by Mark Cousins
Gombrich’s argument was that artistic influence is a matter of “schema plus correction”, but I would prefer the word “variation”. His point is that for an artform to evolve, original images can’t always be copied slavishly. They should be adjusted according to new technical possibilities, changing storytelling fashions, political ideas, emotional trends, etc. This is what I will have in mind when I trace the lines of influence throughout this book. If film A is very original, if it successfully varies the schema a great deal (as, say, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet did in 1986), then films C, D, E and F will show the mark of that influence. I will write about A and mention the others. If, however, film E takes A’s ideas and twists them again in yet another direction, influencing G, H, I and J, then I will write about A and E.
Some conventional historians will object that the model of schema plus variation is of limited use to the understanding of the art form of film which – unlike painting – is so driven by technological change. Why look at how directors have copied and varied each other’s shots and visual ideas when the means of achieving such ideas have regularly been upgraded through the introduction of sound, widescreen, new film stock, camera craning methods and digitisation? This is simply wrong. Look at Scorsese using schema from the 1900s in the 1990s (see page 448) or Von Trier in the same decade looking back to Dreyer in the 1920s and 1940s, or the resemblance between the “washing line” staging in CinemaScope of the 1950s and tableau films of the 1910s. Yes, technology has been a key element in the changing creative possibilities available to filmmakers, but deep down the questions of staging, point of view, pace, suspense, time and psychology faced by filmmakers as they walk onto the set in the morning have remained remarkably consistent. That’s why schema plus variation works. It is for this reason that some of the most distinguished film scholars have suggested that it should be applied to film history5.
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The Story of Film is not about businessmen or audiences, but about directors such as Malian Souleymane Cissé (above), the Japanese Director Yasujiro Ozu (top) and the French impressionist Germaine Dulac (middle). Through their achievements, the history of the medium will be told.
Some circumstances are not covered by the Gombrich model, however. This book is about the films which were influential, but will also describe films which should have been influential. Famous works like Citizen Kane (1941) from America, The Seven Samurai (1954) from Japan, Mother India (1957) from India and Battleship Potemkin (1925) from the former Soviet Union fall into the former category. They were schema which other filmmakers varied. This can be proved. What, though, of the great, original films which seem not to have had an impact on successive filmmakers, because they were made in Africa, or poorly distributed, or flopped at the box office, or were directed by a woman, or were misunderstood or banned? Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Senegalese film Touki Bouki (1973) was the most innovative African movie of its time, but not widely distributed, even within its own continent. Dorota Kedzierzawska’s Polish film Wrony/Crows (1995) is one of the most beautiful films about childhood, but was hardly seen. Kira Muratova made Dolgie provody/Long Goodbye (USSR), about a divorcée and her son, in 1971, but her brilliant and original work was not released in the Soviet Union until 1986. Are these films to be ignored because they failed to have impact? No. All good stories have ironies and these films add bitterness to our tale.
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This is the story of how directors have influenced each other. For example, Mehboob’s Mother India was seen far beyond the borders of the country in which it was made. 1957.
One should be cautious, too, about applying an individualistic notion of artistic creativity to places where it does not pertain. A Hindu director doesn’t have the same conception of her or himself as an individual as Scorsese does. There isn’t the same drive to articulate a distinctive point of view, so the factors which applied to Spielberg, might not do so in South Asia. Also, Indian storytelling is more free-form than that in Western countries, and isn’t so confined by space and time. Likewise, in African storytelling, the idea that an artist is an originator or a varier, is not strong. To vary is to wreck. A great story-teller builds and transmits. Nor was artistic originality an important motive in Japan, at least during the first half of the twentieth century. As in much of Africa, a great Japanese artist was one who subtly reworked tradition, recasting it in a new light.
Despite these qualifications, the intention has been to write an accessible, low-jargon movie history for general readers and those who are beginning to study film, the sort of book that I wanted to read when I was sixteen. As the title suggests, it is a narrative account, not a dictionary or encyclopaedia. Film theorists are suspicious of such attempts to see the history of the movies in story terms, as if doing so is trying to shoe-horn it into a formula. This is to underestimate narrative, which can be as fluid, multi-layered and responsive to subject as a writer wants it to be. So The Story of Film intends to open a door to the world of cinema and describe a reliable path through it. If successful, the reader will advance to more detailed or learned volumes, such as Thompson and Bordwell’s or Robert Sklar’s.
In these writers’ books they will find directors absent here: Catherine Breillat, Jonathan Demme, Abel Ferrara, Amos Gitai, Marcel L’Herbier, Neil Jordan, Ermanno Olmi, Bob Rafelson, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, George A Romero, Hans Jurgen Syberberg and others. Each has produced significant work but in a manuscript of this length, I could not find space for them. Many will dispute my emphases, suggesting perhaps that France’s Rohmer deserves space over Ethiopa’s Haile Gerima. It is crucial, however, to record East Africa’s contribution to film ideas, and France, overall, gets its dues.
This raises two questions: How revisionist is The Story of Film and what new points does it make? Revisionism for its own sake is not interesting – and presumptuous when it challenges primary research – so that has not been the impulse. However, it has been necessary to make several adjustments to received opinion:
Firstly – as the Ethiopian example has just demonstrated – this book is unashamably about world, not Western, cinema. Not in the spirit of tokenism, but to acknowledge that the Egyptian films of Youssef Chahine, for example, are unique because they engage with national and religious ideas, which have not been concerns of Western directors. Non-Western cinema is undervalued in film books, festivals, retrospectives, TV programmes, magazine polls, entertainment journalism and the like – a situation that damages the medium.
The second adjustment, in Chapter Three, is that the standard approach of mainstream Hollywood is essentially romantic rather than classical. Again and again in film books the phrase “classic American cinema” or “the classic period of American filmmaking” is used, as if “classical” means popular heyday or lucrative golden age, which it emphatically does not. Classicism in art describes a period when form and content are in harmony, when there is balance between the style of a work and the emotions or ideas it is trying to express. American films are mostly given to excess rather than balance – their characters are emotional, their stories express yearning – so the lengthy but more precise phrase “closed romantic realism” is used to describe normative film style. This is new and the implications are considerable. In Chapter Four I propose that the films of Japanese master director Yasujiro Ozu are the true works of filmic classicism. This will cause some raised eyebrows, but my model is, I believe, more valuable than the previous one,which used the word “classical” incorrectly.
Thirdly it is proposed that far from being a fallow time for cinema, filmmaking from the 1990s has undergone an unparalleled revival.
The structure of what follows is chronological and divided into three main epochs, Silent (1895–1928), Sound (1928–1990) and Digital (1990–present). Whilst there have been many changes in the course of film history, those in 1928 and 1990 had the greatest impact. Within these epochs, chapters deal with various trends. American cinema will be discussed in all ten chapters in this book, be
cause it has been active almost from the start. Native African cinema, by contrast, did not begin until the late 1950s, so will not become part of the story until then. If the work of a certain country or continent is not mentioned in a chapter, it is not being overlooked: either it was producing no films during the period covered or those that were being made were merely formulaic.
My Silent section looks at the thrill of early cinema, then how that thrill became narrative in the West and finally how movie factories dominated filmmaking after the First World War. Japanese film took another route through these years and this fundamental split is described. In the Sound epoch we look at the blossoming of Eastern cinema, Hollywood Romantic cinema, then the spread of realism. Two pairs of chapters follow: the first cover the great films of the East and the swelling and explosion of 1950s and 1960s cinema in the West. The second pair deals with the massive divergences in world film in the 1970s and 1980s. The last epoch, Digital, takes us up to the present day.
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A vivid example of pre-cinema: Leeds Bridge by Louis Le Prince. UK, 1988.
Finally, a confession: I have rewatched almost every film mentioned in this book. In some cases, however, that has not been possible. In these instances, I’m relying on memories of previous viewings. In addition, there are about forty films mentioned which I have never seen. Either prints of them no longer exist or I have been unable to track them down. They are included because filmmakers or historians have made a case for their importance.
The year is 1888. We are standing on a bridge in an industrial city in … not France or America, where the first public screenings of projected films took place, but in England. The city is Leeds. A man is filming there … his footage still exists. It was only ever shown in machines into which a single viewer looked, but predates the generally accepted birth of the movies in Paris in 1895 by seven years. To the right is what he shot:
1. Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation, London: Hutchinson, 1969
2. Bacall, Lauren, Scene by Scene, BBC Television, 2000. Interview with the author.
3. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Heretical Empiricism, Bloomington: IUP, 1988. Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise Barnett. It is Naomi Green in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, Princeton: PUP, 1993 who provides this less literal but more precise translation of Pasolini’s phrase.
4. Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, London: Athlone, 1990. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale.
5. For example, Bordwell, David, A Case for Cognitivism, Iris Vol 9, Spring 1989, pp11–40.
SILENT LATE 1880S–1928
The short film, Leeds Bridge (UK, 1888), was photographed by Louis Le Prince, a pioneering Frenchman in England. A horse-drawn tram moves slowly; we can just see two men, bottom right of the frame, looking down into the river (5). The first thing we notice is that it is silent. The majority of the films made in the first four decades had no recorded soundtrack. Why was this? The technology to record people talking was available, but the thrill of moving images excited the inventors and their audiences so much, that no-one said, “But these wonders are mute.” As a result, “The kingdom of Shadows” was more mysterious, fable-like and not of this earth. There were also practical implications. Absence of language barriers ensured that the birth of cinema was truly international and the films of the first decade were shown all over the world.
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Although silent, the first films had huge impact: Battleship Potemkin. Soviet Union, 1925.
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Stills of Fred Ott’s First Sneeze – a peep-show Kinetoscope film, not yet projectable, shot by W.K.L. Dickson in Thomas Edison’s Black Maria (overleaf).
TECHNICAL THRILL (1895–1903):
The sensations of the first movies
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What was the world like in the late nineteenth century, just before the movies began? It was very different from today. The USA was still expanding. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires still existed. European empires governed three-quarters of the globe, with India as Britain’s most important colony. The state of Israel did not exist, nor had Iraq gained independence. The creation of the Soviet Union was thirty years ahead.
The industrial revolution had transformed the way of life for Western city dwellers. Urban populations clustered together, yet people became more detached from what they consumed. Life became more kinetic. The steam train made travel faster. Roller coasters, to which the cinema experience would be compared in the late twentieth century, had been around since 1884. Automobiles had just been invented and would evolve with cinema in fascinating tandem. While there was more visual stimulation in the West, its culture or human perception had not changed fundamentally, despite arguments to the latter. Photography had existed since 1827. People had painted for 150 centuries and would continue to do so. Scribes, poets and authors had written for at least fifty centuries.
Then, between them, a few French, British and American men took the lead in inventing what the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy called pointedly “the clicking machine … like a human hurricane”. This was a black box through which a ribbon moves, recording what it saw. Later, light was shone through this ribbon and the action was projected and repeated on a distant white wall, as if no time had passed. This repetition was possible because of a persistence of vision, via which the human brain perceives as continual motion a series of consecutive, rapidly projected, still images. The invention of this Western marvel was complicated, a kind of shambolic race. The runners were men with unfamiliar names: Thomas Edison, George Eastman, W.K.L. Dickson, Louis Le Prince, Louis and Auguste Lumière, R.W. Paul, George Méliès, Francis Doublier, G.A. Smith, William Friese Greene and Thomas Ince. As one edged forward, another took over and then a third sprinted past with a new invention. They worked in the sprawling state of New Jersey across the Hudson from Manhattan; in Lyon in southern France; in sunny Le Ciotat on the Mediterranean; and in Brighton and Leeds in England. These locations were, on the whole, not flashy urban capitals, but working-class places.
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Edison’s Black Maria, the world’s first studio designed to shoot noving images, which revolved to follow the light of the sun.
Not one of these men solely invented cinema and there is no clear start date for its birth. In 1884, New York manufacturer George Eastman invented film on a roll rather than on individual slides. In the same decade, New Jersey inventor Thomas Edison, son of a timber merchant, and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson, discovered a way of spinning a series of still images in a box which gave the illusion of movement and invented the Kinetoscope.1
By the late 1880s, in England, Louis Le Prince had patented a machine the size of a small refrigerator and filmed on Leeds Bridge and elsewhere. George Eastman came back into the race with a new idea: holes along the edge of the film roll that allowed it to be clawed accurately through the camera. The central problem tackled by these engineers, inventors and industrialists was that a strip of film could not run continuously past an open lens in the camera. It had to stop, expose for a fraction of a second, then advance and repeat this staccato action: grab—expose—advance; grab—expose—advance. The Lumière brothers, who came from a family of photographers, noticed that sewing machines worked in a similar way and adapted the technology. They made the box smaller than Le Prince’s huge camera, and reworked it, so that their Cinématographe could record and project images. A further problem was how to ensure that the whizzing jerkiness didn’t snap the film. The simple solution was devised by the pioneering family of Woodville, Otway and Gray Latham in their otherwise unsuccessful Eidoloscope projector: a slack loop of film would be loaded into the camera and projector, allowing the film to act like a piece of elastic as it accelerated and stopped continuously without breaking. These details show that the invention of film wasn’t a one-man effort. When it became clear that film was going to be a worldwide money-making phenomenon, many of these early pioneers tried to claim copyright for their contribution to the process. The rights battles were
nasty and every bit of the process – even the sprocket holes and the loop – had legal claims made about them.
Of all the earliest films, it was those of the Lumière brothers which were the most widely seen. On 28 December 1895, a date many film historians consider the birth of cinema, they showed a short programme of their documentary films (and the fictional one L’Arrosseur arrossé), to a paying audience in a room on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. These included a now famous single shot film called L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat/ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station/ (France) (9). The camera was placed near the track so the train gradually increased in size as it pulled in, until it seemed it would crash through the screen into the room itself. Audiences ducked, screamed or got up to leave. They were thrilled, as if on a rollercoaster ride.
The Lumière brothers dispatched films and projectionists to every continent with such speed that within one to two years audiences in most countries had seen the famous train in La Ciotat. Audiences in Italy (Turin) did so in 1886, as did those in Russia (St. Petersburg), Hungary (Budapest), Romania (Bucharest), Serbia (Belgrade), Denmark (Copenhagen), Canada (Montreal), India (Bombay), Czechoslovakia (Karlovy Vary), Uruguay (Montevideo), Argentina (Buenos Aries), Mexico (Mexico City), Chile (Santiago), Guatemala (Guatemala City), Cuba (Havana), Japan (Osaka), Bulgaria (Russe), Thailand (Bangkok), and the Philippines (Manila). I repeat, these were all in 1886 and all Lumière films. British films were shown in 1896 in the USA and Germany alongside home-produced American and German films. By 1900 the Lumière films had reached audiences in Senegal (Dakar) and Iran, including the Shah in his mirrored Qajar Palace. Films were considered a courtly novelty, a strutting peacock, rather than something for the masses.