The Story of Film: An Odyssey

Himself - Presenter:
A lie to tell the truth. This is film making. The art of making us feel that we're there.

Himself - Presenter:
Hollywood's cinema, the bauble, is brilliant at the anticipation of seeing. The desire to see. The pleasure of seeing.

Himself - Presenter:
[about Brigitte Bardot] She brought more money to the French economy than the motor car manufacturer, Renault.

Himself - Interviewee:
Freud had a phrase for it. The representation of thing by its opposite. If you push away far enough, you'll get there. You'll get to the thing you're pushing away from.

Himself - Interviewee:
We exist, and our apprehension of a story is how we explain the kind of meanderings that we take. So, there's no such thing as the empirical story. It's just what happens to people.

Himself - Presenter:
Godard said that the story of film is about boys filming girls, and about men worrying about mortality and women not doing so.

Himself - Presenter:
[about Visconti's work] Society and beauty. It's as if Marxism itself was a crane-shot.

Himself - Presenter:
[about opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey] This famous cut, from pre-human life to the time of space travel, cuts out more time than any other edit in movie history.

Himself - Interviewee:
[about making The Matrix] None of the actors knew Kung Fu, not even how to use their fists. I was very troubled by that. It took me four months to train them.

Himself - Interviewee:
This tension of tradition and revolt against the tradition are, in a way, contradictory. But as a matter of fact, it is a synthesis. You will always find the synthesis of tradition and revolt from the tradition together in any good art.

Himself - Interviewee:
[quoting his father] The most exciting thing about Indian cinema is that you get poetic justice in three hours. You don't get poetic justice in a lifetime, sometimes.

Himself - Presenter:
[about Star Wars] This is the most absurd plot we've yet heard in this story of film, and yet the movie charms. In part because it draws richly from film history.

Himself - Presenter:
[about David Lynch] He worked with unconscious material the way that a carpenter works with wood.

Himself - Interviewee:
The films that I like, they hurt a bit.

Himself - Presenter:
70s cinema had been about what we *wanted* to see. Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars... 90s cinema had become *can* see.

Himself - Presenter:
[blurry 1900s footage] Real human courage and imagination goes into a shot like this. The camera and the guy are really strapped to the plane as it does a scary loop-T-loop.

Himself - Presenter:
[crisp CGI aerial approach from Gladiator, 2000] Hard work and long hours spent in relative comfort, eating pizza, got a shot like this.

Himself - Interviewee:
Science fiction particularly allows you to do things politically that you wouldn't do - that might not be accepted as easily if you did them straight, because it's not here, it's slightly over here. It's a little bit skewed.

Himself - Interviewee:
[about Romeo + Juliet, 1996] The audience knows this is going to happen. How can it happen in a way in which their delicious expectation and enjoyment of it's-going-to-happen, be suspended so that then it happens, it's a surprise they knew was going to happen? It was perplexing.

Himself - Presenter:
We know something will go wrong, but what? What'll happen next? That's the question the film makers asked, and will always ask.

Himself - Interviewee:
Why can't movies have the same qualities as painting, so you are fascinated by each single frame.

Himself - Presenter:
[about inverted motifs] The great French playwright, Feydeau, said that in order to be funny you need to think sad first.

Himself - Interviewee:
[about Terrence Malick] Terry is a special, far out - or far in - person.

Himself - Presenter:
Much of what we assume about the movies is off the mark. It's time to redraw the map of movie history that we have in our heads. It's factually inaccurate, and racist by omission.

Himself - Interviewee:
I think that now a days, in the last 30 years, people have been - they are lost. They are lost.

Himself - Presenter:
[about Russian Ark, 2002] Sokurov saw the film as a single last breathe of this civilization. And so, astonishing, he filmed the whole movie in a single take. There hasn't been one cut in the whole film. The shot has traveled 1300 meters, through 33 galleries, filming 867 people; cavaliers, music officials, spies, great balls, and portents of the horrors to come. Over 90 minutes. Sokurov and his team rehearsed for 6 months. Filming took place on the 23rd of December when there are only 4 hours of daylight. This allowed for just 2 takes. Take 1 had to be abandoned after 5 minutes. Then take 2, this one, unfolds. Unbelievable tension. The steadicam is so heavy that the operator almost buckles at the knees in pain.

Himself - Interviewee:
I think a lot of film makers think a story is the purpose of a film, and that the characters and the actors really have just got to establish the story and take it to where it's going. And that seems to me to be the complete opposite of what should be happening, because there should be no story. I mean, we spend our lives inventing stories, but the story actually doesn't exist. We exist, and our apprehension of a story is how we explain the kind of meanderings that we take. So, there's no such thing as the empirical story. It's just what happens to people.

Himself - Presenter:
[about Visconti] He films some scenes in a moving tram. A kind of working-class crane-shot. Society and beauty. It's as if Marxism itself was a crane-shot.

Himself - Presenter:
[about David Lynch] His films protest against the rationality and understandability of everyday life. He worked with unconscious material the way that a carpenter works with wood.

Himself - Presenter:
[about the new generation of German directors] One thing's clear. The films all asked the question, I don't want to be what my parents are, then what am I?

Himself - Presenter:
[about Yilmaz G?ney work on Yol, 1982] G?ney is credited as co-director of the film, with Serif G?ren, because remarkably he was in prison for the whole shoot, but escaped in time for the post-production. He sent out explicit notes on how shots should be filmed.

Himself - Presenter:
"Performance" was not only the greatest '70s film about identity - if any movie in the whole story of film should be compulsory viewing for filmmakers, maybe this is it.

Himself - Presenter:
70s cinema had been about what we *wanted* to see. Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars. 90s cinema had become *can* see.

Himself - Interviewee:
Science fiction particularly allows you to do things politically that you wouldn't do - that might not be accepted as easily if you did them straight, because it's not here, it's slightly over here. It's a little bit skewed. And I think humor does the same thing. And if you add them together in the right way, then you can - you can probably get away with murder if you want.

Himself - Interviewee:
Shakespeare and Bollywood cinema had something in common. And what they had in common was the blindness to taste or style or any of those imposed ideals about art. What they were singularly focused on was the engagement of as many human beings as possible, from as many types of humanity, to be moved and touched by story, to deliver a big idea. A big idea through an emotional experience.

Himself - Interviewee:
[walking through the thought process of making Romeo + Juliet, 1996] The audience know this is going to happen. How can it happen in a way in which their delicious expectation and enjoyment of it's-going-to-happen, be suspended so that then it happens, it's a surprise they knew was going to happen? It was perplexing.

Himself - Presenter:
[about Moulin Rouge!, 2001] Visually this is pure romantic cinema. Moon light, a roof-top tryst, reverse angle editing, two-shots. But the music is a wild 90s mash-up of pop songs used almost like dialog, as if reality had been remixed by a DJ.

[last lines]

Himself - Interviewee:
That's where the romanticism comes in, is that we're making something that happens in life *better* than it is in life. Bigger than it is in life.

Himself - Presenter:
Better and bigger than life. Exactly what many movies makers aimed for in the last days of digital, at the end of the old millennium. The story of film was full of the fizz and feedback of those days. And the rapture of self-loss. But then came the 21st century.

Himself - Interviewee:
[walking through the thought process of making Romeo + Juliet, 1996] The audience knows this is going to happen. How can it happen in a way in which their delicious expectation and enjoyment of it's-going-to-happen, be suspended so that then it happens, it's a surprise they knew was going to happen? It was perplexing.

Himself - Presenter:
The emphasis on the surrealism of everyday talk became know as Tarantino-esque, after the film's write-director, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino-esque somehow meant both more real, and less real than life, at the same time. And Tarantino wasn't only significant for his dialog. Like Scorsese, he was a "hyperlink" to film history.

Himself - Presenter:
[about In the Mood for Love, 2000] As in the films of Renner-Brenner Fassbender and Terence Davies, hope as left the building, so rapture has migrated into the imagery and sound.

Himself - Presenter:
[about 1995 primitive cinema wave] In their manifesto they pledged a vow of chastity to the following daunting rules: the camera must be taken off the tripod, the shape of the screen must not be wide, no set should be built, real locations should be used, no props should be brought to those locations, no music should be used, no lighting can be added, no flashbacks, and the director must not take credit.

Himself - Presenter:
Von Trier once said that a film should be like a pebble in a shoe.

Himself - Interviewee:
...The films that I like, they hurt a bit.

Himself - Presenter:
[about opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey] Editing in film usually cuts out time. This famous cut, from pre-human life to the time of space travel, cuts out more time than any other edit in movie history.

Himself - Interviewee:
[quoting Elia Kazan] The main thing about directing is casting.

Himself - Presenter:
[about the rise of Film Noir] The romantic exuberance of Hollywood ebbed - it's paradise got a bit lost. And it showed.

Himself - Interviewee:
[about 1930s Busby Berkeley kaleidoscopics] I used to think they were terrible. Absolutely terrible. I thought they were awful for a long time. And now when I look at them I think they really are unique and wonderful, and they have a point of view, and I like them a lot. What's interesting is that they didn't change at all. I changed. They are what they are. Film locks it. It's like the written word on the page, it doesn't change. It's only our opinion of what it means that changes.

Himself - Interviewee:
The reason Chinese audiences don't enjoy films influenced by the West is hat every country has its own culture and artistic style. Movies bottle the essence of culture.

Himself - Presenter:
Kurosawa's work became, in effect, a style book for cinema. He was like a one-man film school.

Himself - Presenter:
[about All that Heaven Allows, 1955] The film used the gloss of Hollywood to attack gloss.

Himself - Presenter:
The magic techniques for George Belias begot Cocktail, begot anger, begot Scorsese and Lynch. Quite a chain of command.

Himself - Presenter:
The story of Indian film is as vast as the country. India knew as much if not more about devastation as Europe in the '50s. De-colonialization, partition, famine, and the caste system had traumatized it. In all this turmoil you'd think that the country would have no time for cinema. But you'd be wrong. By the 1950s, India seemed made for cinema. It's colors seemed to have the hand of a production designer, back then. It's luminosity as the feel of a studio arc light.

Himself - Presenter:
She had the kind of beauty that made the box office go kerching. There is nothing ambiguous about this stare. Bardot's hair was unkempt, she refused to dress like a posh Parisian woman. Eventually she brought more money to the French economy than the motor car manufacturer, Renault.

[first lines]

Himself - Presenter:
Movie fans around the world, most of them will have heard of the box office smash hits of the 70s: Jaws, Star Wars, The Exorcist, the Bruce Lee movies from Hong Kong, and the Indian epic, Sholay.

Himself - Interviewee:
The Shaw Brothers, such a big studio, made films of many types. And eventually more muscular films about male bonding, in the style of Chan Cheh stood out. This new trend was related to the decrease in age of the audience.

Himself - Presenter:
But for all the dynamism of Bruce Lee films, if we look again at them, we see that though *he* was fast and furious, the camera work was anything but. It patiently recorded the action. It stayed out of the fight.

Himself - Presenter:
By the 70s, the Bollywood bauble got bigger and shinier. In 1971 alone, India made 433 films. At least as many as were made in America in the same year.

Himself - Interviewee:
You must have seen children playing with a string and a pebble. They tie a string to a pebble and they start swinging it over their head. And slowly they keep letting the string, and it makes a bigger and bigger circle. Now, this pebble is the revolt from the tradition. It wants to move away. But the string is the tradition, the continuity, it is holding it. But if you break the string, the pebble will fall. If you remove the pebble, the string cannot go that far. This tension of tradition and revolt against the tradition are, in a way, contradictory. But as a matter of fact, it is a synthesis. You will always find the synthesis of tradition and revolt from the tradition, together in any good art.

Himself - Presenter:
Something happened in American cinema that changed everything. A movie about a shark took 260 million dollars at the U.S. Box office. A scary film about a girl possessed by the devil took 200 million at the box office. A Sci-Fi movie about the Force and the evil Darth Vader demolished all records, taking nearly 500 million. Cinema was on a roller coaster. There'd never been figures like this before. The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars changed American, and then world cinema. Producers started making movies about things people fantasize about seeing.

Himself - Interviewee:
We've proven that we were civilized 7000 years ago. Are we so underdeveloped? That's not civilization. Civilization is how you contact the other people. Do you know how to love? Do you know how to care? This is civilization. If you go to a very poor man here, and he has nothing to give you, he'd go and borrow from his neighbors a loaf of bread, and he'd offer it to you. In Europe you may faint and drop dead in the street, and people will just walk away from you.

Himself - Presenter:
A spokesman of the Vichy government, which sided with the Nazis, said if we've lost the war it's because of Quai Des Brumes. Director Carney retorted that you can't blame a storm on the barometer.

Himself - Presenter:
Hollywood's cinema, the bauble, is brilliant at the anticipation of seeing. The desire to see. The pleasure of seeing. The thief falls in love, of course. And his love sets in motion the rest of the film. This sort of movie is usually called classical. But really, it's romantic. It became Hollywood's claim to fame in the 20's. It's what most people mean when they even say the word "movie". It's the mainstream, the bauble.

Himself - Interviewee:
He started with a very thick script, and then he kind of reduced and reduced. I don't know what he did, but it had this monumental feeling, of course, after reducing for many years. It's like a very good soup, you know.