The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

  A small but prodigious independent film company mopped up some of the social and stylistic ideas of the time and mixed them into its ultra-low budget features. Influenced by Elvis, pop music, Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954) and the emerging drug culture, American International Pictures (AIP) cornered the market in so-called “exploitation” teen pictures, cheap horror movies, sci-fi and biker films. Its most dynamic producer, Roger Corman, came from Los Angeles, studied literature for a while at Oxford in England, was obsessed by gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe, started producing in 1954, offered opportunities to untried directors, was strict about budget and keen on regular flashes of nudity in his films, but otherwise allowed his novice directors to smuggle leftist ideas and fancy European techniques into their films. This combination of generic formula and intellectual and stylistic openness was opportunistic on his part but historically important. Among the untried talents Corman worked with were Francis Coppola, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Brian De Palma, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme and Peter Bogdanovich (238) — the most important figures in US film of the 1970s and beyond. In his eagerness to latch onto something new, to flirt with edgy youngsters, Corman played a crucial role in modernizing American cinema.

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  Some American production companies started to combine the countercultural trends of the 1960s with ultra-cheap genre and exploitation techniques. Foremost among these was American International Pictures, whose Roger Corman (left) became the doyen of rebellious B-movies for years to come.

  Most of these will be discussed in the next chapter but to capture the flavour of invention on the hoof at AIP, to illustrate how its creative crassness helped plug America into the revolution sweeping through world cinema, let’s take Peter Bogdanovich’s first film. Finding that he had horror stalwart Boris Karloff on a contract for two days longer than he thought, Corman asked the young movie critic Bogdanovich to make up a story, film with Karloff for the two days, take twenty minutes from another Karloff picture Corman had made, shoot for another ten days without Karloff, and make a movie out of the result.

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  The best movie to come from Corman’s stable was Targets, about a retiring horror movie star and a serial killer, co-written, produced and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. USA, 1966.

  Bogdanovich had a better idea. He decided to make a film about a horror movie actor, Karloff, who notices that the world around him is changing and that the violence of real life makes his cheapie-style horror look stupid (239). Bogdanovich wrote a script. In it, Karloff says, “I’m an anachronism … the world belongs to the young.” The director’s inspiration was to interweave this story of the end of a movie era with a serial killer narrative based on a real life incident two years earlier when a Texan shot his wife, mother and sixteen other people.

  Released in 1968, after the Bobby Kennedy assassination, after the Martin Luther King assassination and at a time of social change, the resulting film, Targets, brilliantly explored the relationship between life, violence and cinema. Take one scene in the assassin’s home, when he starts the killings. The 1960s pastel house, the knitting pattern nuclear family, the way he calls his father “Sir” and the symmetry of the pictures, creates a stifling portrait of an authoritarian, anaemic, sexually repressive world which is bound to erupt. In the first shooting the camera moves in slowly, there is almost no sound, you hold your breath.

  A year earlier Corman himself had directed The Trip (1967) which was written by Jack Nicholson and told of a TV director who takes the drug LSD. The TV man was played by Peter Fonda, the counter-cultural son of John Ford stalwart actor Henry Fonda. A drug pusher in the film was played by Dennis Hopper. The film included manic trip scenes, visual distortions, overlays and rapid editing: Impressionism five decades after Germaine Dulac. It looks somewhat dated today, but the whole team shared the same world view and enjoyed shocking Middle America.

  Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson ditched Corman to make one of the most famous, controversial and era-defining films of the late 1960s. Biker movies were nothing new but Easy Rider (1969) had its two protagonists, Fonda and Hopper, smuggle cocaine in their bikes before cocaine was a well-known drug. It showed the emotions experienced while tripping. Influenced by short avant-garde films by the director Bruce Conner,24 the movie ends in tragedy – the two bikers are killed by conservative duck hunters. Hopper, who wrote and directed and had long had one foot in the art world, turned the film into an encyclopaedia of modernist techniques. He used 17mm lenses to photograph the trip sequences; taunted his fellow actor Fonda about the death of his mother to elicit candid emotions from him; moved from one scene to the next by cutting to it, then back, then to it, then back again, before finally settling on it.

  Yet these innovations didn’t put audiences off. Why? Because young people were impatient with old-style filmmaking and its associations with the mainstream and conformism. Because Hopper and Nicholson had clearly smoked marijuana before doing scenes. More importantly, because Easy Rider was about endings. Fonda’s character has a premonition that their road-movie-on-bikes life cannot go on for ever. When they are killed, Middle America gets its own back. Martin Luther King’s death had had a sobering effect on young American radicals’ dreams of Utopia, but worse was to come. In the year of the film’s release, the Polish director Roman Polanski got a call to say that his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and three of his friends had been murdered in their Los Angeles home. The news went around the world. Only one year later, in 1970, two of the era’s musical heroes, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, would both die of drug overdoses aged just twenty-seven. A whole series of endings that Easy Rider somehow prefigured.

  It wasn’t only low-budget cinema which was portraying new lifestyles, exploding the old norms of closed romantic realism and anticipating the end of good times. In The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), a well-off student played by Dustin Hoffman is as directionless, as paralysed in the headlights of social change, as were Fonda and Hopper. The film was brilliantly written and photographed in ironic pastels, like the home scenes in Bogdanovich’s Targets. And like the latter it had a curious reverence for the past. Yet its ending was as open as closed romantic realism is closed. The student and his girl depart on a bus, yet their facial expressions are far from happy. The Jungle Book was the most commercially successful film of the year in 1967, but the studios were in crisis. Most of their traditional films flopped, yet The Graduate took ten times its budget at the box office. Such returns speak to money men.

  This includes those who were now running Warner Bros. Since the 1930s the studio had produced gangster films, flirting with the amorality of this American genre but usually denouncing the protagonists in the end. In 1967, they blew this balance apart with a movie which, like The Graduate, took ten times its cost. They hired a former TV director, Arthur Penn, to direct Bonnie and Clyde,25 which told the story of two 1930s romantic bank and gas station robbers who become media stars and who died in a hail of bullets (240). Like Nichols, Penn mixed nostalgia for old gangster movies with modern devil-may-careness. He pushed stylistic questions further, however, borrowing ideas about pacing and freeze-framing from Truffaut. When Bonnie and Clyde die operatically, in slow motion, at the end, the tone is less of a come-uppance than it might have been with Cagney or Edward G. Robinson and his moll – although these were not straightforward deaths either. Instead, it is closer to the ending of Easy Rider, which it pre-dates by two years. The gangsters here were rebels and rebels get it in the neck.

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  Bonnie and Clyde was a new kind of gangster movie because its title characters were counter-cultural rebels and its style was influenced by the French New Wave. Director: Arthur Penn. USA, 1967.

  The final ending of historical importance at this time took place in a science fiction film, a tried and trusted drive-in film genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey (UK–USA, 1968) was directed by Stanley Kubrick, whom we last met in the mid 1950s with The Killing (USA, 1956) and Paths o
f Glory (USA, 1957). After his box office hit Spartacus (USA, 1960), which was not typical of his work, he moved to the UK in 1961 and, with the astringent satire Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (USA, 1964) achieved his bleakest, most fully realized film to date.

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  The ultimate sign that New Wave had crashed on the rocks of traditional Hollywood: MGM funded the transcendental science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Director: Stanley Kubrick. UK–USA, 1968.

  2001: A Space Odyssey, from a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, took things further, however. Starting with a dawn-of-man sequence in which apes play and fight, the film suddenly jumps to the year 2001 in perhaps the most audacious edit in film history. An ape throws a bone into the air (242 overleaf). It rises and rotates in slow-motion. Then a soundless cut to a spaceship gliding similarly. From the earliest years in the evolution of editing, cuts have been used to shorten time. Only occasionally, in suspense cinema or in Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (Soviet Union, 1925), has the opposite been the case. Here Kubrick not only shortens time but elides the whole of human history. He uses the functional economy of a cut to remove from his film virtually everything that has ever been thought or done.

  Thereafter, the future sequence is concerned with a black monolith that has been found on the moon. We saw a similar one in the dawn-of-man prologue. A year later two astronauts sent to investigate it are tyrannized by a psychologically sophisticated computer, HAL 9000. One of them tries to get to the source of the mystery of the monolith but in doing so seems to travel through time and has mind-altering experiences. Kubrick’s realization is astonishing throughout: the backgrounds in the ape sequences were still images projected onto a highly reflective new substance, Scotchlite; he moved the camera in grand rotations to create the sense that in space no particular direction is upwards; to portray a pen floating through mid-air he and his special effects expert, Douglas Trumball, simply attached it to a pane of glass, then gently rotated the glass. The ending is like an extravagant version of a hallucination sequence from Corman’s The Trip. The actor who undergoes it witnesses surreal and cryptic situations in rooms. Kubrick had colours in this sequence reversed in the laboratories and the effect was like a film from the 1920s by Walter Ruttman.

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  2001’s Dawn of Man sequence which ends with a celebrated cut to a space ship, thereby eliding centuries of human evolution.

  What was going on? MGM, the studio of Gone with the Wind (1939), of The Wizard of Oz (USA, 1939), the forcing house of closed romantic realism, had funded a film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose ending was almost purely abstract. Had coherence, clarity, economy and empathy – certainty all qualities of mainstream commercial cinema – fallen out of fashion? The 1970s would show that this was not the case. There would, in fact, be a return to these. But the ending of 2001 illustrates more completely than any of the films by the thirty-eight modern filmmakers considered in this chapter, the central fact about cinema in the 1960s: abstraction entered the heart of it.

  Filmmakers had long been interested in abstract things – look at Busby Berkeley’s musical numbers, for example, or Ozu’s magnificent intermediate spaces. But 1959 was the tipping point in film history beyond which large numbers of new directors got a chance to show that form, the language of cinema that had evolved in its first two decades, was not purely an invisible vehicle for telling stories, building empathy, describing psychology, producing social and human meaning. It was a thing in itself: pre-psychological, related to space, colour, shape and — this was the astonishing element – time. A shot was always a length of time regardless of and despite what it pictured. This was absolutely fundamental. Shots also expressed an idea about space. They usually had a geometric structure. Lines could be drawn between the elements a shot depicted and these lines would give it a sense of movement, of balance or otherwise.

  This was an explosion of sorts but many of the directors who dismantled film language in these years loved cinema more than those who constructed that language. They didn’t want to demolish it but realized that there were some things – abstract, metaphysical points – that this language as originally constituted just could not say. In the chaos of the times, some techniques were lost or forgotten. In the rush to film with natural light, simply, in real-life places, some of the poetry of traditional lighting was lost. Cinematographer Nestor Almendros wrote, “We have moved from an aesthetic with shadows to an aesthetic without them … shadowless light eventually destroyed visual atmosphere in modern cinema.”26 If you doubt this, flick through the images in this chapter and notice how much less contoured they are than, say those of the 1940s in Chapters Four and Five.

  In the 1950s and 60s what had to be said also changed. Western societies were less cohesive than in previous decades. People challenged the religious, moral and material assumptions of their parents. Such challenges had been around for centuries but now many people agreed with them. Developing countries had to start speaking cinematically for themselves. Cinema’s desperately immature treatment of sexual themes and the naked body had to change, though on this point it is noticeable how the sexuality of directors in the 1960s determined rather directly what they filmed: Godard, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Bergman, Fellini, Imamura and Buñuel all chose to film women while homosexual filmmakers Warhol, Lindsay Anderson, and Pasolini more often took men as their subjects. Only the major women directors, Chytilova in Czechoslovakia and Muratova in the Soviet Union, chose to photograph their own sex consistently, per-haps to correct years of what they saw as misrepresentation. Of the heterosexual men, only Imamura and Fellini consistently cast actresses who were not conventionally beautiful.

  There has been no bigger gear change in film history.

  1. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, op. cit.

  2. Ibid.

  3. François Truffaut, “The Whiteness of Carl Dreyer” in The Films of My Life, op. cit., p. 48.

  4. Newsreel cameramen in the Second World War were amongst the first to shoot film as freely as this, and Canadian television’s pioneering Candid Eye (1958–59), filmed hidden camera footage in a remarkably fresh manner.

  5. Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock–Truffaut, op. cit., p. 283.

  6. Ibid, p. 268.

  7. Paolo Pasolini in Pier Paolo Pasolini, A Future Life. Associazione Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini. 1989, pp. 19–20. In fact, there is a dolly shot in Accattone.

  8. Ibid, p. 20.

  9. Ibid, p. 19.

  10. The literal wording from The Gospel according to St John, Chapter 18, verses 33–34, is “Art thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered him, Sayest though this thing of thyself, or did others tell it of me?”

  11. Delli Colli quoted in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema and Heresy. Naomi Green. Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 46.

  12. Pier Paolo Pasolini, A Future Life, op. cit.

  13. “Io, Luchino Visconti”, Aerilio di Sovico in Il Mundo, quoted in Luchino Visconti by Claretta Tonetti, Boston University, Columbus Books.

  14. Quoted in Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer, op. cit., p. 327.

  15. Yugoslavia’s “Novi Film” movement also produced significant filmmakers such as Alexsandr Petrovic, Dusan Makavejev, and Zivojin Pavlovic.

  16. Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time, The Bodley Head Ltd, p. 42.

  17. Ibid, p. 37.

  18. Ibid, p. 37.

  19. Paradjanov to Ron Holloway in the documentary film Paradjanov, A Requiem.

  20. Quoted in Roy Armes, Third World Filmmaking and the West, op. cit., p. 264.

  21. The filmmaker Chris Marker, whose philosophical essay-documentaries were highly distinctive and who was influenced by Dziga Vertov, used still images in his extraordinary La Jetée (France, 1962), in which a man who remembers seeing a shooting at Orly airport and the face of a beautiful girl, travels back in time. His work was probably seen and studies by the Cubans.

  22. This was not the first time that the f
usion of writing and drawing influenced film: Sergei Eisenstein cited the role that Japanese pictographs played in his work.

  23. S. Ray interviewed by Udayan Gupta. “The Politics of Humanism”, Cineaste 12, 1984.

  24. By this stage the American avant garde film scene had become one of the most fertile in the world. Conner and Warhol have been mentioned, but the prolific Stan Brakhage was at least as important a figure. Making films from 1951, he built on the allusive autobiographical cinema of Maya Deren, extending it using camera-less and abstract techniques and creating works about his wife giving birth and about their love-making. The Ohio-born Hollis Frampton was equally experimental, if less productive and, like the Canadian former jazz musician Michael Snow whose Wavelength (1967) explored the space-time properties of shots, he is considered a cinematic structuralist.

  25. Both Truffaut and Godard are said to have been offered the project.

  26. Nestor Almendros in his memoir A Man with a Camera.

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  Robert De Niro’s famous walk near the beginning of Taxi Driver, in which director Martin Scorsese and editors Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro make a dissolve which seems to represent the character’s lapse of consciousness. USA, 1976.

  FREEDOM AND WANT SEE (1969–79)

  Political cinema around the globe and the rise of the blockbuster in america

  At first the momentum of 1960s innovation continued into the 1970s. The bandwagon of explicitly personal filmmaking, of sexual freedom, references to earlier cinema, of abstraction, of ambiguity, quest for meaning, open-endedness, self-consciousness, of the idea of a shot as a unit of time, all those giddy tropes of 1960s counter-cinema kept on rolling. Looking back now we can see that their days were numbered, but at the time, few could tell.