by Mark Cousins
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Where Loach minimized the range of camera positions and angles, Ken Russell did the opposite. In this flashback love scene from Women in Love, he and cinematographer Billy Williams clock their camera ninety degrees to show Alan Bates and Jennie Linden walking vertically towards each other through tall grass. UK, 1969.
The sets in the The Devils were designed by Derek Jarman, a twenty-nine-year-old experimental painter and filmmaker who was influenced by Pasolini, Jean Cocteau, Powell and Pressburger and the paintings of Caravaggio. In 1976, the year of the death of Carol Reed, the year in which the anarchist punks erupted in youth culture, he co- directed Sebastiane, about a Roman soldier who becomes a Catholic martyr. Made with almost no money and written and performed in the Latin language, its frank homoeroticism made it a milestone in the history of gay cinema (269). Jarman and his collaborators later devised a way of filming on amateur film stock, slowing it down, transferring it to video, combining it with other footage to produce trance-like feature films. His themes were Englishness, Shakespeare, homosexuality, the barbarity of contemporary life and, eventually – in the revolutionary Blue (UK, 1993), one of the most abstract films ever made, in which the screen remained a single colour throughout – the director’s own blindness and AIDS-related illness.
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Painter and avant-gardist Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, a landmark work in gay cinema which was by turns vicious and intimate. Co-director: Paul Humfress. UK, 1976.
Cinematographers played a key role in modernizing American cinema of the 1970s, and in Britain one of them became the finest director of the period. Nicolas Roeg worked his way up through commercial cinema as a distinguished cameraman. His first feature was a gangster picture like no other, as radical in form and meaning as The Godfather was conservative. Co-directed with the Scottish avant-gardist Donald Cammel, Performance (UK, 1970) tells the story of a clean-cut petty gangster (James Fox) who goes into hiding in the London home of a rock star (Mick Jagger) and his two female companions. In getting drawn into their world of drug-taking and promiscuity, the gangster confronts his own sexual ambiguities; the rock star sees in his innate violence something feral that he himself has lost. Using mirrors, wigs, make-up and spatial ambiguities, Roeg and Cammell portrayed the merging of these two identities (270) just as the actress and the nurse merge in Bergman’s Persona (Sweden, 1966). Performance is even more concerned with what it is to be an artist than the Swedish film, however. The gangster introduces himself as one. Scenes from his past life were sometimes shot with 12mm “fish eye” lenses, distorting everything. After a gunshot, the camera appears to travel in the path of the bullet through a skull, into a head, crashing through a picture of the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, then moving deeper. The film as a whole does this too, starting in the showy world of London gangsters, then moving into the subconscious lives of its characters, the place where sexualities and whole identities are ill-defined.
Rather than returning to the theme of adults in a closed world, Roeg’s next film looked at children in an open one, the Australian outback. Walkabout (UK, 1971) is a mythic tale of a white fourteen-year-old English girl and her six-year-old brother who are forced to trek across Australia after their father shoots himself at a family picnic. As with the gangster in Performance, the experience seems to allow them to shed their rational twentieth-century selves and become reborn into what aboriginals would call “the dream time”, to live a more mythic, primitive experience which is closer to the cosmos, animals and sexual instincts. At one point the girl swims naked (271). Years later, back in the white world of tower blocks, fitted kitchens, make-up and nine-to-five husbands, she thinks of this free, erotic moment and the sense of loss is overwhelming. Like Pasolini and Herzog, Roeg believed in a paradise lost where people were not ruled by their conscious thoughts and moral assumptions. Unlike them, and under the influence of the anthropologist Carl Jung, he seemed to suggest that this paradise ultimately resided not in pre-industrial lands but deep inside the structure of the human mind. Walkabout and subsequent films like Don’t Look Now (UK–France–Italy, 1973), in which he fragmented into shards of memory, superstition and fear a Daphne Du Maurier story set in wintertime Venice, were cinematic attempts to expose the workings of this structure. It became clear that for him, time was not linear there. Past and future crowded into the present, never more so than in Bad Timing (UK, 1980) a horrific love story whose dazzling portrait of the maze of human consciousness confirmed him as one of the most daring filmmakers of his time.
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A gangster (James Fox, left) and a rock star who has lost his muse (Mick Jagger, right) merge identities in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s remarkable Performance. UK, 1970.
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Roeg’s wide-ranging use of lenses and non-linear cutting (in collaboration with editors like Antony Gibbs and Graeme Clifford) established him as the most stylistically innovative director of his generation. Walkabout. UK, 1971.
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The success of Roeg’s Walkabout raised the bar for a new generation of Australian directors including Peter Weir, whose Picnic at Hanging Rock it resembled in some ways. Australia, 1975.
On top of its artistic achievements, Walkabout also helped kick-start the New Australian Cinema. That a work of such achievement and complexity could be fashioned out of the country’s landscape and psychic history encouraged indigenous filmmakers for the first time since the silent period to be cinematically ambitious. In the same year that it was made The Australian Film Development Corporation was set up, providing, as in Germany, public subsidies for new filmmakers. Soon crude comedies gave way to turn-of-the-century settings, thematic ambiguities, literary adaptations and head-on confrontations of racism. The first great New Australian film, The Cars that Ate Paris (Australia, 1974) was by the Roegian director Peter Weir. His follow up, like Walkabout, started with the incongruity of schoolgirls in prim uniforms at a picnic in the forbidding Australian outback. That Picnic at Hanging Rock (Australia, 1975) was set in 1900, and that the girls were from a posh boarding school, added to the mysterious absurdities of its situations. Three of them and their teacher disappear (272). Weir’s plan was to explain this disappearance at the end of the film – they were to be discovered and brought home on stretchers – but his editor Max Lemon suggested repeating instead the earlier picnic scenes in slow motion, as if they were ghosts. As a child Weir’s father had told him the story of the Marie Celeste, the sailing ship found full of the signs of life but without any people on board. Many of his subsequent films are built around such mysteries. Some, like Fearless (1993) which he made in America a decade after he first worked there in the early eighties, are more literally about characters in secular worlds gradually striving for God.
Gillian Armstrong, born in 1950, followed in the footsteps of Weir, in setting her debut feature in the Victorian era. My Brilliant Career (Australia, 1979) told of a romantic young daughter of a bush farmer who writes a literary memoir. It launched its leading actress, Judy Davis, into her international career becoming, in particular, a favourite of Woody Allen. Phillip Noyce, who was born the same year as Armstrong, started as her assistant on student films. His debut feature was Backroads (Australia, 1977), the best of the early films to look at racism in the country. Like Weir and Armstrong, he went on to be a studio director in Hollywood. The fourth major director to emerge was Fred Schepisi, who studied for the priesthood for a while, made his début film about Catholic boarding schools, then directed his breakthrough, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Australia, 1978). Like Noyce’s Backroads, it was about racism, this time encountered by a mixed-race Aboriginal. Like the films of Weir and Armstrong, it was set around the turn of the twentieth century. Like the other three its success eventually took him to Hollywood. Thus Australian cinema was deprived of its four major talents.
Few would have predicted that the New Wave which swept around the world would make much impact on the very commercial film culture of Hong K
ong. The Shaw Brothers continued to produce their lucrative blends of Kurosawa and Beijing Opera. One of their producers, Raymond Chow, left their company, then produced two films by an athletic California-born former child actor called Bruce Lee. The films, Tangshan daxiong/The Big Boss (1971) and Jingwu Men Xuji/Fist of Fury (1973) narrowed the stylistic range of Shaw actioners, focusing more on Lee’s brilliant kicking and punching techniques – so-called Kung Fu. The films photographed Lee full height (273) – head to toe – as Hollywood photographed its dancers, and portrayed the impact of the blows and the wounds they inflicted, more realistically. This came from Lee himself – a case of a star actor influencing the direction of his films. They were not only a huge box- office success but penetrated world – and Western – teenage popular markets in ways that no Eastern film had done. The shock was felt worldwide, therefore, when Lee died in 1973, aged thirty-three. A decade later Jackie Chan achieved some of the same success by modelling himself on Lee (as well as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd), toning down Lee’s realism and adding comedy.
However, even in Hong Kong there were signs of modernism. An early example was Dong Furen/The Arch (Hong Kong, 1970) by Tang Shuxuan. In this Lisa Lu plays a widow who falls for a soldier but because of feudal rules, cannot marry him. She returns to the routines of her life and her conformism is rewarded by an arch built in the village which comes to symbolize her self-sacrifice. Director Tang hired Satyajit Ray’s brilliant Indian cameraman, Subatra Mitra, to film her story, gracing it with depth and pathos not usually seen in Hong Kong cinema at the time.
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The seventies saw a heyday in Hong Kong cinema: Bruce Lee photographed in a wide shot to reveal his full atheticism in Fist of Fury. Director: Wei Lo. Hong Kong, 1973.
In Taiwan, another dissident director was pushing the stylistic schema of the region. He would become the most influential Eastern filmmaker of the 1970s. King Hu was born in China in 1931 and trapped in Hong Kong after the mainland went communist. He became an actor in the 1950s and joined the Shaw Brothers’ stable in 1958, directing for them from 1963. Hu civilized Shaw productions, bringing his interest in Chinese literary, painterly and philosophical traditions to them and combining these with the kinetic panache of Beijing Opera stage fighting. As early as the 1930s, some Chinese action directors had been attaching fine wires to body braces worn by their actors so that they could lift them into the air, to give them the appearance of floating or spinning. Hu liked the grace and otherworldliness of this but replicated it by using trampolines placed around the set, from which his performers could bounce. His style developed further after seeing Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Japan, 1961), which Sergio Leone in Italy remade as A Fistful of Dollars (1964). He liked the dignity of the film’s samurai character and his loneliness. He watched Western films too, taking from the James Bond films an interest in spying themes, but rejecting what he saw as their white supremacism.
These diverse influences are best seen in his seminal three-hour 1969 film Hsia Nu/A Touch of Zen (King Hu, Taiwan), one of the most beautiful ever made. Set at the time of the Chinese Ming dynasty, it starts with a realistic portrayal of village life, then takes on the delicate qualities of a ghost story as it charts the journey of a young woman who meets a scholar. Expanding outwards, it becomes an epic battle in a bamboo forest (274) during which the woman’s father’s enemies threaten her and a Buddhist Monk bleeds gold and achieves nirvana. What made it so original, so unlike closed romantic realism, was that the nature of the reality portrayed in the film shifted between each of its three sections. At first its focus was social, then moral and interpersonal, and finally transcendental. This was somewhat akin to the spiritual awakening undergone by the characters of Bresson and Dreyer but instead of suggesting this through rigorous cinematic minimalism, Hu’s dazzling editing and art direction – both of which he undertook himself – dramatized the metaphysical expansion of his characters and their world. A Touch of Zen was hugely influential, directly inspiring the international box office hit Wo Hu Zang Long/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, Hong Kong–Taiwan–US, 2000) and the kinetic-philosophical 1990s films of Honk Kong director Tsui Hark. The Hong Kong-US action director John Woo called Hu “a cinematic poet, a cinematic painter and a cinematic philosopher.”
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Among the greatest martial arts films ever made: King Hu’s A Touch of Zen which, as this still shows, was the model for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Taiwan, 1969.
The Indian film industry grew at such a pace in the 1960s that by 1971 – when it produced 433 films – it was the biggest in the world. Amitabh Bachchan, a cross between the western actors Sean Connery and Robert De Niro, became its biggest star. Born in 1942, Bachchan became an Indian national obsession in his early thirties, fortifying the Hindi film industry in Bombay. The comparison to Western actors captures the degree of his fame but not the complexity of his masculinity. His screen persona was often that of a troubled working-class rebel who avenging a crime committed against him or his kin. Yet, this being mainstream Indian cinema, Bachchan also danced. His method of doing so, of combining reserve with grace, was influential and, according to some, helped determine how Indian people “move in the streets, at weddings and at religious processions.”14 In the classic Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975), the most popular of his mid-1970s films, he plays one of two bandits hired to retaliate for the killing of an ex-policeman’s family. The film derived as many of its ideas from American Westerns as did Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. If anything, its visual grandeur, flashback structure and set pieces made it even more operatic than that film.
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The most popular of actor Amitabh Bachchan’s mid-seventies films, the epic vengeance Western Sholay. Director: Ramesh Sippy. India, 1975.
Outside the vivid but conformist mainstream, Mani Kaul’s stylistic innovations in Uski Roti/A Day’s Bread (India, 1969) helped create the New Indian Cinema movement. As in Germany and Australia, public subsidy nurtured this. The films of Kaul, Mrinal Sen and Kumar Shahani helped stimulate debates about low-budget alternatives to the spectacular films made in Bombay. The last in particular was a link between the French and Indian New Wave movements, having worked with Bresson and participated in the demonstrations in Paris in 1968. Like other film movements, New Indian Cinema had its preferred actors such as the forceful and iconic Shabana Azmi and the understated Naseeruddin Shah. Again, as in Germany, state subsidy was short lived. As early as 1976, the Indian Committee on Public Undertakings announced, in a sideswipe at the intellectual cinema of Kaul and Sen, that “films are primarily a means of entertainment.”15
BEYOND THE NEW WAVES: POLITICAL MODERNISM
Most of the films which have been considered so far in this chapter either addressed traditional subject matter with new schemas or used traditional filmic techniques to explore new ethnicities and historical problems. But some countries in the 1970s underwent a more radical renewal in their approach to cinema, abandoning not only old forms but old content as well. Chapter Six showed how the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 began the process in which the non-Western world would cope with decolonialization. These ideas filtered into and sometimes grew out of the world of the arts in the 1960s; Brazilian Cinema Novo in the 1960s was the most prominent result of this in the film world. By the end of that decade the politicization of non-Western film was gathering pace.
Take India, for example. Inspired by an uprising in the village of Naxalbari, the left of that country’s Communist Party created a political movement called the Naxalites which radicalized the ideas of documentary filmmakers in India in the 1970s and filtered into the approach of masters like Ritwik Ghatak (see page 316) and Mrinal Sen. Building on such ideas and in particular the radical work of Brazilian and Cuban directors of the 1960s, two Argentinean filmmakers wrote a manifesto for non-Western filmmaking which was highly influential. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the
Third World” by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino argued that throughout most of the history of the medium, film had been a commodity. Filmmakers in the developing world should reject this history and start again, that argued, treating cinema as a weapon to fight oppression, a revolutionary tool. Their approach was Marxist, they wrote like V.I. Pudovkin in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Their ideas were built on by others and a new categorization of the stages of film history emerged: First Cinema was Industrial and commercial, lasting from the earliest days of narrative film until around 1958; Second Cinema was the modernist art movies of individual creative directors like Godard, Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini and had its heyday between 1959 and 1969; Third Cinema was political modernism, opposed to both industrial and autobiographical art cinema, and would come to the fore in non-Western countries after 1969. The simplifications of this model are clear to anyone who has looked at the subtleties of closed romantic realism and its interplay with its alternatives. Nonetheless the idea of Third Cinema influenced the course of African, South American and Middle-Eastern cinema of the 1970s.16
The most popular images of Africa in cinema until the late 1960s were those of Tarzan movies, where blacks are usually mysterious figures in the background, or John Huston’s The African Queen (USA, 1951), which is told from the point of view of white people and missionaries. In the north of Africa, Egypt’s master director Youssef Chahine had, for more than a decade, been challenging this mainstream formula. Long before German filmmakers in the 1970s did so, in films like Cairo Station (Egypt, 1958) he used the form of American melodrama but moved to other areas of content. At the first Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia in 1966 he said, “Freedom of Expression is not given, it is taken”.17 After Israel defeated his country 1967 and claimed large sections of its land, his semi-detachment from Western cinema became politicized. “For me the Third World is England, France, the USA,” he later said. “I’m the first world, I’ve been here for 7,000 years.”18 The Sparrow/Al’usfour (Egypt, 1973) was a stunning expression of this stance. It follows the stories of a young policeman and a journalist whose lives interweave and overlap in the house of local hostess, Bahiyya, and culminates with Egypt’s premier, Nasser, announcing on television that Israel has won the Six-Day War and that Egyptian territory has been lost. Chahine captures the shock effect of this on the lives of ordinary Egyptians with astonishing vividness. His ending – tracking shots of Bahiyya running through the streets shouting “We won’t accept defeat” – sounds crudely propagandistic but is one of the greatest moments in the whole of Third Cinema.