(industrial music)
- "Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory"
was the very first motion picture ever to be screened.
Shot by brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere in 1895,
the movie is just what its title suggests:
47 seconds of black-and-white footage
capturing factory employees leaving work for the day.
Pretty exciting.
To get from workers leaving a factory
to astronauts spinning in space
took the vision and creativity of a whole slew of engineers,
inventors, cinematographers, directors,
screenwriters and actors.
And here are four films that changed filmmaking.
Who says propaganda is a bad thing?
This little piece of cinema history
was created to pay tribute to early Russian revolutionaries,
but what it did was it wound up overthrowing
the way dramatic films were made altogether.
The silent movie tells the tale of a 1905 uprising
in which Russian sailors thwart tyranny aboard a ship,
only to be laid to waste when heavy-handed bad guys,
in this case Cossacks, come looking for retribution.
The story unfolds in five acts.
"The Odessa Steps" is easily the most notable of the five,
hailed by filmmakers, scholars, and movie buffs
as an important breakthrough in the art of editing.
Sergei Eisenstein was one
of the very first directors to use montage,
editing a series of shots into one sequence
as he captured the climactic destruction that occurs
when the Cossacks invade the town,
weaving together the fates of various townspeople
and one very unlucky baby in a carriage.
And that scene was reprised very famously
in 1987's "The Untouchables," as well as many other movies.
Very famous scene.
"Battleship Potemkin" was banned in several countries,
including, ironically, the Soviet Union
in the Stalinist era.
Joseph Stalin feared it might incite a riot
against his repressive regime.
He may have been right.
♫ Toot, toot, Tootsie, goodbye
♫ Toot, toot, Tootsie, don't cry ♫
"The Jazz Singer" was the first film
to break cinema's sound barrier,
charting new ground by adding spoken dialogue
to a movie production.
That breakthrough was good enough to earn the movie
the first honorary Academy Award for Technical Achievement.
Warner Bros. Studios used what was then
a spanking-new technology called the Vitaphone.
The sound-on-disc system required a projectionist
to sync film reels to a phonograph record
to play recorded dialogue and tunes, and it actually worked.
It was an unsteady but very important first step.
"The Vitaphoned songs and some dialogue
"have been introduced most adroitly."
This is what was said by a New York Times reporter
in 1927 when reviewing the film.
"This in itself is an ambitious move,
"for in the expression of song
"the Vitaphone vitalizes the production enormously."
See what he did there?
Although Vitaphone and similar technologies
were soon replaced by sound on film,
which was a pretty good idea,
it continued to be used for "Looney Tunes"
and other cartoon pictures throughout the 1940s.
If you haven't seen Baz Luhrmann's flashy interpretation
of "The Great Gatsby," don't do it.
Instead, spend a couple of hours with "Citizen Kane," right?
A more gratifying story of the perils of the American dream
that was loosely based on the Gatsby book.
Often at the top of the list for the best movie ever made,
Citizen Kane tells the story
of a publishing tycoon's ill-fated quest for glory.
Also, something about a rosebud.
Written by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz,
the movie's central figure is an approximation
of real-life media giant William Randolph Hearst.
Welles also directed and stars in the cinematic masterpiece
that set the bar for movies a couple of notches higher.
It embraced a time-distorted narrative
that used lighting to capture mood
and relied on deep focus shots
in which the entire frame of each shot
remains in focus at all times
to let viewers search the screen
for the answer to the Rosebud riddle.
Pretty ingenious.
My hat is off to you, sir.
- [Woman] New York Herald-Tribune!
New York Herald-Tribune!
(man speaking French)
- Disciples of film, auteurs like Wes Anderson
and Quentin Tarantino, might want to spend some time
paying their respects to Jean-Luc Godard
and Francois Truffaut.
These titans of the French New Wave
set the course for their American offspring
with a smattering of self-aware films
that used new techniques to tell old stories.
The French New Wave has influenced
all filmmakers who have worked since,
whether they saw the films or not.
And this is what Martin Scorsese once said:
"It submerged cinema like a tidal wave." (whistles)
The centerpiece of the New Wave movement,
"Breathless" is best-known among cinephiles
for its extensive use of jump cut editing.
Director Godard used multiple shots of the same subject
from slightly different angles
to express the passage of time.
The technique also gives the film
an edgy jagged feel, as Godard tells the story of an outlaw,
played by Jean-Paul Belmondo,
and his love interest, Jean Seberg, on the move.
Jump cuts have since become a regularly-used way
to build tension in cinema.
Gangster movie fans might recall
that Scorsese employed the very same technique
in the closing scene of "Goodfellas,"
as the cocaine-addled Henry Hill drives around Brooklyn
and the cops closing in by helicopter.
Great scene, great use of jump cuts.
Italian film icon Federico Fellini
weaves the maybe autobiographical story
of a harried director who's having some trouble
getting his latest project on course
through a series of surreal dream, fantasy,
and present-day scenes that blend one into another,
leaving the viewers that task
for sorting out which is which.
"8 1/2" opens with a dream sequence
that includes director Guido stuck in impenetrable traffic,
struggling to get out of his car,
and then floating toward the clouds
before being pulled back down to Earth
by a rope tied to his ankle.
Guido is going everywhere in his mind
while his film project chases its own tail.
I'd say it's probably autobiographical.
The title of the film, by the way,
comes from the fact that it was the eighth-and-a-half film
that Fellini had directed or co-directed.
It opened the door for generations
of surrealist moviemakers,
including no less than David Lynch,
Terry Gilliam,
Darren Aronofsky,
and Michel Gondry.
So, maybe if you're bored on a Friday night,
try following "8 1/2" with Aronofsky's "Black Swan,"
or maybe Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,"
and you'll really be able to see the influence there.
If you wanna learn more, you can go to howstuffworks.com
and see the whole list of 10,
or you can listen to our podcast, Stuff You Should Know,
'cause we actually did a show
on these 10 films that changed filmmaking.
Let us know in the comments.