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At the end of the 18003,
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multi billion-dollar,
global entertainment industry now.
But what drives them isn't only box office or showbiz.
It's passion, innovation.
Stanley donen innovated when he made singin' in the rain.
In New Zealand, Jane campion made films
that were both modern and gothic.
Kyoko kagawa was in perhaps the greatest movie ever made.
Who are their equivalents in the 21st century?
Which films are making history now?
Welcome to the story of film: A new generation.
An epic tale of movie innovation around the world.
Music: Rock 'n' roll part 2 by Gary glitter
an angry man.
All his life, he's felt ignored.
But now, he's heading to be on a TV show.
He's dressed like a joker,
a dangerous joker.
He's kicking, erupting.
He's letting himself go.
J' it's time to see what I can do
I to test the limits and break through
j“ no right, no wrong no rules for me
I I'm free
j" let it go, let it go... I
an angry young queen.
All her life, she's tried to hide her icy touch.
She can freeze the world with that touch.
She's always hated that, but no more.
Widescreen, euphoric.
"No right, no wrong, no rules for me."
The joker could have sung this.
Two of the most watched movie scenes of our times.
Both are about release.
Frozen is a totem, and it's for kids.
Joker is a totem for some adults.
Two of these people travelled from Brazil to here,
to the steps in the Bronx in New York,
where the dance was filmed.
Movies, it's clear, still have power.
They still compel us.
They still play us like a violin
is that a surprise?
So much else has happened in our lives in this generation.
No wonder we want to slip the leash,
to escape into the parallel universe of the movies.
This is the new cinematheque in Madrid.
The beauty of it. A parallel universe indeed.
Music: Magical awakening by Paul mottram
what was that universe, the movie world, like
in the last generation?
What really mattered in film-making?
Screen out all the talk of box office and oscars
and tabloid gossip about stardom,
and what is left?
The medium.
Its luminosity...
Its shots...
Cuts, honesty and beauty.
What have we loved in the new millennium of film?
And how?
We could tell our story
by looking at films country by country,
but movies are good at leaping boundaries.
Politicians are good at telling us
that our country is unique,
but so many aspects of the movies are country-less,
borderless,
so what follows will be borderless.
When we watch a movie, it's as if we fall asleep.
The big sleep.
2018. A Finnish film.
A woman looks, but then the image seems
to buckle, crack, melt,
and through the melting, a man.
And then, the woman again.
Is this a bit like what it feels to watch a film today?
To melt into it, to dissolve into the looks
and glances on screen.
One of the best films of our times seems to say that.
We're in a makeshift hospital in Thailand.
Soldiers are sleeping.
The doctors close the shutters
and it's like the lights going down in a cinema.
And that tall, thin, blue light that curves at the top,
it wasn't there before.
It seems to symbolise the soldiers' deep sleep,
their dream lives.
A woman befriends one of the soldiers
and then, here, in the distance,
we see her, walking with her crutches,
and he has collapsed or fallen asleep.
And the camera pans...
And tilts, the very first camera movements in the film.
And they go down on the escalator,
down into his dreams and hers.
The setting is an ordinary shopping mall,
but director apichatpong weerasethakul
finds dream states in everyday places and moments.
And then, this slow, melting dissolve back to the hospital.
And look how many coloured lights there are now.
It's like the whole film falls asleep.
What happens when we dive down into our unconscious lives,
as in cemetery of splendour?
What happens when the lights go down in a movie theatre?
We leave our own world for a while,
and cross over into the worlds of other people.
Music: Magical awakening by Paul mottram
the most innovative film-makers have always wanted
to take us into these other worlds.
To hypnotise us, to seduce us,
to jolt us.
And we who love the movies,
the deep dive, don't we want to be hypnotised,
to be taken into the unknown?
Men chatter
A Tuesday evening in Cairo,
setting up a shot in the traditional way.
Hands-on, labour intensive -
the way films have always been made.
Most filming follows tried and trusted methods.
They're scheduled
like many previous movies have been scheduled.
They're shot with similar crews, aims and visual ideas.
Nothing wrong with that.
Many of our favourite films followed the conventions.
But our story here is about the movies around the world
that pushed the conventions...
That came up with brand-new ways of doing things.
They're the ones that renewed the medium of film,
that showed us things we hadn't seen before.
In part two of our story, we'll look at how and why
films in the 21st century have broken the rules.
But first, what films extended the rules?
If you want to get crazy, we can get crazy.
Shrieking
what movies stretched the cinema conventions
like mozzarella?
Shrieking
comedies did so,
as did action movies,
and films about dance, bodies, horror, slowness,
politics
and our dream lives.
Let's look at comedies first.
Which did new things in the 21st century?
One of the world's most famous actors, aamir Khan,
is playing an alien from another planet.
To get home, he needs to hold people's hands.
Very widescreen.
The brightness, colours and musical energy
of a hindi film dance sequence.
Man sings in hindi
a crane shot, like in old Hollywood.
Khan wore green contact lenses and didn't blink throughout.
The fun of so-called bollywood often comes
from its choreography...
Its world in unison.
The alien is an innocent.
He doesn't know what gender, religion, nation or caste are.
He's boyishly anti-sectarian,
exactly what India needs.
But then, over an hour later,
in such a light-hearted comedy, this.
Loud explosions
a terrorist attack,
one of the biggest tonal shifts in contemporary cinema.
Screaming
electronic noises,
as if the soundtrack itself has been mangled by the blast.
The combination makes pk remarkable.
It was one of the biggest box office successes
in Indian film history,
which means that it had
one of the biggest audiences of our times.
Singing in hindi
Car horn blares
hey, oh, oh!
Oh, shit!
Two teenage girls, their own body-popping world,
riffing off each other, like the Marx brothers.
J” yeah, we know it, keep going
j' I came straight off the stage of glasto... j'
- what? - What?
Excuse me. Oh, oh.
What? What?
- Missed ya. - I missed you.
- I missed you so much. - It's been one night.
- Are we gonna go to school or? - No. I don't think we are.
No, we're just gonna stay? Here.
J' I don't wanna stress ya out
j“ I just wanna tell ya the truth
j' motherfuckers try to tear us apart... j'
ajump cut.
The whole film feels like a jump cut.
I my revolution ain't me lovin' you... j”
so full of verve.
School life ignores them.
Jump cut again.
It's like they're invisible.
I swear to god.
Are you kidding me! Samantha!
Where was this energy
at my inauguration assembly, folks?
True.
Narrator: They're brainy and bookish,
whereas everyone else seems to be partying.
It's similar to the funny, private body language
the girls had in grease.
J” ipana with a brand-new flavour
j' it's dandy for your teeth
j" brush-a, brush-a, brush-a
j” new ipana toothpaste
j” brush-a, brush-a brush-a... j”
j” baby, please... j”
but grease was nostalgic.
Booksmart is effortlessly modern...
Oh, sorry, sorry.
About sexuality.
- Here. - Sharp elbows.
Not as sharp as your... chin.
What?
Um, so isn't it crazy that it's the last day?
I know, I can barely believe it.
Are you going to come to Nick's tonight?
His aunt went on a cruise ship that broke down,
so Nick's throwing a party at her house.
That's awesome.
It's all right.
They're... you know, they're stuck on a boat,
shitting in buckets.
That's not really what I meant.
Narrator: Life keeps cutting through it.
All right, well...
All right, I'll see you later.
I'll just, um... fuck!
Narrator: The girls' chat shows how smart they are.
That was bad. I don't even know if she's into girls.
She wore a Polo shirt to prom.
Well, that's just her gender performance.
It's different from her sexual orientation.
- I'm sorry, but I don't get it. - Well, gender is...
No, thank you, that much I understand.
It's just? It's a little bit shocking
that, that you're into Ryan.
First crush, the little white cat from the aristocats.
You go from that to avril lavigne.
It's just, it's not? It's not what I anticipated.
Narrator: But they live life in theory.
It's time for them to party.
The quick beauty and energy of the insights.
A film that extends the world of film comedy.
Deadpool was just as fast, as diamond-sharp,
even its opening titles.
A superhero movie usually has bombastic music,
but here the song is camp and macho-mockery.
A slow-mo, corkscrewing, pull-out.
And the credits. "Some douchebag's film."
"God's perfect idiot."
Music: Angel of the morning by juice Newton
j” if morning's echo says... j”
"a hot chick."
The clichés fall like dominoes.
The shot is bravura but disses the lust for violence...
J” and if we're victims of the night
j” I won't be blinded by the light... j”
and for sexual norms.
J” just call me angel... j”
a head in the ass of deadpool.
A funny cgi vortex.
J” before you leave me baby... j”
deadpool holds on to the knickers of a villain.
Queerness sprinkled like chilli flakes.
The language of superhero comedy extended.
J” just call me angel
j” I'm a guarding angel... j”
the Ugandan comedy crazy world
also had a lot of fun with its opening sequence.
An actor playing a copyright cop.
Mocking Hollywood's piracy controls.
A big budget for tracking shots, or fancy costumes?
Not necessary when your imagination is
as playful as this.
Church organ plays
the least expected comedy of our times came
from one of the most serious film-makers of our times,
Bruno dumont.
We're in the north of France,
the funeral of a local who's been murdered.
We expect solemnity.
Static feedback
but we get an organist in a world of his own...
Static feedback
clueless priests who think
they control their flock, but don't...
Incense, which is supposed to be spiritual,
but just makes you cough.
Widescreen realism at the behest of a lovely anarchy.
Chers amis...
Car horns blare
from comedy to the some of the most striking action films
of our times.
No surprise that India,
one of the most populated countries in the world,
one of the most visually complicated,
continued to excel at action.
The gangs of wasseypur is five hours long
and covers five decades
in the lives of Indian gangsters
who fight over coal mining.
This is the end of part one.
The sound fades.
Shouting fades
then, silence.
Sardar, who's been trying to avenge his father's murder,
is bloodied and beaten.
He's dazed, dying.
If this was a Francis Ford coppola gangster film,
opera music might play.
But here...
Music: Jiya tu by Manoj tiwari
the music seems like it's from a hip Mumbai nightclub.
Music: Jiya tu by Manoj tiwari
and then, astonishing lines.
A tragic scene that mocks the tragedy.
Sardar's on a cart now.
The cart will take away his body...
And then his gun.
Gunshot
80 years after the first gangster pictures,
the gangs of wasseypur was one of the most complex.
Equally inventive was this scene
from prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie to.
Long lenses.
A most 21st-century location - a recycling site.
Bales of paper, rolling like tumbleweed.
But then, we see that it's triads doing the rolling.
Gunmen push bales of paper towards their adversaries,
hiding behind them as they do.
The bales look like Van gogh haystacks,
but the scene is visually new.
This wide shot of the plant, the vista.
Paper in the air, like seagulls.
It's like a kurosawa film.
And then, the shooting starts.
Slow-mo.
Gunfire
genre thinking
which extended the existing language of the movies.
In zama, Argentina's lucrecia martel had
an even less expected action sequence.
17th-century Argentina,
Spanish colonisers, surrounded on a Savannah plane.
Indigenous tribesmen, painted orange.
Horse whinnies
a rider comes towards them.
Two of the Spanish turn.
A third is felled.
Shouting
then, a horse through the shot.
No action sound, no blood.
Behind a tree, then from the back.
Down and up, all parts of the frame used.
Such complex staging.
And this background guy, standing, out of focus.
More great visual thinking.
Giggling
sirens wail
and talk about visual thinking.
Good time, made by two of the most distinctive film-makers
of the 21st century, the safdie brothers.
Benny safdie on the right.
Robert pattinson plays his brother.
They've just robbed a bank.
High-pitched beep
what was that sound?
Hissing
what the fuck did you do?
Screaming
chaos. Mist. Crash.
Horn blares
man coughs
man retches
it's my face... my face.
Narrator: They look fluorescent,
like they're in a computer game.
Pulsing sound.
- My face... - Look at me. Your face is ok.
Open your eyes. Come on, come on.
Narrator: Edgy, hand-held imagery.
Amidst it all, the love of the brothers.
And then, the whole film seems to be pink.
An adrenalized movie.
The brothers escape, houdinis on the run.
I'm going to throw up.
- What did I just tell you? - I don't know.
I told you you're not going to throw up.
Tyres screech
horns blare
so, in our new century,
the best action cinema has been tonally inventive,
visually innovative and colour-coded.
The best action film of our times was all of these.
George Miller's mad Max: Fury road,
an explosively inventive update
of his steampunk mad Max films.
An eco-disaster means that everything -
fuel, blood, morality - is scarce.
Everything is handmade from junk in this artisanal epic.
A guitar, which is also a flame-thrower,
and has a toilet bowl as its base. Punk.
Vehicles like tanks, galleons, bombs.
The camera close to the ground,
to give a better sense ofspeed.
Engines roar
immortan!
Joe, the villain, with animal teeth and breathing apparatus.
Man gasps
he looked at me!
He looked right at me!
He looked at your blood bag.
He turned his head, he looked me straight in the eye.
He was scanning the horizon.
No, I am awaited.
I am awaited in Valhalla.
Max, traumatised.
A wild boxer with a garden fork for a muzzle.
Immortan!
Filming in the Namibian desert.
George Miller's colour palette, mustard sand
and pops of red.
A health and safety nightmare.
They roar up the road.
Backgrounds were added in cgi
and safety lines removed in post production,
but the action itself was real.
The crashes, the dust, the explosions were all real.
In the era of computerised fight scenes,
Miller said, "none of it defied the laws of physics."
We felt the velocity, the physicality.
Then, charlize theron's funosa,
shaven-headed.
No barbarella here.
Max and she don't fall in love or become friends.
Cirque du soleil?
A circus of the desert.
Engine purrs
2,700 shots,
averaging just three seconds each,
orchestrated by editor Margaret sixel.
In the digital age,
in the weightless age,
a film that reminded us of silent cinema, of this.
The most expensive, extravagant,
weighty shot of its time.
Buster Keaton's the general has a double structure.
It's a journey up a road,
then back down it again.
Mad Max: Fury road is the same.
As if to emphasise his debt to buster Keaton,
George Miller also had mad Max: Fury road released
in black and chrome.
Explosions
it seemed more elemental,
even more part of the story of film.
A movie with little dialogue,
it did that traditional thing -
used action to reveal character.
Woman: We can't breathe down here!
Narrator: How someone copes, what they need.
Now!
This looks like an action movie too,
and in many ways, baby driver is an action movie.
It's a heist movie.
But hidden within it and driving its rhythm and style
is another genre -
our next genre, the musical.
How have film-makers innovated with dance in recent years?
Music: Harlem shuffle by Bob and Earl
Edgar Wright's baby driver.
Tilt down to the title character.
J” you move it to the left yeah... j”
he's on an ordinary street,
but we notice that he's moving to the music.
He even seems to skip to the beat here.
Tyres screech
- asshole! - Hey! Hey!
No cut in this shot.
J' with a whole lot of soul... j”
baby almost danced around this pole.
J” just make it last... j”
hey! Jerk!
J” you know you scratch... j”
his movements respond to the street scene.
The world has a beat.
Wright's mood reel, the video he made
to show to funders and crew
how the finished movie would feel,
showed that baby driver extended
the language of classic cinema.
He used this clip.
Digging.
Snonng.
Digging and snoring alternate rhythmically
brushing
brushing in synch, building a rhythm.
Hissing and clinking add to rhythm
shutters open.
A choreographed street.
Dance beneath the surface of the world.
Sound effects create pulsing beat
J” no, I've got no time
j” to play your
j” silly games... j”
at first, this looks more conventional.
A house party in London in the 19803.
Warm colours, bodies close together -
what we couldn't do in lockdown.
A movie smooch.
But director Steve McQueen and his team created
such a mood during the shooting
that, as the song ended, this happened...
J” every time I hear your name... j”
sing along, let's go!
Narrator: The dancers extend the song.
They push back the problems of the world for a night.
J” inside... j”
that's what I'm talking about.
J” cos every time we meet
j” we play hide-and-seek... j”
j” play it on the radio station... j”
another dance film pushing the boundaries,
Beyoncé's visual album lemonade.
J” you just might be a black Bill Gates in the making
j” cos I slay
j” I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making... j”
historical costumes,
shots that look like cheap video,
newspaper politics.
J” I grind till I own it I twirl on my haters... j”
the editing of music videos,
but the spurs of a cowboy.
Her head from above.
A kid dances to cops.
A montage of moments, histories, protests, dances.
Hard not to be ovennhelmed by a net cast so widely.
J” I slay, ok I slay, ok
j” I slay, ok I slay, ok
j” we gon' slay, ok gon' slay, ok
j” we slay, ok I slay, ok... j”
where else in the movie world has dance been a big deal
in the 21st century?
As with action films,
India has continued to be dance cinema central.
In so-called bollywood,
dance has always been a mood enhancer.
Of the thousands of dance sequences in this period,
one of the most choreographed was this...
Music: Tattad tattad by Aditya narayan
in ram-Leela, a reworking of Romeo and Juliet.
Vibrating, then slow-mo.
Widescreen, of course.
A celebration of gujarati clothes and buildings.
A kind of West Side story.
Man sings in hindi
At one point, it's like it's shot
with a surveillance camera.
And then, shaking dandruff out of your hair,
a dance move that went viral
and was copied across India.
In western cinema, there were the magic Mike films,
but bhansali's movie was more choreographed.
Actor ranveer Singh's body was very on display in ram-Leela,
but films have always been attracted
to bodies, haven't they?
Jane Russell came from
a down-to-earth Minnesota family,
but the movie machine squeezed her
into the tiniest swimsuit
to show her angles and curves...
J” I'm looking for trouble
j” I'm gonna throw the book away
j” be unpredictable from day to day
j” in every way I can
j” so this cinderella
j” is looking for a fella... j”
and filmed her from above, the better to see her cleavage.
Luckily, she had a sense of humour and great talent.
Has 21st-century film done anything new with bodies?
Has it extended how it films them?
Yes.
In lorene scafaria's hustlers,
we see women just as undressed,
just as performing,
just as sexualised.
Music: Etude no1 in a flat minor by Thomas leyer
- tabletop. - I can't do that.
But here, a woman is looking.
She's learning. This is a school room.
What if you don't have muscles to do that?
- You have muscles to do this. - I don't have any...
Every girl has muscles to do this.
You can do this one. This is the Martini.
Fireman down.
Narrator: Confidence building, peersuppod.
The film isn't starry-eyed
about pole dancing and stripping.
It's a job, and these women are so good at it
that they can turn the tables on men.
- Just point your toes. - Ok.
There you go. Hold yourself up.
I'm trying!
Try laying flat across. Do a tabletop.
They all love seeing that.
Narrator: And talking of turning the tables,
of upending stereotypes in 21st-century movies,
what about this film about bodies?
Man gasps
two young African-American lads on a beach.
They kissed and are now doing something more sexual.
The velvet, black sea.
The cool moonlight.
Their vulnerability.
I'm sorry.
What you got to be sorry for?
Ten minutes later, we jump fonnard several years.
The thin lad who was on the left, chiron,
has bulked up now.
J” when the scene unfolds
j” young girls 13 years old... j”
earlier we saw him being beat up and now he's like robocop.
His muscles are like a suit of armour.
J” ain't in this new world order
j” dem experimenting in Atlanta, Georgia
j” United Nations, overseas? J”
he touched male skin,
but couldn't deal with the judgement, the derision,
so his body became inflated, rock hard.
The poster of moonlight showed chiron at three stages -
boy, teenager and man -
and with three different skin tones.
Often, we can feel the film-maker searching
for the tone of their film,
but director Barry Jenkins had his from the start.
Moonlight had the mood
of hou hsiao-hsien's equally tripartite
Taiwanese film three times.
Longlens,
velvet smooth,
tentative, in love.
J” give me an answer, love
j” I need an answer, love... j”
another recent film that pushed the boundaries
of how male bodies are portrayed was this one.
A Portuguese man, tied up in a forest.
He looks down at his body.
Women chat in distance
who tied him?
These two Chinese women.
They're on the st James pilgrimage in Europe.
It's like a biblical scene,
but gender-flipped, power-flipped.
You're awake, Fernando.
Why did you tie me up like this, fei?
We're cursed.
St James cannot help us any more.
Only st Anthony can help us.
Stop this nonsense. Let me go.
No, we can't, Fernando.
What do you mean you can't? What do you want from me?
You... stay.
Narrator: The white, male, strong European
turned into a plaything,
an object of veneration or torture.
Fernando: What are you saying?
Narrator: What other new ways did film-makers look at bodies
in recent years?
In xxy, an intersex teenager looks at their body.
Then, outside, the lad they've just had sex with.
Similar composition. Looking and learning.
The storm of adolescence.
Slow recognition of who they are,
what their bodies are.
French film-maker Lucile hadzihalilovic is
one of the great body film-makers.
Here, she pushes the idea of in-betweenness
into almost Sci-Fi territory.
An ultrasound, a baby in the womb.
A boy's eyes, shadowless.
Then this wide.
Is he pregnant?
The way she touches his belly,
the softness of the colours.
The opposite of melodrama.
Blank faces.
A hushed nightmare, like a Paula rego painting.
Another belly, milk on it.
A blank face, like evolution faces.
Wider, the same muted palette,
and another kind of Sci-Fi.
This young woman is on a spaceship.
She was impregnated against her will
and now, she's lactating.
French director Claire denis' films are often about bodies.
In high life, the bodies are invaded or desperate for touch.
It got me.
This child has been invaded, in a way.
She's accused of being possessed,
of being a witch.
She's tied to a huge cotton reel,
dragged from school,
as if by an umbilical cord.
Explorer. Repeat.
Expect a communication blackout at any moment.
Copy that, Houston.
Four years earlier,
Alfonso cuaron made an umbilical body film.
Sandra bullock plays an astronaut
whose daughter has died.
Cameras on gyroscopic heads, actors spinning.
No sense of up or down.
An apparently single shot.
The shock and nausea of dizziness,
dramatically exciting and innovative,
but also a sense that grief is like spinning.
- We've lost Houston. - Ah.
- We've lost Houston. - Unstrap.
We need to get the hell out of here.
- Need some help there? - No, don't wait for us.
It's stuck.
Man down! Man down!
Houston, this is explorer. Copy.
Explorer's been hit. Explorer, do you read?
Explorer. Over. Explorer.
Astronaut is off structure.
Dr stone is off structure.
Dr stone, detach.
Compare that to this great film about bodies
by another great Mexican director,
made 50 years earlier.
Music: Gloria in d major rv 589 by Vivaldi
The woman as heavy as bullock's astronaut was light.
The devotional music, a via dolorosa.
And then, he's carrying a man.
Uphill.
And then, we see it's a carcass.
Was he imagining the other bodies?
And perhaps the least expected recent film
to look at bodies?
Maybe it's this one.
A hand without a body.
It rests a moment, looks across the rooftops.
Blue light. Should it jump?
It does, but, in that moment,
a black and white flashback
to itself as a baby
when it was a whole body.
Handprints. Danger in the electric socket.
Snot.
Discovering the world through its body.
Music: Perfect shadow by Rob Kelly
Can anywhere, anytime, seem horrific?
Can we imagine New York City as an open coffin,
a hell below us, boiling up?
Have all decades been good at horror cinema?
The 1920s set up the template.
Horror went camp in the '503,
blockbustery in the '703,
and Japan took the lead in the 1990s.
In our own times, horror is on fire again.
Its language is being extended.
Lauta!
Classical music plays
Bravo. Bravo, susie.
Berlin, 1977.
A febrile dance school, run by witches.
Dakota Johnson seems to be possessed as she dances.
Intercutting between her
and, in brown, a body which is beaten and deformed
as it mirrors her.
Luca guadagnino's suspiria
was a rethink
of an Italian horror classic but, in its new setting
and faded '70s browns and beiges,
it combined the grotesque
with state communist paranoia and control.
Director Jennifer Kent used a darker colour palette.
An Australian woman in bed at night.
Her husband has been killed in a horrific accident.
Scraping
scraping, a door, half-seen in the gloom.
Door creaks
Scuttling
the shiver of that black thing,
scuttle of an insect.
Scuttling
creatu re: Babadook.
Dook. Dook.
Its voice makes us dread what she might see,
but we also want to see.
Scuttling
gothic, storybook home invasion.
Terror. A brilliant, spiky, noir world.
Muted screams
we slowly realise that what she's really haunted by
is the shock of seeing her beloved die.
Two years later, in Estonia,
a father caresses his dead son.
But then, a kind of babadook.
Groaning
a slave, made of farm implements, rises.
Dad looks like a Rembrandt painting.
Violence. Imagery like lithographs.
Ari aster's midsommar was as bright
as the babadook and November were dark.
You can't speak, you can't move.
All right?
Good.
Narrator: She's talking to the boyfriend
of the main character.
Sunshine, flowers, white costumes.
Images of holidays and happiness.
But not here.
Woman: On this, the day of our deity of reciprocity,
we gather to give special thanks
to our treasured sun.
As an offering to our father,
we will today surrender nine human lives.
As harga takes, so harga also gives.
Narrator: His girlfriend is in a pyramid of flowers,
a ritual she doesn't understand,
but she knows it's deadly.
Woman: One of our own.
Narrator: She's seen unspeakable things.
A cloud pyramid.
Too much order, too much symmetry.
Woman: Nine in all,
to die and be reborn
in the great cycle.
The four new-bloods have already been supplied.
Narrator: Director Ari aster called his film
"the wizard of oz for perverts."
Just as inventive was another horror movie - it follows.
Come look at this.
Ever since she'd had sex with a guy,
a teenager called Jay has been followed
by people, entities,
walking slowly, inexorably, towards her.
They will kill her -
a horror staple, you could say.
But director David Robert Mitchell used a brilliant form.
Take this shot, for example,
halfway through the film.
The camera circles right.
By this stage,
we, the audience, are looking for distant walkers.
And there's one, in a white top.
But the camera moves onwards,
and now, the Walker is behind us.
And there's Jay with a guy.
Does she see the Walker-killer?
No. Most film-makers would do a reverse cut to it,
but Mitchell just circles onwards.
Tannoy: Tickets are $5 dollars for students
and $7 for adults.
Narrator: How close will the Walker be as we next pass by?
Boom
booms on the soundtrack.
Boom
boom
and still we circle.
Boom
boom
and Jay, again.
We hope she'll look up.
And as the camera moves in, still with no cut,
it sort of becomes the point of view of the killer.
We can feel the threat at our backs.
What is the Walker really?
Jay's guilt? A metaphor for sexually transmitted disease?
Whatever, the film electrified space
like few others of our time.
Boom
the slow pan around felt
almost like this famous experimental film -
Canadian Michael snow's la région centrale.
The slow circle, drone.
Beeping
snow eventually went further
and had his shot twist upside down.
The best horror films of our time twisted our world.
Near the end of our story,
we'll come to movies by Jordan peele and bong joon-ho,
which did this with aplomb.
We think of cinema as a dynamic entertainment,
full of action and story,
but there have always been slow films,
for example, this one,
limite, from Brazil in 1931.
Birds.
Then, such a slow dissolve to the woman, handcuffed.
We scan the image,
but then we look again because it doesn't go away.
It dissolves slowly to a close-up.
If the film-maker wanted only to tell a story,
he'd have cut more quickly.
Instead, he seems to want to hypnotise us.
Such hypnosis came to the fore in our times.
Slow movies became a kind of genre,
maybe to try to calm the heartbeat
of the 21st century, its mania, its pinballing.
If you're used to action films,
it's hard to love inaction films,
but the best revived the sense that cinema is a time medium,
that Patience is rewarding.
Pedro costa's Portuguese slow epic colossal youth.
Two people. A chink of daylight illuminates
the red and pink flasks.
Distant traffic and chatter
real street sound from outside,
but in here, it feels like we're hiding
from the speed of the outside world.
Sadness, poverty, and waiting for better times,
but also guys with time for each other.
Sete.
Playing cards at the edge of Europe,
at the edge of the financial crash.
No music, close-ups, camera move or editing.
Just a still life,
like a painting by still life master chardin.
Slow cinema was made everywhere in our era.
We're in america now,
Kelly reichardt's film certain women.
Laura dern is a lawyer.
The end of a hostage situation.
Night-time. Doors and corridors.
Muted colours. No Hollywood hype.
He's in the back. He's unarmed.
You did good.
Inaudible discussion
We've gotten to know her, like her,
but then, this cut...
To another character.
Another unhurried story.
And then another.
We see these new characters' daily lives and desires.
For nearly an hour,
dern's lawyer is out of the story.
We almost forget about her. But then...
Is that her?
The muted colour palette again, long shot.
Then, one of the film's central characters,
and dern is in her background.
You could call this structural slowness.
Woman mouths
And talking of structural slowness, what about this?
Crickets chirrup and dog barks
night-time in the Philippines.
In the distance, a woman and her three kids.
Her husband, a good man, has been imprisoned
for a murder he did not commit.
Years have passed. She's struggled to feed her family.
No music, no film lighting.
The camera tracks right with the family.
We're more than two hours into lav Diaz's epic film
about crime and punishment.
It's built with blocks of time,
like an igloo is built with blocks of ice.
Our hearts break for the family,
but the film's heart doesn't break,
even when there's a story shock, like this one.
The real killer, fabian, walks into shot.
We haven't seen him in ages
and we track with him.
Dogs bark
we can't see his face.
What's he going to do? His hand in his pocket.
He's a radical student with a grudge against society.
It's like we're in a Clint Eastwood film now.
And then, oh no, he follows.
A thriller would out here
to close-ups, or intercut to have music.
But director Diaz isn't swimming in the drama.
He's detached, Dostoevsky-detached.
Dogs bark
then, the kids and a window.
Will killer fabian appear at that window?
Daring slowness, and dread, too.
She yawns
And we're outside as the mother opens the window.
Dawn, and a distant fire,
and soldiers
and another dead-slow tracking shot.
We're scanning the shot now, looking for fabian.
The slowness gives us a sense of place,
of dread and of history.
Knock on door our final great slow film.
A grey image, a knock on a door.
An out-of-focus woman goes to open it.
Knock on door
we're in her flat.
She's having an affair with the man we're looking at.
We don't find this out for a long time,
but the guy who's come in is her husband.
The nerves of the lover.
Tip-toeing. No out, no music.
Door opens and closes
door closes
Door opens
then, the close-up sound of the door opening.
Hand-held move backwards.
Footsteps
Then, the husband.
Why is he not looking at the lover?
Only now he looks.
So, it's the shoes that gave him away.
Tension. Breathing.
This film was made by 29-year-old hu Bo,
who killed himself before its premiere.
A mournful, resigned slow-cinema masterpiece.
And then, what happens?
Off camera, the husband jumps from the window.
Window bangs
an elephant sitting still was a fiction film,
but it looked, at times, like a documentary.
What about the actual documentaries of our times?
How did they innovate?
How did they engage with the real world?
This in the opening night of a documentary film festival
in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
The movie screen is covered in what looks like bin bags.
People crawl from behind the screen.
The Belarus state security, the kgb, is in the audience,
so this is filmed on a phone.
Belarus had proportionally more deaths
than any other country in world war ii.
A quarter of its population died,
and two-thirds of its Jews.
Then, this happens.
The people reveal what, who?
An acrobat? Some kind of human spider?
The spider becomes a dictator.
The people who run this festival
have been arrested several times.
Eventually, the dictator is slain.
Or is he?
Since the late 19903,
documentary has had a golden age.
Observational documentaries have always been
hungry for reality.
In our times, this one extended
the hunger, the empathy.
Yula, a Russian ten-year-old,
who lives on Europe's biggest landfill site, near Moscow.
Her self-awareness, confidence.
Birds cry
years pass.
Yula becomes the narrator of her unfolding life.
She stares.
More years pass.
The stare and the resignation intensify.
The slight wobble of the image reminds us
of the film-maker, Hanna polak,
who shot for 14 years.
It's like a medieval film.
Sama.
Narrator: A baby girl, another observational film.
Five years of shooting.
Sama cries
The narrator is waad ai-kateab, sama's mum.
She also co-directs from the heart
of the war in Syria, which has killed 400,000 people.
The film couldn't be more grass-roots,
and yet it also has an overview,
like a drone shot has an overview.
A story told by the person at its centre.
A first-person film,
but, because the film-maker talks to her daughter,
it's also a second-person film.
Baby cries
panicked chatter
boy cries
observational films are only one type
of documentary, of course.
40 years after the battle of Chile,
his fly-on-the-wall, on-the-barricades,
in-the-moment account of a coup in Chile...
Los agitadores provocan a la policia.
Patricio guzman started a new film,
the Pearl button, like this.
Are we seeing a science doc or an arts film?
Then, this commentary.
What a tiny start to a film.
But then, guzman cuts to these radio scanners,
searching the universe.
Immediately, his scale is vast,
like the audacious cut in time
in 2001: A space odyssey is vast.
Music: The blue danube by Johann Strauss ii
from an ancient, small mineral drop of water
to outer space.
A lesser film-maker might get lost
in this vast canvas,
but guzman connects the two moments.
From here he weaves in other stories -
genocide, how the victims of the dictator pinochet
were drowned in the ocean, and the environment.
Essay films are thinking films.
They take ideas for a walk.
The Pearl button does so, brilliantly.
It extended the reach of documentary.
In the second part of our film,
we'll look at documentaries
which didn't only extend the existing language of film.
They came up with a new language.
But for now, one final documentary film -
a film that people in Belarus would admire
because of its courage to challenge state authority.
This is the film.
It begins with a single event in India -
the assassination of a secular thinker -
but it builds to encompass the history of the country,
its constitution
and the rise of superstition
and religious fundamentalism.
This is a press conference
called to defend the murderer
of a secular activist.
The murderer's defenders are
dangerous and powerful.
In the middle of the conference,
we suddenly hear this question
about anand patwardhan, the director of the film.
And then, patwardhan,
who's just been threatened,
speaks up.
One of the bravest moments in recent cinema.
Patwardhan's line, "I'm standing here," could be
a motto for documentary film-makers at their best.
From documentary to something else - its opposite,
the unreal aspect of film in recent years,
its heat shimmer.
Los Angeles is good at the unreal.
In a city of blue skies, they paint more blue skies.
It's hard to tell the real sky from the imagined one.
At the start of 2020, the world closed.
People disappeared from city streets.
Real life became unreal.
Movies, of course, have always loved the unreal.
They've been great at the off-kilter everyday.
More than 90 years ago,
pioneering surrealist germaine dulac dissolved
between pov street shots
to create a kind of dizzy swoon.
Many films in recent years have extended
this othenlvorldly way of looking at the world.
This is the opening sequence
of ildeko enyedi's on body and soul.
Eyes.
Touch.
Breathing.
Licking...
But not.
So unhurried, so calm.
These images could easily come from a nature film, of course,
but soon, we meet two shy, troubled people
who like each other
but don't quite know how to be in love.
The deer are them in their dreams,
their better selves.
From Hungary to Greece.
In recent years, Greek directors have made
a series of surreal films,
which were dubbed the "weird wave".
Athina-rachél tsangari's attenberg has
some of the same themes as enyedi's deer film.
A young woman with her sick dad.
Then, we see what she's watching.
A TV show,
a man imagining what it would be like to be an animal.
Like she's leapt species.
Then, we cut to the girl and her friend,
walking weirdly, like horses almost,
trying to escape the human condition.
But the most off-kilter film of our times
was, perhaps, this astonishing one.
Years in the making, three hours long,
completed after the death of its director aleksei German,
it's set on a teeming, rancid planet
on which art and thought are quelled.
A bird almost touches the lens.
Then, this striking composition.
The slit of the hat. Not an ounce of free space.
Men whistle
Then, this hand,
then a naked foot, then a boot.
And the greyness and the dirt.
And almost white now.
And the guy reaches his hand out.
Horses' hooves thud
then, this umbrella, out of the mist.
The movie frame constantly invaded.
This guy is the central character,
a visitor from earth.
The people on this planet think he's a kind of god.
He's gone native,
like Marlon Brando in apocalypse now.
Hard to be a god is a medieval mad Max in the mud.
It pushed film as far as it could go.
Boy screams
few artworks of the 21st century were more dense,
confusing or sensory.
Surely this, then, is the end of the line in our story?
No. We're only halfway there.
Even a film as extreme as hard to be a god
had direct connections with the movie past.
Its muddy vortex was there in the battle scene
in Orson welles' chimes at midnight.
Shouting and screaming
visual chaos, the camera almost touching the horse.
So full of texture.
Man clears throat
what lay beyond this excess?
The shock of the new.
New ways of seeing in film,
the black box, where light matters.
The films and technologies
that did something in cinema
we'd never seen before.
Splashing
What did we just see?
A camera fell into a Scottish loch,
then was pulled out.
It took a dive, went underneath,
then came back again to tell the tale.
Part two of our story is about taking a dive,
going underneath,
and coming back a bit shocked, but renewed.
It'll be about those film-makers
who seemed to wipe the lens so we could see anew...
Who, instead of showing a woman's face
as she goes to the opera,
shows the back of her dress,
as if we're seeing a bit of an old painting,
rather than the whole thing.
Orchestra tunes instruments
The Algerian desert.
A man in uniform walks towards a wall.
A needless wall, surely?
The man is having hallucinations,
flashbacks to a violent past.
What's the wall doing here?
In China, walls are put in vistas to block the view.
This man can't see clearly.
He's blocked.
And then, the edge of the wall.
What's behind it?
Cut, and we follow.
Traffic and chatter
is that street sound we hear?
Car horn beeps
the wall seems far bigger now.
And we're in a city. We've crossed a threshold.
Seagulls cry
this man has just woken up.
He was asleep, underneath,
but has come to for air, into his hotel room.
He's still in his pyjamas.
The hotel room has tree wallpaper.
But why is he pushing it?
Loud splintering
wow, a breakthrough.
Drone, and the sound of seagulls.
A corridor, a room next door.
To what does it lead?
Waves lap
seagulls cry
a movie theatre.
A great start to a film.
From bed to cinema.
From undennater to seeing anew.
And the actor?
It's the film's director, Leos carax.
One of the most visual threshold crossings
in modern cinema.
Seagulls cry
The offspring of this famous threshold.
Woman: Essaie.
Jean cocteau's poet plunges into a new realm,
mirror becoming water,
hard is soft,
and then, we're in the dark.
We've left conventions behind.
The same visual idea is
in one of the most inventive films of our times.
We're through the looking glass of desire.
Hard and soft, like in cocteau.
She's an alien and walks on the shiny, black liquid.
He drowns in it, in his desire.
Sliding, screeching music by mica Levi...
Slides us into the Demi-monde,
like that of holy motors.
Both films riffed on Jean cocteau surrealism,
but wiped the lens clean with new ways of seeing.
Under the skin literally started
with the construction of an alien's eye.
We see it form in huge close-up.
And, amid the frantic, beehive music,
we hear her learn to speak.
Alien: Foals.
Foals.
A new language for her,
a new language for movies.
Foals.
And perhaps under the skin's most daring innovation
was to shoot a Sci-Fi movie
starring one of the world's most famous actors,
Scarlett Johansson,
as a documentary.
Do you know where asda is?
- No. - I don't even know?
He doesn't know he's being filmed.
The cameras are hidden.
You can see the edge of the dashboard
in which one is concealed.
No movie lighting on her face.
Man: Left, so it's right, then...
Real street sound.
Man: It's a big asda. You'll see it.
- A big asda sign. - Ok.
Am I keeping you from something?
- No. - Where are you going?
Narrator: A complete reversal of expectation,
a genre baptised and reborn.
- All right, thank you. - See you later.
As challenging as the great Iranian films,
such as this one,
abbas kiarostami and mania akbari's ten,
which is similarly framed,
looks like a documentary...
And yet went way beyond the everyday.
What was it like to try to look at life anew
in our times?
For gilded film-makers,
life has always looked like a moving target.
The world glides and twists in front of their eyes.
Many of the best writers and directors want to try
to describe the world anew.
But newness is also, sometimes, handed to them.
Technology changes how they see, how we see.
Technology changed the story of film
in the 1920s, '50s, '60s, '803 and '903,
and it has done so again in our times.
Broadway legend George m cohan stands on his plinth
in Times Square, New York.
He lived until 1942,
but would find this place almost unrecognisable now.
He looks into a canyon of colour and flicker.
Would he be scared by this?
Are we scared by the constant movement and seduction?
So much has happened in the digital canon
that we can feel dwarfed by it.
Streaming happened.
Films were available on demand,
rather than, as previously, on supply.
"What you want when you want it" was the new offer.
For most of movie history,
they, the film suppliers, had power over us.
In the last generation, we have power over them.
YouTube became a shabby, global cinematheque,
a rewarding megalopolis with 28 billion hits per month.
In China, douban. Com's movie wing was having
50 million hits per month.
And Netflix, Amazon studios and others became
production companies of largesse,
at their best, cosimo de' medicis
for auteurs like Martin scorsese.
Gopro cameras, the brainchild of surfers, launched in 2004.
They were cheap and gave "fish-eye" visual bulges.
Ethnographers lucien castaing-Taylor
and verena paravel seemed to take
this "fish-eye" phrase literally
and attached cameras to fish.
This couldn't be a human point of view or a planned shot.
It's closer, slimier, more immersive and random
than almost anything in the history of cinema.
Accidental visual marvels.
Nearly all cinema has been anthropocentric.
The gopro camera was cinema's copernicus.
The technology was creating new ways of seeing.
Everybody who makes knows that they're limited
by their tools in some ways,
and extended by their tools in other ways.
As a theatre man, George cohan would have known this.
But what would he have made of one of these?
The world in your pocket.
Your life in your pocket.
How have they changed cinema?
The beginning of Austrian film-maker
Michael haneke's happy end.
Obviously, a phone shot.
Vertical rather than horizontal, hand-held.
A teenager, filming her mum.
She hates her mum.
The shot feels like surveillance,
like the horror movie it follows.
The fact that it's vertical makes it feel not polished,
like cinema is polished.
It's secretive, something for her friends' eyes only.
This fall.
In a moment, we'll see the mother unconscious.
Seldom before had we seen a vertical shot like this,
used like this.
What are you plotting?
A very different kind of phone shot,
very widescreen,
the cameraperson on a bike,
racing around the sex worker.
Then, inside, intense colour.
Los Angeles as vivid as a Hollywood musical.
Non-professional actors unintimidated
because there isn't
a big film crew.
Movement dynamised by the deep space
recorded by the lens
ofaniphone.
I don't know who the fuck this bitch is,
but it's a white bitch. It's a white, real fish.
Narrator: The only extra bits of equipment are
a small steadicam and some new lenses.
Woman: Started with a d. Désirée?
The technology gave the film its popping imagery,
but its people popped, too.
If a trans sex worker appears in a big-budget film,
she's usually only to be a colourful aside, a margin.
Here, she's at the centre of the film.
The phone recentres. Copernicus, again.
See you later. God bless.
Oh, ok. I got you.
Girl, calm the fuck down...
Narrator: If we thought that the colour
in tangerine was extreme, look at this.
It was directed by Jean-Luc godard,
the veteran innovator and disruptor.
He had his dog looking at the world.
Video, saturated,
classical music, and then?
An everyday shot of the dog in the snow.
Then, this.
Music: Symphony no 7 in a major by Beethoven
tangerine and Violet.
Outdoing tangerine's colours.
But godard's greater innovation was to re-invent 3-d filming.
His dp, fabrice aragno, used
two inexpensive canon cameras, 50m apart,
mounted in wood, one upside down.
A scene like this,
in the 2-d version we're watching here,
seems unremarkable.
A man drags a woman.
The camera at an angle.
A man walking in the background.
Gunshot
a gunshot.
People running close to, and further from, the camera.
But shoot with two cameras,
and you get two superimposed images,
each from a slightly different angle -
the essence of 3-d.
Usually, they are overlapped in 3-d...
The aim being to get them to match perfectly,
so that when you wear 3-d glasses, you see depth.
But what if they don't match perfectly?
And what if you panned one of them right?
Godard and his dp did just that. From this...
To this.
Close your right eye, and the flower is static.
Close your left eye, it moves.
A splitting, not seen before.
A challenge to binocular vision,
almost as if his dog was seeing the world.
Music: Lola goes blind by Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson also was interested
in an animal's gaze.
This percussive scene is like
the opening of under the skin,
the formation of an eye.
But then we dissolve to the seer.
It's a dog, her dog.
Woman: When lolabelle got old,
she went blind.
She wouldn't move.
She froze in place.
The only place she would run was on the edge of the ocean,
because she knew there would be nothing to run into there.
And so, she went running, full speed,
into total darkness.
Godard and Laurie Anderson wanted to try
to look at their films, their worlds, from new places.
In comparison, this looks more conventional.
I'm not in control.
Narrator: A young man, Stefan,
a fight with his dad, droning music.
Stefan gasps
agitated camerawork.
Stefan, stop it, ok?
Narrator: And then, the screen rises.
We, the viewer, are given an option.
Kill dad or back off.
Let's decide that we should kill his father,
to see what that feels like.
Get away from me.
Dad, just stay away from me. I'm not in control.
Narrator: That's because we're in control.
We have decided that he should kill his father.
- I'm not in control. - Stefan.
I'm not in control.
An earlier moment in the story.
A red room, like in a David lynch film.
Industrial sounds. Stefan as a boy.
And his mum, out of focus.
Earlier, we heard that she died in a train crash.
The young Stefan had delayed her,
which led to her death.
And then, we see our previous choices.
We can click and go back and change our choices.
Could Stefan go back and change this moment?
As she backs out of the cave, the red room,
another layer. The red room is a studio set
and we're behind a man.
Is it the writer, Charlie brooker?
But then, another cut to grown-up Stefan.
Watching the watcher watch his younger self
meet his mum. Our head spins.
Dad, what is this?
Narrator: In video games,
it's normal to make story choices,
but black mirror: Bandersnatch made them about trauma,
and was more cinematic.
As its story options multiplied,
we realised that the film wasn't taking us somewhere.
We were taking it somewhere...
To one of eight major endings,
some of which looped back like mobius strips.
At one point, Stefan thinks he's being manipulated
by a future organisation, called Netflix.
A film about forks in the road,
bandersnatch itself was a potential fork in the road
of movie history.
Skype, Facebook, streaming,
touch screens, swiping, on demand,
gopros giving a fish-eye view,
phones turning movie screens on their side,
3-d re-invented,
screens between us and the world.
Not since the invention of photography in the 18003,
had our old sense of what looking is taken such a hit.
And yet another technical innovation arrived,
another way in which cinema was reborn
or developed a new poetics.
The city of kuching in sarawak, Taiwan.
The great film-maker tsai ming-liang grew up here.
He was formed by this place,
by looking at it in his childhood.
As he walked to school, he could have looked up
at the sky, to the street, to his feet.
Or behind him,
or further around to his left.
He could turn his head anywhere, everywhere.
Such looking for tsai,
for all of us, is in all directions.
It has no frame.
But when tsai came to make cinema,
it, of course, always had a frame.
He was brilliant at framing.
Off balance...
As if we were looking through windows.
But what if cinema had no frame, no window?
Is that possible to imagine? Yes.
On the left here is director tsai,
and, on the far right, what looks like a black pumpkin.
It has lots of cameras in it
and films in all directions at once.
A vr camera.
Tsai used it to shoot a kind of ghost story
called the deserted
about this guy who's sick
and this woman who, across the room,
is cooking rice.
Rice simmers
put on a vr headset and turn your head,
and the image would turn from the guy to the mother.
You looked where you wanted,
a bit like tsai did when he went to school.
People have said that virtual reality isn't cinema,
that it's something else. But is that true?
Back to the joker for a moment.
Its film-makers chose this frame for one of its shots.
Wide, long lens, flat perspective.
We, the audience, had no say.
But vr is
more like this. You turn your head and look where you want.
Usually, film directing means filling
one frame, then, after it, another.
In the deserted and the best vr,
directors are filling many spaces
at many angles from the viewer.
It's still directing, but there's far more of it.
Since the birth of cinema,
by putting their camera close to the action,
many directors have tried
to make us feel as if we're there,
close to or even in the action.
Few movies in the story of film make us feel
that we're more there, more inside,
than tsai's the deserted.
It's a remarkable extension
of the founding impulse of the movies.
As we saw in part one,
documentary has been on a high in recent years.
Something better to come, the Pearl button,
reason and many other films built
on non-fiction cinematic traditions in bold ways.
But some docs seem to have been even more innovative.
This is the second shot
of Kirsten Johnson's film cameraperson.
We're in Missouri. She is filming.
She calls this movie a memoir,
but most of the shots are outtakes
from films she shot for other directors.
She almost never points the camera at herself.
Car approaches
a second car.
Then, this.
Kirsten gasps
we hear her gasp.
Thunderbolt cracks
the lighting is totally out of her control,
the submission of the doc film-maker.
Kirsten sneezes
then, something else out of her control.
She's telling her story using things that aren't her.
18 minutes later, we're in Afghanistan.
Cover this eye... Cover your hurt eye,
and look out and tell me what you can see.
Describe everything that you see.
A shot filmed to tell us how this boy sees,
but as a cameraperson,
Johnson closes one eye to look, too.
In this movie memoir,
he seems to be speaking for her, too.
A mutual ventriloquism.
In this eye, I can feel a little bit light.
And when I'm moving my... Oh, sorry.
Narrator: And talking of ventriloquism takes us
to a film about Indonesia.
In the mid-1960s in the country,
at least half a million people, accused of being communists,
were massacred by officials and gangs.
In 2014, Joshua Oppenheimer released this film
about the atrocity.
On the left, one of the murderers,
his daughter, beside him, unaware of his brutal crimes.
The brother of one of his victims.
The tension caught with two cameras.
Her face hiding her realisation.
His bravery and determination to confront.
The look of silence was a movie monument
to the victims.
But two years before it,
director Oppenheimer
and two co-directors, Christine cynn
and an anonymous person, made a film
about the opposite side,
about the killers themselves.
No ordinary film.
This killer, anwar Congo, demonstrates
with impunity and no remorse,
how he used wire to murder his victims.
Then comes the innovation,
the audacity, the controversy.
The film-makers asks anwar, who's a movie lover,
to recreate the massacres
on camera for a film.
Anwar watches the previous footage of himself.
We are appalled, but his reaction is different.
We were shocked at his crimes, and now, we're doubly so.
And then, we see the re-enactment.
Film noir lighting.
The killers are so enjoying being movie stars
that it doesn't dawn on them
what a kitsch confession this is,
how, 50 years later,
they're traducing their victims.
Call to prayer
and the film-makers - are they complicit?
Their camera assists with this masquerade,
this ventriloquism.
An innovative, ethical, high-wire act,
which seems to succeed in the end of the film,
as we watch anwar retch
at the realisation of the scale of his crimes.
Anwar retch es
Anwar continues to retch
Anwar spits
The two films so challenged those in power,
that many who worked on them didn't want to be named.
And one of the most challenging films of our times
also had people who didn't want to be named.
I want help.
I do, I want help.
Female voice-over: This is a film
about psychological warfare,
a specific type of warfare
designed to distract, misinform...
And anaesthetise the brain...
Narrator: Calm, female voice,
a mosaic of film clips -
documentary, news, fiction, etc.
Voice-over: And is used against every one of them.
Against them...
And against them.
The film was made in North Korea, as propaganda,
to show the citizens of that communist state
how Americans are brainwashed.
It was smuggled out of North Korea,
its didactic commentary translated and re-voiced
by an American woman.
Voice-over: Which is why propagandists call themselves
the public relations industry.
Narrator: We get to see the lies
that are told about the west,
and yet we are mesmerised.
The clips and arguments attacking western consumerism,
political banalities, hypocrisy and greed ring true.
What the film says about our obsession
with media, fashion, desire and PR,
strikes us.
The North Korean propagandists can see our society clearly.
But here's the shock, the reversal, the innovation.
The film wasn't made in North Korea
and wasn't smuggled out of that country.
It was written and directed by slavko martinov,
a New Zealander,
to make it seem like it was from North Korea.
So the female commentary that we hear...
Voice-over: Reading gossip magazines,
eating vast amounts of toxic food and shopping.
Narrator: ..Is a translation into English
of a Korean commentary
that is pretending to be state propaganda,
but which is, in fact, a disguised critique
of western culture, written by a first-time film-maker,
in secrecy, over a ten-year period.
As our heads spin with the layers and complexity of this,
we're troubled by the mirror it holds up to our faces.
Martinov's film was truth in disguise -
a drag doc, a cunning spectacle,
documentary, performed as something else.
Voice-over: ..Leading the resistance.
But when the situation seems to be getting out of hand,
the establishment ordered it to be stopped
and the propagandists moved quickly
to lead the young people away from dangerous protests,
into such fashionable protests.
Screaming
Madrid. An October morning.
Somewhere in this cemetery, Ana mariscal,
one of Spain's greatest movie stars, is buried.
There are no signs for her grave.
It's not easy to find.
Her brightness, her changes of mood, were reminders
that acting has always been cinema's raising agent...
And one of the hardest things to describe in film.
Has there been anything new in acting in recent years? Yes.
Way back in the 19303,
dancer-choreographer Marge champion was
a live-action model for the animators
of snow white and the seven dwarfs.
Her old-movie flow and grace stylised, clarified, idealised.
In the 21st century,
this turned into performance capture.
Straight-down-the-lens emotion.
Rage, a demand, a manifesto.
A better world will emerge
out of the blood and carnage of the past.
A world found upon faith and understanding.
Narrator: We know this isn't an actual ape speaking,
yet the illusion is complete.
There's no uncanny valley,
that creepy feeling we get
at something that's almost but not quite real.
We don't have to force ourselves
to suspend our disbelief.
The technology has become like a window,
transparent enough to reveal
the quality of the acting, the writing, the drama.
Actor Andy serkis had scores of dots on his face,
and infrared transmitters on his costume.
Cameras capture the movements of his facial muscles,
in themselves, and in the light from the right...
The carnage of the past.
Like a complex scaffold or a ct scan.
Technology that came from pre-cinema,
medical photography
and gaming.
In this demonstration,
it's like we can see danninian evolution in reverse.
The layers of skin, hair, wrinkles, sweat.
The composite is like stanislavski plus painting,
rotoscoping and Rembrandt.
The centre of the film world, the human face.
Inaudible
I'm a little concerned.
Narrator: In Martin scorsese's the irishman,
the story covers
a period from 1949 to 2000.
Here, Robert De Niro is playing frank sheeran,
a war veteran and hitman for the mob.
A simple diner scene, natural lighting, mid shots,
character and dialogue.
No Sci-Fi action or special effects.
Except that de niro was 75 when this was shot,
and the character is in his 403.
Scorsese filmed his actors in round-table scenes,
atmospherically lit.
He said of Robert De Niro and al Pacino and Joe pesci,
"I can't have them talking to each other
"with golf balls on their faces."
And so, his team devised this camera rig -
a central and two "witness" cameras.
They called it the "three-headed monster".
Simple dialogue and character scenes were filmed
with the amount of kit you'd use for an action film,
to capture the performances from many angles.
Some of the cameras also shot infrared,
removing the shadows, providing another layer of analysis
of de niro's face.
That famous face was scanned into medusa software
and thousands of images of younger de niro were analysed.
The result was a "digital human"
who looked completely undigital.
The performance capture, lighting acquisition,
physiognomy studies
and muscle movement simulation were invisible.
Lies to tell the truth,
the essence of the movies.
The planet of the apes movies and the irishman
made us think about authenticity in acting.
The performer and film-maker tilda swinton has often said
that the best performance in cinema
is the donkey in au hasard balthazar.
Affectless, uncomplaining, just there.
Stop!
If performances could be enhanced, simulated,
or moved back in time in our age,
where does that leave a scene like this?
A fiction film set in the Soviet union in the '603.
Neo-Nazis are beating up an American psychologist,
claiming that he's gay.
This is not a documentary, but the actors lived,
some say for years, on the vast set.
Many didn't break character.
14 films will be made of the result.
And the thugs here are played by at least one real Neo-Nazi.
He wasn't acting his rage, homophobia or anti-semitism.
Is this justifiable?
Are we back again
to Joshua Oppenheimer's the act of killing?
After such horrors, it's a relief
to turn to something gentler
and more inspiring.
One of the most innovative performances of our time
used no technology whatsoever.
Blue morning light. An old house in Ireland.
A band has come to record an experimental album.
The new keyboard player is talking
to the band's mysterious lead singer and guru, frank.
Frank: He has to convince him to lie completely still.
Narrator: The singer wears a papier—maché head.
Underneath it is the actor Michael fassbender,
but we won't see his face for 80 minutes,
only in the last section of the movie.
Can I ask you something?
Sure.
Why do you wear that?
You think it's weird?
Kind of.
Well, normal faces are weird, too, you know.
The way they're smooth, smooth, smooth,
and then, bleaurgh! You know, all bumpy and holes.
I mean, what are eyes like?
Like a science-fiction movie. Don't get me started on lips.
Narrator: As most movies are centred on actors,
their faces and eyes,
surely it would kill the film not to see fassbender's?
But it doesn't.
We quickly realise that frank is hiding.
Because of the radical use of the false head,
we feel that he's inward, capricious,
delicate, explosive and inventive.
We get to know so much about him.
- I write songs, too. - You write your own songs?
Narrator: Acting, not expressing.
I'd love to play some for you some time.
I'd really like that. Big, non-threatening grin.
Woman cries
the idea is pushed as far as it can go here.
Shouting and crying
the back of a man's head.
He's a Hungarian Jew in a Nazi gas chamber,
forced to gather possessions
and clean up after the exterminations.
The prisoners are forced into the chamber.
The clang of the door.
Door clangs shut
but the camera follows him.
Its square frame tracks him.
It can't, or won't, take its eyes off him.
It's like this for the whole film.
Surrounded by atrocity, his face is blank.
Banging and screaming
bangs, screams.
The sound comes from every direction...
Banging and screaming
but the image follows him,
like the TV camera follows the ball in a football match.
One of the most rigorous visual ideas in recent film.
Banging and screaming
We're getting to the end
of our story of film in recent years.
We started with a needy, damaged man,
a joker on steps,
and a Princess who turns things to ice.
The camera tracked each, followed each.
Maybe that's what cinema is -
a tracking device, following our lives, our stories.
Then, its eye is caught by something else.
And now, it follows the new thing,
like David Robert Mitchell's horror film.
As it follows us, as it tracks us,
what does cinema see?
What has it captured about our lives in the last generation?
The last section of our story will be about this -
who we are, how recent cinema has revealed us.
Let's start with the bad news.
Romanian director radu Jude's
I don't care if we go down in history as barbarians.
Screaming
Romania today.
A tracking shot around a burning barn.
A young theatre director is dramatising
an event from Romania's history -
the 1941 murder of at least 30,000 Jews
by Romanian and German soldiers.
Some of the Jewish people were burnt in barns like this.
The theatre director boldly restages the atrocity.
This is the theatre director.
Then, a speech by an actor playing ion antonescu,
Romania's prime minister during world war ii,
who was later convicted of war crimes.
The film's director, radu Jude, has the actor framed side on,
in front of the burning atrocity.
As this recreation is in a public space
in Romania today, the theatre director should have asked
for permission to stage this bit of her story,
but she didn't.
She thought she'd be refused.
Cut to the city's mayor,
looking uncomfortable, then defiant.
Then, close-up of the theatre director,
maybe surprised
that she's getting away with this very public accusation.
Wide, theatrical shot, then this.
Real citizens, ordinary people, not actors,
clapping and cheering the hate speech, the burning.
The lesson from history unlearnt.
Cheering and applause
People who don't seem to care about the crime,
the attempted genocide.
Radu Jude's play within a film within a semi-documentary
is exposing blistering anti-semitism.
A finger pointed at Europe today...
At something nasty in us.
And talking of us,
there was a film called us.
It pointed a finger, too.
Who pointed? We did.
Something inside us did.
Woman: Shit!
Man: We've lost power.
Narrator: A middle-class family on holiday.
A power cut. Night. Unease.
They shriek
Jesus!
Ok, we lost power. Go back to bed.
There's a family in our driveway.
There is not a family in our driveway.
Narrator: Four people stand, backlit, unspeaking.
Narrator: A family looks mammy
it is a family.
What, you're all scared of a family?
Narrator: And suddenly, the son's mask looks scary,
and the mum gets the threat.
- Uh-uh. - Hey, hey, hey.
Uh-uh.
What?
Zora, give me your phone.
- I'm not... - Zora!
Is there someone outside?
It's just a family, standing outside.
It's probably the neighbours.
Zora: You're kidding me, right?
Narrator: And then, the camera is tracking
around the dispute inside.
And what are those low, background, singing noises?
All right, sure, ok.
- Yes. - You know what?
- What? - I'm going to fix this.
- No, we don't. - I'm going to find out...
- What? - ..Who they are.
No, they haven't, but I know they will.
Everything's going to be fine. Calm down, ok.
- That's too long! - Oh, boy.
No, you don't understand.
How about we all just try to keep calm?
Gabe!
Keep our heads and everything will be all right.
Wait, wait, just one second.
Gabe!
Narrator: And swish back.
And then, dad approaches.
Dad: Trying to have a vacation and my whole family have lost
their goddamn minds.
Hi!
Can I help you?
Narrator: Gradually, it dawns on us
that the standing family is a shadow, the flipside
of the rich, happy family's satisfaction and comfort.
The shadow family is jungian.
They are creatures from the happy family's ID.
Put your shoes on.
Narrator: Bloodshed comes.
Writer-director Jordan peele brilliantly draws us
into a modern American world,
then holds up a mirror,
or makes us think of our shadow selves.
A recent film from Korea showed us our shadow selves.
A posh, modernist
family home in Korea.
A young teacher has arrived.
He's being shown around by the family's maid.
He is to teach the family's children.
The camera tracks.
It's like an architecture video.
Elite life.
But all is not what it seems.
The window in a cheap apartment in the same city.
Socks drying.
The window's at ground level,
which means that the apartment is underground.
As if to emphasise this, the camera descends.
And there's the teacher from the first clip.
But he's not a teacher.
His family is so poor that they have forged a document
to pretend that he can teach.
Cheap furniture, stuff stacked against walls.
Piles of clothes, cramped rooms.
This poor family is the shadow of the rich family.
It's like they're its underbelly,
Korea's underbelly.
And, as in Jordan peele's us,
they begin to invade the rich family.
And as the plot twists,
a more literal underground is revealed.
Another 21st-century film about social corrosion.
Architecture, chutzpah, resentment
and Hitchcock meshed
in director bong joon ho's playful accusation.
And here, in Tunisia, is an even more stark confrontation
between poor and rich.
A naked, grieving ex-soldier
who has run away from conflict, cities, buildings, clothing.
He has nothing left. He's gasping for air.
Man gasps
Then, this.
More than 50 minutes into the film,
we suddenly meet his opposite.
She's rich, clothed, groomed, sleek, bright,
in a pink upholstered chair.
But the camera pulls away from her perfection, her control.
Soon, they will meet.
Their lives will intertwine.
Those opposite identities will eclipse each other.
The Romanian film tracked us, accused us.
Us and parasite and tlamess were cinematic invasions.
Mati diop's atlantics is also about invasion,
also about something getting inside us.
It's set in Senegal.
It has a velvet texture, somnambulant.
Near the start of the story,
we see young people escaping unemployment,
leaving Senegal by sea,
heading for Spain,
hoping for a new life in Europe.
One of them is souleiman. He doesn't return.
This is a policeman.
He's possessed by souleiman, invaded by him.
The cop doesn't trust himself when he's possessed.
A touch of cinematic gothic.
A new way of looking at the migrant crisis,
wholly rooted in west Africa.
This gorgeous Irish animation had some similar ideas.
Dad, look!
A young girl drowned at sea,
but has now become a selkie, a seal.
A lovely possession.
She's central, transfigured,
in gorgeous shades of Amber.
The animated Irish girl had tragically died,
but the film has some optimism
because it imagines not so much an invasion,
but a transformation.
She is glowing.
No. No, please, wait.
Please don't. Please don't take her from us.
We are home.
Ryan coogler's black panther was glowing too.
Wakanda,
an ancient nation in the film's story.
Aerial shots like we've seen
in many conventional films about Africa,
but in these, a spaceship is waved at by sheep herders.
Pre and postmodern worlds in Harmony.
This never gets old.
Narrator: Then, this.
A digital interface, a curtain pulled back
to reveal a kind of Hong Kong, a mythic city,
afro-futuristic,
buildings with the hint of Mali architecture.
A euphoric challenge
to how outsiders usually see Africa,
as third world, underdeveloped.
Instead of the victim narrative of Africa,
here is a founding myth, a paradise lost.
This woman finds a paradise lost.
She looks different from other people.
She's never understood who she is or what she is.
Then, there's a fox at her window.
It's like she's looking at a movie screen
or a mirror.
She's been marginalised all her life,
and sees herself as a fox.
Woman laughs
the joy of that discovery.
Laughter
she meets a man who's like her
and their young hearts run free.
He's fox-like, too.
They don't need to pretend that they're like other people.
They plunge.
They laugh
woman shrieks joyfully
the lake seems to be steaming.
Ali abbasi's film has strong echoes
of this provocative beauty, freaks,
made more than 80 years earlier.
Music and singing
man plays harmonica
a forest dance. People shunned by society.
Dappled light.
They sing
but then, they run.
The conventional world is coming.
Man: Don't you know trespassing is the same as stealing?
Oh, I'm sorry, monsieur.
Is family a paradise lost,
especially after you leave it?
When we migrate, do we carry our families within us?
Lulu wang's film the farewell was about this.
Nai Nai, a family's matriarch,
is reading the result of her medical tests,
her family listening, lined up like a frieze.
They've doctored the results.
Nai Nai has a terminal illness.
Then, the family in slow motion.
In the middle, with long hair, granddaughter billi,
who lives 13,000km away in New York,
and hates the deception of Nai Nai.
To her right, with white hair, Nai Nai's sister,
whose husband has worked away from home for years.
To the left of billi, her cousin and his fiancee.
Nothing like a good wedding to bring people together,
to collapse distance, to put them all in the same frame.
The slow reservoir dogs walk.
But then, this.
Billi is isolated now.
She's talked to her uncle
about Chinese collective identity
versus American individualism.
Is her identity her own or part of the family web,
the family worldwide web?
Is it inside her or outside?
You could ask the same thing
of these children in Bosnia.
Their parents lived through war and ethnic cleansing.
The adults saw atrocities.
Will these kids inherit the trauma
or will they look ahead?
Are they closed or open?
Are their eyes wide shut?
Man speaks Japanese
A manual labourer father
and someone we presume to be his daughter, in Japan.
The camera pulls back.
They're enjoying the night,
the croquettes they've just shoplifted.
Then...
A lonely girl, glimpsed through a gap.
Then, the gap in reverse angle.
Then, this remarkable cut.
A house even more cluttered
than the poor family's house in parasite.
A shot that echoes a scene like this,
in Japanese director yasujiro ozu's film
early summer.
Long lens, flattened imagery,
a screen on the left.
A family composition, contained within squares and lines.
Woman speaks Japanese
man speaks Japanese
and there's the girl.
They've stolen her.
Why? Isn't that a crime?
A reverse angle, now,
even more cluttered.
The whole film is like a reverse angle.
It looks at family in a way
that's the reverse of what we'd expect.
They speak Japanese
we learn that a lot is not what it seems
in this cosy-looking family home.
We're looking at the heart of something,
a film with a heart,
a family with a strong identity,
but an identity based on stealing, on crime.
A family imagined,
a story of identity told.
Woman speaks Japanese
Another family imagined.
Another cramped apartment.
A Russian boy with behavioural problems.
His mother already has five kids,
but has now adopted him, her sixth.
Money is scarce,
but human contact isn't,
love isn't.
The camera, near the floor.
She cradles his feet.
And then, to her oldest daughter.
A good, loving family, like a cat's cradle.
Humming
another loving family, humming together.
Two hands, picking, a girl's and a man's,
as if they're the one person.
Tilt up.
They hum
they live in the forest, away from modern life,
this girl and her dad.
They're like fish in water.
Thank you.
Whittling.
Dad, this wood is really good for feathering.
That's really nice work.
Narrator: Working together.
They own little.
They survive in secret, but in Harmony, here in Oregon.
Soon, we learn that he fought in Iraq and has PTSD.
In trying to live this way, they are playing with fire.
Man blows gently
a film as generous and precise as a Dolly Parton song.
This section of our film, about who we are,
about how recent cinema has looked inside us,
began in Romania.
Then, we went to america, Korea, Africa,
Japan and Russia.
With each move, the picture lightened.
Optimism entered the frame.
Now, we're in Italy in a film set in the 1970s.
An old-fashioned farm, a thunderstorm.
A kindly young man, who always does what people ask, lazzaro,
stands in the rain, oblivious,
like the geese.
A panic to take in the corn.
We see the round edges of the image, like an old photo.
Two girls try to get lazzaro to shelter,
but he seems in another world.
Then, this remarkable scene.
Hands touch him, like he's sick or a Saint.
We've seen him bossed around, but he doesn't complain.
Woman speaks Italian
in Alice rohnnacher's film,
he's the goodness in people.
A timeless thing,
literally so, as we see later.
He's frank-blank, in a way,
but purer and less troubled
than Michael fassbender's character.
He's more like Terence stamp's character
in pier paolo pasolini's teorema -
a kind of visiting angel.
So, when we went to the movies in the last decade,
we saw that we were racist, haunted,
socially divided, mythic,
familial, inventive or angelic.
An upwards sliding scale.
Two more films took the question
of identity in cinema further still.
Firstly, this one.
A trans woman, Marina, in Chile.
Her lover has died.
Society his disrespected her, buffeted her,
blamed her. We track as she walks alone.
The wind of change seems to be getting stronger.
Music: Sposa son disprezzata by geminiano giacomelli
and then, this.
Is the world tilting on its axis?
Is her struggle invisibly becoming more uphill?
Cold light on her face now.
A painful film, which seems to be about her trans identity,
but is really about Chile's.
And Ava duvernay's documentary
about the 13th amendment to the American constitution,
talks about another type of transition.
She uses a montage of voices,
experts filmed in striking settings, to tell her story.
How black people in america were arrested,
and how they turned that
from a badge of shame into pride.
Man: I think that one of the most brilliant tactics
of the civil rights movement
was its transformation of the notion of criminality.
Because for the first time,
being arrested was a noble thing.
Being arrested by white people
was your worst nightmare.
Still is, for many African-Americans.
So what they did, they voluntarily defined a movement
around getting arrested. They turned it on its head.
Man: If you look at the history
of black people's various struggles in this country,
the connecting themes is the attempt to be understood
as full, complicated human beings.
We are something other than this visceral image
of criminality and menace and threat
to which people associate with us.
Shouting and barking
Duvernay's film showed what it's like
to be attacked, belittled, invisible.
The Indian film ship of theseus talked about disappearing
in a very different way.
A jain monk, in a theatrical beam of light.
He's dying.
He has liver cirrhosis, but refuses a transplant.
An acolyte visits.
Acolyte: I got you a gift.
Alphabets.
Narrator: In the first section of the film,
a young woman with eye disease
had been given an eye transplant.
The young guy in this section reads from the book,
and we begin to realise
that transplanting is the theme of the film.
The movie's title, ship of theseus,
refers to a thought experiment.
If, bit by bit, the timbers of an old ship are replaced,
until none of the original material remains,
is it still the same ship?
Or has it a new identity?
It gives me some kicks, though,
to know that a part of me was a part of an animal once.
A flame, a star, a part will become mineral,
grow in a plant, sprout in a fruit, get pecked by a bird.
Every atom of my body will be recycled by the universe.
You think you're a person, but you are a colony,
a microcosm, which has ten times more bacteria
in its body than does human cells.
Have we changed beyond recognition?
Did the emptiness that came in 2020,
the deserted streets, underpasses, airports,
change things?
We watched far more movies under lockdown.
More romcoms, more Netflix,
more tcm or Amazon prime,
or national broadcasters, or other streamers,
and more classic films we love.
And maybe some films that extended
the language of cinema, too.
And when public life returned,
we marched to the movies again.
We couldn't wait to see things bigger than life.
Shots and cuts, innovation and desire.
After wearing those face masks, cinema looked different.
Social distancing seemed to electrify space...
As if it was a tracking shot...
A travelling shot.
Like this one.
We tried to look at life anew,
in someone else's arms.
Movies helped us see again.
Cities, nights, movement, fleeting love.
We remembered the excitement of movies
from the last 13 decades...
In scenes like this.
Swing. A cartoon magazine frame.
Three characters from three worlds.
Spider-ham: Did that feel like a cartoon?
Spider-ham blows raspberry
a moment of slowness, manga, then acid colours.
They grunt
Gwen!
Narrator: Will the image peel apart?
Trains, buildings, cars. A New York City acid soup.
- I like your suit. - Thanks, I made it myself.
Then, a world of dots.
Inventiveness too fast to clock.
So we're swirled, spun.
Buckle up, guys. This is going to take a while.
Maniacal laughter
horn blares
all right, never mind. Let's end this thing.
Spider-man: Into the spider-verse
was cinema on the rinse cycle, the spin cycle.
But then, we come across a new cinema,
a cinema like this one in New York,
and we hope that the cultural pessimists are wrong.
Even when times are tough,
especially when times are tough,
we'll want to go into the spider-verse.
In the last decade,
the spider-verse, cinema, has grown.
More people are making movies,
more types of people, with more points of view.
These are our habitats,
we creatures of the dark.
These are the places where our lives are relit...
Where we see fantasy and feel fear...
Where we come across the movies.
Voyeurism, framed.
As in holy motors, cinema, the thing we love, is close by.
It's the room next door.
And in that room, it's Saturday,
always Saturday.
Cemetery of splendour again.
The soldier and the caring lady have just woken up.
The coloured light still glows.
And his breathing.
The light goes blue.
What have we been digging for?
What are they looking at?
How do they see the world?
They're the audience of the next decade, and the next.
And maybe the film-makers, too.
Music: Rebuild by Jordan gagne