The Story of Film Episode 8 – New Directors, New Form

1965-1969: New Waves – Sweep Around the World.

• Ashes and Diamonds (1958) dir. Andrzej Wajda – Made in Poland. Shows rebelling with a cause. Partly set in sewers. Expressionist. Full of symbols. Disguises meaning by encoding it in symbols.
• Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Roman Polanski – Cuts fast, to jazzy drummy bass.
• Hamlet (1948) dir. Laurence Olivier – Polanski loved this film. Loved the way the camera tracked through the mysterious spaces in the castle.
• Knife in the Water (1962) dir. Roman Polanski – One of the most claustrophobic films. Shows symbolism with a love triangle by having an arm form a triangle. Didn’t deal with war. “Art for art’s sake”.
• The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) dir. Roman Polanski – Set in a winter wonderland, shot in a studio. Widescreen.
• The Hand (1965) dir. Jiří Trnka – Czechoslovakian cinema in these times specialized in animation, and puppetry. Uses live action for the hand, and stop motion for the man. About a haunted life.
• The Fireman’s Ball (1967) dir. Miloš Forman – Forman saw life as comic, which could be seen in his films. Filmed without gloss, like a documentary.
• Daisies (1966) dir. Věra Chytilová – Shows women as dolls by making them squeak whenever they move, as if they are puppets. Shows sequences of a camera on a train. Timed cuts of the ticking of a clock.
• The Red and the White (1968) dir. Miklós Jancsó – Showed a man getting captured in one continuous 3 minute shot without cuts. Doesn’t get close, shows the whole scene. At the end of the film, it shows the closeup of a soldier looking at the camera. Showing humanity. Utilized long takes to show suffering.
• Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (2000) dir. Chris Marker – Filmed with a tracking camera.
• Andrei Rublev (1966) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky – Crispy black/white photography. Utilized a wide angle lens on a balloon to make the image “plunge”. It was banned for 6 years for being religious.
• The Mirror (1975) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky – About the human spirit soaring. Shows religious ideas within death, such as a bird flying from a man’s hand.
• Stalker (1979) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky – Ending shows muted colors, slow panning back shot, then suddenly, a ghostly event. Combines the physical and the metaphysical.
• Nostalghia (1983) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky – Ending shows the camera pulling out, slightly showing the world of the story is contained within a cathedral. Shows a sense of scale.
• Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors (1965) dir. Sergei Parajanov – Showed Parajanov enjoyed the poetic cinema Alexander Dovzhenko. Utilized a shot of a falling tree. Parajanov’s camera is seldom at eye level. Heavily utilized foreground. It was everything the Soviet Realists hated.
• Andrei Tarkovsky & Sergei Parajanov – Islands (1988) dir. Levon Grigoryan – Parajanov is seen conducting a set as if he were conducting an Orchestra.
• Boy (1969) dir. Nagisa Oshima – Utilized the full widescreen. Shows the cynicism of modern japan, which was it’s greed.
• In the Realm of the Senses (1976) dir. Nagisa Oshima
• Love and Crime (1969) dir. Teruo Ishii
• The Insect Woman (1963) dir. Shōhei Imamura – Films an insect as a metaphor of struggling over rough terrain. Utilized widescreen space exquisitely. Similar to that of the typewriter scene of Citizen Kane.
• Citizen Kane (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Orson Welles – Inspired Shohei by framing a key character in the distance, yet still focusing on a closeup character.
• Nippon Sengoshi – Madamu Onboro No Seikatsu (1970) dir. Shōhei Imamura – Shows how frank Madamu Onboro was. Showed sex and class.
• Ajantrik (1958) dir. Ritwik Ghatak – Ghatak’s films showed heightened emotions. Shows the realization of how resources get used further on/recycled (?).
• The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) dir. Ritwik Ghatak – About India’s original sin. Filmed at dawn.
• Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1975) dir. Ritwik Ghatak – Distorts sound as if it were a sci-fi movie.
• Uski Roti (1970) dir. Mani Kaul – An experimental film. Action is paced as if 1,2,3. 1,2,3,4. 1,2,3,4.
• Black God, White Devil (1964) dir. Glauber Rocha – Most innovative movie in Brazil at the time. Filmed in the intense heat of the North-East of Brazil. Scenes are edited like an Eisentein movie. A shooter is shown in front of a cross, as if it were a symbol of vengeance. “Violence is normal if people are starving”.
• I Am Cuba (1964) dir. Mikhail Kalatozov – Camera seems to levitate, utilizing slow motion, wide angle, crane shot, etc. Not cut used a scene. Believes the beauty of a shot will make the idea of a revolution beautiful itself.
• The House Is Black (1963) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Forugh Farrokhzad – Shot in black/white. Attempts to move beyond simple description. The people are thankful for their lives. Utilizes a scene cut with people. Squeaks of a wheel compel the scene the speed up.
• Black Girl (1966) dir. Ousmane Sembène – Shows the difference of luxury between societies. Work slowly turns into slavery. Some scenes filmed like a John Ford western. A mask of hope/gift turns into a symbolism of death.
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) dir. Karel Reisz – Shot in black/white on real streets, no exterior lights. Stylized with haircuts, ideas, T.V., etc.
• Kes (1969) dir. Ken Loach – Shows how Loach turned his sense of collective experience into an honest, and direct film style. Utilized a certain range of lenses. Edits to where an eye would naturally go.
• A Hard Day’s Night (1964) dir. Richard Lester – Starts conventionally, then speeds up. Shows how joyous the youth rebellion was. Filmed up high for some scenes.
• Primary (1960) dir. Robert Drew – A new type of documentary. Didn’t stage scenes. Didn’t use interviews, or hidden camera techniques. Utilized the “fly on the wall” technique. Always follows the character.
• Shadows (1959) dir. John Cassavetes – Followed 3 fictional African American siblings, as Drew followed Kennedy. Also inspired by Neo-realism. Known as “new American cinema”. Made Hollywood cinema look stale.
• Psycho (1960) dir. Alfred Hitchcock – Realized Hollywood looked stale. So Hitchcock decided to film it Psycho in black/white. Heavily utilizes cut, used 70 different camera angles for 45 seconds of film, for that one iconic scene.
• 66 Scenes from America (1982) dir. Jørgen Leth – Shows blankness, and no emotion, just a man eating a burger. Very Warhol-esque.
• Blow Job (1963) dir. Andy Warhol –
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) dir. Mike Nichols – Utilized black/white, harsh lighting, etc.
• Medium Cool (1969) dir. Haskell Wexler – Pushed the relationship of documentary T.V. and American fictional cinema as far as it could go. No edit is more than 4 frames in the ending, even shots of just black. Utilized a zooming shot. Ends up shooting the shot as if it were filming the audience, asking the audience a question itself.
• Easy Rider (1969) dir. Dennis Hopper – Biker flick. Defined it’s era. Open road, long lenses, rock music, etc. Moved from one scene to the other by moving it back and forth.
• Making “The Shining” (1980) dir. Vivian Kubrick – Camera positioning was super important.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Stanley Kubrick – Editing in film usually cuts out time, yet one edit in this cuts out more time than any other cut in history. Gave a sense of space of there being no up/down in it’s own space sequences. The scenes of abstract were inspired by that of Der Sieger.
• Der Sieger (1921) dir. Walter Ruttmann – Ended up inspiring Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey.