by Mark Cousins
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FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION
When I wrote this book eight years ago, I had to pay $75, plus shipping, for a videotape of an Ethiopian film called Harvest 3000 Years to be sent to me from America. It took two weeks to arrive, and my anticipation built. When I finally watched it, I could see that it was a masterwork, and part of The Story of Film.
A moment ago I looked on YouTube, and there it is in all its glory. Also on YouTube, is a film I wrote about in this book but hadn’t managed to see, Teinosuke Kingugasa’s manic, amazing A Page of Madness. Just eight years ago, film history was elusive, a detective story and pricey. Now it’s a click away.
This means that we don’t need to long for great movies as we used to. They’re just there. Hooray to that, but let’s not get blasé. Now that cinema is at our fingertips, cultural signposts, things that point me in the direction of magnificent films like Harvest 3000 Years, are more needed than ever. I hope this book is such a thing.
Although the form of film watching is changing, the content, the story, remains compelling. When I walked away from my keyboard in 2004, the digitisation of the film process was ongoing, non-Hollywood aesthetics were re-emerging in movies from Thailand, Russia, Denmark and Austria and, because 9/11 had out-Hollywooded Hollywood, there was what you could call “the return of the real” in movies. Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and others were casting new shadows over mainstream cinema, and film style was getting grittier.
Since then, James Cameron’s Avatar re-created 3D and made cinema more tactile, South American movies continued to excel, Terrence Malick made another numinous film The New World, Laurent Cantet’s Entre les Murs/The Class seemed even bigger than cinema, and Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia! and Mike Leigh’s Another Year showed what an exciting bag of ferrets British film is at the moment. And if one country somehow pulled all this together, marrying innovation with realism, quietude with millennial unease, it was … Romania.
And as a footnote to all this, here’s a surprise: In the last few years I’ve been travelling around the world, my camera on my back, making a film version of this book, which is called The Story of Film: An Odyssey. I’ve visited the Bengali village where Pather Panchali was shot, and the New York locations of Taxi Driver; I’ve interviewed Stanley Donen who co-directed Singin’ in the Rain, and Kyoko Kagawa who was in some of the best Japanese films ever made, including Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. The process of adapting the book for the screen has been much bigger than writing it – more crew, more technology, more costs – but also more intimate, in that as we edit, say, a sequence on Harvest 3000 Years or The Dark Knight, the films feel really close. They’re right in front of me. I can see every pan, every cut.
Maybe you’ll see The Story of Film: An Odyssey in a cinema somewhere, or on TV. Maybe you’ll
INTRODUCTION
SILENT
1 TECHNICAL THRILL (1895–1903)
The sensations of the first movies
How the first filmmakers devised shots, cuts, close-ups and camera moves.
2 THE EARLY POWER OF STORY (1903–18)
How thrill became narrative
The emergence of Hollywood, the star system and the first great directors.
3 THE WORLD EXPANSION OF STYLE (1918–28)
Movie factories and personal vision
Mainstream filmmaking and its dissidents in Germany, France, America and the Soviet Union
SOUND
4 JAPANESE CLASSICISM AND HOLLYWOOD ROMANCE (1928–45)
Cinema enters a golden age
Movie genres, Japanese masters and depth staging.
5 THE DEVASTATION OF WAR AND A NEW MOVIE LANGUAGE (1945–52)
The spread of realism in world cinema
Italy leads the way, world cinema follows and Hollywood’s vision darkens.
6 THE SWOLLEN STORY (1952–58)
Rage and symbolism in 1950s filmmaking
Widescreen, international melodrama and new, early-modernist directors.
7 THE EXPLODED STORY (1958–69)
The breakdown of romantic cinema and the coming of modernism
A series of new waves transform innovative filmmaking on every continent.
8 FREEDOM AND WANT SEE (1969–79)
Political cinema around the globe and the rise of the blockbuster in America
Revivals in German and Australian cinema and the emergence of Middle Eastern and African cinema; Jaws and Star Wars.
9 MEGA-ENTERTAINMENTS AND PHILOSOPHY (1979–90)
The extremes of world cinema
The influence of video and MTV; challenging films made in non-Western countries.
DIGITAL
10 CAN SEE (1990–PRESENT)
Computerization takes cinema beyond photography
A global art form discovers new possibilities.
CONCLUSION
THE LANGUAGE OF FILM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
1
Above: Steven Spielberg (far right) directing the Omaha Beach D-day sequence in Saving Private Ryan. USA, 1998.
INTRODUCTION
A STORY OF GREATNESS AND SUDDEN SHIFTS
The measure of an artist’s originality, put in its simplest terms, is the extent to which his selective emphasis deviates from the conventional norm and establishes new standards of relevance. All great innovations which inaugurate a new era, movement or school, consist in sudden shifts of a previously neglected aspect of experience, some blacked out range of the existential spectrum. The decisive turning points in the history of every art form … uncover what has already been there; they are “revolutionary” that is destructive and constructive, they compel us to revalue our values and impose new sets of rules on the eternal game.
Arthur Koestler1
The industry is shit, it’s the medium that’s great.
Lauren Bacall2
This book tells the story of the art of cinema. It narrates the history of a medium which began as a photographic, largely silent, shadowy novelty and became a digital, multi-billion dollar global business.
Although the business elements of film are important, you will find few details in what follows of what films cost and how the industry organises itself and markets its wares. I wanted to wite a purer book than that, one more focused on the medium than the industry. As you read, therefore, you will come across works that you may not have seen and may never see. I make no apology for this because I do not want to tell a history of cinema that is distorted by the vagaries of the market place. There are mainstream films described in what follows, but mostly I have focused on what I consider to be the most innovative films from any country at any at any period.
This could be seen as elitist or self indulgent, but it isn’t. Film is one of the most accessible art forms so even its most obscure productions can be understood by an intelligent non-specialist, which I assume you are. When I first read books about Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut, long before I saw their films, I experienced a real sense of discovery. I do not go into great detail about individual movies in The Story of Film, but I hope that what follows conjures similar pictures in your head, and creates a desire to see some of what is discussed.
You will almost certainly find that some of your favourite films are not featured in my story. Many of mine aren’t. I have probably watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (USA, 1960), more than any other film – the scene where Shirley Maclaine runs down the street at the end is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen – but have not included it in this book. This is because, despite its exquisite tonality, it was less innovative than other films mad
e in America at that time. Its adroit blend of irony and sexual comedy derives from Wilder’s hero, the great director Ernst Lubitsch, for example. The movie’s depiction of office life uses visual ideas from King Vidor’s The Crowd (see page 88). And Wilder’s admiration for the way Charlie Chaplin’s films flicker between farce and rapture filters into his depiction of the characters. By focusing on the innovative rather than the merely beautiful, popular or commercially successful, I am trying to strip the world of movies down to its engine. Innovation drives art and I have tried in the chapters that follow to reveal key innovative moments in the history of world cinema. Without the mould breakers, the fresh thinkers, the radicals and mavericks in cinema – without Lubitsch, Vidor and Chaplain – there would be no Billy Wilder directing Shirley Maclaine running down that street.
To pick up on the quotations at the beginning of this introduction, this book is, then, about the greatness of the medium of film and the sudden shifts which it has undergone. Take Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (USA, 1998) which was hugely popular, selling eighty million tickets around the world and finding larger audiences still on television, videotape or DVD. Yet such popularity does not mean that it deviated from the conventional norm, as Koestler envisaged, or that it rose above Bacall’s “shitty” industrial compromises. Instead, it warrants mention because of its shocking opening flashback sequence which showed what it was like to be a soldier landing on Omaha Beach (1) on one of the most important days of the Second World War. These events had been portrayed before in cinema but their impact here came from a shift in the language of film itself. Drills were mounted to cameras to give a juddering effect. The stock was exposed in new ways. The sound of bullets was more vividly recreated than ever before. Steven Spielberg sat at home or lay awake or drove through the desert, asking himself the question, how can I do this differently? The best filmmakers have always asked themselves this, on the set in the morning, at night when they can’t sleep, in the bar with their friends, or at film festivals. It is a crucial question for the art of cinema and this book describes how directors have answered it.
The best composers, actors, writers, designers, producers, editors and cinematographers ask it too but The Story of Film concentrates mostly on the central creative figure in filmmaking. This is not because directors should take credit for everything we see and hear on screen – many films are great because of their actors, writers, producers or editors – but because directors are the people who pull the creative bits together and who oversee that alchemy whereby the words of the screenplay come alive. The French term realisateur – realizer – describes this process well, and what follows is an account of how filmic ideas are realized.
Realizing is, I believe, the root of the medium’s greatness. The ability of a shot to be about both what it objectively photographs – what is in front of the camera – and about the subjectivity of its maker explains the alluring dualism at the heart of cinema. Music, being less representational than film, is purer and more evocative; novels can more adroitly describe mental processes; painting is more directly expressive; poetry, far less unwieldly. Yet none of these are made quite so ambivalently as cinema. The Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini tried to describe this personal-realistic dualism in his term Free Indirect Subjectivity – discorso libro indiretto3 – and a phrase in French philosophy – fourth person singular4 – captures well the paradox of something which is personal but also objective and without consciousness.
The greatest directors – the ones described in this volume – are driven by this paradox, but the process by which, and the reasons why, they form ideas are diverse. Federico Fellini says that another man whom he doesn’t know makes his films, and that that man tunes into Fellini’s own dreams. David Lynch claims that ideas “pop from the ether”. Neither of these are precise ways of describing things, but, as an example I will mention in the conclusion of this book shows (the one about the gorilla, if you want to flick forward), “nowhere” is where some of the best ideas originate. The creativity of other filmmakers featured in the following chapters can be described in more conventional terms: Djibril Diop Mambety from Senegal was angry at colonialism and inspired by French cinema; Martin Scorsese’s rich Italian-American childhood fuelled his imagination; Bernardo Bertolucci drew from his poet father, from the composer Verdi, and from great literature and cinema; Shohei Imamura in Japan was a kind of anarchist who hated the politeness of Japanese culture and movies; Billy Wilder in America did limbering-up writing exercises each morning by imagining more and more original ways in which a young couple could meet for the first time; the mental tensions of the early years of Polish director Roman Polanski were replicated in most of his film work; Spielberg wanted to do things differently because of his imaginative drive, because audiences will pay for something new, because he is bored with the norms of filmmaking, perhaps, and because he can see beyond them, because of new technical possibilities and because he wanted curiosity to teach young filmgoers how brave their grandfathers were.
2
How directors learn from each other: Carol Reed has a visual idea (top), Jean-Luc Godard adapts it (middle) and Martin Scorsese modifies it still further (bottom).
Whatever their ways of dreaming up ideas, filmmakers seldom do so in isolation. They watch each other’s work and learn how to tackle scenes from what has gone before, and from their collaborators, as the images on this page show (2). The first is from the 1946 British movie Odd Man Out. A character is undergoing a crisis and sees moments from his recent experiences reflected in the bubbles of a spilled drink. Director Carol Reed and his team asked how they could portray such a crisis in an imaginative new way and came up with this solution. The second image, made twenty years later, comes from the French film Deux au trois choses que je sais d’elle/Two of Three Things I know About Her (1967). Again a close-up of bubbles in a drink represents the point of view of the main character of the film, played by actress Marina Vlady. The film’s director, Jean-Luc Godard, knew and admired Carol Reed’s work, so it is likely that he was thinking of Odd Man Out when he filmed his version, though cinema had changed since Reed’s day and Godard’s use of the image is more intellectual than his predecessor’s. Now consider the third image, from Martin Scorsese’s American film Taxi Driver (1976). Again, a cup full of bubbles, again seen from the point of view of the main character. Scorsese knew Godard’s film, saw how well the image worked and adapted it for his own purpose, to express his character’s subjectivity and psychosis. This is cinematic influence, the passing of stlistic ideas from one filmmaker to the next.
The process is more complex than this simple example suggests. Thinkers and art historians have long discussed it. The American critic Harold Bloom wrote a book in 1973, The Anxiety of Influence, which touched on the negative feelings artists can have about their forebears. The German philosopher Georg Hegel argued that art is a kind of language, a dialogue between the artwork and its audience. Later, Heinrich Wofflin extended Hegel’s thoughts to argue that the language of art is the result of the ideas and technolo gies of its time. John Ruskin shifted focus by saying that art has a moral obligation to society. More recently, scientist Richard Dawkins in his famous book The Selfish Gene changed the terms of the debate again, comparing art neither to a language which evolves through one artist influencing another nor to a moral system, but to genetics. Just as biological units are genes, so the units of art and culture are “memes”, wrote Dawkins. Just as genes replicate and evolve, so do memes. Carol Reed’s close-up of bubbles in a drink is a meme which replicated and evolved through Godard and Scorsese. Occasionally memes take off, as when everyone is suddenly singing a catchy pop song, or when many of the films made in the mid 1990s in the West seemed to be versions of American director Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1991) or Pulp Fiction (1993).
It is helpful to imagine cinema evolving as a language or replicating like genes because doing so illustrates that film has a grammar and that in some ways
it grows and mutates. However, there are problems in applying the ideas of Hegel, Wofflin, Ruskin, Dawkins and others to the study of film. The first is that they seem to imply that art – and therefore cinema – is always advancing, getting more complex, building on the past. Good film historians know that this isn’t true, and one of the arguments in this book will be that the frontal “technical thrill” of pre-industrial cinema, described in Chapter One, resurfaced in later years. It did not die out in favour of more complex filmic mutations.
The second reservation is more pragmatic. Film can be many things and shouldn’t be reduced to an essence, whether that is moral – as Ruskin argued about painting – or linguistic – as Hegel argued about art in general. There were epochs when cinema did indeed reflect the great moral issues of its day, such as in Europe after the Second World War, but France in the 1920s film’s technical and formal qualities were to the fore; in Japan in the 1930s, spatial concerns were central to some directors; and in the works of the Russians Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Sokurov, the spiritual and religious aspects were what counted. These differences are not a matter of content – what was in front of the lens or what the story is about – but of what film actually is and what role it plays in human life.
A more useful model for understanding the nature of filmic influence can be found in the work of E.H. Gombrich, who wrote in his introduction to The Story of Art, “There is no such thing as Art, there are only artists.” This single volume account of the history of painting, architecture and sculpture asked the questions: What techniques were available to the artists of any period? How did they use and expand those techniques? How did art evolve as a result? This volume asks: What would happen if we did the same for movies? What if we consider that there is no such thing as Film, there are only filmmakers? Who are Griffith, Dovzhenko, Keaton, Dulac, Ozu, Riefenstahl, Ford, Toland, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Ouedraogo, Cissé, Dulac, Chahine, Imamura, Fassbinder, Akerman, Scorsese, Almodovar, Makhmalbaf, Spielberg, Tarr and Sokurov? What techniques did they have available to them? How did they use and expand those techniques? How did they change the medium of film?