Tag: The Story of Film Page 2 of 3

The Story of Film on TCM: Chapter 7

On October 21, 2013

Cinema didn’t tell the story, it was the story.

Two episodes back I said how much I enjoyed the 1940s episode, especially since I love film noir so much. Well, my second favorite movement or faux genre might just be the French New Wave, so I’m definitely biased to enjoy Chapter 7 as well. If the 1950s were a cinematic pressure cooker bursting at the seams, constrained by the studio system and the mores of the time, then the ’60s were the explosion. The world had been in upheaval in the ’50s, but it became even more tumultuous in the ’60s, with the rise of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War, increasing nuclear fears, the hippie generation, free love, revolution, etc. Times were changing, and cinema, somewhat conservative in the ’50s, was now ready to change with them.

Before getting to the New Wave itself, though, Cousins looks at some of the highly individual directors who laid the groundwork for the more personal cinema that the New Wave celebrated. We’re in well-worn cinephile territory here (and really throughout this episode), with Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, and Federico Fellini, but Cousins still manages to bring out insights into their films and relation to the larger Story of Film that I hadn’t really noticed. These are all directors who started their careers in the 1950s or earlier and thus were an inspiration to New Wave filmmakers, even as they continued their own careers throughout the 1960s and beyond.

The Story of Film on TCM: Chapter 6

By Jandy

On October 11, 2013

In Film

In popular American nostalgia the 1950s have a squeaky clean reputation – according to our collective memory, it was a time of white picket fences, domesticity, cohesive family units, and the American Dream coming to fruition. Just looking at the movies of the 1950s disproves that notion, as we instead see sexual desire, teenage rebellion, and discontent seething below the seemingly perfect exterior, ready to burst through the seams at the slightest provocation. Meanwhile, cinema was truly going global in the 1950s. Prior to this, the United States and Europe dominated, with some side notes of interest in Japan and China, but in this chapter Cousins highlights notable films from Egypt, India, Brazil and Mexico as well – new national cinemas bursting through the seams onto the world stage.

The world was undergoing great social change in the 1950s – in America, we had the invention of the “teenager” as a social construct and the development of rock and roll, while in Africa and around the world decolonization was creating new nations intent on forging a national identity and with it, a national cinema. What ties these together for Cousins is their shared use of a form of cinema that’s also bursting at the seams – the melodrama. The melodrama has kind of a negative reputation as being overwrought and emotional, but as Cousins will show, there are a ton of great melodramas, and melodrama as a form encapsulates the kind of repressed emotion just waiting to bust out that characterized the 1950s. Cousins calls the melodrama a “pressure cooker of pent-up emotions” and finds them dotting the globe at this point in film history.

The Story of Film on TCM: Chapter 5

By Jandy

On October 8, 2013

In Film

Movies had to get this raw because life had become this raw.

The world changed in the 1940s, a world war casting its presence over half the decade and its shadow over the rest. Nothing would ever be the same, and neither would cinema. In his intro interview with Robert Osborne, Marc Cousins states that prior to the 1940s, movies had focused on fantasy and escapism, but in the ’40s, movies darken visually and morally. Obviously, this is an oversimplification (and to some degree Hollywood-centric), but Cousins knows that. In the episode, he gives the escapist cinema of the 1940s a passing mention with a Betty Grable musical, but quickly affirms that the essential cinema of the ’40s is neo-realism and film noir, a claim that’s not particularly unreasonable.

But before he goes into the development of neo-realism in Italy and film noir in the United States, he goes back to look at the development of deep staging and deep focus in Stagecoach and Citizen Kane. The Hollywood romantic tradition preferred long lenses which threw the background out of focus, drawing attention to and flattering the star. Deep focus democratized the frame, allowing the viewers’ eyes to wander at will, while encouraging deep staging to emphasize spatial relationships between people and things. Cousins shows shots from Stagecoach that use deep focus and deep staging, including a wide shot of a room including ceilings, something that Citizen Kane is often credited with doing first (Robert Osborne even mentioned the ceilings as revolutionary in Citizen Kane in the intro, but Cousins didn’t challenge him).

The Story of Film on TCM: Chapter 4

By Jandy

On September 30, 2013

In Film

It’s a common understanding among silent film fans that something beautiful and inherently cinematic was lost when sound took over at the end of the 1920s. Silent film had reached great heights of visual splendor, highly complex ways of conveying story, psychology, and mood by visual means, and innovative ways to use the camera, editing, and actors within the frame.

The coming of sound meant learning how to make cinema all over again. Technological limitations meant that the camera was no longer free to roam about the frame – that would have interfered with the sound recording. Similarly, shooting on location became difficult, because ambient sounds were difficult to avoid, so filming moved back onto studio sets (where they would largely stay for the next twenty to thirty years). Cousins points out things that I’d never really thought of or seen mentioned before in his clip of Bing Crosby singing – a two camera shoot ran live, like live television eventually would, to record the sound unbroken. This meant framing was limited; shots couldn’t be restaged for different angles, nor could lighting be reset for different shots, lending everything a flatness. These were all challenges that filmmakers had to learn to overcome to figure out how to use sound cinematically.

But creatively thrives on challenges, and as Cousins mentioned in his introductory interview with Robert Osborne, filmmakers quickly learned to use sound creatively, using it to help set mood, or even undercut the visual for ironic purposes. As early as 1932, Rouben Mamoulian used the everyday morning sounds of Paris waking up as a kind of symphonic overture to his film Love Me Tonight, and used tricks like substituting yapping dogs in for society ladies chattering. Sonic trickery becomes possible, and sometimes even more effective than the visual trickery of the silent era. It’s interesting that I tend to forget Mamoulian directed Love Me Tonight, because it reminds me so much of the Lubitsch films of the same era (several of which start Love Me Tonight‘s Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald), but with Cousins’ praise for Mamoulian’s innovation, I’m excited to rewatch it with Mamoulian in mind.

The Story of Film on TCM: Chapter 3

By Jandy

On September 22, 2013

In Film

It was a time of fantasy cinema and its brilliant alternatives. Movies were on a high. This sublime tension should have lasted forever.

Chapter 3 of The Story of Film follows pretty closely on the heels of Chapter 2. The way Cousins transitions from one chapter to the next makes the whole thing surprisingly palatable to marathon as one very long documentary, and in this case, Chapters 2 and 3 seem incomplete without each other. In Chapter 2, Cousins laid out the foundations of Hollywood romantic cinema, as codified by the studio system in the 1920s, and began looking at the rebel filmmakers who challenged it. In Chapter 3, we find out that the realist filmmakers he discussed in Chapter 2 were actually the first of eight challenges to romantic cinema. What is a rebel filmmaker? It’s not difficult to figure out from the documentary, but Cousins helpfully defined it in his interview with Robert Osborne before TCM’s airing of Chapter 3. Paraphrasing a bit, a rebel filmmaker is someone who looks at the way we do things and knows there’s another way to do it. They want to annoy people on one level, but they also want to innovate – to explore other ways to use cinema to tell stories.

Challenges #2-8 to romantic cinema take up the entirety of this episode. First, Ernst Lubitsch. Yep, just Lubitsch all by himself. Lubitsch took the still-Victorian way that sex and love were depicted in the movies and mocked it, making some of the most urbane, witty, and slyly naughty films of the twenties. And the thirties, to be honest. Interestingly, this is maybe the only one of the challenges Cousins identifies that is primarily content-related rather than stylistic. On the other hand, style is content and of course the stylistic things that make up the rest of the challenges also have an ideological element.