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To tell a story, to implement his vision, the director has to be a technician...
and even an illusionist.
This means controlling and mastering the technical process.
Our palette has expanded tremendously...
through a century of constant experimentations.
The movies grew from silent to sound; black and white to Technicolor;
standard screen size to CinemaScope;
35 millimeter to 70 millimeter.
The American industry, it seems, never failed to embrace new technological developments.
Somehow, it moved faster and more decisively than its foreign rivals.
[Scorsese] As King Vidor said, "The cinema...
is the greatest means of expression ever invented,
but it is an illusion more powerful than any other,
and it should therefore be in the hands of the magicians and the wizards...
who can bring it to life."
Here, Buster Keaton, an aspiring cameraman,
is showing his footage to MGM executives...
in the hope of getting a job.
Unfortunately he has double exposed the film, and the screening is a disaster.
However, as every director will experience,
accidents can be the source of extraordinary poetry...
and beauty.
What Keaton"s cameraman needs is to learn and master the language of film.
Interestingly, most of the early film pioneers,
including D. W. Griffiith, had no formal education.
They were self-taught and often shared the prevailing prejudice...
that the cinema was a minor form of entertainment.
The American film probably came of age in February, 1915,
when D. W. Griffiith opened his first feature-length epic,
The Birth Of A Nation.
According to Raoul Walsh, who was one of Griffiith"s assistants at the time...
and who played the role ofJohn Wilkes Booth,
it took The Birth Of A Nation to convince Americans...
that films were an art in their own right...
and not just the illegitimate offspring of the theater.
How did Griffiith achieve this triumph?
Essentially through his composition and orchestration of the shots.
As Walsh put it, "The high and low angled shots...
turned a good picture into a great one."
One close-up was worth a thousand words.
Erich von Stroheim, also one of Griffiith"s assistants,
said that he was the pioneer of filmdom,
the first to put beauty and poetry into a cheap and tawdry sort of amusement.
l"ve always felt that visual literacy is just as important as verbal literacy.
And what the film pioneers were exploring was the medium"s specifiic techniques.
In the process, they invented a new language based on images rather than words.
A visual grammar, you might say.
Close-ups, :
irises, :
dissolves, :
masking part of the screen for emphasis, :
dolly shots, :
tracking shots.
Now these are the basic tools that directors have at their disposal...
to create and heighten the illusion of reality.
When Lillian Gish called D. W. Griffiith "the father of film,"
she used the same analogy.
She said, "He gave us the grammar of filmmaking."
He understood the psychic strength of the lens.
Half a century later, Stanley Kubrick may have had Griffiith in mind...
when he remarked that what is truly original in the art of filmmaking,
what distinguishes it from all the other arts,
may be the editing process.
Watch how Griffiith developed, two years before The Birth Of A Nation,
the technique of crosscutting.
He shows you two events happening at the same time...
and intercuts them to increase the tension of the suspense.
Now, at that time, Griffiith had to fight his distributors,
who feared that audiences would be confused by this innovation.
It was in the great epics of the silent era...
that the illusionists learned to use special effects and visual wizardry...
to conjure up some of their most compelling visions.
The American tradition of the great spectacle...
was born around 1915...
when D. W. Griffiith saw Cabiria,
an Italian super-production.
Watched it twice in one night. It inspired him.
Gave him the audacity to create his masterpiece, Intolerance.
Giovanni Pastrone"s Cabiria had all the right ingredients:
adventure, melodrama, pageantry, religion,
extraordinary production design...
and striking camera angles and lighting.
To film this scene, they actually dragged...
Hannibal"s elephants up onto a mountaintop.
Intolerance.
Much has been made of its extravagant budget,
real-size sets and thousands of extras.
The achievement is all the more extraordinary because Griffiith worked without a script.
It was all planned in his head, not on paper.
But Griffiith went even further.
Intolerance was a daring attempt at interweaving stories and characters...
not from the same period,
but from four different centuries.
Freely crosscutting from one era to another,
he blended them altogether in a grand symphony devoted to one idea:
passionate plea for tolerance.
Griffiith"s passion for history was balanced by his passion...
for simple people, the victims of history.
In modern day America, a young woman is deemed an unfit mother...
because her husband is in jail.
Oppression is represented by society matrons,
Puritan reformers who want to place her baby in an orphanage.
Griffiith"s distressed heroines carried with them...
the heart and soul of the picture.
For them, he composed his most eloquent close-ups.
Like Griffiith, Cecil B. DeMille liked to paint on a big canvas.
His ambition was to tell an absorbing personal story...
against a background of great historical events.
His first Biblical epic was inspired by one simple belief.
You cannot break the Ten Commandments, : they will break you.
Watch DeMille"s masterful staging of the exodus from Egypt:
the visual contrasts between the pharaoh"s war machine...
and the simple caravan of the Israelites, :
his sense of wonder, :
his attention to details, even in big crowd scenes.
His miniatures were as powerful as his frescoes.
DeMille even used an early two-strip Technicolor process here.
However, the grandiose set pieces were always subordinate to the story.
DeMille knew that spectacle alone would never make a great picture.
He spent much more time working on dramatic construction...
than on planning photographic effects.
"The audience,"he said, "is interested in individuals whom they can love or hate."
DeMille believed that he could translate the words of the Bible in the medium of film literally.
To achieve this, he devised extraordinary technical effects,
such as the parting of the Red Sea.
DeMille insisted that every detail be seen with equal clarity.
Here, for instance, notice the rocks and seaweed...
scattered on the sand to make the beach look like the bottom of the sea.
It was a last-minute inspiration on the part of DeMille,
who led his army of extras into the surf...
and showed them how to gather the kelp.
Of course, I never saw DeMille"s silent films when I was a boy.
His later epics are the ones that made an indelible impression on me.
[Narrator] Before the dawn of history,
ever since the first man discovered his soul,
he has struggled against the forces that sought to enslave him.
He saw the awful power of nature parade against him,
the evil eye of the lightning,
the terrifying voice of the thunder,
the shrieking, wind-filled darkness,
enslaving his mind with shackles of fear.
Fear bred superstition...
[Scorsese] And then there was DeMille"s own remake of The Ten Commandments,
which I have seen countless times.
- [Woman] Look! - [Man] Look! There!
- Where he struck the river, it bleeds. - The water turns to blood.
DeMille presented such a sumptuous fantasy that if you saw his movies as a child,
they stuck with you for life.
- The marvelous superseded the sacred. - [Woman Screams]
What I remember most vividly are the tableau vivant,
the colors,
the dreamlike quality of the imagery...
and, of course, the special effects.
God is a unique flame,
but the flame is a different color to different people.
These were the words of Rama Krishna which DeMille quoted to define his own faith.
Sokar, great lord of the lower world...
The great illusionists of the past, Cecil B. DeMille,
D. W. Griffiith, Frank Borzage, King Vidor,
were conductors.
They orchestrated visual symphonies...
what Vidor called "silent music."
It would fade away as Hollywood embraced sound.
But the legacy of the silent era was remarkable.
American movies had matured into a sophisticated art form...
with elaborate camera moves, long takes,
deep focus, expressive lighting, miniatures, et cetera.
I mean, in the late "20s, the most exciting experiments...
were taking place at the Fox Studios,
where the German master, Frederick Murnau,
was given carte blanche on the strength of his European triumphs.
His film, Sunrise, became the most expensive art film...
made in Hollywood.
[Horns Honking]
Rather than a plot, Murnau offered visions,
a landscape of the mind.
His ambition was to paint his characters"desires...
with lights and shadows.
This is how the frenzied city girl tempts the young farmer:
with a kaleidoscope of images.
She wants him to leave everything behind:
his land, his wife, his child,
the peace and innocence of the country life.
The vamp has planted a deadly thought in the young husband"s mind.
Murnau calls Sunrise "a story of two humans."
This song of the man and his wife is of no place.
You might hear it anywhere at anytime.
They don"t have a name,
but you experience every idea, every emotion that visits them.
He had George O"Brien"s shoes weighted with 20 pounds of lead...
to give the actor a more threatening presence.
[Bell Tolling]
[Tolling Continues]
Murnau was called "a cerebral director" by his Hollywood peers...
because he demanded that his actors fully understand...
the mind of their character.
He said, "I talked to an actor of what he should be thinking...
rather than what he should be doing."
"The camera,"said Murnau, "is the director"s sketching pencil.
It should be as mobile as possible
to catch every fleeting mood.
It must whirl and peep and move from place to place as swiftly as thought itself."
Later in theirjourney, the broken couple is reunited.
Fear and guilt fade away. They become invulnerable.
Nothing can harm them anymore, not even the city"s hustle and bustle.
Magically, subjective perceptions take on an objective reality.
A superimposition could serve as an inner vision...
or an inner monologue.
What Murnau is projecting onto the environment...
is their dream, their common dream.
- [Horns Honking] - At least for a brief moment.
- [Trolley Car Bell Ringing] - [Horns Honking]
In Sunrise, love and death are intertwined like day and night.
But in Seventh Heaven, love negated death itself.
Both films starredJanet Gaynor,
who commuted between the two sets,
working with Murnau during the day and with Borzage at night.
She is a street angel.
She"s saved by Charles Farrell, a street sweeper.
Reluctantly, he takes her to his lofty garret above the city.
He works in the sewers of Paris but insists that he lives near the stars.
Borzage was not a highly educated man,
let alone an art historian like Murnau.
His approach to the medium was more instinctive.
He was a maestro of the pantomime.
What inspired him was the sheer power of emotions.
This was the great mystery that elevated his melodramas...
into pure songs of love.
Directed by Borzage, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell...
formed a unique couple,
at once vibrant with sexual passion...
and wrapped in a mystical aura.
Their romance would lift them from the physical to the spiritual.
////[Marching Band]
War rips them apart.
[Clock Ticking]
[Ticking Continues]
[Ticking]
But as Borzage once stated, "Souls are made great through love and adversity."
Even when he"s blinded in the trenches,
the lovers remain in daily telepathic communication.
[Clock Tolling Five Times]
[Clocks Tolling]
[Cheering]
[Cheering Continues]
Borzage deeply believed in the transcendent power of love.
Time and space can be surmounted and abolished.
Because Diane refuses to accept Chico"s death...
she"s able to bring him back from the dead.
[Ticking]
[Ticking Stops]
////[Woman Singing]
////[Continues]
For the lovers, reality itself is immaterial.
The art of the pantomime had reached its zenith.
But the era of sound had arrived.
And for the silent film directors, this was a time of painful transition.
Even a script conference called for new skills.
We were so imbued and so living in, in pantomime...
that a fellow would come in and tell a story to, uh,
say, to Thalberg at MGM...
a comedy story, particularly... or, say, Mack Sennett...
He"d tell the whole damn story in pantomime.
He comes in and... Aah! And then, sock!
And, you know, everything was like that.
It looked like cartoon strips.
So all of a sudden we"re dealing with dialogue.
So, I had, from the time I was...
12 or 14 or something,
thought entirely in terms of images and pictures and movement.
Movement. I very much... What"s an interesting movement?
So here we are with words.
[Scorsese] The studios bowed to the tyranny of sound experts...
who knew little about filmmaking.
At first, they had the cameras enclosed in a soundproof booth...
or ensconced in a blimp.
As William Wellman put it, "Creaking floors received more attention...
than creaking stories."
Actors were kept anchored within the range of microphones.
Now, these had to be hidden sometimes in rather obvious props...
like this lantern in Anna Christie.
- Pretty, eh? - Gives you the creeps, though.
Film historians insisted that at that time movies stopped moving.
But the myth of the static camera has been dispelled...
now that so many films of the period have been rediscovered.
There were directors who refused to be shackled or paralyzed.
Directors such as Rouben Mamoulian, Frank Capra,
William Wellman, Tay Garnett,
all of whom can be credited with getting the camera moving again.
- ////[Swing] - Most Tay Garnett pictures of the early "30s...
feature fluid camera moves and even very long takes.
Two gins for Frankie.
Watch how skillfully the camera follows the tray across the dance floor.
////[Continues]
The choreography looks effortless.
But believe me, this shot must have been very hard to achieve.
[Whistle Blowing]
The dreamlike world of the silent film was no more.
With the talkies a more naturalistic approach seemed to prevail.
But in fact, sound encouraged the illusionists to heighten reality.
[Feet Stamping Simultaneously]
Here, in The Big House, the sound effects alone suggest...
- that the convicts are anonymous robots. - [Whistle Blows]
[Together] "Our Father, Who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done..."
But in the chapel, as soon as you hear their voices, they come alive.
[Men] "Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses...
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil."
They are given an identity and a purpose...
when their actions contradict the chorus of prayer.
"...forever and ever. Amen."
- A most effective counterpoint. - [Clattering]
- Sound can enhance the drama tremendously, - Not bad, huh?
particularly when it depicts an event that you"re not shown.
** [Whistling]
Just watch this one.
In Scarface, Howard Hawks demonstrated that sound and visual effects...
- [Gunfire] - can blend into a deadly metaphor.
[Gunfire]
Sound can tell the whole story,
as Wild Bill Wellman proved repeatedly.
Apoet of stark images and brutal understatements,
he loved to jolt, deceive and even frustrate his audience...
by depriving them of a spectacular scene.
[Gunfire]
[Woman Screams]
Here, in The Public Enemy,
- [Coughing] - [Screaming Continues]
he dared to stage the film"s climax and the hero"s comeuppance offscreen.
- [Typing] - Three-strip Technicolor.
In the mid-"30s this dramatically improved process...
was a wonderful gift bestowed on the illusionists.
- How"s that for an entrance? - Perfect.
What"s happened to you?
You"re deliberating whipping yourself into a fiit of hysterics.
Oh, no, I mustn"t do that.
It might disturb Mother and Ruth or wake up Danny.
In the old two-strip Technicolor, the one DeMille used...
in the silent Ten Commandments,
the color blue couldn"t be reproduced.
But now the three-strip process covered the entire spectrum.
Extra-wide cameras could expose three negatives simultaneously,
each recording one of the primary colors.
This is Gene Tierney, an angel face with the darkest of hearts.
Leave Her To Heaven was a fascinating hybrid, a film noir in color,
with the neurotically possessive woman...
destroying anybody who might come between her and her husband,
even the unwanted child she"s carrying.
[Screaming, Thudding]
We wouldn"t be separated for long.
- Just a few weeks. - No, l"d... l"d rather wait.
Her husband"s younger brother, a paraplegic boy, was in her way too.
Now you have to remember that color was rarely used for contemporary drama then.
- Think you can make it, Danny? - Aw, it"s a cinch.
It was more associated with period pieces and musicals.
John Stahl"s direction and Leon Shamroy"s cinematography...
conjured up an unsettling superrealist vision.
Don"t worry about your direction. l"ll keep you on your course.
- Okay! - This was a lost paradise.
Its beauty ravished by the heroine"s perversity.
l... I think l"m gettin" tired.
Take it easy. You don"t want to give up when you"ve come so far.
Okay. l"ll get my second wind in a minute.
[Panting] Oh!
The wa... water"s cold.
Colder than I thought.
Oh! I ate too much lunch.
I got a stomachache. Ellen!
It"s... It"s a cramp.
Ellen! It"s... It"s a cramp!
Ellen, it"s... Ellen, it"s...
Help me!
////[Whistling]
** [Whistling Continues]
Danny!
[Screaming] Danny!
Rather than encourage realism, the Technicolor palette went even further...
and added flamboyance to the melodrama.
////[Piano]
The illusionist always knew that color itself...
can actually play a dramatic role.
This is what Nicholas Ray attempted in Johnny Guitar.
** [Strikes Chord, Resumes Playing]
- Joan Crawford was Vienna, - Are you satisfiied they"re not here?
- No! - the outsider,
persecuted by the so-called respectable citizens...
because of her ties to a band of renegades.
In this truly offbeat western,
Nicholas Ray reversed the genre"s traditional iconography.
Black was the color of Mercedes McCambridge and the vigilantes,
while the outcasts were endowed with rich colors or even pure white.
[Man] We came for the kid and his bunch.
l"m sitting here in my own house, minding my own business,
playing my own piano.
I don"t think you can make a crime out of that.
[Woman] You"re only a boy! We don"t want to hurt you!
Just tell us she was one of ya, Turkey, and you"ll go free!
[Man] Come on, Turkey. Tell us. l"ll give ya my word ya won"t hang.
What should I do? I don"t wanna die! What do I do?
Save yourself.
Well, was she?
[Whimpers]
You can mirror emotions with color.
Vienna"s gambling house was designed and adorned like the set of a baroque opera.
Colors were deliberately distorted or thrown off balance.
Blue was toned down in favor of deep, saturated colors.
When an insane jealousy compels McCambridge to destroy Joan Crawford"s palace,
the palette alone suggests a fury from hell.
Now, the size of the screen itself needed to grow. It couldn"t be contained.
In the mid-"50s it spilled over its boundaries into something much grander.
And I still remember one of the great experiences I had...
in, in fiilm-going back in 1953.
I was ten or eleven years old when I went to the Roxy Theater,
and the curtain began to open and continued to open and open...
on the biggest screen l"d ever seen.
It was the fiilm The Robe.
It was the first CinemaScope picture, shot in 1953.
[Narrator] Rome, master of the earth.
[Scorsese] Originally, the new aspect ratio was a commercial gimmick...
designed to give the film industry an edge over its rival, television.
[Narrator] From the foggy coasts of the northern sea...
[Scorsese] Yet many filmmakers resisted the innovation.
"It"s only good for funerals and snakes, "pronounced Fritz Lang.
////[Marching Band, Dissonant]
It was a new canvas, and directors were put to the test...
as they learned to master the new proportions.
////[Continues, Dissonant]
At first, Elia Kazan disliked them.
But East Of Eden showed that CinemaScope could suit an intimate family drama...
as well as vast frescoes.
You were not limited to landscapes or processions,
horizontal lines or diagonal movements.
Watch how Kazan plays with the configuration of his set,
whenJames Dean dares to enter his long-lost mother"s bordello for the first time.
Will ya let me talk to ya?
Please. I gotta talk to ya.
Joe! Joe!
Get out of here. Joe! Tex!
Actually, Kazan combined the old and the new proportions in his composition,
introducing narrower frames, such as doorways and corridors...
within the wide format itself.
I wanna talk to ya! I wanna talk to ya!
Talk to me! Talk to me! Please! Mother!
Few were as skilled as Vincente Minnelli...
in using CinemaScope for dramatic effect.
Here in the tragic finale of Some Came Running,
the actors seem to blend into their surroundings.
[Man] They have a lot of souvenirs and a lot of free prizes for ya.
I got one of them, uh, them grammar books from the library.
I got it from that teacher who...
whom... whom is the objective...
- Whom says so? - Hmm?
The suspense actually derives from their integration...
into the environment.
You don"t know if and when the killer and his unsuspecting prey...
will come together in the same space.
CinemaScope allows Minnelli to deploy a more complex,
and therefore more threatening image.
The more open the frame, the greater the impression of depth...
and the more striking the illusion of reality.
We"re presented with a vibrant, chaotic canvas...
and it"s up to us to explore and interpret it.
[Gunshots Continue]
////[Carousel]
////[Continues]
////[Singing In Foreign Language]
The impact of the wide screen was particularly signifiicant...
on such genres as the western and the epic.
When he started Land OfThe Pharaohs,
Howard Hawks was nervous about the new format.
He complained, "It"s good only for showing great masses and movement.
It"s hard to focus attention, and it"s very diffiicult to edit."
However, his approach proved masterful.
[Narrator] Three million of such stones would be needed...
before the work was done.
Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds.
Every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place...
in the great pyramid.
[Scorsese] It was the composition of the shots that helped us appreciate...
the human efforts and technical feats...
that the filmmakers attributed to the pyramid builders.
What is that stone, Father?
That"s the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh,
the stone that will hold his body after death.
Where does it go to?
Into a great chamber in the pyramid, but where that is, you must not know.
This was like a documentary made on location 2,800 years B.C.
The wide screen gave the sense we were really there.
This is the way people lived and worked.
This is what they believed, endured and achieved.
[Man] I just shot it the way you see a thing.
I shoot straightforward, too.
I don"t use any camera tricks or anything.
Camera usually is at eye height.
And the audience sees just what we see.
Today, a film like The Fall OfThe Roman Empire...
has the poignant beauty of a lost art,
for this was the autumn of the great American epics.
They simply became too expensive to make.
[Indistinct Howling]
Like Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann had been a master of the western.
The Fall OfThe Roman Empire offered a multilayered drama...
which was as intense as any of the director"s westerns.
His sense of space and dramatic composition has never been more evident.
Throughout the film, you could hear the gods laugh in the background,
a cruel laugh that spelled the doom of all the protagonists...
and of the Roman Empire.
[Howling Continues]
So, is the grand old tradition started by Cabiria and Intolerance obsolete?
Well, it would seem so. I mean, today there"s no need to drag...
Hannibal"s elephants up the Alps anymore.
They... They can be generated by the computer.
So is this the end of epic cinema or the dawn of a new art form?
Nobody can afford to buy 3,000 or 4,000 extras.
It"s just not economically feasible anymore,
"cause you have to costume them, you have to transport them,
you have to feed them.
Uh, and it... You move very slowly...
when you"re trying to direct a large group of people like that.
So doing that today is, is next to impossible.
[Lucas] But doing it digitally, which is, you get a small group of people,
say, 100 people, and you replicate them, you move them around.
You can have exactly the same effect for a tenth of the cost.
We"ve changed the medium in a way that is profound.
It is no longer a photographic medium.
It"s now a painterly medium, and it"s very fluid,
so that things that are in the frame you can take out,
move, put them over here.
And so, it"s almost like going from two dimension to three dimension...
in the dynamic that"s been created at this point.
[Man] There is a misconception that we are surrendering something of art...
to a technology that will do it for us.
That... That is never the case.
But cinema itself is technology.
And to say that, oh, well, it can"t be an art...
because it"s a mechanical device rushing celluloid through it...
is as naive as to say, well, you can"t create...
because now it"s a computer rushing numbers through it.
The technology is always an element of creativity.
But it never is the source of the creativity.
And, so, my attitude is to embrace technology as it comes...
[Man] In any kind of art form you"re creating an illusion...
for the audience to look at reality through your special eye.
The camera lies all the time.
It lies 24 times a second.
[Laughing]
[Scorsese] In other words, we"re all the children of D. W. Griffiith...
and Stanley Kubrick.
[Person Breathing]
Take 2001, the first film to link the camera and the computer...
in the creation of special effects for the spaceship"s journey into the unknown.
This was a breakthrough in technical wizardry.
Every frame of 2001 made you aware...
that the possibilities for cinematic manipulations are indeed infinite.
Like Griffiith"s Intolerance, like Murnau"s Sunrise,
it was at once a super-production,
an experimental film and a visionary poem.
////['Also Sprach Zarathustra"]
**
Whether the illusion is created through high-tech...
- or low-tech wizardry doesn"t really matter. - [Cat Meowing]
The magic will only be effective if it is carried by a strong vision.
[Meows]
And it can be achieved in so many ways.
Fifty years ago when he was assigned to a small "B"film called Cat People,
directorJacques Tourneur had practically no budget...
and, of course, none of today"s new technologies.
But he knew that the dark had a life of its own.
He decided not to show the creature threatening his protagonist.
[Growling]
- He"d only suggest a presence. - [Growling Continues]
And to do that, he simply conjured up an ominous shadow play.
[Growling, Hissing]
[Growling]
[Growling Continues]
- [Screeching] - [Screams]
- [Scream Echoes] - Help!
[Screaming]
Help!
[Screams]
It was a sleight of hand that an early film magician...
could have performed at the turn of the century.
What is the matter, Alice?
Sorry to have disturbed you, Alice.
I missed you and Oliver, and I thought you might know where he is.
We waited for you at the muzeum. You"ll probably fiind him at home.
If you don"t mind then, l"ll run on.
Could I have my robe, please?
Sure.
Gee whiz, honey, it"s torn to ribbons.
Now, we talked about the rules, about the narrative codes, about the technical tools,
and we"ve seen how Hollywood filmmakers adjusted to these limitations.
They even played with them.
Now"s the time to look at the cracks in the system.
And what slipped through these cracks has always fascinated me.
I mean, there were opportunities, there were projects...
that allowed for the expression of different sensibilities,
offbeat themes or even radical political views,
particularly when the fiinancial stakes were minimal.
Less money, more freedom. I mean, the world of"B" fiilms was...
often freer and more conducive to experimenting and innovating.
The "40s directors found that they could exercise more control on a small-budget movie...
than on a prestigious "A" picture.
Also, they"d have less executives looking over their shoulder.
They could introduce unusual touches, weave unexpected motifs...
and even transform routine material into a much more personal expression.
So in a sense, they became, um, they became smugglers.
They cheated and somehow got away with it.
Style was crucial.
The first master of esoterica was Jacques Tourneur,
who began making his mark in low-budget, supernatural thrillers.
On Cat People he had a good reason not to show the creature.
He said, "The less you see, the more you believe.
You must never try to impose your views on the viewer.
But rather, you must try to let it seep in little by little."
This oblique approach perfectly defines the smuggler"s strategy.
[Growling]
[Pneumatic Brakes Hissing]
Climb on, sister. Are you ridin"with me or ain"t ya?
You look as if you"d seen a ghost.
Did you see it?
The son of pioneer Maurice Tourneur, Jacques Tourneur had the good fortune to find...
an extraordinary oasis of creative subversion...
in producer Val Lewton"s unit at RKO.
Lewton, a former story editor for Selznick, was once described...
as "a benevolent David Selznick."
Lewton worked extensively on all of the scripts that he produced.
But he never set foot on the set and left the director to his own devices.
Look at that woman. Isn"t she something?
A "B"film like Cat People only cost $ 134,000.
Looks like a cat.
But it touched a chord in America...
by exploring a young bride"s fear of her own sexuality.
Moia cectra?
[Scoffs] Now wait a minute. It can"t be that serious.
- Just one single word. - She greeted me.
She called me sister.
- [Growls] - When her deepest feelings for her husband are aroused,
the heroine is overwhelmed by shame and guilt.
She seems to be consumed by a malevolent spirit.
[Whispering]
Or if you will, by her inner demons.
You were saying, "The cats..."
They torment me.
I awake in the night,
and the tread of their feet whispers in my brain.
I have no peace,
for they are in me.
Tourneur"s films undermined a key principle of classical fiiction:
[Doctor] "In me"? "In me"?
[Scorsese] the notion that people are in control of themselves.
Tourneur"s characters were moved by forces they didn"t even understand.
Their curse was not fate in the Greek sense.
It was not an external force.
It dwelled within their own psyche.
So in its own way, Cat People was as important as Citizen Kane...
in the development of a more mature American cinema.
[Wind Howling]
In Tourneur"s second film with producer Val Lewton,
I Walked With A Zombie,
the heroine is a nurse assigned to a catatonic woman in the West Indies.
- She"s drawn into a parallel world... - [Indistinct Howling]
when she seeks the help of sorcerers to cure her patient.
[Howling Continues]
Jacques Tourneur was a modest craftsman.
He compared his work to that of a carpenter who simply carves a chair or table...
that he"s been hired to build.
But years later, at the end of his career,
Tourneur confessed that he had always been passionately interested in the supernatural.
A bit of a psychic himself, he made films about the supernatural...
because he believed in it...
and had even experienced it firsthand.
How did he smuggle this contraband?
Tourneur relied on the imagination of the audience.
He said, "When spectators are sitting in a darkened theater...
and recognize their own insecurity and that of the protagonist on the screen,
then they will accept the most unbelievable situations...
and follow the director wherever he wants to take them."
[Gasps]
- [Drums Beating] - Tourneur"s twilight zone was a labyrinth.
His were perilous journeys into the unknown...
and sometimes the occult.
Reality remained opaque and rarely were people what they appeared to be.
They stood at the frontier of a hidden world,
a shimmering canvas of distant murmurs and deep shadows.
[Drums Stop]
[People Murmuring]
- She doesn"t bleed. - Zombie.
Common to all of Tourneur"s films was a muted disenchantment,
a strange melancholy,
the eerie feeling of having embarked on an adventure...
from which there was no return.
[Woman Thinking] It seemed only a few days before I met Mr. Holland in Antigua.
We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian.
It was all just as I had imagined it.
I looked at those great, glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek.
I breathed deep, and every bit of me inside myself said,
- "How beautiful." - [Man] It"s not beautiful.
You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland.
It"s easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer.
Everything seems beautiful because you don"t understand.
Those flying fiish, they"re not leaping for joy.
They"re jumping in terror. Bigger fiish want to eat them.
That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies,
the glitter of putrescence.
There"s no beauty here, only death and decay.
You can"t really believe that.
Everything good dies here, even the stars.
After Tourneur opened Pandora"s box, things were never the same.
It may have gone unnoticed at fiirst, but a strange darkness crept into American fiilms,
a feeling of insecurity, disorientation and foreboding,
as though the ground could suddenly give way under your feet.
When my father was alive, we traveled a lot.
We went nearly everywhere. We had wonderful times.
I didn"t know you traveled so much.
- Oh, yes. - Perhaps we"ve been to some of the same places.
No, I don"t think so.
- We"re in Venice. - Yes, we"ve arrived. Now, where would you like to go next?
- France? England? Russia? - Switzerland.
Switzerland. Excuse me one moment while I talk with the engineer.
Again, appearances were as deceptive as they were beautiful...
in Max Ophuls"s elegies.
- You and the lady, are you enjoying the trip? - Very much.
- We"ve decided on Switzerland. - The romantic decor was a trap.
- There you are. Thank you. - Oh, thank you!
Switzerland!
This was a carnival of illusions,
an imaginary journey for an imaginary romance.
Ophuls was an angel in exile in Hollywood.
The Viennese maestro suffered years of unemployment...
- [Tooting] - until producerJohn Houseman gave him a chance...
to adapt Stefan Zweig"s novella, Letter From An Unknown Woman.
Now, you know far too much about me already, and I know almost nothing about you, huh?
- It was his valentine to Vienna, - Except that you"ve traveled a great deal.
and a farewell to the culture of his youth.
Ophuls"s camera and his heroine moved in unison.
The fluid visual choreography allowed you to experience...
Joan Fontaine"s every heartbeat.
- [Woman] Stefan, the train is leaving. - Just a minute.
For a brief moment, happiness appeared within reach.
How long have you been standing here?
But Stefan will always remain unattainable.
I don"t want to go. Do you believe that?
l"ll be here when you get back.
Say "Stefan" the way you said it last night.
Stefan.
It"s as though you"ve said it all your life.
- [Man] Better hurry, sir. - Yes! Good-bye.
- [Woman] Stefan! - Yes! Good-bye.
Cold reality sets in at the train station.
Won"t be long. l"ll be back in, in two weeks.
The real one. Lisa will never travel with Stefan,
the frivolous pianist on whom she has projected her passions.
She"s left behind, pregnant with a child conceived that magical night.
Ophuls was just one of the European expatriates...
most of them refuges from Fascism...
who were largely responsible for the exploration of these new darker territories.
The others were well-known directors such as Fritz Lang,
Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder.
But also lesser known names such as Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak,
Edgar Ulmer, Andre De Toth.
To them, crime was a source of fascination.
It allowed them to probe the nature of evil.
Monstrosity was something banal, almost natural.
The criminal world cannot be conveniently isolated or circumscribed...
within the urban underworld as in the old gangster film.
Hello, Adele. I dropped over to the butcher shop like you told me to.
I got a nice piece of liver.
[Scorsese] It was everywhere, lurking under the surface.
Every man was a potential criminal.
How long have you known Katherine March?
Answer me!
I don"t know what you"re talking about.
How long have you known her?
Don"t get excited. Let me help you off with your coat.
You"re the one that"s excited.
Get away with that knife. Do you want to cut my throat?
[Scorsese] The common man falling in a trap...
Why"d you come here?
[Scorsese] as he succumbs first to vice, then to murder.
- To ask you to marry me. - What about your wife?
I haven"t any wife. That"s fiinished.
- For cat"s sake... - Her husband turned up. l"m free.
This was Fritz Lang"s favorite plot: reality turning into a nightmare.
I don"t care what"s happened.
l-I can marry you now.
l-I want you to be my wife.
We... We"ll go away together.
Way far off so you can forget this other man.
- [Crying] - Don"t cry, Kitty. Please don"t cry.
[Laughing] l"m not crying, you fool. l"m laughing.
Kitty.
Oh, you idiot. How can a man be so dumb?
Kitty.
[Continues Laughing]
l"ve wanted to laugh in your face ever since I first met you.
You"re old and ugly, and l"m sick of you. Sick, sick, sick!
- Kitty, for heaven"s sake. - You killJohnny? l"d like to see you try.
Why, he"d break every bone in your body. He"s a man.
You wanna marry me? You?
Get out of here! Get out!
Get away from me! Chris! Chris!
Get away from me! Chris!
[Screaming] Chris!
Violence has become, in my opinion,
a defiinite, uh, point, in a script.
It has a dramaturgical reason to be there.
You see, I don"t think that people believe in the devil...
with the horns and the forked tail.
And therefore, they don"t believe in punishment after...
they are dead.
So, my question was for me,
what are people...
In what belief people... Or, what are people fearing is better.
And that is physical pain.
And physical pain comes from violence.
And that, I think, is today the only,
uh, uh, uh, fact which people really fear,
and therefore it has become a-a defiinite part of life...
and naturally also of scripts.
[Scorsese] The phrase "film noir" was coined by the French in 1946...
when they discovered the Hollywood productions they had missed...
during the German occupation.
[Man Narrating] Did you ever want to cut away a piece of your memory...
or blot it out?
You can"t, you know. No matter how hard you try.
You can change the scenery, but sooner or later...
you"ll get a whiff of perfume...
or somebody will say a certain phrase or maybe hum something,
then you"re licked again.
[Scorsese] This was not a specifiic genre like the gangster film,
but a mood which was best described by this line from Ulmer"s Detour.
- Mr. Haskell. - "Whichever way you turn...
Mr. Haskell.
fate sticks out its foot to trip you."
Mr. Haskell, wake up. It"s raining.
Don"t you think we oughta stop and put up the top?
[Scorsese] In Detour, down-and-out pianist Tom Neal...
hitchhikes his way west to join his fiancée.
His life starts unraveling when the man who has given him a lift falls asleep.
[Man Narrating] Until then l"d done things my way,
but from then on something else stepped in...
and shunted me off to a different destination...
than the one I had picked for myself.
But when I pulled open that door...
Mr. Haskell, what"s the matter? Are you hurt?
Are you hurt, Mr. Haskell?
[Scorsese] Doom was written on Tom Neal"s face.
He was bewildered and afraid to go to the police.
Keeping the dead man"s car and cash was definitely a mistake,
but an even bigger mistake was picking up a female hitchhiker.
[Man Narrating] A few hours more, and we"d be in Hollywood.
l"d forget where I parked the car and look up Sue.
This nightmare of being a dead man would be over.
Where did you leave his body?
Where did you leave the owner of this car?
You"re not foolin" anyone.
This buggy belongs to a guy named Haskell. That"s not you, mister.
It just so happens I rode with Charlie Haskell...
all the way from Louisiana.
He picked me up outside of Shreveport.
[Scorsese] Detour was shot in six days for only $ 20,000.
Vera, open the door. Please, open the door.
If you don"t open the door, l"m going to kick it down, Vera.
[Scorsese] The director could only rely on his resourcefulness.
[Man] Vera, don"t call the cops. Listen to me.
l"ll break the phone.
[Scorsese] In fact, his idiosyncratic style...
grew out of such drastic limitations.
This is why Ulmer has become such an inspiration over the years...
to low-budget filmmakers.
Vera.
[Scorsese] Here we find Tom Neal...
after a second outrageous twist of fate.
[Man Narrating] The world is full of skeptics.
I know. l"m one myself.
In the Haskell business,
how many of you would believe he fell out of the car?
Now, after killing Vera without really meaning to do it,
how many of you would believe it wasn"t premeditated?
[Scorsese] Ulmer couldn"t even afford any special effects.
He simply let the shot go in and out of focus repeatedly,
an appropriate reflection of the character"s disoriented mental state.
[Man Narrating] Vera was dead, and I was her murderer.
Murderer!
[Scorsese] The hitchhiker"s journey...
turned into an ironic morality play.
Film noir showed how quickly an ordinary man could lose it all...
when he strayed from his path.
Lured by the prospect of sinful pleasures,
he ended up suffering hellish retribution.
[Billy Wilder] Film noir.
I don"t know, you know,
when I make a picture, I never classify it.
If this is a comedy, I wait until the preview.
If they laugh a lot, I say this is a comedy.
Or serious picture or fiilm noir.
I never heard that expression in those days.
I just made pictures that I would have liked to see.
And if I was lucky, it coincided with, uh,
with the taste of the audience.
I killed Deitrichson.
Me, Walter Neff.
Insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars.
Until a while ago that is.
Yes, I killed him.
I killed him for money and for a woman.
[Scorsese] Film noir revealed the dark underbelly...
of American urban life.
Its denizens were private eyes,
rogue cops, white-collar criminals,
femmes fatale.
As Raymond Chandler said,
"The streets were dark with something more than night."
[Man] This is not the right street.
Why did you turn here?
[Honking Horn]
What"re you doing that for?
- [Continues Honking] - What"re you honking the horn for?
[Strangulated Gasps]
[Scorsese] You couldn"t take anything for granted anymore.
Not even suburbia.
Not even the supermarkets of Southern California.
I loved you, Walter, and I hated him.
But I wasn"t going to do anything about it, not until I met you.
You planned the whole thing.
I only wanted him dead.
And l"m the one that fiixed it so he was dead.
Is that what you"re telling me?
And nobody"s pulling out.
If we went into this together,
we"re coming out at the end together.
It"s straight down the line for both of us. Remember?
[Andre De Toth] Life is a betrayal,
and, you know, sometimes you betray yourself, too, you know.
Let"s have the guts to admit it.
There isn"t anybody born here lately...
who didn"t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.
So, why to hide it?
Truth, honesty, that"s my key to fiilmmaking.
[Indistinct]
Do you have any identifiication?
Sure.
[Scorsese] Andre De Toth was one of the most persistent...
of the expatriate smugglers.
In Crime Wave he undermined the old cliché...
that in America you can always get another break.
- [Rings] - A second chance.
Phone.
- Hello. - Steve?
- Yeah. - Steve Lacey?
[Scorsese] Gene Nelson plays an ex-convict trying to go straight...
Hello, this is Lacey.
[Scorsese] who is haunted by his past.
- Hello. - [Phone Clicks]
They"re always passin" through town,
tryin" to put the bite on me for this or that.
I told you how it"d be.
And I didn"t mind, did I?
I love you. I wanted you.
And now that l"ve got you, I care a lot less.
I can"t fiigure it. What do you see in a guy like me?
I see a guy who"s swell.
[Scorsese] Sterling Hayden portrays the relentless cop...
who presumes he is guilty.
Lacey"s kept pretty straight since he got out.
Yeah, I know. Sober, industrious, expert mechanic on airplane engines.
A pilot before they sent him up,
- now works at a private airport in Sunland, right? - Right.
- Call him. - [Rings]
- [Woman] Don"t answer it, Steve. Let it ring. - [Ringing]
They"ll just want what they all want.
Let "em think you"re away, that you"re not here, and they"ll leave you alone.
- [Ringing] - [Steve] Once you"ve done a bit, nobody leaves you alone.
- Somebody"s always on your back. - [Woman] Steve.
No answer.
[Woman] There, you see?
I told ya.
Doesn"t look so good for Mr. Lacey.
[Scorsese] Even a sympathetic parole offiicer can"t save him.
You stay on your side of the fence. l"m looking for a cop killer.
l"m on my side. I don"t take things for granted.
I check and recheck. Lacey"s made good with me.
I have faith in him.
- Once a crook, always a crook. - That"s nonsense.
Sick men get well again.
Yeah? And you hate to lose a patient. Well, you"re gonna lose this one.
Stay here and fiind that dough.
Don"t worry about wrecking the joint. Just fiind it.
Right.
All right, hot shot.
Put out your hands.
[Andre De Toth] How long one has to pay for a mistake?
For a misstep in their life? When is enough enough?
You don"t like that, do you, Mrs. Lacey?
It can happen to you, too, if you"re covering up for this guy.
So don"t try to walk out. You"re a material witness.
[Lacey] Don"t stay here, Ellen. Forget about me.
Get out of town!
You fiinished, Mr. Lacey?
[Scorsese] There"s no reprieve in film noir.
You just keep paying for your sins.
Ida Lupino often used film noir visuals,
but for her own very specifiic purposes.
In Lupino"s films, it was young women who went through hell...
when their middle-class security was shattered by a traumatic experience.
Bigamy, parental abuse,
- [Whistles] - unwanted pregnancy, rape.
- [Horn Honks] - Taxi! Taxi!
Lupino would force the audience to experience from the inside...
the ordeal of her heroines.
Please! Please! Somebody help me!
[Horn Blares]
[Blaring Continues]
[Scorsese] In Outrage, she presents the ultimate female nightmare...
not as a melodrama, but as a subdued behavioral study...
that captures the banality of evil...
in an ordinary small town.
[Blaring Continues]
In an unusual move, actress Ida Lupino had become a director in 1949...
because she"d been suspended by Warner Bros.
She seized the opportunity to form a production company...
with her husband Collier Young.
They developed their own projects,
making a policy of discovering young talent...
and tackling unglamorous subjects...
such as the rape in Outrage.
I couldn"t move.
I couldn"t move!
How tall was he, dear?
Take him away! [Sobbing]
[Scorsese] Beyond the horror of the crime,
Ida Lupino illuminates the changes in the psyche of the victim,
a wounded young woman who"s about to be married...
but now has to learn how to overcome her pain and despair.
Go on! Take a good look!
Go on, all of you!
Hey, Annie.
l"m asking you to marry me now.
Or didn"t you hear me?
Yes, I heard.
Well?
No!
Anne! Hey!
- [Gunshot] - [Scorsese] InJoseph Lewis" Gun Crazy,
the focus was not on the victim,
but on the criminals themselves.
You were compelled to share their fear...
and even their exhilaration.
The audience was pulled into the action and became an accomplice.
You can"t shoot a man just because he hesitates.
Well, maybe not, but you can sure scare him off, like that hotel clerk.
- No, Laurie, I just don"t... - Oh, Bart, you know something?
- What? - I love you.
I love you more than anything else in the world.
[Alarm Ringing]
[Scorsese] Of course the fascinating pair of Gun Crazy...
belonged to the outlaw tradition of the "30s.
- Help! Help! - The tradition that would culminate in the "60s...
- with Arthur Penn"s Bonnie and Clyde. - Laurie, Laurie, don"t!
Come on. Get in!
But in Lewis"landmark film, the renegades were wild animals.
Sex and violence were totally intertwined.
- You were gonna kill that man. - He"d have killed us if he"d had the chance.
[Police Siren Blaring]
Shoot! Why don"t you shoot?
[Siren Continues]
Shoot!
- Shoot. Do you hear me? - All right!
[Gunshot]
Get "em?
Yeah.
[Scorsese] First and foremost, film noir was a style.
It combined realism and expressionism,
the use of real locations and elaborate shadow plays.
Here ace cinematographer John Alton deserves a mention.
The Hungarian-born master painted with light.
This was the title of his 1949 textbook...
which we were still using as students in the 1960s.
Extreme black and white contrasts, :
isolated sources of lighting, :
Pass key! Pass key!
ominous camera placement, :
deep perspective.
The most striking examples of Alton"s work...
are found in Anthony Mann"s early films such as this film, T-Men.
And in the same year, Raw Deal.
[Man] Five or ten minutes, we"ll be pullin"out.
Pullin"out for a new country,
leaving everything behind.
Maybe, maybe we can make a different life...
for ourself in South America.
A good life.
[Woman Thinking] Why didn"t he stop talking?
When the clock stopped moving,
he was singing everything l"d ever wanted to hear.
All my life, the lyrics were his, all right.
But the music... Anne"s, Anne"s.
And suddenly I saw that every time he kissed me...
he"d be kissing Anne.
Every time he held me, spoke to me, danced with me,
ate, drank, played, sang it would be Anne, Anne.
Anne!
[Scorsese] These were small B-productions...
where Alton was free to experiment...
and often took unusual risks.
Busy little man, eh, snooper?
Almost had ya, all of you.
Tony!
And you, Vanny, so smart.
Top-drawer crook. Lived with me and never caught on.
[Scorsese] "There is no doubt in my mind...
that the prettiest music is sad," he remarked.
- Knew all the angles... - [Gunshot]
'And the most beautiful photography is in a low-key with rich blacks."
[Dying Man] Sucker.
[Body Falls]
[Heavy Breathing]
[Scorsese] The paranoia of film noir reached its high point...
with Robert Aldrich"s film Kiss Me Deadly.
[Brakes Screech]
Out of the dark, a haunted woman appears to private eye Mike Hammer.
She"s running away from a mental institution and an unbearable secret.
She"s not mad, though.
Merely innocent, destined to be a sacrifiicial lamb.
- If we don"t make that bus stop... - We will.
If we don"t,
remember me.
[Tires Screech]
[Woman Screaming]
[Screaming Continues]
Stylized lighting and composition conveyed a deranged world.
- [Screaming] - There was no moral compass anymore.
Aldrich even turned Mickey Spillane"s detective Mike Hammer...
into an ambiguous figure, a guy who"s treated like dirt by everybody...
and is even described as a "sleazy, despicable bedroom dick."
Aldrich"s point, an important one during those McCarthy times,
was the end neverjustifiies the means.
- [Man] She"s passed out. - l"ll bring her to.
If you revive her, do you know what that would be?
Resurrection, that"s what it would be.
And do you know what resurrection means?
It means raise the dead.
And just who do you think you are that you think you can raise the dead?
[Scorsese] At the end of Kiss Me Deadly,
the duplicitous woman who stole this package from a secret government project...
was like the wife of Lot who refused to heed the warnings.
[Screams]
[Screaming]
[Scorsese] Aldrich"s tale led to a few cryptic, threatening words:
Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity.
This time opening Pandora"s box...
meant universal annihilation, the apocalypse.
Of course, not all smugglers operated within film noir.
In Part 3, as we continue ourjourney,
l"d like to show you how they worked around more wholesome genres...
and even, at times, big Hollywood star vehicles.
We"ll also look at a different breed of directors,
those who attacked the system head on...
the iconoclasts.
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