Notes:
The following material is from Wikipedia:
1918-1932: The Great Rebel Filmmakers Around the World
- The Thief of Bagdad (1924) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Raoul Walsh
- Soft lighting, shallow focus, makeup, dream-like appearance
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Scrub mainstream cinema of it’s gloss and makeup
- Robert and Bertram (1915) dir. Max Mack
- At first he acted in movies, and then directed and mocked in his movies the heavy-handed way romance and sex where shown in movies
- The Oyster Princess (1919) dir. Ernst Lubitsch
- Shows director’s mocking tone
- All assistants are black
- The Mountain Cat (1921) dir. Ernst Lubitsch
- Very visually daring
- Man gived girl his heart, she eats it
- “A riot of surreal production design”
- The Marriage Circle (1924) dir. Ernst Lubitsch
- American censorship means he had to be inventive with how he portrayed sex and marriage
- Uses objects to show the characters are having sex
- La Roue (1923) dir. Abel Gance
- Tells the story of a complex love triangle
- We see a man’s own thoughts, what images are passing through his head
- Images flashing past give us an impression of his final moments
- “There is cinema before and after La Roue just as there is painting before and after Picasso”
- Napoléon (1927) dir. Abel Gance
- 4 hour impressionist film
- Made mainstream romantic cinema look static in comparison
- Re-thought the camera’s relationship with movement
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) dir. Robert Wiene
- Metaphor for the German state and it’s people
- The whole thing was the dream of a madman, and the German state was not evil after all, and did not control it’s people
- Jagged spaces and lines like shards of glass
- The Tell-Tale Heart (1928) dir. Charles Klein
- Same jagged spaces
- The Lodger (1927) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
- Used some of the shadowing and lighting from Caligari
- A Page of Madness (1926) dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa
- Director former actor
- Visual overlays, fast cutting as in La Roue
- Woman dancing, she is in the asylum
- We learn through complex flashbacks that she tried to drown her daughter
- Her husband joins to try and help but ends up going insane in the asylum too
- The film itself seems psychotic
- 2nd great Japanese film
- Metropolis (1927) dir. Fritz Lang
- Like a fantasy in New York with it’s set
- Used 36,000 extras
- The Crowd (1928) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. King Vidor
- Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) dir. F. W. Murnau
- Dancing in the movie looked a bit awkward and shy as in real life
- Had gigantic city set built
- Voted best film of all time by French critics
- Opus 1 (1921) dir. Walter Ruttmann
- Looked like biology
- He painted on glass, wiped it off, and painted again while filming the result
- Entr’acte (1924) dir. René Clair
- Put the camera in places a conventional ballet could only dream of
- Put the camera under the dancer
- Rien que les heures (1926) dir. Alberto Cavalcanti
- Haunting experimental film
- Spellbound (1945) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
- Dream sequence reflected previous director’s scene
- Un Chien Andalou (1929) dir. Luis Buñuel
- An attempt to show how the unconscious works
- Editing so that we saw things in other things
- Blue Velvet (1986) dir. David Lynch
- Reflected previous director with shot of ant-covered ear
- L’Age d’Or (1930) dir. Luis Buñuel
- Man and woman trying to make love, crowd of people stop them
- Fascist patriots hurled ink at the scene
- Out of distribution for 50 years
- Kino-Pravda n. 19 (1924) dir. Dziga Vertov
- Child of the revolution made it
- Worships the work of peasants
- Glumov’s Diary (1923) dir. Sergei Eisenstein
- First film
- Actor’s performed, mugged for the camera
- Director was bisexual, christian, jew, marksman
- Battleship Potemkin (1925) dir. Sergei Eisenstein
- Wanted to film on the stage that was steps
- Shots that lasted on an average of 3 seconds
- Wanted bodies to roll down the steps
- Director adored D.W. Griffith
- Steps create panic which was exactly what director wanted
- Creates the idea of innocent ruined by the state
- Charlie Chaplin loved film
- The Untouchables (1987) dir. Brian De Palma
- Used similar shot to steps sequence from previous director
- Arsenal (1929) dir. Alexander Dovzhenko
- Women stand motionless in the sunshine in dead villages
- It is like they can hear the song of the war in their heads
- Soldier goes mad with German laughing gas
- Women stand motionless in the sunshine in dead villages
- Earth (1930) dir. Alexander Dovzhenko
- Man is dancing and suddenly collapses, no one knows why
- I Was Born, But… (1932) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
- Shows boyhood
- Almost all silent films have been destroyed in Japan from causes like natural disasters and bombings
- Ozu seemed to be telling us the type of innocence in the boys doesn’t last
- Ozu did not believe in heroes
- The boys learned that all people are just decent
- Tokyo Story (1953) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
- Ozu’s most acclaimed film
- “Had his own precise rhythm”
- He would try not to show the floor and filmed part of the ceiling to get more of a three dimensional look
- Brought the camera around the characters to a 90 degree angle, to take you inside the conversation
- Used 50mm lenses so nothing was overly bulging
- Added pauses in his films, to give the story and the space a breather
- Interested in centering the body and de-centering the ego
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) dir. Chantal Akerman
- One of the few movies that used Ozu’s camera height
- The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
- Osaka Elegy (1936) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
- About a telephone operator who is forced into prostitution
- The director’s sister was forced to be sold as a gaysha because they were in poverty
- Citizen Kane (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Orson Welles
- The boy is playing in the background
- Praised for visual boldness buy Mizoguchi did it first
- Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
- Filmed very different from Hollywood romance
- Since we see her from behind, we do not feel sorrow with her by moral indignation at her plight
- Director was known as a woman’s director
- Mildred Pierce (1945) dir. Michael Curtiz
- American film reflects bridge scene about almost attempted suicide from previous director
- But since Hollywood, it was filmed romantically and romanticized suicide
- Romance of the West Chamber (1927) dir. Hou Yao and Minwei Li
- Period costumes
- Scenes of City Life (1935) dir. Yuan Muzhi
- Went more to leftist realist cinema
- The Goddess (1934) dir. Wu Yonggang
- Single mother at son’s performance
- Money is so tight she has been forced to sell herself to pay for her child’s education
- Tracking shot shows the whispers about what she does for a living passing down the line
- Center Stage (1991) dir. Stanley Kwan
- Director had her repeat famous Japan scene
- New Women (1935) dir. Cai Chusheng
- Played real-life actress who committed suicide after being hounded by the press
- Tabloids trashed her name because she was so real and did not romanticize sex
- Ended up committing suicide by overdose just like her character