Notes
The following material is from Wikipedia.
1970s and Onwards: Innovation in Popular Culture – Around the World.
- The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959) dir. Li Han-hsiang
- feminine, studio set, colorful, musical
- A Touch of Zen (1971) dir. King Hu
- Hu changed Hong Kong cinema from feminine to fast, action packed, sword fighting themed cinema with this film
- “graceful, exquisitely engineered cinema”
- Kung Fu took over
- starts as an action movie, turns into a ghost movie
- action cinema at its most innovative
- Enter the Dragon (1973) dir. Robert Clouse
- Bruce Lee’s much more angry Kung Fu fighting style which stemmed from plot and his personal life
- introduced a bigger shift to masculinity
- camerawork patiently recorded the action, stayed out of the fight
- not much editing, steady and wide imagery
- A Better Tomorrow (1986) dir. John Woo
- male bonding, loyalty, betrayal
- new style of film: shootouts filmed with several cameras, “the aesthetic of the glance”
- Iron Monkey (1993) dir. Yuen Woo-ping
- fast cutting, numerous camera angles
- characters were in the air rather than the ground like Bruce Lee
- innovation impressed Hollywood once again
- The Matrix (1999) dir. Lilly Wachowski & Lana Wachowski
- influenced by Iron Monkey and Yuen
- Yuen took 4 months to train actors how to use their fists, none knew how to fight
- Once Upon a Time in China (1991) dir. Tsui Hark
- filmed extravagantly, very uniquely with extensive details
- made Hong Kong cinema spin
- New Dragon Gate Inn (1992) dir. Raymond Lee
- influenced by Tsui Hark
- Mughal-e-Azam (1960) dir. K. Asif
- Bollywood
- took more at the box office than the Sound of Music
- Devi (1960) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Satyajit Ray
- Mausam (1975) dir. Gulzar
- musical
- modern look influenced generation of women
- “joy of love and its pain”
- more glamour and accent on beauty and youth
- Zanjeer (1973) dir. Prakash Mehra
- uses zooms, freezes and close-ups to show and dramatize feelings of fear, rage, and realization
- main character was king of cinema at the time
- Sholay (1975) dir. Ramesh Sippy
- in country at time, youth was unhappy with the system
- innovative colossus of 70s cinema
- similar to an epic, landscape like a western, music like an action film
- captured the spirit of the times
- huge box office success
- similar to movies like magnificent 7
- The Message: The Story of Islam (1976) (a.k.a. Mohammad, Messenger of God) dir. Moustapha Akkad
- looked like a conventional biblical epic
- scene where man talks to camera, we expect reverse angle but it doesn’t come because he is talking to prophet Mohammad and Islam doesn’t allow the depiction of the prophet
- Akkad made two different version, one with Arabic actors and one with Western actors
- The Making of an Epic: Mohammad, Messenger of God (1976) dir. Geoffrey Helman & Christopher Penfold
- The Sparrow (1972) dir. Youssef Chahine
- account of when Egypt lost territory to Israel
- captures emotions and shock of citizen
- end scene with people marching the streets was one of most iconic scenes in Arab film history
- The Exorcist (1973) dir. William Friedkin
- marked the start of the era of the blockbuster
- “slapped horror cinema in the face with realism”
- voice of devil smoked cigarettes, swallowed raw eggs and drank to make her voice sound the way it did, extremely innovative vocal performance was the outcome
- A Guy Named Joe (1943) dir. Victor Fleming
- Spielberg was influenced by this film
- Jaws (1975) dir. Steven Spielberg
- both an establishment and an innovative film
- shot on water to get the affect of realism
- The Making of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1995) dir. Laurent Bouzereau
- spielberg talks about how he used people in bathing suits as transitions to make scenes feel seamless
- Vertigo (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) dir. Steven Spielberg
- technique where he films people looking at something, draws out those shots, then cuts to camera rising over what they are looking at
- Jurassic Park (1993) dir. Steven Spielberg
- uses same technique
- Star Wars (1977) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. George Lucas
- felt like a storybook film
- uses wide angle lenses to film spaceships to make them appear much bigger
- Luke dresses like a samurai, follows tropes of a knight
- most absurd plot so far in history
- The Hidden Fortress (1958) dir. Akira Kurosawa
- helped inspire Star wars: robots and fighting style
- Triumph of the Will (1935) (a.k.a. Triumph des Willens) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Leni Riefenstahl
- helped inspire Star Wars: shots of stormtroopers