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Robin Davies wrote:I can't believe he crammed so many legendary film-makers into one programme.
Are there enough left for the remaining eight episodes?!

Episode 8: 65-69

Tarkovsky, Psycho and Easy Rider

“French directors sitting in cafes thinking they were the centre of the world, but they weren’t”

Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union – repression

Ashes and Diamonds - the scene in the bombed out church and upside down crucified Christ.
“Wajda like many Polish directors disguises meaning by encoding it in symbols”

Polanski – Two Men and a Wardrobe – Knife In The Water “Unlike many Polish films Knife in the Water was different for not dealing with WWII. Society and history less interesting for Polanski than the human triangle”

Fearless Vampire Killers – a hermetically sealed version of Jewish Middle Europe. Sharon Tate.

Cz – The Hand by Jiri Tinka – a haunted life of ill-fated rebellion against indoctrination

Milos Forman – life as comic – The Firemen’s Ball

Daisies – pop art, psychedlia

The Red and the White – long takes to evoke suffering, the influence on Tarr

Tarkovsky – Andrei Rublev, the endings of his films
Paradjanov

Oshima – Boy and Realm of the Senses – the real Abe Sada interviewed in Teruo Ishii’s 1969 film Love and Crime

Imamura – The Insect Woman and History of Postwar Japan as Told by A Bar Hostess

Ritwik Ghatak – Interview with Mani Kaul

Brazil – Black God, White Devil

I Am Cuba - technical style used to strengthen the message of the film

Iran – “the only country where the founding father of film was a woman” - The House Is Black

Class consciousness and decolonialisation:
Senegal – Ousmane Sembene and Black Girl
Britain – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Ken Loach on ‘kitchen sink’ films – Kes – a connection between film style and politics

60s Britain taken over by youth culture – Hard Day’s Night

Documentary – No staging, interviews or hidden cameras (?!?!) Primary
Fly-on-the-wall

Shadows - fusing fly on the wall with neorealism and Method

Hitchcock responding to this with Psycho

Andy Warhol eating a hamburger in a Jorgen Leth film (66 Scenes From America)

Warhol’s films – Blow Job: “Bresson minus any attempt at spirituality”
“Warhol, Anger and Cocteau leading to ‘New Queer Cinema’ of 90s”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? Photographed by Haskell Wexler – Medium Cool “Jesus, I love to shoot film”. Interview with Wexler, drawing on ideas of Godard.

Ending of Medium Cool vs ending of Easy Rider – (On Medium Cool: “all along the camera has been the voyeur, now it’s the centre of the voyeurism”)

The death of the studio system. Increase in film courses and the Film School Generation. Roger Corman’s B movie studio as aspiring filmmaker finishing school

Easy Rider – anti-conformity, impatient by endings and fearing the revenge of Middle America , seeing equivalents for real-life assassinations in the ending (I buy Rich Hall’s ‘return to Southern stereotypes’ argument from The Dirty South more though)

Kubrick – Making of The Shining – the apes of 2001, the jump cut from bone to spaceship, the psychedelic ending (linking with Ruttman)

“Movies everywhere – not just a window through which you saw characters and stories but a language for thought itself. Would it be permanent? No – 70s and the return of romantic cinema just over the horizon.”

70s America is wonderful “The garden started to bloom again”

3 types of New American Cinema: Satirical movies: Buck Henry. Dissident filmmakers: Charles Burnett. Assimilationists: Robert Towne

Satirical:

“Too late to salvage society, so let’s satirise it” Back to Duck Soup. Milos Forman, Frank Tashlin (consumerism vulgar, society infantile – Artists and Models. Feydeau: “In order to be funny you have to think sad first”), Buck Henry (Catch 22. Henry: “If you have any sense when you hire Orson to be in your movie you have to know he will be the centre of something”), Robert Altman (MASH – overlapping dialogue. Mocking a tragic situation in the hospital. Zooms and long lenses so actors couldn’t be sure that they were on camera), back to Buck Henry and The Graduate. Milos Forman (The Fireman’s Ball, “Forman had to adjust his approach in the US remarkably little”: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)

Dissidents:

Hopper (The Last Movie), Altman (McCabe and Mrs Miller) Coppola starting as a dissident (The Conversation), Scorsese the most celebrated dissident (Mean Streets, Schrader on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull. Italian Catholicism – ethnic identity was apparently what ‘romantic cinema’ had screened out)

Schrader when began to direct was “dissident too but his rebellion took the form of fascination with male religious grace” – American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. The influence of Bresson, specifically Pickpocket, on Schrader (Schrader: “[After American Gigolo] I put the ending on Light Sleeper, where it belongs!”).

All white male dissidents – leads to Charles Burnett. Killer of Sheep

New York over Hollywood: Woody Allen

Assimilationists:

Bogdanovich mixing old and new (The Last Picture Show) Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch building on Leone. Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid showing the conflict in Peckinpah)

Malick and Badlands – our couple addled by pop culture. Days of Heaven: “trying to apprehend the infinite”. The filming of landscape harking back to D.W. Griffith and across to the landscapes of Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

Cabaret and The Godfather – 'immorality' as mass entertainment

Chinatown, behind the scenes of Rosemary’s Baby – the personal tragedies transferring across to the dark ending of Chinatown

STATE OF THE NATION FILMS
with Herzog and Roeg and the way 70s cinema tackled ideas of identity and sex (and the rise of capitalism/consumerism)

New German Cinema - the gap between generations more pronounced in 70s Germany along with economic growth in West Germany:

Wim Wenders interviewed (with ponytail!)
Fassbinder – naked in a clip from Fox and His Friends, remaking All That Heaven Allows in Fear Eats The Soul, reinterpreting All About Eve in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant “Loved the American cinema but sneered at its lies, Fassbinder took American stories and furthered them”

Fassbinder dealing with women in confined spaces, Wenders men in open spaces, but both obsessed with the idea of America

Wenders: the Empire State building in Alice In The Cities contrasted with An Affair To Remember

Margarethe von Trotta – shown as actress in Fassbinder’s Gods of the Plague and then a clip from her film as director, The Second Awakening of Christina Klages

Herzog – Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams
“Like Pasolini Herzog romantic, not interested in feminism of von Trotta or Americana of Wenders. After Ford this is the most 'landscape director' in the ‘Story of Film’”

Wenders on German history and the way Fassbinder confronted it. A shot of present day Alexanderplatz.

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Italy – questions of identity and sex.

Pasolini – Trilogy of Life (clip from Arabian Nights). The problem of consumerism. Pasolini’s murder. (No Salo)
Bertolucci – Spider’s Stratagem – Storaro capturing feeling of Magritte paintings
The Conformist – Facism and beauty

Godard seeing Conformist’s beauty as betrayal of 60s radicalism – interview with Bertolucci

The influence of Conformist on American movies – Storaro used on Apocalypse Now. The end of Taxi Driver turning “ugly events beautiful”

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Britain - “Like Italian cinema beauty key but also the idea of identity becoming fragmented”

Ken Russell – Women in Love – a sex scene as a sideways dance

Performance – contrasted with Mean Streets – clothes as a gangster’s uniform. “Movie gangsters have always been about display”. The merging of personalities building on Persona.
“If any movie in the whole story of film should be compulsory viewing for filmmakers, this is it”

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Australia

Roeg – Walkabout – the devastating ending of the grown woman in the kitchen remembering her own brief Dreamtime

Weir - Picnic At Hanging Rock - the disappearance. “White Australian identity evaporating in the heat”

Gillian Armstrong – My Brilliant Career – “not about a woman’s relationship with nature, but with men”. The female point of view pointing towards Jane Campion and Baz Luhrmann. Interview with Sam Neill about starring in ‘women’s films’.

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Japan

Documentary exploding fictional worlds:

Noriaki Tsuchimoto – Minamata: The Victims of Their World
“Shocking to see identity asserted so angrily”

Kazuo Hara – The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On – hiring actors to play participants who have dropped out of the film. Interview with Hara on the confrontational interview within the film turning into a brawl. “The unpalatable truths of life are buried under layers of lies”

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Africa

“Towards a Third Cinema” manifesto:

1. Hollywood (aka The Bauble)
2. The European art cinema of Godard and Fellini
3. Political cinema of Latin America, Arabic and African cinema post 69

La Nouba

Sembene – Xala – the new businessmen aping the ousted colonisers. Sembene ideologically certain but Mambety chopped up certainty into fragments
Djibril Diop Mambéty – Badou Boy. Hyenas – the horror of consumerism and what people will do to keep the goods coming
Safi Faye – Letter From My Village
Hale Gerima – Harvest 3,000 Years

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Middle East

Identity and national liberation. Yilmaz Güney – Hope and Yol

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Latin America

Patricio Guzmán – The Battle of Chile - documenting the other 11th September
Jodorowsky – The Holy Mountain – “The thief's journey mirrors the story of 70s cinema - it stripped cinema naked, loaded it with symbolism and turned it into gold. Then used it to ask who are we as individual nations.“

Mainstream directors of the 70s are coming up next to change all that…

Episode 11
Sholay and Star Wars

Jaws, Star Wars, The Exorcist, the Bruce Lee films and Sholay
“the best of the mainstream films did new things”

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Hong Kong:

“no city except New York has been more filmed”

First golden age 1950s with the Shaw Brothers building the largest private film studio in the world. Transporting the audience into a new, technicolour, feminine world: Kingdom and the Beauty

King Hu changing the martial arts film with the epic scaled, extremely designed A Touch of Zen

The origins of Kung fu: master and pupil, loyalty and discipline key.
“But Touch of Zen was no ordinary kung fu movie. It starts with action then turns into ghost film, then reverie – a social film turns into a transcendental one”
The influence on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Bruce Lee bringing hyper-masculinity to kung fu – Enter The Dragon
Stanley Kwan on masculinity

“For the dynamism we see in Bruce Lee movies we see that though he was fast and furious, the camerawork was anything but”

The change to that: John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat and A Better Tomorrow – style as the driving force
Fragmentary scenes and multiple tracking cameras bringing a new wave of gangster films.

Interview with Yuen Wo-Ping – director and fight choreographer. Iron Monkey. Fighting in three dimensional space. The Matrix.

Tsui Hark “the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong” – Once Upon A Time In China. The art of elaboration of narratively simple sequences. New Dragon Gate Inn.

“Not since Soviet films of the 1920s had the space in film been so fragmented.”

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India:

Mughal-e-Azam in black and white and the recently colourised version
Sharmila Tagore – going from understated Devi to glamorous Mausam
Gulzar “The director without whom mainstream 70s Hindi cinema unimaginable”

Amitabh Bachchan “If Tagore was the queen of Bollywood, Bachcan was the king. Not since the days of Chaplin had one person been the subject of such fame”
Zanjeer

Sholay “one of the most influential movies in the Story of Film”. The dance on broken glass.
Interview with writer Javed Akhtar - The tension of tradition and revolt from cinema conventions – borrowings and innovations
One minute a musical, then a big production number “the film melds Chaplin and Leone, Cliff Richard musicals and horror cinema together”
The importance of the rule of law over pure vengeance (as in Bruce Lee films!)
Bachchan on the importance of poetic justice

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Middle East:

The Message – avoiding depicting Mohammed by showing actors speaking direct to camera, leaving gaps for unheard dialogue and moving the camera as a point of view. Producer Moustapha Akkad later produced the Halloween films (also full of their own kinds of pov tracking shots).
Two versions of the film for Western and Arabic audiences.

Youssef Chahine - The Sparrow – Interview with Chahine on the masses eventually standing up to oppression and corruption

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US:

Jaws, The Exorcist and Star Wars breaking box office records
Producers making films about things people fantasised about seeing, rather than reality
Thrill and sensation
The rise of the multiplex and era of the blockbuster

Mercedes McCambridge on being the voice of the devil in The Exorcist (in an uncredited clip from Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror series from 1997)

Spielberg next to the truck from Duel. A Guy Named Joe as a Spielberg influence.
“Jaws was both an establishment film and an innovative one”
Point of view: The dolly in/zoom out shot in Jaws contrasted with the use of the same in Vertigo
Close Encounters/Jurassic Park showing the awe of the characters but withholding the reveal until cinematically (and musically) most effective
“The world of Spielberg one of suburbs, absent fathers and underdogs who encounter the sublime – the most successful romantic director in the Story of Film”

Star Wars: a futuristic fairy tale. Utilising Stereo. Opening crawl and spaceship fly past.
“Luke dresses like a samurai”. “The most absurd plot yet seen in the Story of Film”. A side-by-side comparison with The Hidden Fortress (and the stormtroopers with Triumph of the Will!)
Mysticism – putting away the computer in the final "use the force" sequence. “The hero is learning to feel rather than think, which happened to cinema in general in the 70s”
“A cinema of sensation rather than contemplation”

The election of Ronald Reagan vs Tianamen Square. "The 80s would be the decade of protest in film…"

colinr0380 wrote:There were a couple of issues here that I noted - in the Hong Kong section Cousins conspicuously avoids mentioning Jackie Chan at all (similarly Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao) and in the section talking about The Exorcist he mentions the famous story of Friedkin slapping an actor in order to get a trembling reaction from him during a take, however he says this over the scene of Jason Miller's Father Karras taking the devil in before he goes out of the window, not the scene of the other priest giving Karras the last rites at the bottom of the flight of steps. That actor was apparently the one that Friedkin slapped in order to get his hand trembling while making the sign of the cross over the body.

Episode 12: A Horse Thief Wrapped In Blue Velvet

The Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers:

Interview with Tian Zhuangzhuang – The Horse Thief – the fear of spiritualism by the authorities leading to comparison with Paradjanov.

Chen Kaige – Yellow Earth – the reclamation of femininity for women in a post-Mao era. Horizon lines. “Emptiness within the landscape, maleness within the female and the good within the bad. Very similar to Taoism and challenging to the authorities”.

Zhang Yimou – Raise The Red Lantern and House of Flying Daggers “A pictoral masterclass”

Tianamen Square – “One of the greatest images ever of speaking truth to power”

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Eastern Europe – “filmmakers telling stories about taboo subjects”

Tengiz Abuladze - Repentance – the burial of the couple harking back to Dovzhenko’s Arsenal. The digging up and display of the dictator’s corpse signifying the way that the past will not be buried.

Elem Klimov – Come and See – the post-bomb tinnitus, the girl running from the bodies, the struggle of the couple through the bog scored to a waltz . “The greatest war film ever made”

Klimov becoming head of the Soviet Film Union, discussing censorship with the authorities.

Kira Muratova – Long Goodbyes. The mother talking to her son on the train, while they are sat in opposite directions and he is attempting to sleep (anticipating Asthenic Syndrome). Fragmented editing and long lenses. “Muratova’s theme here was the way people suffocate each other… films were supposed to be about social themes but this about social bondage”. Unbanned in the late 80s. “The most underrated director in the Story of Film”.

Krzysztof Kieslowski – A Short Film About Killing – tower blocks and multiple stories. Snowballing events. Comparing the build up to the murder of the taxi driver with the scene where Marion Crane encounters her boss in Psycho. Real-time murder. The hanging for the crime. The emetic viscerality of death in both forms. The power of the film to change the death penalty in Poland.
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Africa:

In 70s about society and post-colonial world, in 80s directors looked beyond the present tense to re-think cinema

Interview with Gaston Kaboré about Wend Kuuni. Flashbacks nested within flashbacks

The importance of mythology and legend in African film

Souleymane Cissé – Yeelen. “As big as Lawrence of Arabia and as shapeshifting as 2001: A Space Odyssey. A magic realist film and one of cinema’s most complex works of art”
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America:

Reagan and MTV killing the radio star.
Music video influence on film – Flashdance – she’s a maniac. “Pure impressionism”
“But 80s America mostly male, Reaganite dreamland” – Top Gun . Cruise giving the finger to a couple of Russians. Fast cutting. “An advert for the new masculinity”

Blue Velvet – the opening sequence
The Elephant Man – the doctor’s tear on his first sighting of John Merrick – the surrealism in the film
“He works with the unconscious the way a carpenter works with wood”
The eye of the duck scene (as mentioned by Lynch in his Scene By Scene interview with Cousins in late 1999)
Return to Blue Velvet – the In Dreams performance
“Lynch said that as people get older their window on the world closes. This was what was happening to his country in the 80s…and its cinema”

Spike Lee – Do The Right Thing. Tilting camera angles borrowed from The Third Man. The final sequence “the most striking moment of protest in 80s cinema”

Interview with John Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi – “state of the nation filmmakers”
Return of the Seacaucus Seven – “the camera patiently observed intelligent adult conversations about politics”
Taking creative control over the way of making their films
Renzi: “I used to be scared of Hollywood but now they don’t even do their job very well”…Sayles:“And most mainstream filmmakers haven’t done much better than we have in making the films they want to make”
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France

Flashiness, visually hyperactive style “this was a protest too…a protest against seriousness”
Luc Besson – Subway
Leos Carax – Les amants du Pont Neuf – Bionche dancing to Public Enemy on the bridge against a backdrop of fireworks. Influence from An American In Paris. The rebuilding of the bridge as a full scale set a perfect example of being: “Glossy and wasteful in a glossy and wasteful age”

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Spain

Almodóvar– Labyrinth of Passion “protest had had a sex change”
Transgression and anarchism in the Spanish underground

Erice – The Quince Tree Sun
“No camera moves, natural light and a gentle pace to capture the passing of time and the delicacy of the moment. Franco was all about lies, Quince Tree Sun was a return to the truth”

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UK:

“Where politics soften in Spain, in Britain they hardened. Film seen [by the Establishment] to be a source of reassurance for the masses but the best filmmakers fought against that”

My Beautiful Laundrette: “the right wing liked entrepreneurs…immigrants less so”

Bill Douglas – My ain Folk - "the greatest scene of reconcilliation in cinema"

Bill Forsyth – Gregory’s Girl - "'normal' people in real locations"

Terence Davies – Distant Voices, Still Lives – symmetrical framing as an influence from Catholicism (and Vermeer). The slow forward tracking shot compared to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and Donen’s Royal Wedding. Davies: “If you are feeling exactly the same at the beginning and the end of the tracking shot, then you are not using it correctly”. Beauty of images being a way of transcending pain.

Peter Greenaway – A Zed and Two Noughts – symmetricality taken to its furthest extremes, and to point out the woman having only one leg. The greatest analyst of imagery.

Derek Jarman – The Last of England “if the cinema of England was a tempest, its God of Thunder was Derek Jarman”. “Video editing meets Leni Reifenstahl meets Kenneth Anger’s use of magical imagery – it is hard to imagine a greater provocation to the ‘Establishment’”

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Canada:

Cronenberg – Videodrome. James Woods playing with a half turned-on TV.
Crash - “The car showroom as an erotic place. Almost whispered dialogue. No outside traffic noise or music. Rosanna Arquette’s hair the same colour as the upholstery”

Norman McLaren – Neighbours – a fight over the boundaries of a white picket fence

Denys Arcand – Jésus de Montréal – “the 80s ending with the most dazzling attack on hypocrisy. Again it speaks truth to power, but the power is Us, the Audience”

“Then came the 90s. The age of digital and the internet, and the entering of another Golden Age…”

Episode 13: In the Mood For Loving Japanese Horror

The death of celluloid. The murder weapon: Terminator 2 and rampant digital imagery
The era before “the loss of reality”

Iran

Samira Makhmalbaf - The Apple – re-enactment of real events with the participants replaying their roles

“The doubling back of experience was unique to Iranian cinema of this time”

Mohsen Makhmalbaf – A Moment of Innocence. Critiquing a critical moment of life, seeing it from other perspectives and losing innocence by what you discover. Re-enactment allows for coming to terms with a defining moment. “The single greatest work of autobiography in cinema”

Abbas Kiarostami – the Koker trilogy “complex layers of reality and how cameras can change lives”: Where Is The Friend’s House?/And Life Goes On/Through The Olive Trees

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Hong Kong

Wong Kar-Wai – Days of Being Wild “fluorescent light, saturated colour and the beauty of faces creating the world of his films”. In The Mood For Love – the slow motion crossing of paths of the couple on the way to get noodles.

Maggie Cheung in Assayas's Irma Vep

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Taiwan

Interview with Tsai Ming-liang about Hou Hsiao-hsien. A City of Sadness – showing the location of the hospital from one set up for multiple scenes “reality doubling back again. Hou shows we recall places more than events”. Comparison of Hou Hsiao-hsien with Ozu and the frames within frames.

Tsai Ming-liang – Vive L’amour. The importance of the lengthy final crying scene and the request to cut it short when submitted to the Venice Film Festival. Tsai: “I often film people drinking water. Then they either cry or piss. Bodies are containers, but also for emotion”.

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Japan

Interview with Shinya Tsukamoto – On the influence of Godzilla.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man – The eroticism of fusing with metal. Cronenberg as a father figure for cyberpunk. Back to Videodrome.
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer – the single frame imagery of the mind’s eye. Memories turned into electronic impulses.

Ring “Japan’s biggest ever international hit – in the country of Sony and Panasonic the ultimate fear is of video imagery”. Borrowing the domestic setting of The Exorcist. Borrowing the dreamlike calm of the ghost from Ugestu. The deadly videotape “The sound in this sequence contained an astounding fifty audio tracks. Sound was now doubling back over itself”.

Audition – the telephone call and the burlap sack. “Stillness being used as a counterpoint to violence in an almost Buddhist way”

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Denmark

A trip around Zentropa
The rules of Dogme 95
“A celebration of the primitive in cinema before the arrival of computer generated imagery”

Breaking the Waves
Editing together moments of a take that seemed the most true even if they broke continuity. The influence of Homicide: Life On The Streets on the editing.
The (annoying!) bells of Heaven at the end. Cousins: “the most audacious moment in the whole of world cinema in the 90s”
Von Trier: “The good thing about going too far is that the audience can make a mark of how long they stayed with it. A lot of people didn’t last beyond the bells!”

Dogville – an intimacy between director and actor. Lars von Trier on the chalk outline of the sets: “One of Nicole’s friends, Russell Crowe, came to the set and said ‘this demands an explanation’. I said ‘Not from me!’ “
Von Trier’s women ‘versions of himself’. The preference to work with women
Von Trier: “The films I like hurt a little bit. A lot of films are reproductions. I’m trying to make something that makes a little mark or pain”.

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France

Mathieu Kassovitz - La Haine – “a static camera staring at its blank characters”. A stroll around the banlieue.
Influence from Leone, Do The Right Thing and the homage to Taxi Driver (and the Scarface “world is yours” motto!) Cousins: “the old beauty of film used to show new truths about working class France”.

Bruno Dumont - L’Humanite – the opening shot “the film has a cold stare, like marble”. The half-noticed levitation. The final shot of the briefly glimpsed handcuffs. Bresson redefined.

The Dardennes - Rosetta – the constant running of the character followed by the handheld camera. No shots/reverse shots.

Interview with Claire Denis – “for me there is no difference between James Cameron and me. We both love to make film”. Using celluloid in a non-masculine way. Denis on Touki Bouki and her feelings about Africa. Beau Travail – the fight in stripped down form. The dance scene coming after the main character’s suicide. A comparison to the end of Ozu’s Late Spring. “You are sad that it is the end of something yet you show something that is a beautiful loop, like the skin of the apple peel”.

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Poland

Dorota Kedzierzawska – Crows. “A film about the human face, another thing the coming digital cinema could not portray”

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Russia

Victor Kossakovsky – the documentary Wednesday 19th July 1961. The connections between people. “A celebration of real human beings in the last days of cellulouid”

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Austria

“Michael Haneke saw human beings from a darker, isolated perspective”
Code Unknown – the opening confrontation “Even the shots do not connect. This is revolutionary”
Funny Games – being the end of cinema, of characters. The grabbing of the shotgun and the reversal of consequences “something happens that would never happen in the age of celluloid. It is as shocking as the scene in Bergman’s Persona where the film melts. In both cases the spell is broken and we are woken up. To what?”.

...To a digital world where the characters on screen are avatars like Hobbits or Neo in The Matrix.

Episode 14 – Bigger Than Life

Digital filmmaking taking over. Coens, Tarantino and Lurhmann – “Reality losing its real-ness”

CGI allowing digital environments to be created and camera moves through electronic, rather than real, space (comparison between the camera move in Intolerance and over the Colosseum in Gladiator)

The difference between celluloid and digital information.

Robert Patrick walking out of the flames in T2. Making added imagery “look like it had been photographed”, not just superimposed onto the scene (shown in a clip from Anchors Aweigh)

Removing the proof of human hands from the creation of objects – comparing the animation of Gertie the Dinosaur (can see the animator’s handiwork) with the inhuman spectacle of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park

Grainy news footage of the Titanic turned into Cameron’s spectacle aiming to put the viewer into the position of the passengers (A theme park ride? Which the various characters taking a water slide from aft to bow only serves to emphasise)

“70s cinema had been about what we wanted to see. 90s cinema about what we can see. About the thrill of seeing, as if for the first time”

Ethics and bravery not as present in the creation of CGI shots - the camera on the wing of the plane in Wings vs the overhead shots of Gladiator

Two versions of the possibilities of digital filmmaking - Toy Story and Blair Witch Project

Star Wars Episode II filmed without celluloid

House of Flying Daggers – sequences involving real actors interacting with CGI objects caught by CGI camera movements: “Images doing things they could never do before, all with remarkable choreography and grace”

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Post-modernity

“Schindler’s List, L.A. Confidential and Silence of the Lambs 40s genre pictures in modern guises”
But quoting, irony and films about films now taking over

Goodfellas – the straight to camera narration – Pesci’s character shooting directly into camera compared to the (gun)shot in The Great Train Robbery

The opening of Siodmak’s Killers vs the opening of Pulp Fiction – total silence vs chatter about foot massages until Tarantino’s killers ‘get into character’

The surrealism of everyday talk becoming Tarantino-esque “Both more real and less real than everyday life at the same time”. “Tarantino, like Scorsese, a hyper-link to film history”

Yuen Wo-Ping choreographing Kill Bill
Reservoir Dogs contrasted with Ringo Lam’s City On Fire
Band a part as Tarantino’s punning company logo (very Godardian!)

Natural Born Killers “the mash up of filmic styles was almost a definition of post-modernism. No one style could capture the truth”

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The Coens – Miller’s Crossing. The opening with the hat. The Hudsucker Proxy – “honing the Frank Capra worldview”.
“Wide eyed and clueless heroes” – Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Bridges in The Big Lebowski .

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Interview with Gus Van Sant – the barn-dropping opening climax of My Own Private Idaho. Influence from The Shining for the more bizarre images.

Elephant: “No movie of the 90s was more complexly connected to film history”. The 4x3 screen ratio. Steadicam, constant movement and unexplained violence. Alan Clarke’s Elephant.
“HBO was the only company not interested in making Columbine, but who were interested in making Elephant”
Films feeling like video games. Gerry and Last Days.
Van Sant on playing the first level of Tomb Raider (“I couldn’t find Doom”) “To get from point A to point B you have to travel there. You cannot cut, you have to walk, as in reality”
The walk in Gerry
The walking in Sátántangó

Last Days – influence from Jeanne Dielman - fixed rather than travelling shots
Jeanne lighting the oven contrasted with Blake fixing his breakfast
Van Sant on ‘Ozu camera placement’

The remake of Psycho – “the original was based on a true story, the remake was based on a film. Anne Heche was not playing a real person but an actor. Welcome to the first days of digital” The shower sequences played side by side.

Van Sant: “I found that even if everything is the same, the intentions and the soul of the filmmaker is different…It became an example of how you cannot really copy something”

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Matthew Barney – the Cremaster cycle “a movie world all of their own”

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Paul Verhoeven. Interview with Ed Neumeier – Robocop and Starship Troopers.

The boardroom massacre. The plastic smiles and empty-headed blandness of TV news
Neumeier on ‘four quadrant demographics’: “The studios want everyone in the world to like the film, almost regardless of culture”

Starship Troopers – brains vs brawn and the gun always wins. Neumeier:”Verhoeven said that he wanted to make a film about young Germans in 1935 entering the world full of potential and excitement of what they could achieve – and nobody knew they were doing wrong. I said nobody would make that”. Neil Patrick Harris in the SS uniform at the end, humiliating the enemy.

Neumeier: “Sci-fi lets you do things politically that you could not do if played straight. Humour does the same thing, and combining the two lets you get away with murder!”

Cousins: “the spiciest entertainment cinema of the 90s”
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Australia and New Zealand

Interview with Jane Campion – An Angel At My Table “a shy young woman with a lively unconscious mind, she does not feel at home in the world”
Campion: “You have to be strong about vulnerability. Stand up for softness”
The Piano – the shot through the girl’s fingers “looking like a red curtain”

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Interview with Baz Lurhmann – Cousins: “if Jane Campion was the Ingmar Bergman of cinema, Lurhmann was the Vincente Minelli”. Luhrmann: “Shakespeare and Bollywood focused on the engagements of as many human beings as possible – a big idea conveyed through an emotional experience”

Romeo + Juliet - The gas station confrontation and the first meeting of the couple through the fish tank.
Moulin Rouge! – Model and CGI shots of Paris at the opening. The first nightclub scene. The seduction scene “a wild mash up of 90s love songs – reality as created by a DJ”

The red curtain trilogy (with Strictly Ballroom) – “a manifesto in almost exact opposition to Dogme”:
Rules of the red curtain trilogy:
Death foretold (as in Titanic)
Something to heighten the cinematic experience: dancing, language, singing

Expanding a brief emotional statement into an enormous, bigger than life moment


“The 90s were all about being expansive, full of self-referential feedback and the rapture of self-loss, but then came the 21st century…”

last part of my history of cinema is on tv in uk on sat. it has a gorilla, laurel and H, sokurov, Korea, Inception and a surprise ...

broadwayrock wrote:Towards the end of the interview he mentions a dvd boxset being released.

Episode 15 – the fantastical made up world of Fahrenheit 9/11 and the bitter reality of Mulholland Drive

Heavy editing phasing out as ‘slow cinema’ begins taking over

The clash between reality and dreaming – Laurel & Hardy in Swiss Miss showing the painted backdrop of the bridge over the Swiss Alps and the gorilla. “The Story of film is the story of the gorilla” – cut to a gorilla in Blonde Venus “filmed with the same lighting used to film Marlene Dietrich, then the reveal of Dietrich herself”. Diffusion filters

“In the 21st century what has been new? What has been “the gorilla”?”

Documentary

Reality returning – documentaries taking over “the first time that non-fiction cinema held its own on the big screen – 9/11 out Hollywood-ed Hollywood, reality had become greater than fiction”

Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11 – the “My Pet Goat” moment with the Michael Moore commentary and noodling piano music. Comparing the box office take of Fahrenheit 9/11 with The Bourne Supremacy – fiction films taking on rough, documentary looks.

Etre et Avoir – seeing a heroic teacher from a child-like perspective
Zidane: A 21st century Portrait – hearing the thoughts of a footballer

Fiction

’Reality’ films

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Brad Pitt compared to the way Lillian Gish filmed in Way Down East

Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Climates – documentary and fiction merging, continual focus changes causing the audience to search out the characters in the image. Cousins comparing to Bergman.

“The gorilla, the new idea in cinema, was an old idea. The idea of realism of real people who still matter”

New Romanian Cinema: The Death of Mr Lazarescu – human decency “we are all in this scary new century together”

Lucrecia Martel - The Headless Woman – the accident and the lack of fast editing in the sequence “a tense, tragic, mysterious moment which gives the film its tone”. The camera staying in the car as she leaves to walk off the shock – the sound of thunder and rain on the windscreen.

Carlos Reygadas – Battle in Heaven – the allusions to painting of Christ, rising music and constrasting body types in a blank room “the social gap is so profound, the only way of bridging it is through touch”. The crane shot around the roofs of the city during the sex act itself – “cinema coming full circle, showing that sometimes there is a world between two people even as they cling to each other”

(South) Korea – darkening reality and giving it a new trangressive brutality. 2003 as a case study: Lee Chang-dong, Oasis (the family meal); Bong Joon-ho, Memories of Murder (the ending); Park Chan-wook, Oldboy (the fight sequence).

Dream films

The Wizard of Oz leading into Mulholland Drive. Surrogates for the character, co-opted into new roles of witnesses or investigators, playing roles in the mystery and paying the price for their acceptance of a part in the narrative

Requiem For A Dream – “the great distortion movie about how drugs distort the world” “a paranoid dream in a fearful century”


Combining reality and fantasy – blurring the line

Interview with Roy Andersson – Songs From The Second Floor – the musical train sequence and the ending

Andersson: “Personal and collective guilt. We carry guilt as representatives of mankind and we have to reconcile and rid ourselves of it. It infects our society and our time.” – “I do not want a frame of my film to be indifferent – a lot of modern films contain indifferent frames.”

Comparing Andersson with Laurel and Hardy. Andersson: “They are tragic and funny at the same time. Two losers wanting to be accepted by the middle and upper class, but always fail! They are films of social and political tragedy”


The split screen in Indiscreet making it look as if the couple are in bed together - comparing to the split screen sequence of the Rules of Attraction with the combination of the two shots at the end “we go from an inside movement to an outside one – few films use old techniques in new ways as memorably as this one” (also look to the split screen sex scene in Requiem For A Dream)

Avatar – taking on new characteristics and abilities. The behind the scenes documentary showing the motion capture process “the set of a modern sci-fi film looks like a factory” – inserting human feeling into an electronic universe.

Weerasethakul – Tropical Malady – the tree of fireflies “not only has the friend been reincarnated as a tiger but also the film has been reincarnated from naturalistic to mystical – seldom in the whole story of cinema has this shift been made” (perhaps maybe in Raging Sun, Raging Sky?)

Interview with Sokurov – Mother and Son. Art talking about the possibilities of life. Connecting the style of Mother and Son to Caspar David Friedrich: “we even filmed in places where he painted”. “Filmmakers always want to do something quickly, but if you film quickly you only get quickness with no thought behind the action”.

Russian Ark - “Perhaps the most inventive ever made – perhaps the greatest ‘gorilla’ in film history”. Illustrating the moment before the death of a society. Sokurov: “It is a symbol of the destruction of people by others”. The astonishing unfolding of a single take and the moment it ends captured in the behind the scenes documentary. (Is the presence of this material in the series a sign by Cousins that making of material is becoming more important in filmmaking, and much more accessible to a wider audience with the advent of DVD; or simply another element to his theory of reality and fiction merging?)

“The most serious director of the 21st century, and the most daring. He, and filmmakers like him, suggest that the future of cinema is in provocative hands”.

Epilogue: 2046

What is film’s future?

Inception as a metaphor for filmgoing – layers of imagery, collective dreaming, “a slight embarrassment at the intimacy of the dream they have just shared”. A dream within a dream.
Characters playing a virtual game with virtual personas, living and dying together in a deeper layer of reality.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – on the run from a disappearing past. “What if the same happened to film? If in a digital or ideological storm film were wiped or banned and impossible to see?...”

Sealed Archives - ”…except in a bunker or room like this. If so, then we have to remember them.” People, places, objects involved in a film (and the studios and workshops where the filmmakers worked - vacated spaces from the interviews throughout the series, flash frames of the filmmakers) preserved by those who remember. Like the 'living books' in Fahrenheit 451.

“Or will cinema have a greater role in our lives?” – the plaza in Ouagadougou where filmmakers joined hands in tribute to those who passed in the last year.

Jonathan S wrote:...Does anyone know the source of his claim about a drunken "wild man" being retained on movie sets to come up with bizarre ideas?...