The Story of Film

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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 STORYOFGREATNESS ANDSUDDENSHIFTS

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 made 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.