SMC Founder.Programmer Craig Hammill on Movies That Embraced a Transitional Period
As a way of getting the mental juices flowing, we wanted to look at great movies that embraced the technological, economic, or industry-wide shifts that would become the new norm rather than trying to avoid them.
Intolerance (1916, dir by DW Griffith)
First up, we consider DW Griffith. It wasn't really that Griffith embraced new technology or approach so much as he invented it. In the earliest days of cinema (1890's-early 1910's), innovations were happening fast and furious out of necessity. But it wasn't until Griffith came along that the idea of a "feature film" of 2 hours or so could really be comprehended as the industry norm. Griffith really conceived of a film language (close ups, medium shots, wide shots, moving shots) that could roughly be viewed in the same way a novelist puts together clauses, sentences, paragraphs, chapters. And thus, a filmmaker could put together a film "novel" or a film feature. All through the 1910's, movies were mostly 1-3 reels (10-30 minutes). But Griffith began to conceive stories that needed bigger canvasses and running times. No early film is as impressive or ambitious as Griffith's Intolerance which cross cuts between different time periods all linked by the theme of human prejudice. It's pretty trippy to watch a 1916 movie cross cut pretty rapidly from Ancient Babylon to 1600's France to 1900's urban life to symbolic shots of a woman rocking a baby. While the movie doesn't completely work and there are certainly later silent movies even more ambitious that work better (Abel Gance's Napoleon, Murnau's The Last Laugh immediately jump to mind), Intolerance really broke the ground for all subsequent filmmakers. This is what feature filmmaking could be to move from the "curiosity" phase to a sustainable entertainment model like theater, opera, ballet: a long form story that could leap time periods yet be unified by theme and character. To this day, Intolerance is still a visionary movie.
The Public Enemy (1931, dir by William Wellman)
While many folks point to movies like The Jazz Singer from 1927 as the key transitional movies from silent to sound, to this programmer it feels movies like the controversial gangster action pick Public Enemy starring James Cagney in 1931 really did the most to announce that the "sound picture" was here to stay. When a new technology comes, be it sound, color, widescreen, digital, or streaming, it's initial applications are often "gimmicky". But a movie like The Public Enemy which tells the rise and fall story of bootlegger/gangster Tom Powers really shows why sound was such a seductive audience technology. Cagney gives an electric, high wire, scandalous performance that's really only possible with dialogue and machine gun fast delivery not title cards. Made during the short lived pre-code era from 1927-1933 when movies also dealt more frankly with sex, violence, poverty, reality, Public Enemy sizzles with an electricity-sexual, verbal, violent, complex-that silent cinema can't quite get across in the same way. Public Enemy took everything that was great about silent cinema-namely the atmospheric visual storytelling-and married it to everything that was great about music or theater-namely heightened dialogue and sound. Once gangster pictures like Public Enemy and Scarface came around, there was really no going back. And "crackling dialogue" became as important a cinematic effect as an expressive shot. Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, who both got their start in silent cinema, took notice and made sure their pictures had BOTH dynamo visual storytelling and whip-smart scripts of dialogue.
The Red Shoes (1948, dir by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
It must seem to moviemakers that every 10-20 years they have to grapple with a technological innovation they didn't ask for. Only 20 years after the advent of sound, it became increasingly clear that "color" movies were going to be a bigger audience draw than black and white movies. And though black and white movies would continue to be fairly normal until the mid 1960's, the writing was on the wall that color technology was going to have to be wrestled with. But like all new technology, color demanded moviemakers figure out a way that it could be cinematic, not gimmicky, and forward the story. Enter The Archers, filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who made The Red Shoes, a story about a love/control triangle between a dancer, a composer, and a theater impresario. The title says it all. The filmmakers signal to you that color will play a key part in the story. But what Powell and Pressburger do brilliantly is to control color in such a way that the moments of technicolor brilliance really are climaxes/turning points/key scenes in the movie. For the most part, the Archers developed a color palette that while rich was also fairly muted/limited so that the focus stayed on the story. This reserve brilliantly allowed them to go full blast with color in those pivotal moments of maximum emotion. Though most of us moviemakers are lazy with color at best or mega-pretentious and too calculating with it at worst, great practitioners of color-the Archers, Hitchcock, Godard, Wong Kar Wai, among many others-find ways to make the color advance story and emotion.
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, dir by David Lean)
In the 1950's, movies felt widescreen was the answer to television. TV had adopted a square frame because that was the standard movie frame. So movies decided they had to offer "more screen". By moving from a roughly square framing to a very long rectangular framing, movies set up dozens of new challenges for directors/cinematographers. How do you effectively frame a close up? What will camera movement look like with such a rectangular frame? Initially cinemascope or widescreen was a bit too wide and so it got shortened just a bit to the ratio 2.35 (2.35 inches of width for every inch of height) still the widescreen industry standard today. One of the 1950's directors who really figured out widescreen framing was David Lean with his seminal rousing historical action epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. Ironically, Lean had no experience with widescreen or epic filmmaking prior to Kwai (though he had directed two beloved Charles Dickens' adaptations). Still he and his cinematographer figured out incredibly cinematic ways to frame groups of people, people against locations, and action sequences. KWAI tells the fascinating story of British POWs who end up building a bridge for the Japanese. When an Allied commando team is sent to blow up that bridge, the British POW leader (played miraculously by Alec Guiness) has taken such pride in how his unit has built the bridge that he doesn't want to see it destroyed. Lean would pioneer a style (possibly from his experience as an editor and directing intimate character dramas) that would allow him to cut from the MACRO (wide shot) to the MICRO (close up or detail) and back out again. Thus he was able to balance the epic with the intimate. The universal with the specific. He would take this style and hone it to its apotheosis in Lawrence of Arabia. But here, in Kwai, widescreen moves from a gimmick to an industry standard.
A Clockwork Orange (dir by Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
The old Hayes Code which many moviemakers were already ignoring by the mid-60's was scrapped and replaced with the voluntary rating system we know today (G, PG, PG-13, R, X later changed to NC-17). This change, which also reflected a growing cultural openness to more explicit, challenging, honest, adult topics, allowed filmmakers to make movies that were impossible to conceive of even 10 years earlier (though one shocking one was made, but more on that later). Enter Stanley Kubrick's 1971 A Clockwork Orange which is still fairly shocking and visionary even by today's standards. The story of a strange future where teenage boy gangs roam, fight, rape, do drugs, and generally disregard all laws, Orange was intentionally designed to SHOCK. What Kubrick cleverly does (as he always does) is to create this fascinating, lurid world to draw us in only to reveal to us that the real topic of the movie is free will. For all the folks out there who say Kubrick was a cynic or pessimist, it's interesting that 2001 has one of the most positive/affirmative endings of all time and Eyes Wide Shut essentially affirms long-term love and marriage. Of course in a Kubrick movie you do have to go through hell first.. Here in A Clockwork Orange, Alex, the gang leader, volunteers for a prison drug program that causes him to have a nauseous reaction to violence and sex so he can get an early release. But the drug treatment essentially prevents Alex from being Alex. Lest folks say Kubrick was a determinist, here he is making one of the most powerful movie arguments for the importance of free will. Yes, Alex, if he gets free will back, will probably go on raping, killing, terrorizing. But goodness only means something if we have the option to choose evil. Rumi the poet once said "Nothing can be clear without its polar opposite present. Between two banners, one black, one white, something gets settled.." Kubrick embraced the new freedoms of the R and X rating and made one of the most philosophically challenging movies of all cinema.
Celebration (1998, dir by Thomas Vinterberg)
This digitally shot Danish movie, made years before Hollywood and the rest of the world would pivot to digital from film as the standard capture medium, saw the future before everyone else did. Vinterberg decided to make his movie on the absolute cheapest video cameras he could. Everything else about the movie is actually pretty high-end: great performances, a great hotel location. The movie embraced the Dogme 95 rules (written by, among others, Lars Von Trier as a way to force moviemakers to be creative while using only available light, source sound, etc.). It tells the story of a dysfunctional family gathering to celebrate the father's birthday with 40-50 of his friends & associates. Then the son gets up and gives a toast in which he reveals the father sexually molested him and his twin sister leading to the sister's suicide. Ironically, this is the set-up for what turns out to be a pretty hilarious (though markedly dark) movie. The guests aren't allowed to leave (their car keys have been hidden) and the family has to wrestle with this dark secret. There's even a dynamite ghost sequence. What Vinterberg proved here was that if you have a crackerjack story and the filmmaking chops, you can make an amazing feature on the cheapest of equipment. This movie inspired dozens (if not hundreds) of knock offs to the point where the "ensemble gathering at a location" genre became a kind of cringe-inducing description of lots of movies that weren't as creative as this one. But Vinterberg showed the world that digital movies could be and WOULD BE works of art. Lars Von Trier, Danny Boyle, Dennis Villeneuve, Mike Leigh, Alfonso Cuaron were just around the corner to follow.
Roma (2018, dir by Alfonso Cuaron)
In many ways, it was this movie that announced to the world that some of the greatest filmmakers' dream projects were going to be going straight to streaming. Cuaron essentially tells the story of his childhood in 1970's Mexico City but chooses to focus mostly on his indigenous live-in maid, Cleo and his mother whose husband abandons the family. It's a beautiful movie that somehow manages to pull off a panoramic view of the tumultuous political and class struggles of Mexico through the very focused telling of one family's trials & tribulations across one year. What Roma proved both for the good and the bad was that the studios were no longer interested in financing, developing, nurturing idiosyncratic auteur projects. For now, if you're a talented moviemaker with a risky project, the green light is probably going to happen at Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Amazon, or Showtime not at Disney/Fox, Universal, Warner Brothers, or Paramount. While this is great news for these moviemakers, it should also be a warning flare fired up into the dark oceanic night to those who love cinema. It doesn't have to be this way. And this doesn't have to be the fate of cinema. While Streaming is the new Art House (as David Lynch likes to say), the Art House should be the Art House. Hopefully inventive/creative folks can find a way to marry the innovations of streaming and the internet to the wonderful theatrical feeling of discovering a new masterwork with other people in a darkened cinema.
Psycho (1960, dir by Alfred Hitchcock)
Sometimes there's a story hidden in plain sight for which all of us moviemakers should take note. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is still revolutionary 60 years after it was made. Ironically, it was made by a master Hollywood craftsman, within the studio system, at a moment where there wasn't any huge technological or industry wide shift occurring. A Woman steals money only to repent when she stops off at a roadstop motel run by a nervous young man, Norman Bates, who seems to be controlled by his invalid Mother who lives in the house up the hill. From there. . .well . .let's just say (if you've never seen the movie) the rug gets completely pulled out from under the audience's feet again and again and again. This is the kind of mold-shattering visionary work only a true master could have made. Paramount really didn't want Hitchcock to make a movie about such unseemly subject matter (murder, psychosis, implied abnormal sexuality) so Hitchcock made the movie in black and white, for a low budget with his TV crew. He took no upfront money opting instead for 60% of the backend if the movie ever made money. Well. . .it did. But what Hitchcock proved here was that truly great movies are often great because they're new/unique/groundbreaking/challenging. And no one wants to fund that kind of movie until it's a hit. So all of us, even the greatest/most successful moviemakers, have to be willing to risk everything on these movies and make them for whatever resources we can muster in the best way we can. Thus it always was and shall forever be. The risk is great. But the reward of boldness is greater.
Written by Craig Hammill. Founder and Programmer of Secret Movie Club.