Notes:
The 1980s: Moviemaking and Protest – Around the World.
- The Horse Thief (1988) dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang
- A horse theif’s son dies
- For the burial, vultures eat the son’s body and when they are done they soar into the sky, bringing the spirit to the sky
- Yellow Earth (1985) dir. Chen Kaige
- Communist soldier collects folk songs, writing the lyrics that he can hear
- He meets a 14 year old girl, and she questions him, but doesn’t look at him
- Completely static shot of her while they have their conversation
- Had little action or conflict
- The girl wants to join the army to strike out against the world, rather than staying home
- Using emptiness in the frame as a compositional element
- Raise the Red Lantern (1991) dir. Zhang Yimou
- Director cinematographer of previous movie
- Boldly symmetrical and had striking orange red color palette
- House of Flying Daggers (2004) dir. Zhang Yimou
- Slow motion, amazing imagery, studied painting
- Repentance (1984) dir. Tengiz Abuladze
- Created a sensation
- Tells, in an almost comic book way, a story about a dictator with a hitler mustache
- The dictator dies, but someone digs his body up and ties it to a tree in the garden of his morally corrupt son
- The corpse looks unremarkable, as if just sitting there relaxing by the tree
- A symbol for the fact that atrocity cannot be buried
- Film seen by millions, a rare example of film actually changing the world
- Arsenal (1929) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Alexander Dovzhenko
- Above film similar
- Haunting static shot of dead smiling soldier
- Come and See (1985) dir. Elem Klimov
- Nazi bombs have just exploded, into the frame we see the teenage boy who is fighting the Nazis
- We zoom out and up, because of the wide angle lens he seems to get smaller, the brim of his hat reaching out to us
- He cannot find his family, and is this girl is going to help him search
- They run off together, and he does not see, but we do, his families bodies with other bodies piled behind a building
- The wide lens combined with the editing suggest this is what the girl is seeing
- They go through a bog, we hardly hear their screams, very physical
- Long Goodbyes (1971) dir. Kira Muratova
- Throughout the film, the mother and soon look away from each other
- They are on a train, but we never hear the sound of a train
- The theme of the film was about how people can suffocate each other
- About psychological bondage
- Muratova was accused of being anti-soviet because of his the way he filmed, his camera as if hidden
- They claimed it was a commentary of Soviet surveillance
- A Short Film About Killing (1988) dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski
- Pictures 20 year old boy in yellow and green imagery
- Boy sees rock, decides to do harm with the rock
- Makes us scared of him, if he can do that he can do anything
- He gets in a taxi, he is going to kill the taxi driver, but the taxi driver of course does not know
- Taxi driver stops to let kids cross the street, echoing shot of people crossing the street from a view inside the windshield in below film
- The lady driving the car in Psycho does not know she is about to die, just as the taxi driver does not
- The boy strangles the man, we see his foot come out of his sock, he takes forever to die
- The scene lasts 3 minutes and 45 seconds, real-time shots
- The mask on the imagery so heavy, it looks as if it is night sometimes
- The boy is sentenced to death for his crime, but he is gone in a moment, again with green lighting and darker imagery
- The film has to be seen to be believed, it changed the death penalty in Poland
- Talking truth to power
- Psycho (1960) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
- Wend Kuuni (1983) dir. Gaston Kaboré
- Orphaned boy with name meaning gift from god
- Camera follows him from a distance
- We get a flashback from when his mom is still alive, they are sick, underneath a tree
- Film takes place before colonial society
- Speaks truth to the past
- Yeelen (1987) dir. Souleymane Cissé
- Title means brightness
- Man has to destroy his father, so he is in tears
- A water buffalo in slow motion and a sci fi roar on the soundtrack
- Tracks up from his feet to show his stony look
- His father becomes a mythic elephant, and the man is a lion
- Mystical rods seem to brighten, channeling the cosmos
- Video Killed the Radio Star (1979) (music video) dir. Russell Mulcahy
- Very first music video
- About imagery, showed screens within screen
- Became language of popular imagery around the world
- Flashdance (1983) dir. Adrian Lyne
- Shows how music videos influenced film
- Fast cuts, sexy imagery, popular music, we do not hear the woman who is dancing’s feet
- Top Gun (1986) dir. Tony Scott
- Rich color, a roller coaster in the sky
- Close ups of pilots, like star wars
- Advert for the new dream, the new masculinity, the new America
- Blue Velvet (1986) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. David Lynch
- We float into this movie as if in a dream
- Children go to school in slow motion
- White picket fences, a dream
- The Elephant Man (1980) dir. David Lynch
- Dark american dreamworld
- Shows us the surrealism of his world
- Director’s movies protest against the rationality and understand-ability of everyday life
- Had an abstract fear of the world, but viewed that fear through a beautiful lens
- Do the Right Thing (1989) dir. Spike Lee
- Shot on a block in Brooklyn
- Used saturated colors to show the heat of the day
- Film takes place on one hot summer day, as tensions rise between black and Latino people
- Borrowed some techniques from the below film, such as a skewed camera showing the skewed world
- The Third Man (1949) dir. Carol Reed (introduced in Episode 5)
- Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980) dir. John Sayles
- About the reunion of a group of college friends, 10 years after they were arrested on their way to an anti-war protest
- The film feels truthful, because it is not edited in a flashy MTV way
- Director was always interested in what do we see in real life that we don’t see in movies
- Director and producer always wanted to make the movies in their own way, cast their own actors
- Most of the do it yourself approach in individual cinema came from the Director and Producer’s ideologies
- Subway (1985) dir. Luc Besson
- A roller skater slashes a bag, and runs away from cops
- Filmed like a car chase, from the skater’s point of view
- Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) dir. Leos Carax
- Fireworks, public enemy plays, could be a modern dance about high class people but the people are homeless, the girl is going blind and the man is a drunk
- An American in Paris (1951) dir. Vincente Minnelli (introduced in Episode 5)
- Modern dance, color splashed across the screen, romantic ecstasy
- Labyrinth of Passion (1982) dir. Pedro Almodóvar
- Camp, a touch of goth in his eyeliner, and purple sideburns
- A porn shoot, the porn star is male, the style cheap, not glassy
- Challenged old fashioned spain with sex and style
- A Hard Day’s Night (1964) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Richard Lester
- Camerawork that makes you feel as if you are there
- The Quince Tree Sun (1992) dir. Víctor Erice
- A man has been painting a Quince tree for weeks
- Uses no camera moves, natural lighting
- My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) dir. Stephen Frears
- We are in London, a high level shot like a musical, a Pakistani man is re opening his laundry place
- Britain loves entrepreneurs, but not immigrants
- In the back room, his nephew is having sex, with a white man
- “A knee in the balls for the right wing government”
- My Childhood (1972) dir. Bill Douglas
- Far more serious but equally bold
- Woman takes a swig of beer, the beer seems to warm her heart
- Gregory’s Girl (1981) dir. Bill Forsyth
- Looked at young people and the ordinary places where they fall in love
- For most of the film, it is horizontal, but then it becomes tilted, a touch of poetry
- Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) dir. Terence Davies
- A family home terrorized by a father
- Signature slow dissolve
- Intolerance (1916) dir. D. W. Griffith (introduced in Episode 1)
- Director from above films love of slow tracking shot comes from this movie
- Young at Heart (1954) dir. Gordon Douglas
- Another influence on Davies, director of one above movie
- A Zed & Two Noughts (1986) dir. Peter Greenaway
- Director likes his frames to be perfectly symmetrical
- The Last of England (1988) dir. Derek Jarman
- Inter cut shots of male dancer and fire, we hear a Nazi speech
- Videodrome (1983) dir. David Cronenberg
- A man is watching TV late at night, alone
- Half switched off, half turned on
- The TV throbs and we hear a sensual woman’s voice
- The idea that a machine can be sexual, something to touch, something to kiss
- Crash (1996) dir. David Cronenberg
- A car shown as an erotic place
- Wanted to show modern society that we are all more down and dirty then we would like to think
- Neighbours (1952) dir. Norman McLaren
- Two neighbors fight over a flower
- Jesus of Montreal (1989) dir. Denys Arcand
- Brilliant assault on hypocrisy