Hello, my name is Craig and this is Crash Course Film History.
Most movies that we watch are examples of
narrative filmmaking.
They’re works of fiction, and tell made-up
stories about invented characters.
Even films that are based on actual events
are carefully crafted stories that are made
to seem real or plausible.
But there are types of cinema that play by
entirely different rules... weird rules.
Experimental films reject the techniques and
goals of narrative filmmaking altogether,
aiming to evoke a specific mood, thought,
or emotion.
And documentary films may borrow from the
narrative techniques of fiction films, but
instead of inventing their stories and characters,
they seek them out in the real world.
These filmmaking styles both have their own
histories, methods, and major figures.
And they interact with the fictional narrative
movies we’re used to watching in interesting ways.
It’s time to jump into Experimental and Documentary films.
[Opening Music Plays]
We could easily spend an entire Crash Course
series on the history of either experimental
or documentary film.
There’s a long tradition of filmmakers using
cinema to achieve different goals than mainstream
narrative films, which are usually trying
to educate or entertain by telling a story.
Experimental film covers all kinds of movies,
from shorts and features, to films with vague
storylines and those that reject narrative
altogether.
No story, no setting, and no characters.
You’ll sometimes see experimental film referred
to as “avant-garde” or “vangarde” cinema.
Or, "That Weird Stuff."
Whatever you call it, it wasn’t until the
strict conventions of narrative fiction filmmaking
took hold in the early 20th century that experimental
cinema came into its own.
Because it deliberately opposes those conventions.
Audiences used to mainstream action movies
and rom-coms might feel confused or even frustrated
by non-narrative experimental cinema.
Some experimental films are trying to make
you feel uncomfortable, test your patience,
or push you to think more deeply.
Others might be profoundly beautiful abstractions,
intended to soothe you.
I like to think that I'm a profoundly beautiful abstraction intended to soothe you.
The thing that binds all these films together
is that they refuse to be bound by the typical
rules of telling a story.
The first major avant-garde movements in the
arts began to flourish in Europe in the 1920s,
just as narrative feature films were asserting
themselves
as the dominant commercial form of cinema.
At this time, a group of French filmmakers
inaugurated the Cinèma pur movement.
Their goal was to return film to its most
basic elements, which they saw as light and motion.
Filmmakers like René Clair, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp emerged
from the Dada art movement.
They viewed the rules of narrative storytelling
as tyrannical and bourgeois.
So instead of building their films around
characters involved in a plot, they focused
on images, trick shots, slow or fast motion,
and eventually music and sound.
René Clair’s 1924 film Entr'acte is 22
minutes long and comprised of disconnected
shots like people running in slow motion,
a cannon being fired, a ballet dancer shot
from below, and people disappearing.
The rhythm is beautiful, but there’s no
story in sight.
I think I had a dream like that once.
That same year, Fernand Lèger made the frenetic
short film Ballet Mécanique with co-director
Dudley Murphy.
Constructed of abstract images, either painted
or drawn, upside down shots, mechanical devices,
double-exposures, and more, the film explores
the relationship between art, design, and engineering.
Surrealism, another abstract art movement,
took a more whimsical and sometimes confrontational approach.
The Surrealists drew on dream-like imagery
that invites interpretation, but isn’t directly symbolic.
Their work aims to not have any literal meaning,
but still be moving, scary, beautiful, or absurd.
I like to think of myself as moving, scary, beautiful, or absurd.
Salvador Dali is probably the most famous
surrealist, and collaborated on a funny, disturbing
film with director Louis Buñuel.
Released in 1929, Un Chien Andalou is made
up of a series of scenes that seem to be about
a volatile relationship between a man and
a woman.
The film doesn’t make logical sense, and
yet it provokes a strong sense of wonder and dread.
Once you see it, you’ll never forget it.
I saw it, I remember.
Now, the 1940s saw the arrival of American
filmmaker Maya Deren who believed that film
was meant to create an experience, not tell
a story.
Her films Meshes of the Afternoon and Meditation
on Violence lull viewers into expecting a
story with some narrative film techniques,
only to move into abstract shots and cuts
that make it impossible to understand what
the heck is going on.
That’s because the point isn’t to understand the film, but rather to feel it.
And it just goes to show: without a steady
diet of mainstream narrative films, much of
the avant-garde wouldn’t work – we wouldn’t
have the expectations that Deren’s films subvert.
Hey Nick, can we do an experimental film where I repeatedly punch the eagle over and over again?
Nick: No.
Working from the 1950s to the 1980s, Stan
Brakhage is an acknowledged master of experimental
film and known for a kind of cinematic collage.
He found unusual techniques to create abstract
imagery, from physically painting or scratching
the film, to using multiple exposures and
rapid movement to mimic the
movement of the human eye.
And Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is perhaps the most widely known living experimental filmmaker.
Working in short films, features, and installation
art, Maddin refuses to be identified with
any particular style or theme.
In his hands, true experimental film continues
to thrive.
Many narrative filmmakers have drawn inspiration
from experimental film.
Before he made Luke, Han, and Vader, George
Lucas made his own politically charged avant-garde
shorts as a film student at USC.
David Lynch, the mind behind Blue Velvet and
Twin Peaks, borrows heavily from the experimental
film tradition.
Although his films are clearly telling stories,
they don’t seem interested in answering
their own questions.
They’re often about ambiguity, dream logic,
and the fine line between absurdity and violence.
Other narrative feature films skirt the edge
of experimental cinema – from E. Elias Merhige’s
horror movie Begotten and David Gordon Green’s
coming-of-age drama George Washington, to
Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience.
Just to name a few.
Now, you may not have seen many experimental
films, but chances are you’ve seen a few documentaries.
Documentary film is almost as broad a category
as experimental film.
Some documentaries rely on interviews, while
others use footage of actual events.
Some take a more abstract approach, and others
use narrative fiction techniques to recreate
past events.
Whatever its methods, a documentary is a work of non-fiction that aims to explore – or document –
some aspect of reality as accurately
as possible.
But it’s important to remember it’s still
a film told through the lens of a filmmaker,
and still an illusion of reality.
The very first films ever made were documentaries,
from Thomas Edison’s vaudeville acts to
the Lumière brothers’ slice-of-life shorts
and actualités.
And the first feature-length film known to
incorporate documentary techniques is Robert
Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North.
An exploration of the Arctic life of an Inuk
and his family, the film mixed fictional drama
with documentary footage long before that
was a popular – or even accepted – thing to do.
In fact, we didn’t even have the word “documentary”
until 1929, when Scottish filmmaker John Grierson
coined it to describe a work of non-fiction
filmmaking.
In 1932, Grierson wrote an essay called “First
Principles of Documentary” which argued
that the true power of cinema was in recording
and presenting real life,
rather than creating fictional stories.
And in the 1930s and ‘40s, documentary film
became a major force in news and propaganda.
Prior to television, newsreels often screened
before feature films, presenting documentary
footage of events from around the world.
Governments harnessed the power of documentary
film to sway public opinion.
One of the most famous examples is Leni Riefenstahl’s
1935 film Triumph of the Will.
Commissioned by Adolf Hitler, the film documented
the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg, Germany
in 1934, using actual footage, staged scenes,
and stirring music to convey a sense of power
and myth to the Third Reich.
The United States set about producing their
own documentaries in response,
like Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series, whichdrummed up support for the American war effort
in World War II.
In the post-war period from the 1950s to the
1970s, Cinema Verité came into fashion.
Rather than staging action like a narrative
film or employing a narrator to explain what
the audience was seeing, Cinema Verité put
you directly in the center of the action as
it unfolded.
Direct Cinema also emerged in these years.
Very similar to Cinema Verité, these deeply
personal films attempt to present reality
with as little commentary as possible, and
to consider the complex relationship between
cinema and truth.
Ross McElwee’s 1985 film Sherman’s March
is a great example.
What begins as a journey along the route of
General Sherman’s Army at the end of the
Civil War, becomes an examination of McElwee’s
inability to find a new romantic partner after
a bad break-up.
The availability of lighter, cheaper, easy-to-use
film equipment made these kinds of films possible,
just as they had for Italian Neo-Realism,
French New Wave, and the subsequent generations
of independent fiction filmmakers.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, documentaries flourished
on television, from nature documentaries on
the Discovery Channel to long form documentaries
like Ken Burns’ brilliant and comprehensive
9-part film Civil War.
These days, platforms like YouTube and Vimeo,
along with high-quality digital cameras and
editing software, make it possible to produce
and distribute documentaries extremely quickly.
Now, like experimental film, the documentary
tradition has influenced fiction films and
been influenced in return.
Mockumentaries use the visual and narrative
techniques of a documentary to tell a fictional story.
Usually to hilarious results... or horrifying.
Rob Reiner’s 1984 film This Is Spinal Tap
pokes fun at the self-serious rock documentaries
of its time.
One of its stars, Christopher Guest, has made
a career out of mockumentaries, from Waiting
for Guffman to Best in Show.
In 1999, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo
Sánchez used the mockumentary form to scare
the pants off a generation of filmgoers with
The Blair Witch Project.
Wait that wasn't real? Nick?
Nick: No.
It was real.
And Lake Mungo, a 2008 psychological
thriller from Australia, uses documentary
techniques like interviews to excavate the
story of a family coming to terms with their
daughter’s drowning.
Documentaries have long borrowed fiction film
techniques as well, to recreate scenes and
weave them in with interviews and strict documentary
footage.
Master documentarian Errol Morris made The
Thin Blue Line in 1988 about a man on death
row for a crime he didn’t commit.
His cinematic recreations of the crime launched
a wave of true-crime docu-series on television.
These days there’s no shortage of cinematic
documentaries – like the incredible visuals
of Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno, the
immersive 2015 film The Birth of Saké, and
the heartbreaking narrative of Fire at Sea,
which examines the 2016 European refugee crisis.
And in 2017, the sequel to the BBC’s astounding
Planet Earth series captivated audiences all over again.
Whether we see them on the big screen or a
small one, even today documentaries maintain
the power to inform, entertain, and move us
in profound ways.
Today we talked about the emergence of experimental
film as an alternative to mainstream narrative
fiction filmmaking.
We examined strategies that experimental films
use to convey meaning and evoke thoughts and emotions.
And we briefly discussed the history of documentary
films and how they have influenced – and
been influenced by – fiction films.
Next time, we’ll shift gears and look at
fiction film production, beginning with the
script and the screenwriter.
And you’ll be getting a new host, actress
and overall awesome human being, Lily Gladstone.
I guess this is goodbye, Beardlovers.
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, Blank on Blank, PBS Space Time, and Global Weirding with Katharine Hayhoe.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of these profoundly beautiful abstractions intended to soothe you and our
amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.
