>> Speaker 1: Maybe you wanna learn about movies, broaden your horizons,
discover a new taste, or kick ass at bar trivia.
Either way, there's a whole new world of films out there, and
these are our picks of the ten most important film movements of all time.
[MUSIC]
Kicking us off at number ten we wanna start off by tipping our hats and
puffing our pipes at the filmmakers of the British Commonwealth.
But it's not for one of cinema's earliest movements from the Brighton School or
their dirty prison colony down under's new wave, which you can thank for Mad Max.
Instead, it's for their 1950s and 60s British new wave.
>> Speaker 2: We are right, left, and center.
After they've skinned you dry, you get called up to the army and
get shot to death.
>> Speaker 1: Now sure, British new wave might be one of the lesser new waves.
Is in a list filled with an infuriating amount of new waves.
Seriously, every film movement and its mother is called a new wave.
But it gave us a healthy dose of disillusionment, free cinema,
angry young men, and kitchen sink realism.
Now, those might just sound like words,
but they were actually pretty pretty important innovations in a less
conventional British cinema.
One that focused more on the realities of working class
daily life than the flights of unbelievable fancy that came before.
And if you're thinking to yourself, hey, I should check that out,
then we recommend Saturday night and Sunday morning.
And if to start.
Next up at number nine we're turning our eyes towards the Scandinavian province.
And as for movements there's been Swedish silent cinema where golden age greats like
Youstrom and Stiller left their impact before leaving for Hollywood.
The Phantom Carriage is a good starting point.
And you also may have heard of Dogme95, Thomas Vinterberg and
Lars von Trier's avant-garde movement that disavowed titles, lights, dollies, tricks,
and dishonesty.
Check out the celebration and the idiots to get started there.
However, our number 9 pick actually goes to the Scandinavian revival that took
place in the 40s and 50s.
>> Speaker 3: [FOREIGN] >> Speaker 4: [FOREIGN].
>> Speaker 3: [FOREIGN] >> Speaker 4: [FOREIGN]
>> Speaker 1: In Nazi occupied Denmark,
allied import bans led to an uptick in domestic film making and
while the rest of the world was churning out propaganda during.
In World War II, neutral Sweden banned it and made their own films instead.
So in the post war economy recovered Scandinavian film returned in full force.
Dark monochrome, slow and
a little bit mystical with old directors reborn like Carl Theodor Dreyer.
And newer talents emerging like Ingmar Bergman making films like Day of Wrath and
The Seventh Seal.
For number eight we've had enough of white people for now and
turn our attention to the east for Asian cinema movements.
But, of course, Asia is really freaking big and this list is pretty damn small so
unfortunately we're going to have to be a little bit reductive.
And honestly it has a whole lot more to do with gaps in our knowledge than any
lack of quality Asian cinema.
There was China's fifth generation, notable for our frequent favorite,
Emu Shang.
India's parallel cinema with Satyajit Ray.
Hong Kong new wave, South Korean new wave, Taiwan new wave and Iranian new wave.
Basically a whole metric sh- [BLEEP] ton of new waves.
Even Japan had a new wave.
But for our number eight pick,
we're actually giving it to Japan's golden age of cinema.
>> Speaker 5: [FOREIGN] [FOREIGN] >> Speaker 1: Basically,
a little while after World War II, America finally left Japan unoccupied and
uncensored and so a bunch of super bored and super propaganda Japanese directors
unleashed all their creativity all at once.
Won a bunch of film festivals and became a big deal.
Big three, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and
Yasujiro Ozu all made their films wildly different.
Kurosawa cut his like a Western, Ozu cut his like a maverick, and
Mizoguchi hardly cut at all.
But they somehow fit together, which is what makes them great.
If you're a newbie to Japanese film, start with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.
If you're looking for something a little slower, more artsy and different,
go with Ozu's Tokyo Story.
First, a little recognition.
There's always been some healthy geographic cross-pollination in film
movements.
Movements ripple in both cause and effect well beyond security checkpoints.
For most of this list, we're looking at film movement lines drawn along country
borders, and, often, this is appropriate.
The avant-garde tends to have regional thrust, but occasionally it doesn't.
And we're boxed into a cultural shortsightedness when film scholarship is
more provincial than film authorship.
The direct cinema, cinema verite documentary movement
radically changed the face of non-fiction filmmaking worldwide and
surrealist cinema moved across the entire face of the earth.
But for our number seven pick, we're giving it to the new queer cinema,
a film movement that embraced gender and sexuality as socially constructed
objects uniting queer friendly independent filmmakers across the world.
>> Speaker 6: Get off the floor.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Speaker 6: And learn it and
learn it well.
>> Speaker 1: The movement pushed acceptance of LGBTQ themes
up from the depths of art house into the mainstream.
>From Paris is Burning, Mala Noche, and
Go Fish all the way up to Brokeback Mountain and Milk.
Next up at number six,
we think it's important that everybody learn a little bit about third cinema.
[MUSIC]
Now, a first cinema is for commercial gain and second cinema is for the sake of art.
Third cinema was conceived of as a form of revolution.
Staunchly anti-colonial in countries of the Third World,
third cinema was conceived of in Latin America in the 50s and 60s to raise
political awareness amongst the oppressed amidst a heavily censored landscape.
Now, this means that state funding and
multiplex exhibition were out of the question.
So third cinema was guerrilla through and through.
They raised money from unusual sources,
shot their films swapping rolls like free loving hippie collectives.
And showed their finished work at renegade folding chair screenings in the ruralest
of areas.
Latin America has had a number of noteworthy movements that have tended
towards revolutionary.
Brazil's Cinema Novo, Argentina's Grupo Cine Liberacion and
Cuban revolutionary cinema.
But their most political of aspirations found shelter under the umbrella of
third cinema.
And it didn't stop there.
Third cinema's rebel yell has echoed across all continents where colonialism
was a problem.
>From South America to Africa to Asia, and even back to Europe.
Check out the Hour of the Furnaces for the documentary that set it all off in Xala
for a Senagalese narrative that shows how far reaching this movement really was.
Flying back to Europe for our number five, we're taking a look at Italy.
In film movement wise that maybe could have been Italian futurism,
if most of the films hadn't been lost, or
it might've been the Italian new wave that debuted Pasolini and Debuluchi.
However, it's hard to find a more important Italian movement than its famous
post-war neorealism.
>> Speaker 7: [FOREIGN] >> Speaker 1: After World War II,
are you seeing a trend here?
With their official film studios all but
destroyed, neorealist filmmakers moved to the streets.
Polished studio dramas gave way to on location stories filled with lower class
non actors struggling to go about their normal lives in the shadow of the war.
Its bleak honesty shook audiences up and injected a dose of grit into a film world
filled with wish fulfillment and leftover propaganda braggadocio.
Almost everybody recommends De Sica's Bicycle Thieves to start,
and they're right.
There's hardly a better introduction.
Next up in number four, we're turning our eye to Germany.
And while we're sure everyone would be thrilled if we decided to honor the Nazi
era propaganda films, we're gonna skip it.
Instead we could look to new German cinema an avant-garde movement than most notably
gave us film makers like Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
However, we wanna look back a bit further to Germany's
first moment in the cinema spotlight with German Expressionism.
You might know the movement from its really shadowy movies, with a set
designer who either had a severe case of vertigo, or was very, very, drunk.
Of course, the set designer didn't have vertigo, and
he only might have been drunk.
Because expressionism was all about saying [BLEEP] you to reality, and
finding a new mode of expression to grapple with art and honesty in the midst
of modernity and the aftermath of World War I and all its horrors.
The goal was to make the inner outer,
to render the invisible visible by throwing it on screen.
All exaggerated and in shape and color, and emotion, and
forcing us to look at it laid bare, and if that sounds interesting to you,
you might wanna check out Wiene's Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and
Murnau's Nosferatu for a crash course in expressionism.
[SOUND] Next up at number three, we're turning our eyes towards Eastern Europe,
so we got Romanian New Wave, the Czech New Wave and the Polish School.
Of course, the Socialist Realism that they were rebelling against
was a worthy movement in its own right, if heavily mired in propaganda.
However, for our number three pick, we're giving it to the Soviet Montage movement,
headed by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov.
Sure they all had different approaches to it.
But the Soviet montage school of thought identified cutting as the one thing that
made films special and unique from every other art form.
And took that idea and ran with it creating entire doctrines of film making
around the brilliance of the cut.
And while they may have been a little hyper focused on it,
their innovations in editing inform almost every cut today, whether we know it or
not, so give it a try.
Check out Eisenstein's Strike and Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera for
your Soviet montage primer.
[MUSIC]
Moving in at number two, we can't forget about the movements of America.
Sure, Hollywood's pretty obvious, but we can't ignore its massive influences.
There's been new wave films starring Jim Jarmusch,
Mumblecore starring Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers, and
the LA Rebellion School starring Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima.
There was the age of the movie brats,
well educated film makers like Spielberg Coppola,
who sublimated their eclectic global taste into the classic Hollywood style.
And there's also been post-classical Hollywood,
which saw an incredible infiltration of European new wave styles into the American
mainstream in breach of classic Hollywood style.
But if you're noticing the common theme,
most of these styles are created in opposition to something.
And that something is the Classical Hollywood continuity style that formed
during our number two pick, the Golden Age of Hollywood.
>> Speaker 8: Well, Rick, you're not only a sentimentalist but
you've become a patriot.
>> Speaker 9: Not even but it seemed like a good time to start.
>> Speaker 8: I think perhaps you're right.
>> Speaker 1: Thanks to a continually war-ravaged Europe,
the American film industry remained relatively unscathed and
a popular destination for refugee filmmakers.
As a result, Hollywood was uniquely positioned to dominate the market and
create one of the most enduring modes of filmmaking ever, invisible film making.
You're probably already very familiar with Golden Age films, but
if you need a starter kit you can't go wrong with Casablanca, Stagecoach, and Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington.
And finally, closing us out at number one, how could we forget the French?
Now, France has had a whole lot of official film movements and
sure that's probably because they've had a very active film industry with close ties
between academia, criticism, the art house, and the mainstream.
But we like to think it also has something to do with the fact that they just enjoy
grouping things together and naming movements.
And as for movements, [SOUND], they've had French impressionism, poetic realism,
French new look, and the new French extremity.
I mean they're definitely really good at coming up with movement names.
But for our number one pick could it be anything other then the Nouvelle Vague?
>> Speaker 10: [FOREIGN] [SOUND]
>> Speaker 1: In a world where movies were
made by teams at big studios, using the same stars, and
the same formulas and emphasis was put on commercializing a product,
instead of exploring an art, the new wave was a dramatic reaction.
Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Rivette, basically a bunch of
film lovers with a magazine, burst onto the scene with some dramatic ideas.
Films should express the truth, not pander to viewers.
Films should be made by an auteur, not a committee.
It should be complex instead of spoon fed.
A movie should be a kick in the pants, not a lazy escape.
They broke rules.
They asked us the big questions and showed us the mundane.
They jumped their cuts, tracked their shots,
improvised their dialogue, addressed the camera directly and ruined the illusion.
Start with Goddard's Breathless and Truffaut's 400 Blows and
then just get lost in it because the movement was massive, international,
and has had a bigger impact than you can ever imagine,
which is why we think it's the most important film movement of all time.
So what do you think?
We know we just skimmed the surface but do you want another list that goes over some
of the hidden gems we honorably mention here?
Hit like and leave a comment to let us know and
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>> [SOUND]