A History of the World Cinema, Part 1

Cinema turned 100 last year and the British, who believe in doing things properly, wanted to give the movies a present. But what can you possibly give the medium that has done it all?

“I hesitated for eight months because I couldn’t think of how to do it,” says Colin MacCabe of the British Film Institute. “The cinema is so enormous, so vast, how could you turn out something that would show its range?”

Then Florence Dauman, a Los Angeles-based producer, had a thought. “We had a meeting at the Chateau Marmont and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask great directors to make films about their own country’s film histories?’ ” And, just that quickly, the idea behind “The Century of Cinema” came into being.

While not all 18 of the projected episodes are finished, enough of this remarkable series is in the can to safely characterize it as a wide-ranging master class on the movies, an exciting, always idiosyncratic collection of personal essays that illustrate the notion that, as Edgar Reitz’s German film notes, “No other invention has so profoundly changed people’s dreams and their knowledge of the world.”

And though the films are intended mainly for video and then television release, 13 of them can be seen on the big screen in a rare open-to-the-public series at the Directors Guild of America starting Monday and extending through the end of July. The series is free but phone reservations are necessary.

Nothing about making these essays, which range in length from 52 minutes to nearly four hours, turned out to be simple. Raising money was always a problem, with key contributors running a wide gamut from Miramax (which has the American rights) to Saudi Arabia’s Prince Nawaf Bin Abdulaziz.

Just as much of a headache for co-executive producers MacCabe and Bob Last was what MacCabe calls “the most complicated rights clearance in history,” involving clips from about 2,000 films, so many that clearing them all for theatrical release was too daunting to even attempt.

As might be expected from a project this diverse, the quality of the finished films does vary. The longest effort, the 3-hour, 46-minute “A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” is a brilliant piece of work, enthralling, enlightening and just a little bit maddening, and several others, though not up to this level, are excellent as well. And, interestingly enough, all of them prove to be as much about the history of the countries in question as about the films produced.

This is especially true of the most accomplished film after Scorsese’s, “Cinema of Unease,” made by director-turned-actor-turned-director again Sam Neill. Potent enough to have been selected for the New York Film Festival, this study of cinema in New Zealand focuses on how a lovely island came to have “a uniquely strange and dark film industry.”

Used to feeling that “real movies came from overseas,” New Zealand produced travelogues almost exclusively until 1973, the year Britain, the nominal mother country, joined the Common Market. In need of a sense of who they were and feeling “abandoned and increasingly stupid,” New Zealanders, starting with Roger Donaldson’s 1977 “Sleeping Dogs,” turned their back on the picturesque and focused on the idea of a menacing land peopled by outsiders pushed too far by society. Neill’s literate examination of this transformation shows how much can be wittily packed into only 52 minutes.

Somewhat longer but done with as much intelligence and style is “Typically British,” made by top U.K. director Stephen Frears. He starts by recalling a quote from Francois Truffaut to the effect that there is “a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain,’ ” and then ripostes, with a tartness that typifies his approach, “Well, bollocks to Truffaut.”

Since so many of Britain’s directors, himself included, end up working for Hollywood, Frears goes there to conduct two sets of interviews that frame his selection of clips. Director Alexander Mackendrick (who has since died) and critic Gavin Lambert chat about the period from Alfred Hitchcock through the postwar Golden Age that, Frears archly notes, “people like me are frequently beaten up for failing to measure up to.”

The chat continues with Michael Apted and Alan Parker, key members of the next generation, who talk about the importance of television and the preeminence of director Ken Loach, who Apted pays tribute to by calling “Kes” “the best film in Britain since the war, respecting all our vanities.” Like many of the directors in the series, Frears ends up worrying if exporting films and directors is worth the inevitable loss of national individuality.

If these efforts are more or less conventional, the same cannot be said for what eternal rascal Jean-Luc Godard does with his country’s films. Co-directed with Anne-Marie Mieville, Godard’s essay refuses even to use the word “century,” instead calling itself “2 X 50 Years of French Cinema,” and starting with the question: “Why celebrate cinema? Isn’t it famous enough already?”

Centered around a hotel meeting between Godard and actor Michel Piccoli, president of France’s First Century of the Cinema Assn., “2 X 50” paradoxically focuses on how much French cinema people have forgotten. The hotel staff is quizzed, its members revealed as never having heard of “Grand Illusion” and thinking the only Becker worth remembering is Boris, not Jacques. Playful, original, infuriating, this is pure Godard and fun besides. “2 X 50” is being shown without English subtitles, but anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of French should have no difficulty with it.

Of all the works in the series, South Korean Jang Sun-Woo’s “The Cinema of the Road” covers the film and national history that is least known to Western audiences. And the director takes pains to tie the two together, devoting as much time to historic events such as the Donghak Peasants Revolt as to trends in filmmaking.

More well known are Japanese films, at least from 1950 on, and Nagisa Oshima’s “100 Years of Japanese Cinema” is fortunately at its best in dealing with the earlier years and directors like Sadao Yamanaka, dead in World War II at age 28, whose prewar “Humanity and Paper Balloons” looks exquisite even in clips. But when Oshima himself enters the story, the director has an unfortunate tendency to pay more attention to his own work than anyone else’s.

Scorsese, by contrast, prudently stops his massive opus when he himself enters the stage. More of a fanatical film buff than any other working American director, Scorsese generously puts his enormous knowledge at our disposal, creating an exceptional document crammed with a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and reflection. With clips from close to 100 films and interviews, both current and vintage, with more than a dozen directors, “A Personal Journey” is so dense with information that, long as it is, repeated viewings are helpful in taking it all in.

Co-directed by Michael Henry Wilson, expertly edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and produced by Florence Dauman, “A Personal Journey” is quintessentially personal as opposed to authoritative. It’s an unapologetically director-centric view of the film universe, with screenwriters, cinematographers and anyone else thoroughly neglected. And directors that are well-covered elsewhere, like Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, get scant notice here.

But, as Scorsese himself says, “I can’t be objective. I can only talk to you about what moves me.” Which means not so much the classics as obscure and intense little movies that no one but true believers ever gets to see. Like a delighted curator, Scorsese shows us “I Walk Alone,” a pivotal, almost unknown gangster film; the ethereal silent “Seventh Heaven”; and a dazzling tracking shot from Allan Dwan’s “Silver Lode,” a forgotten western with a smuggled-in anti-McCarthy message.

These films are not just mentioned, they are integrated into “A Personal Journey’s” eight chapters, with titles such as “The Director as Illusionist” and “The Director as Iconoclast,” all of which try to answer what Scorsese sees as the central dilemma of the movie business: “How do you survive the constant tug of war between commercial imperatives and personal expression? Do you end up with a split personality?”

Scorsese himself had something of a split personality while making this, working on it while shooting “Casino.” “In the long run,” he told co-director Wilson, “this will probably be more important than ‘Casino.’ ” More than that, “A Personal Journey” takes its place as one of the very few essential documentaries on the American film experience.

For those who can’t squeeze into the DGA, all of “The Century of Cinema” is scheduled to be released on Buena Vista Home Video by the end of the year, with a TV deal still to come. If it’s true that “film is a disease, it infects your bloodstream,” as Scorsese quotes Frank Capra saying, no one who’s stricken will want to miss this unique collection.

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‘The Century of Cinema’

Monday, at 7 and 9 p.m: “Typically British” (Britain).

Thursday, at 7 and 9:30 p.m.: “I Am Curious, Film” (Scandinavia) and “2 X 50 Years of French Cinema” (France).

June 4, at 7 p.m.: “A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” (United States).

June 7, at 7 and 9 p.m.: “Cinema of Tears” (Latin America).

June 24, at 7 and 9:30 p.m.: “Cinema of Unease” (New Zealand) and “Cinema of India” (India).

June 26, at 7 and 9:30 p.m.: “Irish Cinema--Ourselves Alone?” (Ireland) and “The Russian Idea” (Russia).

July 23, at 7 and 9:30 p.m.: “100 Years of Japanese Cinema” (Japan) and “Cinema of the Road” (Korea).

July 25, at 7 and 9:30 p.m.: “100 Years of Polish Cinema” (Poland) and “The Night of the Film-Makers” (Germany).

* The Directors Guild is located at 7920 Sunset Blvd., west of Fairfax. Admission and parking (entrance on Hayworth) are free. For reservations call (310) 289-5300.