CLAUDEDECK / VOL. IV / DECK 07
A field guide to cinema, from the brothers Lumière to the algorithm: silent era to streaming, auteurs and movements, in eighteen scenes.
KODAK 5219 · 500T · PUSH +1Auguste and Louis Lumière project ten short films at the Salon Indien du Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. Thirty-three paying customers, one franc each. The first film: La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Forty-six seconds. The third: L'Arrosseur Arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled). The first comedy.
Six weeks earlier, on November 1, the Skladanowsky brothers had projected films in Berlin. Edison's Kinetoscope had been showing in penny arcades since 1894. But the Lumière evening is taken as the public birthday of cinema because of who showed up the next day: Georges Méliès, the magician, who tried to buy a camera from the brothers and was told no — "this invention has no commercial future" — and went home and built one himself.
35MM · 4 PERFS · 24 FPS
"THE CINEMA HAS NO FUTURE." — LOUIS LUMIÈRE, 1895
SCENE 03 · THE SILENTS
Georges Méliès makes Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), the first science-fiction film. D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), three hours, twelve reels, racist epic that nonetheless invents most of the grammar of narrative film — close-up, cross-cutting, tracking shot. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) demonstrates that meaning lives between cuts: the Odessa Steps sequence, six minutes, 155 shots. F. W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) wins Best Unique and Artistic Picture at the first Academy Awards. Buster Keaton, deadpan, falls off buildings without rehearsal. Charlie Chaplin tramps. Greta Garbo arrives.
B&W · ORTHO · SILENTOctober 6, 1927. The Jazz Singer opens at the Warner Theatre in Manhattan. Al Jolson's first synchronized lines — ad-libbed — rip silent cinema apart in a single sentence. Within three years half of Hollywood has converted. Some great silent stars cannot survive the transition: John Gilbert's voice was thin, Pola Negri's accent too heavy. Some new ones arrive in the wave: James Cagney, the Marx Brothers, Mae West.
Sound brought new constraints — the camera, suddenly, was inside a soundproof booth, and could not move — and new freedoms. Rouben Mamoulian's Applause (1929) puts the microphone on a boom and lets it travel. Sergei Eisenstein writes a manifesto demanding that sound be used as counterpoint, not duplication. Most of his colleagues ignore him. By 1934 the Production Code is being enforced, and American cinema enters its strangest, most stylish, most repressed decade.
SCENE 05 · STUDIO SYSTEM
The year of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Ninotchka, The Rules of the Game (Renoir, in France). Probably the strongest single year of cinema ever produced.
The studio system — MGM, Warner Bros, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox — runs Hollywood like a factory. Stars are under contract; directors are workers; everyone shoots multiple films a year. The system breaks in 1948 (Paramount Decree) and ends, slowly, over the next 20 years.
TECHNICOLOR · 3-STRIP1954. François Truffaut, age 21, publishes "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema" in Cahiers du cinéma. He argues that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true author of a film. The auteur theory is born. He attacks the polished French "tradition of quality" and praises Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller. Andrew Sarris translates the idea into English in 1962. American film critics start ranking directors.
The young writers at Cahiers — Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette — pick up cameras themselves. The French New Wave begins with Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1960). Jump cuts; handheld; on the streets of Paris; written and shot in eight weeks. Cinema, suddenly, looks different.
EXT. PARIS STREET — DAY
A young man, MICHEL, runs from the police. He stops, lights a cigarette, looks straight at the camera.
MICHEL
If you don't like the sea, if you don't like the mountains, if you don't like the city — go hang yourself.
JUMP CUT. He is now in a hotel room. PATRICIA looks at him.
PATRICIA
What's that, a "louse"?
MICHEL
It's a real bitch.
After Godard · Breathless · 1960
SCENE 07 · FIVE NATIONAL CINEMAS
Italy. Italian Neorealism, 1945–52. Rossellini's Rome, Open City, De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), Visconti's La Terra Trema. Shot on real streets, with non-actors, on rationed film stock. The aftermath of fascism, photographed.
Japan. Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), shot from the height of a kneeling person on a tatami mat. Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), three hours, 207 days of shooting. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953).
India. Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy (1955–59), shot in rural Bengal on the smallest budget the medium has produced.
Sweden. Ingmar Bergman from Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) through The Seventh Seal (1957) to Persona (1966).
Iran. Forough Farrokhzad, Abbas Kiarostami, the Makhmalbafs — cinema as poetry, mostly without permits, often in a single take.
ARRI 35 BL · FUJI · HAND-HELD1967. Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde shocks American audiences with violence and irony in equal doses. Mike Nichols's The Graduate the same year does it with sex. Hollywood, in trouble at the box office, hands the keys to a generation of film-school graduates: Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas, Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Altman, Cassavetes.
The decade of The Godfather (1972), Mean Streets (1973), Chinatown (1974), Jaws (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), Apocalypse Now (1979). Then, in 1980, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate bankrupts United Artists; Star Wars (1977) had already changed the economics; the studio executives take back power, and the blockbuster era begins. The auteurs adjust. Some of them, like Cassavetes, never could.
SCENE 09 · KUBRICK
Stanley Kubrick made thirteen features in 46 years. He moved to England in 1962 and never came back. His shots are central, symmetrical, recessed; his tracks are slow; his actors do many, many takes. 2001 (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975, photographed by candlelight using NASA-derived f/0.7 lenses), The Shining (1980), Eyes Wide Shut (1999). He died six days after delivering the final cut of his last film.
Tony Zhou's Every Frame a Painting episode "Kubrick // One-Point Perspective" sums up the visual signature in 80 seconds. It has been viewed nine million times.
PANAVISION 65MM · STEADICAMYasujirō Ozu, low camera, static frame, the family drifting apart in seasons. Kenji Mizoguchi, fluid long takes through Japan's vanished neighbourhoods. Akira Kurosawa, dynamic cutting, Western-influenced epics that the Western then re-stole (The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, Star Wars).
Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000): two lonely neighbours pass each other on a Hong Kong stairwell, Christopher Doyle's camera turns each meeting into a slow-motion ache. Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness (1989), four families through Taiwan's twentieth century, in deep wide takes that ask you to wait. Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000) follows a Taipei family across one summer with surgical empathy.
South Korea's twenty-first century: Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019), the first non-English-language Best Picture winner. Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003) and Decision to Leave (2022). Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Tsai Ming-liang (Malaysia), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), and Jia Zhangke (mainland China), the slow-cinema masters of the twenty-first century.
SCENE 11 · THE CINEMATOGRAPHER
Gregg Toland on Citizen Kane (1941), inventing deep focus — everything from foreground to back wall sharp at once — by stopping the lens way down and lighting the room from miles away. Sven Nykvist on every Bergman film. Vittorio Storaro on Apocalypse Now and The Last Emperor. Robert Richardson on Stone, Tarantino, Scorsese. Roger Deakins, fourteen Oscar nominations before he finally won, for Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Hoyte van Hoytema (the Nolan films). Emmanuel Lubezki, the long-take poet of Children of Men, Birdman, The Revenant.
F35 · ZEISS MASTER PRIMES · T1.3SCENE 13 · ANIMATION
Walt Disney's Snow White (1937), the first feature-length cel animation, runs 83 minutes and required two million painted cells. Hayao Miyazaki founds Studio Ghibli in 1985 and produces My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001, the highest-grossing Japanese film ever and the only foreign-language Best Animated Oscar). Pixar's Toy Story (1995), the first fully computer-animated feature, grosses $373m. Hsu Chi-yi, Tomm Moore, Sylvain Chomet, Wes Anderson's stop-motion, Adam Elliot's claymation. Animation is not a children's medium. It hasn't been for a long time.
CEL · CGI · STOP-MOTION
The choice of what stays inside and what doesn't. Aspect ratio (1.33, 1.85, 2.39); lens height; the rule of thirds and its violations.
Where the actors stand and how they move within the frame. Welles's deep-staged compositions. Tarr's slow tracking. Wes Anderson's centred orthogonals.
Wide (18mm) gives space and distortion (Kubrick). Long (85mm+) flattens and isolates (Tarantino). Anamorphic (CinemaScope) gives oval bokeh and horizontal flares.
Photographic reference · widescreen still
SCENE 15 · THE EDIT
Lev Kuleshov, in a 1918 experiment, intercut the same shot of an actor's face with three different following shots: a bowl of soup, a coffin, a child. Audiences praised the actor's range: hunger, grief, love. The face had not changed. Meaning lives between shots.
Walter Murch on Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor for fifty years. Sally Menke for Tarantino. Anne V. Coates, who cut the most famous match-cut in cinema (Lawrence's match snuffed against the desert sunrise, Lawrence of Arabia, 1962). The cut is an argument the director is making with herself in the cutting room. Most of the work is invisible by design.
MOVIOLA · STEENBECK · AVID2007. Netflix begins streaming. By 2013 it produces House of Cards. By 2019 Roma (Cuarón) and The Irishman (Scorsese) are released by Netflix and nominated for Best Picture. The theatrical window collapses, then partially recovers. Apple TV, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, MUBI, Criterion Channel: each launches with a war chest, an algorithm, and a vault.
Cinema as a theatrical medium — communal, dark, fixed-length — survives in IMAX and arthouses, but most people now watch on a 12-inch screen at home. The aesthetic adjusts. Long takes risk being scrolled past. Bright wide shots may render as blurred postage stamps on a phone. Directors test for this: Christopher Nolan still mixes for IMAX, Lynne Ramsay still composes for the long stare.
The TV serial — The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Leftovers, Severance — has, arguably, become the form to which serious narrative cinema migrated in the 2000s and 2010s. Whether that counts as "cinema" is an argument for another reel.
SCENE 17 · LOOK AT NEXT
Every Frame a Painting · Tony Zhou's series · the gold standard of the form
Cinema is 130 years old. It has produced perhaps two million features. You will, in your life, watch about three thousand of them. Pick well.
The list every cinephile keeps in their head has Kane, Tokyo Story, Vertigo, 2001, Persona, Apocalypse Now, In the Mood for Love, A City of Sadness, Jeanne Dielman, The Tree of Life, Yi Yi, Mulholland Drive. Yours will differ. The pleasure is in the difference.
"Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame, and what's out." — Martin Scorsese