A History of Films about Film: Part 2

History was made on 28 December 1895 in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Thirty-three people paid one franc each to watch the 10 short films projected with a Cinématographe by Auguste and Louis Lumière. In the process, they became the first paying audience to attend a motion picture show and, to mark the 125th anniversary of what has since been hailed as the 'birth of cinema', Cinema Paradiso celebrates with a two-part survey of films about film.

Crews Control

Several films have centred on the dynamic during a shoot between the cast and the crew. In the studio era, actors, directors and technicians often worked together on a regular basis. But the changing face of Hollywood film-making means that runaway productions often use crews that have either been recruited by a producing partner or are based at an overseas facility. Fading idol Victor Mature accepts the shortcomings of the crew assembled by Peter Sellers in Vittorio De Sica's After the Fox (1966), although he has no idea that they are actually crooks hoping to use a bogus movie shoot to get their hands on the smuggled gold bullion waiting off the Italian coast.

The famous Cinecittà studio and Capri provide the setting for Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963), which sees Brigitte Bardot fall out of love with screenwriter Michel Piccoli when he obsesses over the script for The Odyssey, which Fritz Lang is set to direct for American producer, Jack Palance. Spain provides the setting for Rainer Werner Fassbider's Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), as the cast and crew indulge in some careless talk and sexual shenanigans while waiting for director Lou Castel and star Eddie Constantine to arrive and start shooting Patria O Muerte. Fellow German Wim Wenders remained on the Iberian peninsula for The State of Things (1982) and Lisbon Story (1994). The former sees Hollywood legend Samuel Fuller among those stranded on the set of a sci-fi thriller while director Patrick Bauchau heads off in search of funding, while the latter sees Bauchau reprise the role of Friedrich Monroe, as he goes missing from the film on which buddy Rudiger Vögler has agreed to work as a sound recordist.

Audio technician John Travolta's microphones keep picking up sounds he would rather not hear after a chance recording lands him in the middle of a political conspiracy in Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981). Working in an Italian dubbing studio on a giallo thriller, Toby Jones begins to lose touch with reality in Peter Strickland's darkly droll chiller, Berberian Sound Studio (2012). There's less to smile about when life and art start to overlap in Atom Egoyan's Ararat (2002), as director Charles Aznavour strives to make a film about the Van Resistance during the 1915 Armenian Genocide. However, Tony Mendez is eventually able to appreciate the grim ironies while leading a film crew into Iran in a bid to release the hostages being held after the Iranian Revolution in Ben Affleck's Argo (2012), which won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Unsurprisingly, the Academy is partial to stories about movie making. François Truffaut took the award for Best Foreign Film for Day for Night (1973), in which the French auteur also plays a director with a hearing problem, who relies heavily on script clerk Nathalie Baye to cope with neurotic star Jean-Pierre Léaud, Italian diva Valentina Cortese and scandal-hit Anglo ingénue Jacqueline Bisset on the set of Meet Pamela.

Chaos also reigns during the production of Steve Buscemi's low-budget indie, thanks to the preening of leading man James LeGros and the incompetence of cinematographer Dermot Mulroney. Tom DiCillo got the idea for Living in Oblivion (1993) while making Johnny Suede with a relatively unknown Brad Pitt, who was about to become a star through Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise (both 1991), which remains the last instance of two performers in the same film being nominated in the Best Actor or Actress categories at the Academy Awards. Unfortunately, Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis would cancel each other out, but other factors keep mitigating against Catherine O'Hara, Harry Shearer and Parker Posey when rumours start circulating about their possible nominations for Home For Thanksgiving in Christopher Guest's hilarious hype comedy, For Your Consideration (2006).

Although Carl Denham, Ann Darrow and Jack Driscoll head to Skull Island to make a film, neither Robert Armstrong, Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot nor Jack Black, Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody ever get to shoot a scene, thanks to the eponymous simian interloper in Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper's King Kong (1933) and Peter Jackson's 2005 remake. Watts is no stranger to films about film, as she took the title role of the Australian actress struggling to make an impact in Hollywood (despite the efforts of agent Chevy Chase) in Scott Coffey's Ellie Parker (2005) before reuniting with Laura Harring to voice Suzie and Jane Rabbit in David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006), which sees actress Laura Dern discover that she's working on a remake of a Polish film that was abandoned because of a tragedy. Dark shadows are also cast over Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2011), which sees aspiring actress Watts try to help amnesiac Laura Harring piece together her past.

A number of films have followed the fortunes of documentary crews, with Lone Scherfig's Their Finest (2016) celebrating the efforts of the Ministry of Information units that did their bit to boost morale and inform the public during the Second World War. Peacetime allowed film-makers to return to the continent, but director Robert Newton and extra buddy Dennis Price have a hidden purpose when they check into an Italian ski lodge in David MacDonald's Snowbound (1948).

A chilly reception is also accorded to CIA agents Matthew Johnson and Owen Williams when they pose as documentary makers in order to investigate a potential Soviet infiltration of NASA in the Johnson-directed Operation Avalanche (2016), which is set in the same year that Jim McBride transformed the way in which filmic truth was perceived with David Holzman's Diary (1967), which stars L.M. Kit Carson as a film buff who hopes to gain insight into his life by recording it.

Nobody had thought of making 'found footage' features at this time, but an excursions to an exotic location helped set the ball rolling, as documentarist Robert Kerman goes in search of a missing crew in the South American rainforest in Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which remains one of the most infamous of the so-called 'video nasties'. However, Luis Llosa's tongie is firmly in his cheek, as he accompanies docu-makers Eric Stoltz and Jennifer Lopez into the same jungle in their bid to find the lost Shirishama tribe in Anaconda (1997).

Oceanographer Bill Murray vows to hunt down the jaguar shark that had killed his diver friend during the making of their latest underwater documentary in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004), which knowingly lampoons such Jacques-Yves Cousteau actualities as The Silent World (1956), which had been co-directed by Louis Malle and had won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. David Amito and Michael Laicini further spoof the form in Antrum (2018), which examines the myth of a supposedly cursed 1979 film from Bulgaria.

Rémy Belvaux took the parodic form into darker territory in Man Bites Dog (1992), as the director leads the documentary crew tailing Belgian serial killer Benoît Poelvoorde. Sharing pensées and spouting poetry, he's certainly more personable than Piers Cuthertson-Smyth (Alan Cumming), who virtually stalks Ginger, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Posh during a day in their life in Bob Spiers's Spice World (1997). Staying in London, the tone is much bleaker, as Tilda Swinton sets out to discover why Oxford crammer students Jamie Petrolini and Richard Elsey randomly murdered Egyptian chef Mohamed El-Sayed in a supposed SAS test mission in Luca Guadagnino's The Protagonists (1999).

The Los Angeles gay party scene fascinates film-maker Daniel Kucan in Dirk Shafer's Circuit (2001), while Christopher Denham and girlfriend Nicole Vicius join a cult to make a film exposing leader Brit Marling as a fraud in Zal Batmanglij's Sound of My Voice. Released by Disney the same year, Jeffrey Hornaday's Geek Charming (both 2011) shows how Sarah Hyland consents to letting Matt Prokop make a documentary about her, in the hope that it will boost her chances of becoming Blossom Queen. But teenage siblings Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould come to question the wisdom of getting to know estranged Pennsylvanian grandparents Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie by documenting their stay in M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit (2015).

Auteurs and Oughtas

Magician Georges Méliès had attended an afternoon preview of the Cinématographe on the day of the 1895 Lumière premiere and had quickly become convinced that moving images would be a grand addition to his act. In fact, he discovered he was as good a film-maker as he was an illusionist, as he perfected camera techniques that enabled him to make trick films and simple narratives. His most enduring outing is A Trip to the Moon (1902) and Cinema Paradiso users can seee his 1908 handcoloured remake, An Excurion to the Moon, on Volume Five of the delightful Retour de Flamme series. The equally ambitious Voyage a travers l'impossible (1908) can also be found on the BFI's Early Cinema: Pioneers and Primitives selection, which includes 13 Lumière titles.

The finest introduction to the Master of Montreuil is Jacques Meny's Méliès the Magician (1997), which includes such gems as The One-Man Band (1900). But the story didn't end happily, as Martin Scorsese's reveals in Hugo (2011), an adaptation of Brian Selznick's novel, The Invention ofHugoCabret, which is set in 1931 and centres on the discovery of a 12 year-old boy (Asa Butterfield) that the old man (Ben Kingsley) running the toy kiosk at Gare Montparnasse in Paris is none other than cinema's first genius. In addition to converting five of its 11 Oscar nominations, this lively fantasy also earned Scorsese the Golden Globe for Best Director.

Méliès would live long enough to see the novelty he had helped refine become a sophisticated artform, thanks to such elegant talkies as Max Ophüls's La Signora di tutti (1934), which uses flashbacks to follow the (mis) fortunes of suffering screen star Isa Miranda. This example of the so-called 'White Telephone' phase of Italian film-making hints at the mastery of the mise-en-scène technique of shooting in depth with a moving camera that would characterise such later Ophüls masterpieces as La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1951), Madame De. . . (1953) and Lola Montès (1955), which had a profound influence on the new waves of the 1960s and are all available from Cinema Paradiso in DVD and Blu-ray editions that do full justice to their exquisite visuals.

Among those under the Ophüls spell was Federico Fellini, who captured the pressures on a film director to create in 8½ (1963), a semi-autobiographical satire that explores how Marcello Mastroianni's tormented genius overcomes a bout of creative block. Daniel Day-Lewis would take over the role of Guido in Rob Marshall's musical remake, Nine (2009), which starred Mastroianni's frequent co-star, Sophia Loren, as Guido's mother.

Film-makers have often paid homage to the past in their pictures, with Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996) harking back to the silent era, as Hong Kong superstar Maggie Cheung prepares to play the role taken by Musidora in Louis Feuillade's crime epic, Les Vampires (1915), which came two years after the equally influential serial, Fantômas (1913). Indeed, Georges Franju acknowledged his debt to Feuillade in Judex (1963), a remake of a 1916 chapterplay of the same name that is available from Cinema Paradiso with Nuits rouges (1973), in which a master criminal known as 'The Man Without a Face' crosses swords with the Knights Templar.

Madrileño director Fernando Trueba examines cinema as a propaganda tool during the era of Europe's Fascist dictators in The Girl of Your Dreams (1988), which is set in 1938 and follows Penélope Cruz's troupe to Berlin to make a musical in both German and Spanish. Compatriot Pedro Almodóvar also has a habit of giving his pictures a film-making connection, with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), Bad Education (2004), Broken Embraces (2009) and Pain and Glory (2019) all being rooted in a screen milieu. Italian counterpart Nanni Moretti similarly fills his scenarios with cinema-related situations, most notably in DearDiary (1993), The Caiman (2006) and Mia Madre (2015).

The tentacles of the German film industry reached out across the continent under the Third Reich, as Rüdiger Suchsland explains in his grimly compelling documentary, Hitler's Hollywood (2017). However, Bertrand Tavernier narrows the focus to the Continental Film company that was imposed upon French cinema in Laissez-Passer (2002), which shows how screenwriter Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydès) and assistant director Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) strive to sneak subversive messages into films during the Nazi Occupation. Marcel Carné famously made Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) as an act of cinematic resistance under the noses of the Germans and this forms part of Tavernier's gloriously eclectic selection of the films that have shaped him and his homeland, A Journey Through French Cinema (2016).

Among the cited titles is Agnès Varda's Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962), which proved to be one of the key films of the nouvelle vague. Husband Jacques Demy was an equally influential director, with the Palme d'or-winning musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), impacting on Damien Chazelle's La La Land (2016), which also borrowed the studio lot device from David Butler's Doris Day vehicle, It's a Great Feeling (1949). Varda recreated Demy's formative years in the enchanting Jacquot de Nantes (1991), which remains one of the finest films about cine-obsession.

French cinema has frequently turned the focus on to events on the other side of the camera. Catherine Breillat, for example, drew on the problems she had encountered while filming a delicate scene in À ma soeur (2001) in Sex Is Comedy (2002), which shows Anne Parillaud trying to generate an on-set spark between antipathetic actors Grégoire Colin and Roxane Mesquida. More recently, Japanese maestro Hirokazu Kore-eda also tapped into this tradition with The Truth (2019), in which screenwriter Juliette Binoche takes exception to the revelations in actress mother Catherine Deneuve's memoir.

The fans also get overexcited in Guy Hamilton's The Mirror Crack'd (1980) when Marina Gregg (Elizabeth Taylor) and Lola Brewster (Kim Novak) come to St Mary Mead to make a big-budget Hollywood historical about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. However, Miss Jane Marple (Angela Lansbury) becomes more than an interested spectator when one of her neighbours is murdered. Agatha Christie may not be on a literary par with Laurence Sterne, but her novels have proved easier to bring to the screen than The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which keeps confounding Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and their fellow cast members in Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story (2005).

By contrast, it's Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece that makes life difficult for neophyte director Adrian Brody in Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). Few productions have been so hampered by events behind the scenes and Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe managed to make two documentaries about its genesis: Lost in La Mancha (2002) and He Dreams of Giants (2019). As Garth Jennings reveals in Son of Rambow (2007), however, even homemade movies can prove problematic, especially when the project that 1980s schoolboys Bill Milner and Will Poulter decide to enter into the Screen Test Young Film-Makers's Competition has been inspired by Ted Kotcheff's Vietnam actioner, Rambo: First Blood (1982).

The parodic elements are markedly more subtle in James Ivory's Bombay Talkie (1970), which follows British novelist Jennifer Kendall to Mumbai, where she becomes embroiled with Bollywood superstar Shashi Kapoor, his wife Aparna Sen and smitten screenwriter Zia Mohyeddin. Satire also combines with serious critique in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Camera Buff (1979), as Polish amateur Jerzy Stuhr comes under pressure from his wife, his boss and the local Communist Party chief after he starts making little films with the 8mm camera he had bought to make home movies of his newborn daughter. However, the ultimate arthouse proof that fact is consistently more peculiar than fiction comes from Abbas Kiarostami, who details in Close-Up (1990) how film buff Hossain Sabzian came to pass himself off as leading Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Things get even more complicated for Michelle Ehlen in the self-directed Butch Jamie (2009), when she is cast as a man in a movie and promptly falls for a straight crew member. More annoyingly, she keeps being upstaged by her bisexual roommate's cat, Howard, who has just landed a major commercial deal. Playing herself in Ari Folman's The Congress (2013), Robin Wright also comes to regret the contract that she signed at the suggestion of agent Harvey Keitel and mogul Danny Huston that gives the studio complete control over her digital image.

Harvey Keitel plays a director in another comeback saga, Paolo Sorrentino's Youth (2015), as he insists that age should be no barrier to making another movie with favourite star Jane Fonda, just as composer buddy Michael Caine is resisting all attempts to revive his masterpiece. Even more eager to commit their vision to celluloid are Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, whose attempts to make The Room (2003) - which has acquired the reputation of being one of the worst films ever made - are chronicled with knowing glee in The Disaster Artist (2017), in which director James Franco plays Wiseau alongside his brother, Dave.

Murderous Mavericks

Film history is strewn with anecdotes about martinets on the set. But focus-puller Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) takes things to extremes when he conducts a series of camera tests in an effort to photograph fear in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, which has become a British horror classic despite being panned by the press when it was released in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's equally ground-breaking Psycho (both 1960). The critics were also divided over Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a monochrome adaptation of Henry Farrell's novel that channelled the long-standing feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford into a landmark of Grande Dame Guignol, as actress sisters Jane and Blanche bicker over their heydays as a child star and a Hollywood diva.

The past also rears its ugly head in Norman J. Warren's Terror (1978), as director John Nolan comes to regret basing his latest picture on the showdown between one of his 17th-century ancestors and the witch named Mad Dolly who had beheaded her. Decapitation and hypnosis also shape proceedings in Lucio Fulci's A Cat in the Brain (1990), a dark treatise on the psychological impact of cinema, as the director plays a variation of himself as he is being haunted by the prospect that he has been murderously contaminated by the horrific visions he has concocted for the screen.

It's the image of a pig being slaughtered that tips aspiring teenage film-maker Arno Frisch over the edge in Michael Haneke's Benny's Video (1992), while the relationship between James Russo and Madonna in a movie entitled Mother of Mirrors puts director Harvey Keitel's marriage to Nancy Ferrara comes under strain as life and art begin to blur in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game (1993). He would return to the filmic milieu in Pasolini (2014), which chronicles the last day of Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini (Willem Dafoe), who has just scandalised the nation with his unflinching depiction of its Fascist past in Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

The horrors are all in the mind in Wes Craven's Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), or are they, as the director and Heather Langerkamp and Robert Englund, the stars of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), admit to being troubled by dreams of the film's bogeyman, Freddy Krueger. Craven would play more meta games in Scream 3 (2000), as the survivors of the original Ghostface murders, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Dewey Riley (David Arquette), learn about the slayings going on around the set of the exploitation movie, Stab 3. In John Ottman's Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000), a killer in a fencing mask stalks the campus and makes life difficult for film student Jennifer Morrison, as she tries to complete her thesis assignment.

Deaths are not confined to the sets of horror movies, however, as Nina Hartley discovers when assistant director William H. Macy catches her fooling around with another man in Paul Thomas Anderson's blistering insight into the American porn industry, Boogie Nights (1997). Naive film student Michael Cunio becomes obsessed with porn star Scott Gurney and refuses to believe he is merely a straight man making a living in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's The Fluffer (2001). Having retired from porn, Srdan Todorovic is lured back in front of the camera in Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film (2010), only to discover that the serious drama he had been promised is a snuff movie with plenty of sinister sub-plots.

While he has often shocked audiences, John Waters had never gone to the extremes of this denunciation of 'the fascism of political correctness'. Indeed, the Pope of Trash is in a typically playful mood in Cecil B. Demented (2000), which sees the Sprocket Hole fans of cult director Stephen Dorff kidnap Hollywood star Melanie Griffith for his next sick exercise. Director James D'Arcy has an even more fiendish plan in mind in Matthew Parkhill's Dot the I (2003), as he hires London-based Brazilian actor Gael Garcia Bernal to seduce fiancée Natalia Verbeke, who has no idea that her British beau is making an 'emotional snuff film'.

American bank investigator Michael Keaton proves quicker on the uptake when he realises that both the French criminal underworld and the Russian mafia have swept washed-up action star Michael Caines' latest assignment into their turf war in John Mackenzie's Quicksand (2003). The crew that decides to shoot a horror movie in an abandoned psychiatric hospital also gets to repent at leisure in Michael and Shawn Rasmussen's Dark Feed (2013), while Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim question the wisdom of relaunching a struggling shopping mall in order to repay the bank loan they had blown on making the three-minute short, Bonjour, Diamnd Jim!, in Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012).

Classmates Matthew Johnson and Owen Williams draw on Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) and Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich (1999) in producing a homemade movie that shows how a couple of victims avenge themselves on their bullies in Johnson's debut feature, The Dirties (2013). If the content of their first cut is a little strong, waitress-cum-actress Alexandra Essoe comes to question some of the things she allows herself to be subjected to while shooting The Silver Scream in Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer's Starry Eyes (2014). But Taissa Farmiga has no say in the matter in Todd Strauss-Schulson's The Final Girls (2015), when she attends an anniversary screening of Camp Bloodbath and not only gets sucked into the picture, but also has to team up with her actress mom Makin Akerman in order to get her back into the real world in one piece.

Such a predicament would just be in a day's work for Mike Coolwell (Mos Def) and Jerry McLean (Jack Black) in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (2007), after the latter manages to magnetise himself and wipe all of the VHS tapes in the New Jersey video store belonging to Horace Fletcher (Danny Glover). So, to keep him in business and keep the demolition crew away from his condemned premises, Mike and Jerry start churning out DIY versions of such classics as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991), Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters (1984), Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future (1985), Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987), Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff's The Lion King (1994), and Brett Ratner's Rush Hour (1998) - all of which are available from Cinema Paradiso on high-quality DVD and Blu-ray editions that come with the guarantee that you won't have to remake them in the unlikely event of an accidental sweding.