The Story of Film – Episode 15

Notes:

2000 Onwards: Film Moves Full Circle – and the Future of Movies.

  • Swiss Miss (1938) dir. John G. Blystone and Hal Roach
    • Putting a piano in the Swiss Alps, shot on a set with a painted background
      • We know something will go wrong, it always does
  • Blonde Venus (1932) dir. Josef von Sternberg
    • Hollywood at its most playful, absurd, new
  • Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Louis Lumière
    • Movies started with this documentary
  • Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) dir. Michael Moore
    • First time in the story of film that non fiction cinema held it’s own on the big screen
    • One of the biggest box office hits in the history of documentary
    • All they had to do was show the footage, add a commentary, and time stamps
  • The Bourne Supremacy (2004) dir. Paul Greengrass
    • Film above made the same amount of money as this one
    • Filmed more like a documentary, the director came from documentary’s
  • Être et avoir (2002) dir. Nicolas Philibert
  • Zidane – A Portrait in the 21st Century (2006) dir. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno
    • Documentary
    • Used extra long lenses to film a football match
      • Follows one player, not the overall match, we see his thoughts as subtitles, although he never speaks
  • The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) dir. Andrew Dominik
    • Shallow focus, no attempt to computerize the images
  • Way Down East (1920) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
    • Film above has the delicate photo-realism of this film
  • Climates (2006) dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
    • Shot digitally
    • A hotel room, a wife in close up, the drip of water on the soundtrack
      • We cut to her older husband, his face half obscured
      • Lots of mysterious focus shots
    • Sad film about marriage
  • The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) dir. Cristi Puiu
    • New Romanian cinema
    • Passionately showed that we are all in this scary new century together
  • The Headless Woman (2008) dir. Lucrecia Martel
    • Argentinian film
    • Static camera with one shot shows woman in her car, reaching for her ringing phone, accidentally hitting something, pulling over, trying to calm herself down, then driving off
    • The camera stays in the car as she stops again, gets out, leaves the shot
    • We see her keep secrets from her family and from herself throughout the film
    • Hauntingly unglossy movie
  • Battle in Heaven (2005) dir. Carlos Reygadas
    • Close up of a dark hand holding a light-skinned one
    • When they are shown having sex, the camera travels up and we see a single uninterrupted over 3 minute long crane shot showing people repairing a satellite dish, and other homes
  • Oasis (2002) dir. Lee Chang-Dong
    • A man who is just out of prison is dominating the conversation at the dinner table
      • He has brought with him a young woman with cerebral palsy, it is uncomfortable
  • Memories of Murder (2003) dir. Bong Joon-ho
    • A cereal killer has killed 10 Korean women, which is a true story
    • A cop is looking for the killer, he seems haunted by the memory of the murder
    • A girl then approaches him, and reveals that she may have seen the murderer
      • A conversation, simply shot
    • All through the film, the detective has been looking for this kind of breakthrough, and now that he finally gets it, it’s just ordinary, it doesn’t give him anything
  • Oldboy (2003) dir. Park Chan-wook
    • Film based off Japanese manga cartoon book
    • The camera keeps its distance on a dolly during the fight
  • Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Georges Méliès(Although Mark Cousins and the title on the screen indicate that the scene being shown is from La lune à un mètre, the scene is actually from Le Voyage dans la lune.
    • One of the first science fiction films
  • Mulholland Dr. (2001) dir. David Lynch
    • A girl falls asleep and dives down into her own consciousness
    • Then the girl grows up, falls in love with another girl, and gets so jealous she hires a hit-man to kill her
      • Another man is there, and it is as if he is seeing her commit the crime, the thought-crime
    • So innovative because it was the wizard of oz plunging into a black rabbit hole
  • Requiem for a Dream (2000) dir. Darren Aronofsky
    • Looked at people on drugs
    • Movie about how drugs distort the world
  • Songs from the Second Floor (2000) dir. Roy Andersson
    • Man has burned down his business and is on the train, the walls a bad green, but suddenly heightened, like a musical fantasy
    • In the ending, symbols of religion are being dumped into a wasteland beyond the city
      • Uncut shot lasts for minutes, and then people stand up from the field, like the day of judgement, they have been there all along
  • Way Out West (1937) dir. James W. Horne
    • Previous director fan of this
  • Indiscreet (1958) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Stanley Donen
  • Rules of Attraction (2002) dir. Roger Avary
    • We feel in the middle of this flirtatious conversation
  • Avatar (2009) dir. James Cameron
    • CGI really helped make this movie
    • In real life, the man is a marine and cannot walk, but he runs in his avatar body
    • The faces were filmed for realistic facial expressions
    • Managed to insert the mystery of human thinking and emotion into a digital animation
  • Motion Capture Mirrors Emotion (2009) dir. Jorge Ribas
  • Tropical Malady (2004) dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
    • Backdrop so still it looks almost painted
    • The film then seems to break down, it goes to black, restarts, we see a man in the dark, looking up at a tree lit by fireflies
      • We learn that his friend is now a tiger, and he must hunt him
      • The film seems to have been reincarnated, from a naturalistic tale of friendship, to a tale of hunting and hunted
  • Mother and Son (1997) dir. Alexander Sokurov
    • Russian cottage in the countryside, mother is dying, her son tends to her, she is happy dying in his arms
    • Many critics feel this is one of the best films of its time
  • Russian Ark (2002) dir. Alexander Sokurov
    • A ball from older times, they flow down the steps like a river, but we feel when they leave their heads will be cut off by young men waiting, they are going to slaughter and it is unavoidable
      • There was nothing noble about the slaughter, just violent, disgusting
    • Director saw the film as the last breath of this society
      • Because of that, filmed it all in one take, there is but one cut in the entire movie
  • In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2003) dir. Knut Elstermann
    • Documentary footage from when the film above was finished

Epilogue the Year 2046

The Story of Film – Episode 14

Notes:

The 1990s: The First Days of Digital – Reality Losing Its Realness in America and Australia.

  • Gladiator (2000) dir. Ridley Scott
    • Digital cinema, overhead shot as if camera was on a helicopter, but all created digitally
  • Intolerance (1916) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
    • Put camera on crane to get opening shot
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) dir. James Cameron
    • Scanned a photgraphed image and then painted silver metal over it and made different movements, to make the man look like he turned into mercury
    • Before, digital characters were cartoon characters, two dimensional, not real
  • Anchors Aweigh (1945) dir. George Sidney
    • Two dimensional mouse dancing with person
  • Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Winsor McCay
    • One of the first animations
  • Jurassic Park (1993) (introduced in Episode 11) dir. Steven Spielberg
    • Reflections on the floor of the feet of the t-rex, looks very real
  • Titanic (1997) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. James Cameron
    • We see the sinking ship as if it had actually been photographed
  • Toy Story (1995) dir. John Lasseter
    • First mainstream feature film to be made entirely of CGI
    • Allowed deep staging and shots that were hard to get in real life
  • The Blair Witch Project (1999) dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
    • Shot on low tech digital video
    • Marketed on the internet
  • House of Flying Daggers (2004) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. Zhang Yimou
    • A blind dancer
    • A man flicks a bean at the drums to confuse her, we see the bean and track it as it hits drums
    • The bean is computer generated
    • The man throws a CGI plate at her, she wields a CGI sword at him
    • Allowed us to see things in a way we hadn’t before
  • Goodfellas (1990) dir. Martin Scorsese
    • About gangsters
    • This gangster looks right into the camera
  • The Great Train Robbery (1903) dir. Edwin S. Porter
  • The Killers (1946) dir. Robert Siodmak
    • Two killers are about to do a hit
    • The shot is dark, the shadows from German expressionism
    • They are quiet
  • Pulp Fiction (1994) dir. Quentin Tarantino
    • Two killers about to do a hit
    • They talk a lot
    • The shot is a lot lighter
    • Both more real and less real than life at the same time
  • Reservoir Dogs (1992) dir. Quentin Tarantino
    • Long lens, wearing black glasses, man shoots the police with two guns
    • Climax shot of three thieves pulling guns on each other, one police officer on the ground bleeding
  • City on Fire (1987) dir. Ringo Lam
    • Long lens, wearing black glasses, man also shoots the police with two guns, an inspiration for the shot above, very similar shots
    • Same with the second shot described above, the exact same in this film, wide shots and then close ups, three thieves, police officer on the ground, in the climax of the film
  • Bande à Part (1964) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
    • Tarantino used A Band Apart as the name for his production company
  • Natural Born Killers (1994) dir. Oliver Stone
    • Tarantino wrote the screenplay
    • Mash up of styles, no one type of image to capture the truth, fragmented multiple realities
  • Miller’s Crossing (1990) dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
    • A hat falls into the foreground, the trees in the background out of focus
      • The wind blows the hat farther away, backwards, but the focus follows it and we see the leaves and the trees in the background fall into focus
  • The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
    • A little man caught up in events he doesn’t understand
  • O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
    • George Clooney played a similar “trespasser” in this movie
    • Clooney wide eyes, clueless
  • The Big Lebowski (1998) dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
    • Surreal design, fondness for old Hollywood
  • My Own Private Idaho (1991) dir. Gus Van Sant
    • Was about a young hustler
    • To show what the man felt like when he had an organism, the director showed a barn crashing into a landscape
      • Never had sex been shown in this imaginative way before
    • Film full of empty landscape shots, golden lighting, the empty road
  • The Shining (1980) dir. Stanley Kubrick
    • One singular alone beautiful shot, like the barn in the film above
  • Elephant (2003) dir. Gus Van Sant
    • Shot in 4 by 3 ratio
    • Needless violence, about a school shooting
  • Elephant (1989) dir. Alan Clarke
    • Used a steady camera to show the glide-like walking of gun men in Ireland
  • Gerry (2002) dir. Gus Van Sant
    • Filmed like in videogames, no cutting, you have to walk from point A to point B
    • Obsession with the beauty of walking
  • Sátántangó (1994) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Béla Tarr
  • Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) dir. Chantal Akerman
    • Full of fixed shots
    • Filmed square on, in domestic places like kitchens
  • Last Days (2005) dir. Gus Van Sant
    • Some shots remarkably similar to film above
  • Psycho (1960) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
    • Original, based off a real story
  • Psycho (1998) dir. Gus Van Sant
    • Based off the previous film
    • Departed from the original with only tiny details
    • This version became devoid of the original dark underlying tensions
    • “Became an example of how you can’t really copy something” because of the different intentions and such, -Director
  • Cremaster 3 (2002) dir. Matthew Barney
    • Director used to work in sports
    • Worked up a sweat making his movies as well
    • He is filmed rock climbing
    • Film overloaded with symbolism
    • Similar to the determination of man climbing building in film below
  • Safety Last! (1923) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
  • RoboCop (1987) dir. Paul Verhoeven
    • Businessmen want to make money by launching this new mechanical cop, but it turns on them
    • They try again, and come up with a more liberal version
    • Satirical script
  • Starship Troopers (1997) dir. Paul Verhoeven
    • Even more satirical about the threat to humans by alien bugs
      • The bugs were all computer generated
    • Decided never to let on who was the bad or good guys
    • In the ending, the “queen” bug is tied up, humiliated
      • A man puts his hand on it and cries out “it’s afraid” and everyone starts cheering
  • An Angel at My Table (1990) dir. Jane Campion
    • About a shy young woman training to be a teacher
    • She is standing in front of the class, and a trainer, and a person who is going to asses her
      • She freezes at the chalkboard, has a panic attack, we focus on a close up shot of the chalk
  • The Piano (1993) dir. Jane Campion
    • The child is looking through her fingers, they look like read curtains about to open
    • Only film directed by a woman to win a certain award at a film festival
  • Romeo + Juliet (1996) dir. Baz Luhrmann
    • Director defined the first days of digital cinema
    • Director collection of history of film, lots of inspiration and fondness for Bollywood, Shakespeare
    • Hyperactive version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
    • Leonardo De Caprio played Romeo
    • Translated to modern American times
    • Comic dialogue
    • Knights have become street kids in Hawaiian shirts
  • Moulin Rouge! (2001) dir. Baz Luhrmann
    • Fashion, cross-dressing, kaleidoscope

The Story of Film – Episode 13

Notes:

1990-1998: The Last Days of Celluloid – Before the Coming of Digital.

  • The Apple (1998) dir. Samira Makhmalbaf
    • Feels like an intimate personal myth about parental love and how it can go wrong
  • A Moment of Innocence (1996) dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf
    • A real life policeman directs a film about his life
    • He casts a quite handsome actor to play his younger self, already adding a touch of glamour to the real story
  • Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987) dir. Abbas Kiarostami
    • Director filmed like a football coach
    • Wanted to take the fake things out of filming, like unnatural lighting, dolly shots, etc.
    • One of the greatest films about childhood and friendship
  • And Life Goes On (1991) dir. Abbas Kiarostami
    • The film is about after the earthquake that struck where the director filmed the above film, and they went looking for the two boy actors that lived there but found something else; the love of human life
    • He made a short scene about him meeting a man who shared some of his values, and he fell in love with the woman playing his wife, but she did not love him back
  • Through the Olive Trees (1994) dir. Abbas Kiarostami
    • Made this film about that one tiny scene in the above film, and his feelings for the woman who was playing his wife
  • Days of Being Wild (1990) dir. Wong Kar-wai
    • Soft shadowing, shallow focus, beautiful natural colors
  • In the Mood for Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai
    • Time slowed down, a woman passing a man, he glances, music in 3/4 time, it rains like in a movie
    • The man and the woman are in separate marriages, but lonely
    • They are in the mood for love
  • Irma Vep (1996) dir. Olivier Assayas
    • Director scribbled on the celluloid to show what directors sometimes do to actors
  • A City of Sadness (1989) dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
    • Late 1940s
    • Long, static shots, average 40 seconds each
    • Director said that holding a long shot holds a certain kind of tension
  • Tokyo Story (1953) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
    • Previous director was inspired by and revered this director
  • Vive L’Amour (1994) dir. Tsai Ming-liang
    • About the loneliness of life in modern cities
    • At its end, a young woman walks to a park bench and cries, we don’t know exactly why
      • Waves of emotion cross her face as the sun comes out, we stay in a static shot
      • That scene lasts 7 minutes
  • Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) dir. Shinya Tsukamoto
    • “Combination of something that felt like eroticism and something hard like metal” -Director
    • Black and white captures the man’s terror and fear
  • Videodrome (1983) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. David Cronenberg
    • Previous director was inspired by this film and this director
  • Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) dir. Shinya Tsukamoto
    • A man has transformed into a gun
    • 43 seconds of single frame shots of biology
    • Partially inspired by fear of technology
  • La Roue (1923) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Abel Gance
    • Above shot partially inspired by shot in this movie
  • Ringu (1998) dir. Hideo Nakata
    • Film about people who die after watching a videotape
    • The horror is that it takes place in our own home
    • Avoided the christian idea of the soul made it distinctly Asian
  • The Exorcist (1973) (introduced in Episode 11) dir. William Friedkin
    • Above director loved this movie and borrowed the normal setting from it
  • Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
    • Eerie cam of dreamlike female ghost
  • Audition (1999) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Takashi Miike
    • The camera is very stable
    • Uses blankness to surprise us with the terror
    • Used stillness as a counter to violence
  • Breaking the Waves (1996) dir. Lars von Trier
    • About the suffering of a naive young Scottish woman
    • We follow her with a mostly handheld camera
  • Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) dir. Tom Fontana
    • No continuity, a burden to be freed of
  • Dogville (2003) dir. Lars von Trier (introduced in Episode 2)
    • Director often operated the camera himself
    • Again, breaks the editing rules
    • Used no sets
  • La Haine (1995) dir. Mathieu Kassovitz
    • Shot in black and white
    • Sometimes static camera stared at it’s black characters
    • The beauty of old style film techniques
    • About a black teenager
  • Do the Right Thing (1989) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. Spike Lee
    • Previous film inspired by this one
  • Humanité (1999) dir. Bruno Dumont
    • As unglossy as an early silent film
    • In the very last image, the man is filmed in medium long shot, and we glimpse handcuffs on him
      • Could the policeman be the rapist, or is he just an innocent man, paying for all out sins?
  • Rosetta (1999) dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne
    • About a feral teenage girl, who is desperate for a job
    • She runs throughout the film, and we follow her with a handheld camera
  • Touki Bouki (1973) dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty
  • Beau travail (1999) dir. Claire Denis
    • People say that cinema is men photographing women, but this movie is about women photographing men
    • The two men fight, the but director films their fight minimally, without testosterone
    • One of the men kills himself, and the last scene we see is him dancing to music, in the dark with lights, like in a disco, the death of disco and the death of celluloid
  • Late Spring (1949) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
    • The director of the above movie compared the last dance seen of the previous movie to the last scene of this movie, the father peeling the apple alone, peeling the apple sadly, not sharing it, sitting alone in a chair
  • Crows (1994) dir. Dorota Kędzierzawska
    • Used celluloid in a non-masculine way
    • About an older girl who kidnaps a younger girl, the girl is ignored by her parents
    • Film color coded in yellows and greens
  • Wednesday (1997) dir. Victor Kossakovsky
    • Man tacks down every single person in the city who was born on the day he was
    • All photographed naturally, like a documentary
    • Celebration of real human beings in the last days of celluloid
  • 24 Realities a Second (2004) dir. Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor
  • Code Unknown (2000) (a.k.a. Code inconnu) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Michael Haneke
    • Shot lasts 11 minutes, and the camera starts to move in complex ways
  • Funny Games (1997) dir. Michael Haneke
    • Anxiety, sense that something is on the brink, that humanity is becoming something else
    • Boys brutally terrorize the family
    • He looks straight into the camera and asks if it’s enough, to us, it’s unsettling
    • The woman they are terrorizing shoots one of them, and the other frantically scrambles for the rewind button
    • The film rewinds, to right before
    • He is commenting on how we enjoy violence, it is revolutionary
  • Persona (1966) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Ingmar Bergman
    • The film melts in one scene

The Story of Film – Episode 12

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

The Story of Film – Episode 11

Notes:

  • The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959) dir. Li Han-hsiang
    • A 50s world, feminine, studio set, highly colored, musical, a perfect world
  • A Touch of Zen (1971) dir. King Hu
    • Changed the world of Hong Kong cinema
    • More aggressive, swishing camera, swords, every move designed, graceful, engineered cinema
    • When Kung-Fu took over Hong Kong cinema
    • No ordinary kung fu movie
      • Turns into a ghost story, and then a reverie
      • Sunlight cuts like a sword, it sounds like steel
      • The Buddhist monks levitate
  • Enter the Dragon (1973) dir. Robert Clouse
    • Bruce Lee’s fighting had more sweat, anger, agression
      • Real anger in Lee’s face came from his own life, dealing with racism and other things
    • Though Lee was fast and furious, the camera work was anything but
    • The camera simply filmed, stayed out of the fight
      • Not a lot of editing in old Hong Kong cinema
  • A Better Tomorrow (1986) dir. John Woo
    • 80s clothes, sex, a story about more male bonding, loyalty, and betrayal
    • Filmed shoot outs with several cameras and used slow motion
      • Scenes broken down into glances,
    • Director made Mission Impossible 2
  • Iron Monkey (1993) dir. Yuen Woo-ping
    • Director choreographed as well
    • Cutting as fast as John Woo movie
    • Spun his characters in the air
    • Scene where actors fight kung fu on poles with fire underneath them
    • Director says he seldom uses a storyboard
      • Says he’s always thinking about the movie, the scenes
      • Director of the Matrix approached him
        • Said he wanted to infuse special effect technology with Chinese and Hong Kong Kung Fu techniques to create a brand new look
  • The Matrix (1999) dir. Lilly Wachowski & Lana Wachowski
    • We can see Yuen’s influence in the kung fu style fighting scenes
    • Yuen says “The hardest thing was that the actors did not know Kung Fu- not even how to use their fists”
      • It took him four months to train them
      • He taught them how to do all of the moves
      • He designed the moves for the characters based on what the director told him of what he wanted their personality to be
      • Yuen liked the freedom of not having a storyboard set in stone, liked making movies in Hong Kong because it felt more free, in Hollywood everything was set and you had to follow the storyboard exactly, after that there were no more changes
  • Once Upon a Time in China (1991) dir. Tsui Hark
    • Director is Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong
      • Directed 44 movies
    • Staged a small scene where a man and woman meet as if it was a gunfight, there was no logical reason
      • Over 25 shots just for them meeting
  • New Dragon Gate Inn (1992) dir. Raymond Lee
    • Two women fight as if there is a whirlwind in the room
      • Spinning, erotic
  • Mughal-e-Azam (1960) dir. K. Asif
    • Took the box office as the sound of music did in the west
    • Director wanted to make the film in color but couldn’t
  • Devi (1960) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Satyajit Ray
  • Mausam (1975) dir. Gulzar
    • 70s cinema unthinkable without this director
    • Influenced a generation of Indian women
    • Man and woman on mountainside, having romantic scene
      • Older version of the man is standing there, walking around on the mountain behind them, his future self looking back on when he was happier
  • Zanjeer (1973) dir. Prakash Mehra
    • Zooms, freezes, close ups, dramatic fragments of rage and anger, panic and fear
  • Sholay (1975) dir. Ramesh Sippy
    • Widescreen titles like an epic, music like an adventure film, landscape like a western
    • Huge box office success and played at one cinema for 7 years
    • Captured the feeling of that time
    • Freeze frames, slow motion, as a main character is shot down
      • Trauma electrifies the film
    • Fearlessly inventive shifts in tone
    • Scene where bad guy has main character’s sidekick’s girlfriend dance for his life
      • To make things more interesting, he places glass shards under her feet
      • Adds element of horror where no Bollywood or Hollywood film has dared to go before
  • The Message: The Story of Islam (1976) (a.k.a. Mohammad, Messenger of God) dir. Moustapha Akkad
    • Perhaps seen by as many people that have seen any film in the history of cinema
    • Biblical epic
    • Islam doesn’t allow the depiction of Mohammad, so we never see him in the film
    • Amazing scene where the uncle of Mohammad is talking directly to the camera, we see from Mohammad’s perspective
  • The Making of an Epic: Mohammad, Messenger of God (1976) dir. Geoffrey Helman & Christopher Penfold
  • The Sparrow (1972) dir. Youssef Chahine
    • Stunning account of terrible event in Egyptian history
    • The president of Egypt announces they have lost territory to Israel
    • We see everyone’s shocked faces, people rush outside, everyone gathers, chants, raises their fists, “Long live Egypt!”
      • It is treated slightly as a victory as people come together in shock and protest
  • The Exorcist (1973) dir. William Friedkin
    • A believable, middle-class home
    • Handheld, wide angle shot captures the panic and fear of the scene
    • Director wanted to take horror cinema and combine it with realism
    • Tells the story of a teenage girl possessed by the devil
    • Actress that did the voice of the devil ate raw eggs, drank, and smoked cigarettes to make her voice gurgle and sound more realistic
    • One of the most innovative vocal performances in cinema history
    • Director pushed other actors far too, slapped man actor on the face just to film his trembling reaction right afterwards for the film
    • Had some traditional techniques as well
    • Director had no-nonsense approach
    • Audiences across America fainted, threw up, a documentary was even made about people’s reactions to the film
  • A Guy Named Joe (1943) dir. Victor Fleming
    • Steven Spielberg was influenced a lot by this film
    • Pilot says goodbye to the woman he loves, because he was hilled in the war, and has to watch as she is falling in love with another man
  • Jaws (1975) dir. Steven Spielberg
    • Both an establishment film and an innovative one
    • 3 very different men on the boat, filmed in three shot
    • Spielberg wanted realism
    • Had one character crush a Styrofoam cup in mockery of the masculine crushing of a beer can
  • The Making of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1995) dir. Laurent Bouzereau
    • In the scene where the boy on the raft is attacked by the shark, Spielberg imagined it as being filmed all in one shot
      • Had the brilliant idea of actors in colorful bathing suits walking in front of the camera as the police chief is sitting there, one color as he looks out, another to wipe away what he is seeing
        • Clearly establishes that we are seeing from his point of view
  • Vertigo (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) dir. Steven Spielberg
    • Shows his signature move – the awe and surprise reaction wise shot with a dolly moving in, we do not see what they are looking at, the tension builds, the music rises
  • Jurassic Park (1993) dir. Steven Spielberg
    • Same shot as mentioned above of person looking again, and again, the music rising, they remove their glasses to see better, they get out of the car to see better
  • Star Wars (1977) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. George Lucas
    • Almost doubled the box earnings of Jaws
    • We are in a realm of myth
    • Luke dresses like a Samurai
    • Draws richly from film history
    • Fast cutting, the music crashes like waves in the climax
    • In that moment, the hero decided to feel, not think, which is what happened to American cinema itself
    • Everyone fell in love with this cinema of sensation, not contemplation
    • The two robots play off the two characters in Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress below
      • Spears in that film became lightsabers
  • The Hidden Fortress (1958) dir. Akira Kurosawa
  • Triumph of the Will (1935) (a.k.a. Triumph des Willens) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Leni Riefenstahl

The Story of Film – Episode 10

Notes:

1969-1979: Radical Directors in the 70s – Make State of the Nation Movies.

  • Fox and His Friends (1975) (a.k.a. Faustrecht der Freiheit) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
    • The idea was to make films as beautiful as America but about different things
  • All That Heaven Allows (1955) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Douglas Sirk
    • Same idea as above
  • Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (a.k.a. Angst essen Seele auf) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
    • Far less beautiful, more glossy
    • Director uses dolly/tracking shot to show racism
    • About the darkness of humanity
  • The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) (a.k.a. Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
    • About the darkness of humanity as well
    • Actors move slowly as if haunted and exhausted
  • All About Eve (1950) dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
    • About two women controlling each other
  • Alice in the Cities (1974) (a.k.a. Alice in den Städten) dir. Wim Wenders
    • Women falls in love with another woman and becomes her slave
      • That shot filmed with the background being a mural of Midas begging someone to rid him of his gold touch
    • Took an American story and rubbed it in the dirt
    • Loved Hollywood cinema but was snobby at it’s lies about identity
    • Long roaming lens, as if looking to remember
  • An Affair to Remember (1957) dir. Leo McCarey
    • 17 years earlier than previous film
    • Precise camera
  • Gods of the Plague (1970) (a.k.a. Götter der Pest) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  • The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978) (a.k.a. Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages) dir. Margarethe von Trotta
    • One of the least tense robberies ever filmed
    • Focuses on relationship between Christa, main character, and her relationship with the clerk
    • Christa is finally caught, and the clerk confronts her and tells the police it wasn’t her
      • Close up shots, almost exactly at eye-line level
    • About women’s intimacy during difficult times
  • Burden of Dreams (1982) dir. Les Blank
  • Arabian Nights (1974) (a.k.a. Il fiore delle mille e una notte) dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
    • Young man has been looking everywhere for his young lady servant
    • He is on the bed, tired, and in the room is a young king wearing a golden beard
    • He eventually relents to the king asking for sex and pulls his pants down, but the king is really his young maiden and cannot contain her giggles
  • The Spider’s Stratagem (1970) (a.k.a. Strategia del ragno) dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Tracking shots show woman how has been static for decades, the tracking camera seems to give her life
    • Man finds out his “hero” anti fascist father was really collaborating with them and was no hero, he doesn’t know what this makes him
    • Director loves the haunting light of dusk
  • The Conformist (1970) (a.k.a. Il conformista) dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
    • About fascism and identity
    • Bold composition, plunging perspective
  • Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
    • Violent scene  filmed with perfectly still camera
    • Has camera glide across the ceiling, an ugly event filmed in beautiful style
  • Women in Love (1969) dir. Ken Russell
    • Films sex scene as slow motion outdoor dance
    • Puts camera on its side, so they are vertical
  • Performance (1970) dir. Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg
    • About London gangster who keeps checking himself in the mirror
    • In one shot we see the two mans faces melding together, they are becoming more and more like each other
    • Greatest 70s film about identity
  • Mean Streets (1973) (introduced in Episode 9) dir. Martin Scorsese
    • About another narcissist getting all donned up
  • Persona (1966) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Ingmar Bergman
    • Original dissolve strangely similar to show two people merging together, becoming one another
  • Walkabout (1971) dir. Nicolas Roeg
    • A white city girl and her brother are off in the desert
    • Their father has just shot himself and tried to shoot them too
    • Film about the contrast in Australia between the city and wilderness, sea and swimming pools
    • Woman wears makeup like a mask
    • Has a half dreamlike memory of swimming naked with an aboriginal man
  • Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) dir. Peter Weir
    • Group of girls wearing white, Victorian style dresses in the desert heat of Australia
    • Filmed in slow motion, ghostly, one girl watches and screams as the rest disappear
    • At the end, we see more picnic scenes, but slow, with no synced sound, the girls are ghostly again
  • My Brilliant Career (1979) dir. Gillian Armstrong
  • Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1971) dir. Noriaki Tsuchimoto
    • Documentary filmed over 17 years
    • A chemical company dumped chemicals in fishing waters causing hundreds of deaths and deformities
    • People there to protest, families of the dead, trying to get the company to accept responsibility
  • The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) dir. Kazuo Hara
    • Handheld camera
    • Director came to belief that unbearable truth was buried between layers and layers of lies
  • Black Girl (1966) (a.k.a. La noire de…) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Ousmane Sembène
  • Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941) dir. Richard Thorpe
    • Scrubbed clean white family having breakfast in a jungle
    • Not realistic
  • La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1971) dir. Assia Djebar
    • No sync sound
    • Poorly preserved but dreamlike
    • More realistic picture of Africa
    • Looks at Algeria through a feminist lens
  • Xala (1975) dir. Ousmane Sembène
    • Follow up to The Black Girl
    • Starts at the end of colonial rule
    • Director against religion
  • Sinemaabi: A Dialogue with Djibril Diop Mambéty (1997) dir. Beti Ellerson Poulenc
    • Djibril spoke slow in an almost dreamlike way
    • Had a great love of cinema
  • Badou Boy (1970) dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty
    • A man and a boy saddle up a horse
    • Repetition of standing up and hunkering down of the two people give it an abstract look
    • Director said you either engage in stylistic research or simply film reality
  • Hyènes (1992) (a.k.a. Hyenas/Ramatou) dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty
    • Woman half made of gold, returned to village where the man who spurned her lived
    • She treats the villagers to luxuries, consumer goods
    • But the villagers become greedy
    • Village becomes like a shopping channel, a fun fair, a way to celebrate capitalism
    • Villagers so hooked on capitalism that they kill the man who spurned the woman for more
  • Kaddu Beykat (1975) (a.k.a. Lettre paysanne) dir. Safi Faye
    • Director first important African female director
    • Offscreen in a gentle voice she describes what we see
    • Show and tell for the world
  • Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976) (a.k.a. Mirt sost shi amit) dir. Haile Gerima
    • Starts at dawn, as if all of history has been just one day
    • Low contrast, black and white
    • Extremely long lenses to telescope the land
      • Makes us feel distant
    • Man tells story about the queen
      • Colonial power, told almost like a myth, not necessarily to anyone
    • Fight breaks out, voices start to flood the soundtrack, people are starting to talk to each other
  • Umut (1970) (a.k.a. Hope) dir. Yilmaz Güney & Serif Gören
    • Main character scruffy, masculine hero
      • Illiterate man who searches for treasure to feed his family, almost going insane
  • Yol (1982) dir. Yilmaz Güney & Serif Gören
    • Man has been released from prison for 5 days
      • Long lens filming, wind in the grass, wide shots, freedom
    • The music dies, the smile dies on his face, the state military are there
    • Still life shots of confrontation
    • No words needed, people look imprisoned in their own windows and doorways
    • Guney was a communist
  • The Battle of Chile (1975/1977/1979) (a.k.a. La batalla de Chile) dir. Patricio Guzmán
    • About identity and betrayal
    • Wide shots from above to show soldiers running around like ants
    • No filters, no gloss
  • The Holy Mountain (1973) (a.k.a. La montaña sagrada) dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
    • When the thief gets to the top of the tower, it becomes something like the wizard of oz, an odd corridor
      • This scene is in a way, a man climbing into his own mind and discovering archetypes and people that are like him

The Story of Film – Episode 9

Notes:

1967-1979: New American Cinema.

  • Duck Soup (1933) dir. Leo McCarey
    • People expect the president to come in at the top of the stairs but he comes in at the bottom
    • Satyrical
  • Artists and Models (1955) dir. Frank Tashlin
    • Films looked like cartoons
    • Bright colors and vivid imagery meant to give off that reality is fake
    • Director wrote a book about a possum
      • Possum hanging upside down in tree smiling
      • Passerby think he is frowning because he is upside down
      • People take him all over to show him the world and give him an adventure
      • He doesn’t like what he sees in the world, it is scary and disgusting
      • He is now frowning and the people return him to his tree, pleased because they think he is now happy
  • Catch-22 (1970) dir. Mike Nichols
    • One of the great movie satires
    • We want you to like us scene very good show of american character, we’ll chop your children up and feed them to the fish but we really want you to like us
  • Mash (1970) dir. Robert Altman
    • An upside down world where the situation is almost lighthearted when nurses are operating on a man dying
  • The Graduate (1967) dir. Mike Nichols
    • Student floats in his parent’s pool, in a world of beer and boredom, he is expressionless
    • He has an affair with one of his parent’s friends
    • He walks like a robot, slumps in front of the tv, drinks beer
  • The Fireman’s Ball (1967) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Miloš Forman
    • Deadpan, documentary like, making firemen look clueless and dumb
  • One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) dir. Miloš Forman
    • We’re in a mental institution
    • Close ups, natural lighting
  • The Last Movie (1971) dir. Dennis Hopper
    • Challenged film style
    • We are in Peru, and an american film crew is filming a western
    • It seems a documentary but it really is the story
    • The locals recreate characters and idols out of bamboo and treat them as if they are real
      • Almost like the film is a god that has visited them
      • They recreate the punch out scenes as well, but with real violence since they don’t understand it is fake
    • Bright, daring hate letter to american cinema
  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) dir. Robert Altman
    • Anti western film
    • Long lenses, muted colors, camera roams
    • No heroes, just characters lost in snow, out of their depth and uncertain about the world
    • Questioned what American history even means
  • The Conversation (1974) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
    • Was about the new type of sound equipment
    • Professional in his lab, surrounded by his new equipment
    • Accidentally eavesdrops on young forbidden lovers
    • He becomes obsessed with them and their mystery, replaying the tape over and over almost to the point of a mental breakdown
    • He cannot see them but the camera shows us them, in a long lens with a distant shot, the visual equivalent of the characters distance
    • The movie is about becoming obsessed with small pieces of others lives, to the point where your own live dissolves
  • Mean Streets (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese
  • Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
    • About Vietnam veteran driving around in a taxi
    • Filmed in slow motion, the taxi moves around in a slow ghostly way
    • Motivation behind film was existentialism
    • Character walks around in blue lighting, finds it painful to be alive
    • When he makes a phone call, camera tracks away from character, because the moment is too painful to watch
  • Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
    • Director kept his camera away from emotion, similar to the film above
  • Raging Bull (1980) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Martin Scorsese
    • About a self destructive man
    • Reaches rock bottom before finding redemtion
    • Catholic boxer
    • Slow motion shots for boxing scenes like christ
    • Fast cuts in fights
    • First time Italian Catholicism was in an american film
  • Italianamerican (1974) dir. Martin Scorsese
    • Same type of domestic shot as in film above
  • American Gigolo (1980) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Paul Schrader
    • About a male prostitute floating through the world
    • 80s red lighting
    • Find grace through a woman the same way as Pickpocket
  • Light Sleeper (1992) dir. Paul Schrader
    • About a drug dealer also floating through the world
    • Director wanting to show rescue from emptiness
    • Drug dealer has revelation with the exact same shot, with a woman
  • Pickpocket (1959) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Robert Bresson
    • Famous ending borrowed by Schrader
  • The Walker (2007) dir. Paul Schrader
  • The Birth of a Nation (1915) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
  • Killer of Sheep (1978) dir. Charles Burnett
    • Director did not want it to look Hollywood at all
    • Filmed in black and white
    • Used grey-black music
    • From kids point of view
    • Put a narrative together from a lot of things he had seen
  • The Shop Around the Corner (1940) dir. Ernst Lubitsch
    • First great filmmakers Jewish
    • Man is not hero of story, but humor and wit is the centerpiece
  • Annie Hall (1977) dir. Woody Allen
    • Explicitly Jewish character at the center of the film
    • The joke was that New York Jewishness was foreign and unfamiliar
    • Free form shooting
  • City Lights (1931) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Charlie Chaplin
    • Chaplin is the butt of his own jokes, but makes the blind girl see
  • Manhattan (1979) dir. Woody Allen
    • A city symphony
    • Widescreen images
    • Again, Jewish character at the center of the story
  • The Last Picture Show (1971) dir. Peter Bogdanovich
    • Shows how director mixed old and new
      • Black and white, conventional back and forth editing
    • Country music plays
    • At first look, could be a western
      • But woman is dumped by a man for a woman of greater beauty, we see her sorrow
      • He is too inarticulate to even say sorry
    • 16 second dissolve to a wide shot of the town, now ghostly, a horrid place to live, empty
  • The Wild Bunch (1969) dir. Sam Peckinpah
    • Took and stretched the neo realist idea of extending time
  • Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) dir. Sam Peckinpah
    • Showed how torn the director was about american history
    • When Garret finally kills Billy, he quickly turns to shoot himself in the mirror, as if he cannot bear to face himself
  • Badlands (1973) dir. Terrence Malick
  • Days of Heaven (1978) dir. Terrence Malick
    • Director studied philosophy
    • Cuts between character and landscape shot
      • Shows that he is, somehow, trying to capture the infinite
  • Mirror (1975) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
    • Work has much in common with Malick
    • Wind seems to be nature coming alive
  • Cabaret (1972) dir. Bob Fosse
    • Could be an old style musical, except musicals were not usually shot in close ups
    • Director used the best of the old techniques
    • Song in movie about living in the moment
  • The Godfather (1972) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
    • Most successful upgrading of gangster movies from the 30s
    • No long lenses, no helicopter shots
    • “North lighting” was rare in american cinema
    • Low lighting levels, shallow focus, internalizes performance
    • Showed network of relationships, unlike the 30s gangster movies that followed one character
  • Chinatown (1974) dir. Roman Polanski
    • Shot wide screen, muted 30s color
    • Private investigator unknowingly stumbles across the story of the water theft in LA, the rape of the land, where they were taking water away from farmers to fill the swimming pools
    • Directors wife and family, unborn child were murdered
      • Seemed to strip him of any delusions about reality
    • Movie about rape, money, greed
    • High point of American cinema of its time
  • The Maltese Falcon (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. John Huston
  • Jules et Jim (1962) dir. François Truffaut
    • Fleeting, lightness, expressionist

The Story of Film – Episode 8

Notes:

1965-1969: New Waves – Sweep Around the World.

  • Ashes and Diamonds (1958) dir. Andrzej Wajda
    • Takes place in the first day of peace after World War II
    • About rebel with a cause
    • Expressionist film-symbols of the world upside down
  • Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Roman Polanski
    • Director was Jewish
      • Mother was murdered in Auschwitz
  • Hamlet (1948) dir. Laurence Olivier
  • Knife in the Water (1962) dir. Roman Polanski
    • Director’s first feature film
    • Claustrophobic film
    • Love triangle, actor literally forms triangle with his arm in shot
    • Did not deal with war
    • Modernist – described as art for arts sake
  • The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) dir. Roman Polanski
  • The Hand (1965) dir. Jiří Trnka
    • Specialized in animation and puppetry
    • Hauntingly symbolic movie
    • The hand indoctrinates the man
    • Hand live action, man animated
    • Man eventually tries to resist and dies
  • The Fireman’s Ball (1967) dir. Miloš Forman
    • Filmed almost like a documentary
  • Daisies (1966) dir. Věra Chytilová
    • Two women squeak like dolls when they move
    • Authorities hated the movie
    • Director was banned for working for six years
  • The Red and the White (1968) dir. Miklós Jancsó
    • Detached control of camera is like detached control of white countrymen
    • Used lots of long takes to show suffering
  • Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (2000) dir. Chris Marker
  • Andrei Rublev (1966) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
    • The year 1400, we are in a bell tower
    • Crisp white photography
    • Film was banned for six years because it was religious
  • The Mirror (1975) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
    • As a man dies a bird flies fromm his hand, like the christian idea of the holy ghost
  • Stalker (1979) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
    • For more than two hours we follow three men
    • Then, we meet one of the mens daughters reading a book
    • Dandelion seeds float through the air, smoke drifts upwards
    • We see the girl and a table with a glass in a wide shot, we see the glass moving on its own, we hear an offscreen dog yelp as though it’s scared by the ghostly event
  • Nostalghia (1983) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
    • We follow a man and a dog throughout the film
    • Shot pulls out, we gradually see they are in a ruined cathedral
    • The whole story seems to be contained within this cathedral
    • It starts to snow
  • Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors (1965) dir. Sergei Parajanov
    • Film begins with a breathtaking point of view shot of a falling tree
    • Later, shot from a daisy looking up
    • Used foreground well
    • Dream sequence where the actors seem to float, mounted to the camera
  • Andrei Tarkovsky & Sergei Parajanov – Islands (1988) dir. Levon Grigoryan
    • Sergei imprisoned on charges of suicide and homosexuality
      • People protested and he was released 4 years late
  • Boy (1969) dir. Nagisa Oshima
    • A composition using a full wide screen
    • Boy and mother stand, mother seems worried about her son crossing the street
      • But really, they are about to stage an accident
    • They stage accident and mother blackmails the driving, who thinks he ran over her son
  • In the Realm of the Senses (1976) dir. Nagisa Oshima
    • Based on a true story
    • Starts gently
    • About a geisha, set in the 1930s
    • An elder man is poked at intimately by boys, made fun of
      • Symbolism for Japan losing its nationality and respect
    • Geisha becomes obsessed with one of her clients and castrates and strangles him
      • In real life, the woman served 5 years in prison for 2nd degree murder
  • Love and Crime (1969) dir. Teruo Ishii
    • Same real life woman from above seen here, in blue robes
  • The Insect Woman (1963) dir. Shōhei Imamura
    • Films insect as no nonsense metaphor for huans, struggling over rough terrain
    • Woman works on a farm, has a child
      • In shocking shot, suckles the father
    • Director often made films about women
  • Citizen Kane (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Orson Welles
    • Key character framed in far distance
  • Nippon Sengoshi – Madamu Onboro No Seikatsu (1970) dir. Shōhei Imamura
  • Ajantrik (1958) dir. Ritwik Ghatak
  • The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) dir. Ritwik Ghatak
    • About the original sin of the division of India
  • Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1975) dir. Ritwik Ghatak
    • DIrector distorts the sound as if the it is a sci-fi movie
  • Uski Roti (1970) dir. Mani Kaul
    • Experimental film
    • Man about to throw a stone at a tree to get a guava to give to his woman
    • Slow beats during action
  • Black God, White Devil (1964) dir. Glauber Rocha
    • Director was 25 when he made the movie
    • Shows the opposite of Brazil’s commercial cinema
    • Cowboy and his wife follow black preacher who is talking about revolution
    • Suddenly, all his followers are shot
    • Combined innovative film style with anti-colonist film ideals
  • I Am Cuba (1964) dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
    • Crane shot so beautiful it was shown at a film festival 10 years later
    • Camera floats over funeral
      • Like the soul of a dead student watching over
  • The House Is Black (1963) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Forugh Farrokhzad
    • Founding film father was a mother
    • She was 27 when she made this film
    • Sincere film, people in film are thankful for their lives
    • Shot as a unit of poetry
      • As girl is pushed around in wheelbarrow, we see the lives of others
  • Black Girl (1966) dir. Ousmane Sembène
    • About black woman who works for white family
    • Gives them an African mask as a gift
    • Is impressed by luxuries such as sprinkler in the backyard
    • Work gets harder, girl starts being treated as a slave
    • Eventually, it is too much and she is driven to commit suicide
      • Shot of this is black and white
    • Shaken and guilty, the husband of the white family goes back to where the girl came from to return the mask
    • The brother of the girl follows him around, wearing the mask
    • He is haunting
      • The mask, at first a symbol of hope, has now become a death mask, a symbol of guilt
  • Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) dir. Karel Reisz
    • Was set in working class England
    • Shot in black and white, on real streets, no cinema lighting
    • About man who works in factory
    • His son, seems a bit rock and roll, ends up getting a girl pregnant and she has to get an abortion
    • This form of cinema seemed new, since it was about the working regular class
  • Kes (1969) dir. Ken Loach
    • About a bullied boy who finds joy in training a hawk
    • Shot from the other side of the street, people walk by and in front of the camera, the camera did not inhibit the people
    • Edited for where your eye would naturally go
  • A Hard Day’s Night (1964) dir. Richard Lester
  • Primary (1960) dir. Robert Drew
    • New type of documentary
  • Shadows (1959) dir. John Cassavetes
    • Filmed on the streets, constant movement
    • Made Hollywood cinema look stale
  • Psycho (1960) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
    • Shot in black and white, tv style
    • Had actress wear plain clothes from ordinary stores
    • Steals clothing, goes home and takes a shower to wash away the moral dirt, to feel clean again
    • Woman is stabbed in the shower
      • We feel the experience
      • 70 different camera angles in 45 seconds
  • 66 Scenes from America (1982) dir. Jørgen Leth
  • Blow Job (1963) dir. Andy Warhol
    • Radical approach
    • Stripped cinema of expressive techniques
    • Nothing but a shot of a man’s face
    • We assume from the title he is receiving oral sex
  • Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) dir. Mike Nichols
  • Medium Cool (1969) dir. Haskell Wexler
    • Pushed the relationship between documentary, tv, and american cinema
    • Man watches Martin Luther King Jr’s speech and gets fired up
    • Ending in which cameraman is killed
    • Shots no longer than 4 seconds
    • Turns the camera on us, the audience, to make us think about how we are being represented
  • Easy Rider (1969) dir. Dennis Hopper
    • Mother of all biker flicks
    • Success at the box office because young people were impatient with the old cinema
    • Bikers killed by conservative duck hunters
  • Making “The Shining” (1980) dir. Vivian Kubrick
    • Camera position was central Kubrick’s art
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Stanley Kubrick
    • In one scene, attached camera to the set as it turns to show in space there is no up or down
  • Der Sieger (1921) dir. Walter Ruttmann
    • Hallucinated effects

The Story of Film – Episode 7

Notes:

The following material is from Wikipedia: 

1957-1964: The Shock of the New – Modern Filmmaking in Western Europe.

  • Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Louis Lumière
    • When movies were a bright, new art form
    • One of the first films shown
  • Summer with Monika (1953) dir. Ingmar Bergman
    • Among-st the most sensuous of its time
    • Allowed actress to look straight into the camera
  • The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman
    • Bergman’s best known film in the 50s
  • Winter Light (1963) dir. Ingmar Bergman
    • About a night who returns from the crusades and faces his own mortality
      • Realizes the senses are among the best thing humans have, and uses them to question god
    • Man declares that god is dead
    • Death common among Bergman’s films
    • In scene between clergyman and his wife, Bergman shows his guilt for how he treated his wife
  • Persona (1966) dir. Ingmar Bergman
    • Used film as a self-conscious media
    • Film seems pure, violence free, but at the end it erupts with images of violence and ugly images it seems to have been subconsciously holding back
  • Pickpocket (1959) dir. Robert Bresson
    • Director thought of human life as a prison from which we must break out
    • 50mm lens
    • Ordinary people clothes
    • Not unusual composition in any way
    • Tries to show the invisible in his films
    • When his girlfriend comes to see him in jail, he has finally found grace
      • That is the scene where the prison metaphor becomes fully visible
        • People were trapped in their own bodies, and they had to seek to escape to find grace
  • Au hasard Balthazar (1966) dir. Robert Bresson
    • About donkey who throughout his life is treated unfairly
    • Cinema for director was a path to grace
  • Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
    • Only having one character in every shot, you only see what the protagonist sees
      • Got this from pickpocket
  • Ratcatcher (1999) dir. Lynne Ramsay
    • Hauntingly attatched to objects in the physical world like Bresson
  • Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Jacques Tati
    • Director disliked strong storytelling like Bresson and Ozu
  • Mon Oncle (1956) dir. Jacques Tati
    • Show his feelings about modern life
    • Films brand new house in flat light
      • Woman only turns on her fancy fish fountain when guests arrive
    • Famous scene that captures whole building, the camera does not move but our eyes do
  • Fellini’s Casanova (1976) dir. Federico Fellini
    • Director ran away to a circus when he was 7 years old
      • Loved the larger than life circus world
    • Big party scene with fireworks and big floats
  • Nights of Cabiria (1957) dir. Federico Fellini
    • Shows how modern Fellini was
    • Kept outdoing itself and changing style
  •  (1963) dir. Federico Fellini
    • Director wants to make a film
      • Has a muse, she wears only white, approaches him like she is flying, gliding across the ground
    • Everything in the film was decided at the last minute
  • Stardust Memories (1980) dir. Woody Allen
    • Opening scene, like opening scene in 8 1/2, where character has stepped into another world, like he is looking at his life, or a party, through a pane of glass
  • Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) dir. Agnès Varda
    • Perfectly captures the spirit of the new wave
    • Starts in black and white and color
    • We see shots from her point of view, on real streets, real people
    • Woman goes to park and seems carefree, is almost growing okay with her apparent diagnosis of cancer
      • But then she meets a man, and they are lost in each other’s worlds
  • Last Year at Marienbad (1961) dir. Alain Resnais
    • Man seems to be remembering looking at a woman
      • But the film actually questions what is real
    • The memory is of a woman standing in front of two statues
      • The camera cranes up, and we see the back of the two statues, and as the camera travels up we see water in front of them
    • We wonder, has the man misremembered?
  • The 400 Blows (1959) dir. François Truffaut
    • Boy has neglectful parents and runs away
    • Film is about being alive
    • Boy’s screen test is used in the actual film
  • À bout de souffle (1959) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
    • Director Saw Pickpocket ten times
      • A loner
      • Preferred close ups, to isolate people from the world
    • Characters there because they are beautiful in themselves
      • Part of the beautiful cinema experience
    • Each shot is a thought, a director’s thought
      • Ultimate bomb the new wave planted in cinema
  • Life of an American Fireman (1903) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Edwin S. Porter
  • Arsenal (1929) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Alexander Dovzhenko
  • Une femme mariée (1964) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
    • Sex scene almost the same as sex scene in movie below
    • Shows how influential director was
  • American Gigolo (1980) dir. Paul Schrader
    • Similar framing, body parts as film above
  • Accattone (1961) dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
    • Director was a poet, was gay, and used the word “stupendous” a lot
    • First film
    • Captured his life experiences
    • Was a bout a pimp in dirt-poor Rome
    • Used religious music to make everyday struggles dramatic
    • Made everything look sacred, so even the face of the pimp would become like a sacred man in a painting
  • The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
    • Took cinematographer to see below film in order to show him what he wanted
      • Influenced filming of woman in this movie
  • The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
  • A Fistful of Dollars (1964) dir. Sergio Leone
    • Resisted the allure of comedies
    • Made a western movie
    • Character was lonely, because director loves Kirosawa’s film
    • Visual style amazing
      • Foreground and background far apart but all in focus, deep staging was not common
        • Gave the movie an epic quality
  • Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Sergio Leone
    • Took innovation of techniscope and applied it to a mythical setting
    • In opening sequence, channels the neo-realist idea that time in cinema should be real
    • Only director who made the music beforehand and then played it for the actors while they were filming
  • Johnny Guitar (1954) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Nicholas Ray
    • Previous director saw this film
    • Leone loved the idea of waiting for the future introduced in this film and used it in his film
  • Senso (1954) dir. Luchino Visconti
    • Color, lighting, and costumes sumptous
    • Heart of film is with ordinary people and the gods, they are protesting
      • They look down on the aristocrats
    • Director thought civilians and peasants had the greatest moral weight in society
  • Rocco and His Brothers (1960) dir. Luchino Visconti
    • Director used crane’s eye view to look down on the aristocratic world
    • Filmed in a moving tram
  • L’eclisse (1962) dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
    • Actress walks out of the shot, out of the film, never to reappear, in the famous ending
    • We see the street corners, the places where she and her man once were, but it’s all empty
      • The void seems to take over
    • We see a woman from behind, and think it’s our main character returned, but it’s just ordinary passerby
  • The Passenger (1975) dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
    • In ending, character is lying on bed, and the camera leaves him and seems to go for a walk
      • When the camera finally returns to the character, he is dead
  • The Travelling Players (1975) dir. Theodoros Angelopoulos
    • In second shot, the camera slowly withdrawls
    • The shot is just about the street as it is the people
  • The Wheelchair (1960) dir. Marco Ferreri
    • Edgy, non-conformist tone
    • Film opens with men walking with toilets on their head, making fun of the military marches in the country at the time
  • What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) dir. Pedro Almodóvar
    • Features the same kind of dysfunctional family as the wheelchair
    • The tone is the same as the wheelchair
  • Viridiana (1961) dir. Luis Buñuel
    • Became director’s most banned film
    • Uncle kisses his niece, who he has drugged, and she is a nun
      • Little girl watches from the window
      • Uncle symbolizes Franko
  • I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) dir. Vilgot Sjöman
  • La Maman et la Putain (1973) dir. Jean Eustache
    • Man shows his despair straight to camera

The Story of Film – Episode 6

Notes:

The following material is from Wikipedia: 

Episode 6 – Sex & Melodrama[edit]

1953-1957: The Swollen Story: World Cinema Bursting at the Seams

  • Rebel Without a Cause (1955) dir. Nicholas Ray
    • Man’s emotions are bursting at the seams, he kicks and flails at desk to show his anger
  • Cairo Station (1958) dir. Youssef Chahine
    • Director changed film history
    • First great African film
    • Pushed boundaries
    • Captured tension of the times
    • Shots of train to show people having sex
    • Melodramatic, sexual, and innovative/
  • Paper Flowers (1959) dir. Guru Dutt
    • Used the opposite of Hollywood lighting
      • Lit from below, no hair lighting
  • Raja Harishchandra (1913) dir. Dadasaheb Phalke
    • Early Indian films like this are about saints
  • Sant Tukaram (1936) dir. Vishnupant Govind Damle and Sheikh Fattelal
  • Pather Panchali (1955) dir. Satyajit Ray
    • Wanted to make film about a very specific place
    • Drove 30 minutes to a small Bengoli village
    • Cinematography has tender, luster, texture
    • Portrait of live of son of a priest
    • We were seeing a real Indian village on screen for the first time
    • Director was believer in prime minister who wanted to industrialize India so in the movie, the industrial train arriving is treated as wondrous, hopeful
  • Devi (1960) dir. Satyajit Ray
    • Movie about girl whose father dreams she is a goddess
    • Actress was only 14, start of her career
    • She is filmed lighted from below as if by candlelight
  • Mother India (1957) dir. Mehboob Khan
    • About woman who is getting married
    • She discovers the world of mud, sweat, hard work
    • Combination of romance and struggle
    • Called the Indian Gone With the Wind
    • Landmark in the history of cinema
  • Two Stage Sisters (1964) dir. Xie Jin
    • Camera moves in to get a closer look at a woman’s emotions
    • Everything beautifully placed in the moving frame
    • Painful human drama viewed through beautiful lens
    • In one shot, we move from a gods eye view to a peasants as the camera tilts down in the sky and then moves down to the ground
  • Ikiru (1952) dir. Akira Kurosawa
    • About man who needs to find where he fits into the world
  • Stray Dog (1949) dir. Akira Kurosawa
    • Man tries and tries and tries until he gets what he wants
  • Seven Samurai (1954) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Akira Kurosawa
    • Man thinks battle is still winnable and dies because of it
  • Throne of Blood (1957) dir. Akira Kurosawa
    • Shakespeare adaptation
    • Films lady like ghost, gliding across the floor, her kimono squeaking
  • The Godfather (1972) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
    • Influenced by previous scene where man gets shot by 100 arrows
  • The Magnificent Seven (1960) dir. John Sturges
  • Limite (1931) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Mário Peixoto
    • Soaring camera expressing a woman’s liberty
  • Rio 40 Graus (a.k.a. Rio 100 Degrees F.) (1955) dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos
    • Brought Brazilian cinema back into the spotlight
    • Bold use of deep staging
    • Used advanced visual techniques
    • Was like Brazil’s Cairo Station
  • The Life of General Villa (1914) dir. Christy Cabanne
  • Doña Bárbara (1943) dir. Fernando de Fuentes and Miguel M. Delgado
    • Director virtually invented Mexican cinema
    • Themes of feminine suffering
    • Men are shot against the sky
    • Dona Barbara is hardened by being raped right after her husband is shot and becomes an unforgiving land owner
  • The Wild Bunch (1969) dir. Sam Peckinpah
  • La perla (1947) dir. Emilio Fernández
    • Director himself half Indian
    • Man poor fisherman, but finds pearl
      • Everyone becomes envious and they can’t sell it, it becomes a cancer in their life
    • Dark human themes
  • Los Olvidados (1950) dir. Luis Buñuel
    • Filmed street gangs, physically disabled people, in street light
    • One of the boys dreams of meat as a thing to hunger for, a thing to fear
  • All That Heaven Allows (1955) dir. Douglas Sirk
    • White picket fence, beautiful autumn day, spotless clean car
    • Widowed woman shunned by her friends when she has an affair with her gardener, much younger and of lower class than her
    • Society cannot handle her sexuality, her friends and family get her a TV to keep her company at night and distract her from the gardener
      • She is not watching her TV, but we see her reflection in the screen as the camera moves towards it, showing she is trapped in the rectangle
  • I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1975) dir. David Helpern
  • Johnny Guitar (1954) dir. Nicholas Ray
    • Woman dressed in black, the color of villany, almost spits in anger as she speaks
    • Film is full of political anger
    • Woman’s body movement is strong, she is the most manly in the film, but is rejected because of her sexual deviance
  • Fireworks (1947) dir. Kenneth Anger
    • Anger himself is stripped and beaten by sailors
  • Scorpio Rising (1964) dir. Kenneth Anger
    • Combined masculine costumes with low body close ups, below lighting
    • Added rock music
  • Marty (television show) (1953) dir. Delbert Mann
    • Camera right next to actor
    • Character rather than gloss
  • Marty (1955) dir. Delbert Mann
  • On the Waterfront (1954) dir. Elia Kazan
    • Man confronts Union boss who was also responsible for murder
      • Character does not think much of himself
      • He is composed and slow to anger
      • His fury finally explodes
      • As he was taught in acting school, he let himself feel his emotions, then suppressed them, then let them out
  • Red River (1948) dir. Howard Hawks and Arthur Rosson
    • Old and new cinema fought it out
      • Old actor and new actor fight in movie
  • Touch of Evil (1958) dir. Orson Welles
    • Welles filmed with wide angle lenses to make images bulge
  • The Searchers (1956) dir. John Ford
  • Vertigo (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
  • Rio Bravo (1959) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Howard Hawks
    • Got to show an “ordinary” home
  • Great Expectations (1946) dir. David Lean
    • Adaptation of Charles Dickens book
    • Gothic, erotic
  • Lawrence of Arabia (1962) dir. David Lean
    • Lawrence imagines going to the Arabian dessert
      • Sees the hot sun in the fire of a burning match
      • Hints that his desire for Arabia is sexual
  • O Dreamland (1953) dir. Lindsay Anderson
    • Director bookish and leftist
    • Stare at people was full of pity and admiration, but also disappointment and maybe content
    • Symbolized Britain itself in the 50s
  • Battleship Potemkin (1925) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Sergei Eisenstein
    • Working classes were pictured as noble types
    • Very leftist film
  • …And God Created Woman (1956) dir. Roger Vadim
    • Actress was very sexy and brought a lot of money to the box office