Do movies matter? Mark Cousins thinks so. He outlines ten films that have left an indelible mark on the ways of the world.
I’ve just spent six years travelling around the world, to make a history of the movies – the first time this has been done in this way. It’s been an unforgettable odyssey. I’ve swapped jokes with Stanley Donen, who made Singin’ in the Rain, and went to a tiny village in West Bengal in India, where one of the greatest Indian films, Pather Panchali, was made. I’ve climbed to the Hollywood sign at dusk, wearing my kilt, and seen Paris afresh, through the eyes of the movies. In all this time, one question has been in my head. Do movies matter? Have they changed the world in any way?
Films have tweaked our sense of romance of course, but in many ways television has changed the world more than cinema – think of Michael Buerk’s BBC news reports that led to Live Aid. Yet at fascinating moments in film history, movies were at the right time in the right place, or so compelling, beautiful or true that they did actually change our lives. Here are the ones that did so. Together they make a surprising history of cinema.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION, 1915
This famous silent epic film by DW Griffith, is about two families, the Camerons in the South and the Stonemans from the North, during the American civil war. When the North wins, one of the southern sons becomes leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The film’s racism is famous, but what’s less well known is to what extent it actually changed history. In a key scene, the Cameron family is being attacked by black soldiers, but they’re rescued by the Klan. DW Griffith used Wagner music and fast editing to such stirring effect that the KKK, which had almost been disbanded in 1869, revived.
By the mid 1920s, because of The Birth of a Nation and other reasons, its membership was up to 4 million. In its early decades, cinema had changed the world in a way in which it could hardly be proud.
MALE AND FEMALE, 1919
But then came movie stars and, in particular, Gloria Swanson. Half forgotten now, she was a Hollywood star in Capital Letters. It wasn’t Swanson on her own who changed the world, but Swanson reflected in the mirror of her times. As Cari Beauchamp tells me in my film, in the 1910s and 1920s, people lived in bell jars. Most didn’t travel more than 100 miles from their homes. But at night they went to see a film like Male and Female, in which Cecil b Demille directed Swanson. She plays Lady Mary Lasenby, dressed in feathers and furs, a creature unlike any that most women had ever met. She travelled and sinned, and women projected their wanderlust, their explorer instincts, on to her. In one scene in this movie, Swanson lies down as a lion paws her. Freud would have had a field day. Films like Male and Female gave to the 20th century, images of decadent, adventurous women that changed women’s inner lives.
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