News flash: the world’s a big place. WHAT!?!?!
Huh!
And humans have been making films in almost every corner of it for more than a hundred years.
While Hollywood dominated the global film market in its first six or seven decades,
lots of profoundly influential film movements arose all over the world.
Now, there’s way too much to cover in just two videos.
But, hopefully, these overviews will inspire you to explore more on your own.
To start, let’s look at a few key movements and filmmakers throughout Asia that were born
out of intense political change and had a lasting impact on world cinema.
[Intro Music Plays]
During the 1930s, the Japanese government
placed stringent controls over domestic film production through its Ministry of Propaganda.
They censored content that didn’t uphold the values of the Imperial government, and
promoted movies that celebrated the Japanese military.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Ministry of Propaganda borrowed a page from the Nazi
playbook and actually took over the country’s ten largest film studios.
Then, they consolidated these studios into two main production companies and forced them
to make pro-war movies.
Now, real battle footage from the Pacific was hard to come by, so these wartime Japanese
filmmakers got really good at creating special effects.
And that experience would come in handy after the war, when they were given more artistic freedom.
Yasujiro Ozu is widely acknowledged as one of the masters of classical Japanese
cinema, a period that stretched from 1926 to the 1950s.
Ozu began his career making quiet, humanistic films about family relationships and intergenerational conflicts.
He grew up admiring American studio films, especially those by Ernst Lubitsch and D.W. Griffith.
Ozu’s first film to achieve wide acclaim was a comedy called I Was Born, But….
The film follows a pair of brothers who lose faith in their father when they discover he’s
not standing up to his boss.
A lot of Ozu movies embed this kind of gentle social critique into their very personal stories.
Aesthetically, Ozu is known for his long, wide shots that allow entire scenes to play
out, sometimes very slowly.
This is often considered to be a reflection of the power of ritual in traditional Japanese life.
He also innovated the use of offscreen space, having characters exit the frame for surprisingly
long periods of time, and letting the camera linger on the now-empty space.
These moments echo certain Zen aesthetics about emptiness and patience.
And they root Ozu’s films in ancient Japanese customs and beliefs, even though his stories
take place in what was then the present day.
After the war, Ozu went on to make three masterpieces: Late Spring, Early Summer, and his most famous
film, Tokyo Story.
Now, the end of the war brought profound changes to the Japanese film industry.
Much of the country was scarred, both physically and psychologically, having suffered a massive
firebombing campaign and atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One kind of postwar Japanese cinema dealt with the aftermath of these atomic bombs in
very direct, explicit ways.
It’s impossible to watch Ishiro Honda’s 1954 film Godzilla and not see the parable
underneath the sci-fi monster movie.
...and also not try to mimic Godzilla's noise.
Craig: ahhhh... ahhhh Nick: You're not doing a very good job.
No, I'm not doing a very good job.
The creature is unleashed by careless atomic
explosions, and the human characters spend the movie wrestling with the potentially apocalyptic
consequences of scientific research.
Godzilla and its sequels also show off the sophistication of the Japanese special effects
industry, as all that work during the war was now beginning to pay off.
After the war, General Douglas MacArthur led the American Occupation forces which oversaw
the “democratization” of Japan from 1945 to 1952.
And this brought a new kind of censorship to Japanese films.
They were forbidden from glorifying imperialism, feudalism, and militarism.
The Occupation forces rounded up and destroyed hundreds of films that were deemed anti-democratic.
Under the Occupation, the state-run film companies were broken up to foster competition, and
filmmakers were encouraged to make movies that celebrated democratic values
and personal freedoms.
One filmmaker who flourished in this postwar period was Akira Kurosawa, who would go on
to become one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.
For real. He's a big deal.
Kurosawa became an international star with his 1951 revolutionary film Rashomon.
It tells the story of the murder of a samurai warrior through the eyes of four unreliable
narrators.
We see the events of the film four times, each time from a different point of view.
And the film never tells us which version of events actually happened.
Kurosawa seems to imply that truth and reality are subjective, in both cinema and life, and
that our only hope is to be as good to one another as we possibly can.
YA, NICK!
Unlike Ozu, Kurosawa kept his camera moving,
a style he would bring to many of his later samurai films.
And he was often borrowing stories from other cultures.
His samurai movie Yojimbo was based on an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammett.
Throne of Blood was a Japanese re-telling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
And he used King Lear as the basis for his samurai epic Ran.
In turn, Kurosawa inspired many foreign films based on his work.
George Lucas famously lifted elements of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress for the first
Star Wars film.
And Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai has been remade twice in the United States
as The Magnificent Seven.
I guess that makes it the "Magnificent Fourteen." *giggle*
From anime to horror and period dramas to Kaiju films, stories from the Japanese movie
industry continue to resonate around the globe.
Now, in mainland China, the film industry also underwent some significant changes because
of political pressures.
The first domestic films emerged in 1905.
And within five years, a stable industry began to form, starting in Shanghai and spreading
to other coastal cities.
Sound was introduced in 1929 and China’s film industry continued to grow, until the
Japanese invaded in 1937, occupied Shanghai, and shut down domestic production until the
end of the war.
When Mao Zedong’s Communist Party took over the country in 1949, they placed control of
film production under the Minister of Culture.
During the 1950s, the Chinese government built a dozen major film studios throughout the
country and produced a lot of pro-Communist films.
In the early 1960s, the government censors relaxed enough to allow film adaptations of
several operas and novels.
Before this, works like Su Li’s Third Sister Liu and Early Spring in February by Xie Tieli
would have been considered too bourgeois to produce.
Then in 1966 came the Cultural Revolution, a violent, decade-long purge of most cultural
and economic institutions in China.
Professionals of all kinds, including filmmakers, were driven from their jobs and homes by the
Chinese government, and sent off to be “re-educated” in the countryside.
As a result, film production came to a halt in 1967 and wouldn’t resume for another
three years.
And even then, only amateur filmmakers were allowed to make movies at first.
Eventually, through fits and starts, professional filmmakers emerged from their re-education
camps or graduated from new film schools and began making movies again.
One of the most notable directors from mainland China is Zhang Yimou.
His first film, the sumptuously shot Red Sorghum, won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987.
Known for his striking visuals and painterly style, Zhang made several notable martial
arts films in the early 2000s – movies like Hero and House of Flying Daggers – before
overseeing the Opening Ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
Zhang has even worked with American movie stars.
Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe play lead roles in his 2017 film The Great Wall.
This collaboration may be the first of many, since well-financed Chinese production companies
have begun to partner with American studios to make films for audiences in both countries
and beyond.
Outside of mainland China, Hong Kong has a long tradition of kung fu and swordplay films.
I just kung fu'd the eagle.
Its film industry elevated these violent genres to art in the 1960s and ‘70s, through precisely
choreographed action and rapid editing.
Figures like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan popularized this authentic martial arts cinema outside
Hong Kong.
And directors like John Woo even went on to make blockbusters within the American studio
system – films like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II.
Wong Kar-wai is another superstar director from the Hong Kong film industry.
His elliptical, post-modern films often examine unrequited love and the deep interior lives
of their characters.
From the dreamlike lyricism of In the Mood for Love, to the martial arts grandeur of
The Grand Master, his films have had a profound influence on filmmakers throughout the world.
As big as China and Hong Kong loom on the world stage, the largest film industry in
the world is located in India.
All told, the country produces eight- to nine-hundred movies a year,
roughly a quarter of the world’s films.
So India had a growing film industry under British Colonial Rule in the early part of
the 20th century, prior to winning their independence.
They ran into trouble, though, when sound film arrived.
Because India makes films in more than sixteen languages!
When you hear the term Bollywood, for instance, that refers to film production centered in
Bombay.
These Hindi-language films make up 25 percent of Indian cinema.
Bengali-language film production occurs mostly in Calcutta, while facilities in Madras produce
Tamil-, Kannada-, and Telugu- language films.
Despite the language differences, what unifies most Indian films is their style.
Most Indian cinema consists of lavish musicals or mythological romances, all following relatively
strict formulas.
For the musicals, the saying goes, all you need is “a star, six songs, and three dances.”
The Indian star system actually resembles the American studio era of the 1930s.
Actors are chosen and groomed by the film studios, and plugged into movies built around
their personas.
Now, the most profitable movie ever produced in India is Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 film Sholay.
It’s an action-adventure film heavily influenced by Hollywood westerns, but also has its share
of over-the-top song-and-dance numbers.
The film was so popular when it was released that it ran continuously in movie theaters
for five years! I can't even hold a job for five years.
Meanwhile, the universally-acknowledged master
of Indian cinema was Satyajit Ray, whose style was different than most Indian films.
After studying as a painter, Ray found his filmmaking inspiration in Italian Neo-Realism,
especially Vittorio De Sica’s classic The Bicycle Thieves, the intimate story of a father
and son struggling to survive poverty in post-war Italy.
In 1955, Ray made his first film, The Song of the Road, which tells the story of a young
Bengali boy coming of age.
Unlike the spectacle of most Indian cinema, Ray’s film focuses on the emotions of its
fully-realized characters, and intimate moments of everyday life.
The film became a surprise international hit and won the Jury Prize at the 1956 Cannes
Film Festival.
In his next two films, 1957’s The Unvanquished and 1959’s The World of Apu, Ray continued
to follow the main character from his first film as he matured into adolescence.
These three films together are known as the “Apu Trilogy” and cemented Ray’s international
reputation and low-key, contemplative style.
Indian cinema is more than just fun Bollywood spectacle.
It’s a multifaceted film industry that, along with all these Asian film cultures,
has profoundly shaped modern filmmaking today and for generations to come.
Today, we talked about post-war Japanese cinema from Kurosawa’s samurai to Hondo’s Godzilla.
We scratched the surface of Chinese cinema, from mainland epics to the martial arts film
traditions of Hong Kong.
And we looked at India, home to the largest film industry in the world.
Next time, we’ll tackle indigenous cinema from Africa and Latin America, to maverick
filmmakers in the Middle East.
Crash Course Film History is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check out a playlist of their latest amazing shows,
like Eons, Coma Niddy, and PBS Space Time.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of these ministers of propaganda and our amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.