movie.

Mario Peixoto's film Limite,
made in Brazil,

when the director was just 19,
was called "very beautiful"

by the Soviet montage master
Sergei Eisenstein.

A woman sits on a hill, alone.

No dialogue.

No reverse angle.

A series of dissolves.

As if we're walking towards her.

She seems worn down
by something.

The atmosphere's sultry.

Then this.

The camera is lifted
and rushes towards her face.

Hand held.

Then this.

It seems to soar.

When we hear that she's
probably just out of prison,

maybe we understand more.

Maybe she's exhausted.

Traumatized by confinement.

She's beginning to unwind.

The first Brazilian film
was made in 1906.

By the late 20s,
more than 100 features had been made.

Limite seems to have been
the most remarkable and pensive of them.

It refined the ideas of the
French impressionist filmmakers.

Not until the 1950s would
Brazil again make films of such splendor.

And it's in the 1930s that Poland, too,
makes its first major contribution to the story of film.

The country's first movie studio
started production in 1920,

but in 1938,
this very non-genre film made waves.

It was made by Stefan
and Francizka Themerson.

Men carry a mirrored wardrobe
into a forest.

A surreal adventure
that's sometimes lyrical.

The Themersons seem to love to
play with light and exposure,

and it's sometimes experimental.

Off horizontal angles,
reverse action, etc.

Thirty years later, Poland's
most famous filmmaker,

Roman Polanski, seemed to have the
Themersons pioneering film in mind,

for one of his
experimental shorts.

Poland had a hard time in the 1930s,

and then was invaded by
its neighbour, Germany.

Popular German films
of the 1930s tended to be folksy,

about mountains
and music and homeland.

Soon Adolf Hitler's national socialists
banned Jews from working in the film industry.

Into this moral wilderness strode
this filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl.

She used soft light, mists,
mountain landscapes.

Romantic close-ups of herself.

Talented and outrageous,
beautiful and resolute.

Hitler and Reichsminister of
propaganda, Josef Goebbels,

asked Riefenstahl to
film a Nazi party rally.

The result was Triumph of the Will,
[Triumph des Willens]

a documentary of sorts,
which pictured Hitler

and the party almost
in mythic terms.

Riefenstahl was given the
resources that Griffith had

for Intolerance or
Gance for Napoleon.

Her images were geometric,
epic, euphoric, bombastic.

Then, here in the olympic stadium
in Berlin, she filmed the 1936 games.

This is one of the cameras
she used.

She attached them to balloons
and dug others into the ground,

so she could get
at the same level of the athletes.

Zoom lenses, which allow close-ups
to be taken from a distance,

and give the feeling of intimacy
became available around 1932.

Riefenstahl used them
to pick out details in the crowd.

In this diving sequence she cut
before the athletes hit the water,

or reversed the action, or
turned some shots upside down,

to make them soar,
balletic, like a musical.

Hollywood choreographer Busby Berkeley
nicked visual ideas from military marching,

and, in turn, Riefenstahl seemed
to steal ideas from him.

Riefenstahl was interested
in the sublime, something grand and fearful

glimpsed beyond the everyday.

She filmed these people as
if they were Greek gods,

apparently approving of the political
obscenity of her paymasters.

Next to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock,
Riefenstahl thought in terms of cinema

more than any other filmmaker
of the 30s or 40s.

Though she disputed it
to the end of her life,

she seems to have used people
from concentration camps

as extras in this
film, Tiefland.

Again, using glossy film techniques,

an elaborate tracking shot
and moody lighting.

Even with the coming of modernity and
new ideas about the divided self,

Riefenstahl didn't change
her style one bit.

Her 70s photographs
of African people here,

are similar to her images
of athletes in the 30s.

The story of film
so far in the 30s

has been about the great
American movie genres

versus movie innovation elsewhere.

But then, in London in the 30s,
we meet a man who was

both one of the great genre directors,
and seriously innovative.

His name is Alfred Hitchcock.

You have to remember
that this process of frightening

is done by means
of a given medium.

The medium of pure cinema is
what I believe in.

Is the assembly of pieces
of film to create fright

is the essential part of my job.

Hitchcock became the greatest image maker
of the 20th century.

More significant even
than Pablo Picasso.

How can we say this?

For seven reasons.

The first is
about point of view.

In his youth, Hitchcock saw,
here, on Oxford Steet in London,

a phantom ride film... shot with
the camera attached to the front of a tram.

He loved it.

He saw that the camera
could become the eye of a character.

Nearly 50 years later, in this scene
in Hitchcock's dreamy sex film Vertigo,

his camera becomes
the eye of James Stewart,

filming through his windscreen as
Stewart tracks a woman in a green car,

with whom he's obsessed.

The second reason why Hitchcock's images
are great is because of where he was born.

Here.

Essex in england.

A place with a lot of life.

But Hitchcock thought, perversely,
that movies should not be about life.

He said that they're stronger
than realism.

He cut the everyday world
out of his pictures.

Why?

Maybe because of this place.

The catholic Jesuit college
where Hitchcock studied.

He said that the Jesuits taught
him a logic

that allowed him to prove the improvable,
for example, that god exists,

which gave his films
an otherworldly logic.

For example in this film:
a decent man is locked up

in the larder of a posh house.

He needs to get out.

So he holds a match
to the house's smoke detector.

His clothes are rumpled
and he gets a bit wet.

But a moment later he's out.
On the street.

Patting himself down,
far less rumpled.

No scenes to show
how he got out.

A story miracle.

Jesuitical logic that would continue
throughout Hitchcock's career.

And the third brilliance of Hitchcock
is his understanding of fear.

That it's in ordinary places.

That it's different from shock.

Look at this scene
in his film about a German

trying to bomb London, Sabotage.

A boy is on a London bus.

Suddenly what he is carrying
explodes.

Well, now everything
seems to be alright.

The boy dies.

Shock and tragedy.

But fear is different to shock.

In Sabotage, Hitchcock tells
us no less than 15 times,

that the boy's package is a bomb and that
it will blow up at 1:45 pm on Saturday.

Fear comes from knowing
that the shock is coming.

Throughout his career, Hitchcock
told us well in advance,

to be scared, and so we were.

Hitchcock worked
in German cinema.

Then came here,
the first film production company

built in Britain by the Americans.

Hitchcock met his wife here

and learnt from the great female
American script-editors who worked here.

Hitchcock's films
were very female.

The fourth reason that Hitchcock was great
was due to his use of close-ups.

More than any director since Eisenstein,
Hitchcock loved close ups.

His great British film
The 39 Steps is obsessed by hands.

That of the mysterious man
with the severed finger,

who knows what the 39 steps are.

The hands of Madeline Carroll,
the reluctant girl

that Hannay gets hand-cuffed to,
as she takes off her stockings.

They're holding hands
in the end.

"Close ups," said Hitchcock,
"are crashes of cymbals."

Dramatic punctuation in a story.

And close ups lead to the fifth reason
why Hitchcock was so innovative.

Where most directors started
with establishing shots

then cut to mid shots then close
ups, to take us into a world gently,

Hitchcock tended to the opposite.

This is the start
of The 39 Steps.

We start with a close up
of a neon.

We don't know where we are.

Then a ticket booth.

Then carpet.

Then feet.

Then a back.

Then the top of a double bass
and a conductor.

Only then do we widen out.

We're in a London theatre.

But we see no cityscape,
no theatre exterior.

The 39 Steps was written here
where Hitchcock lived,

where he had his ideas.

Norman Lloyd produced lots
of Hitchcock's TV shows

and was in this scene
that shows the sixth reason

why Hitchcock was the greatest image-maker
of the century.

We're in America, and Lloyd is hanging
from the statue of Liberty.

It just has the sound
of wind.

You hear the slight...

It isn't the whistle, quite,
it's just the almost murmur of wind.

I'll get your sleeve.

The standard thriller way to play
this scene would be big dramatic music.

Lloyd shouting for help
from the nice guy, Robert Cummings.

But Hitchcock uses no music.

Almost whispered dialogue.

I'll clear you.

I swear I will.

I'll clear you.

Hurry up with the rope!

Why so little sound?

Because lots of noise
would take away

from the tiny detail of the stitches
on the sleeve loosening.

But, also, because Hitchcock,

who learnt his techniques
in silent cinema, loved silence.

Tell them quick.

The sleeve.

Sleeve.

There was an urgency.

He was pleading
with the guy to save him.

And at the same time
he felt he was falling.

And somehow in trying
to get at Bob Cummings,

he didn't feel
that shouting would do it.

He just felt if he could
give the urgency to him

that he would really save him.

And look at this scene
from Hitchcock's film, Marnie.

It shows the seventh reason
why Hitchcock is great.

Sean Connery is with Tippi Hedren
who plays Marnie.

They're on a cruise
and he wants sex and she doesn't.

No!

So he rips off her gown.

She freezes.

I'm sorry, Marnie.

And what does Hitchcock do?

He cuts to a high angle
for a moment.

A shriek.

Her shriek?

Hitchcock said that where a
close up is a clash of cymbals,

a high level shot is a tremolo.

Back in London, where the studio,
where he made the great British films,

once stood,
there are posh flats now.

And at their centre is a massive sculpture
of Hitchcock as a Buddha.

Wise and inscrutable.

Hitchcock, the great image-maker
and entertainer, would surely have chuckled.

Hitch had a certain physical presence,
as a consequence of that

it came him a certain churchillian,
Buddha-like, masterful presence

when he sat there and he would
just stare at you, as if to say:

"are you sure that what
you're saying makes sense?"

Looking back at the 1930s,
the first decade of sound cinema,

it's clear that the new movie genres became,
at their best,

dazzling inventive friends,
familiar and beloved.

But cinema at the time was full
of haunting strangers too,

uncategorizable directors like Cocteau
and Vigo, the French poetic realists,

brilliant scary talents
like Leni Riefenstahl

and an obsessive trickster
like Alfred Hitchcock.

As the decade came to an end,
as war was declared in Europe,

three films about three women,
debated the roles that pleasure

and escape play in our lives.

Ninotchka is a joyless communist,
who finds love in Paris

and starts dressing
like a Princess.

Comrades, people of the world.
The revolution is on the march.

I know.
Bombs will fall.

Civilisation will crumble.
But not yet please.

Wait!
What's the hurry?

Give us our moment.

She's intoxicated with love,
diamonds, the glittering city,

and lit like romantic cinema
of the 1920s.

So happy and so tired!

Like Ninotchka, Dorothy
in The wizard of Oz

lives in a grey reality too.

In this famous moment,
we see the back of an actress,

wearing sepia clothes
in a sepia set.

The door opens from her world
onto a fantastic colour set

and a second actress, Judy Garland,
in blue gingham check,

walks into a land
of apparent pleasure: Oz.

A fantasy world like
Ninotchka's Paris.

Yet Oz is a false dream
for Dorothy.

She comes to understand
that there's no place like home.

As the camera cranes, the
film gently questions

the very 30s idea of escapism.

And here's the third woman
dealing with escapism.

Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone with the Wind is rich and spoilt.

She starts life in a fantasy world
but steps into reality and war.

The rising camera in this
brilliant single shot

shows the scale of the trauma.

The previous two films didn't blame
Ninotchka or Dorothy

for making mistakes about escapism, but
Gone with the Wind's god's eye view

punishes Scarlet for her denial.

She loses everything.

Gone with the Wind is thought of
as one of the most escapist films

ever made yet its content
explicitly attacks escapism.

Its form is another matter.

It created so vivid
an emotional universe.

Its craning camera was so grand.

Its music was so lush,
that the film's bitter pill was sugared.

Ninotchka, Dorothy and Scarlett show
that escapism was the main melody in 1939,

but listen carefully and you can hear
the distant drums of war, realism,

and Orson Welles.

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