The Epic: One of Cinema’s most difficult and rewarding genres by Craig Hammill

Yes, it’s 7 hours long. Yes, it’s brilliant.

It may be with some cheek that we write a short(ish) piece on the movie epic-one of cinema's most difficult and rewarding genres.

Where do you start? Where do you end?

We are even more perverse as to leave out some of the highest watermarks-2001, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, The Godfathers Pts 1 & 2-get no mention here (as much as we love them). They're so talked about as to risk becoming white noise.

The movie epic is endangered. It runs the risk of extinction. We can not let that happen. 

Because the movie epic is, in some ways, cinema's cathedrals. When you watch a great one, you can't believe such a thing could have been made.

Flawed but formally daring-a must for a true epic.

It stuns and confuses the mind. You are forced into a state of wonder. A movie epic reminds you that wonder is a real feeling.

A movie like D.W. Griffith's 1916 INTOLERANCE, one of the earliest, self-conscious epics, tells a number of stories across history, cross cut. It's most well known for its historic Babylon sets (constructed in Los Feliz where the Vista Theater now stands). But it's a key text because Griffith tried to do something as formally daring as the movie was extravagant in production design. The movie doesn't fully succeed. Interestingly, a more intimate Griffith movie, BROKEN BLOSSOMS, communicates the themes of intolerance with more clarity than the big bold INTOLERANCE does. But nevertheless, INTOLERANCE represents the bold daring a moviemaker must have to even think they can make an epic.

Other silent epics like John Ford's 1924 THE IRON HORSE or King Vidor's 1928 THE CROWD show a maturing understanding that the vista shot-thousands of extras, the battles, the huge cityscapes-works better if its counterpoint is the intimate close up. We need the intimate story of a few characters we can rush into close up on to make the "money shots" (literally, the shots that cost trans-Atlantic steamerships of money) resonate.

We get it, David. We get it.

For decades, 1939's Civil war and its aftermath epic GONE WITH THE WIND was held as the platinum standard of epics. My grandmother, GG, no matter the movie would often say "Well it was good but it was no GONE WITH THE WIND." Now the movie has turned problematic with its insensitive and shallow portraits of African-Americans while exulting a kind of "glory in defeat" of the Southern Confederacy. But we shouldn't "cancel" the movie because we would lose much more than we would gain. Our entire country celebrated the confederacy for decades. Congresspeople had portraits of Robert E. Lee in their offices. If we lose contact with "why" this kind of sentiment existed, we have no tools to enter into dialogue with it. The MAGA movement of today is the great-grandchild of the "lost cause" sentiment of the 1930's. 

Producer David O. Selznick tried to top his GONE WITH THE WIND with his 1946 DUEL IN THE SUN, a nutty movie about how a biracial woman (Jennifer Jones, Selznick's partner) and a murderous but sexy cowboy (Gregory Peck in one of his rare "bad guy" roles) can only express their lifelong lust for each other by killing each other. This technicolor riot of a movie that seems to explode with extras like the spring migration of dandelion spores was so transparent in its "lust in the dust" subtext that it inspired generations of subversive moviemakers from Martin Scorsese to Pedro Almodovar to Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The sacharrine may be seeping in but damn can David Lean make an epic.

The 1950's saw biblical epics as a bread and butter Hollywood genre that could showcase technical innovations like widescreen. Yet someone like master moviemaker and editor George Stevens could make an epic like 1956's GIANT about a Texas oil family's reckoning with racism with nary a Christ or Godhead in site. Martin Scorsese's 2023 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON feels self-evident in its love of GIANT. 

William Wyler's BEN HUR, a tangential Christ story, is just great moviemaking and great storytelling. But it's elevated to jaw drop status by the well deserved fame of its central chariot race sequence. A stunt man nearly died during a particularly dangerous chariot jump. AND THEY KEPT THAT SHOT IN THE MOVIE! If you've never seen BEN HUR you practically leap out of your seat when that shot happens. 

David Lean began to creep to overripeness with his epic of the Russian revolution DR. ZHIVAGO but it's still a great movie. Both ZHIVAGO and Warren Beatty's 1981 REDS (about socialist American journalists who ultimately cover the Russian Revolution) have a tremendous sense for how a love story can be the gravitational core of an epic that also imparts a sense of history.

I see your vision, Warren.

One zenith of epic moviemaking that must be seen to be believed is USSR's Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE. This 7 (!!) hour movie about the Napoleanic invasion of Russia in 1812 has a gaggle of things going for it. Never before and maybe never since have such battle sequences been filmed. Clearly stunt and labor laws were not an issue as extras leap into walls of fire and hundreds of horses collide, collapse, careen off the screen in staged cavalry battles. But WAR AND PEACE is a key epic text as well because filmmaker Bondarchuk (who also plays awkward but heartfelt nobleman lead Pierre) constantly finds near avant garde experimental ways to communicate emotional storytelling. CInematic tears appear to sometimes wipe across the screen. Cameras fly over ballroom dances into close ups. Fluid camera movements are suddenly intercut with "ugly" staccato still frame images. But the formal experimentation is an exhilaration and a complete unqualified success. 

George Stevens-the chameleon of the great mid-century moviemakers.

70's brat filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg would make their idiosynchratic epics with APOCALYPSE NOW and EMPIRE OF THE SUN respectively. Coppola's movie shines because of its clear grasp of what makes its source material Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS such a compelling story. Spielberg's epic about a boy (Christian Bale) separated from his parents in World War II Shanghai is such an undersung gem because of the sequences in which Spielberg communicates the surrealness of wartime through Spielbergian cinematic sequence making. This writer has always been in awe of the sequence in which the boy is more interested in watching his POW housemates have sex then the mass carpet bombing raid happening outside his window. 

Akira Kurosawa's KING LEAR adaptation RAN showed an older moviemaker could make a LEAR that simultaneously felt like a warning to humanity that we are all on the precipice of madness. And while many see the movie's ending as bleak, this writer sees it as much more ambiguous. Kurosawa leaves us on a ledge (literally) for good reason. We're still on that ledge.

f you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao…You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow

Chen Kaige's LGBTQ+ controversial epic FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE about the Chinese re-education horrors under Chairman Mao was about as daring a movie as a mainland Chinese moviemaker could make. It's also unbearable in its emotional devastation.

Terence Malick's 1998 return to moviemaking after a 20 year hiatus THE THIN RED LINE is, in this writer's estimation, his best movie. A loose adaptation of a James Jones' World War II novel about the South Pacific battle of Guadalcanal, the movie really is about the competing, conflicting philosophical conclusions of the soldiers. Just as the epic has a rotational dynanism when it moves from wide shot to close up, so to does it have a dynamism when it juxtopposes cultures. In THE THIN RED LINE, the war between the Americans and the Japanese is juxtopposed with indigenous islanders who seem to be biding their time, aware these soldiers are disconnected from the earth.

Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER is the newest worthy entry in that ol' reliable sub genre of the epic-the epic biopic. Here of nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer who helped birth the nuclear bomb. Nolan too finds a clockmaker's craftsman understanding of how to juxtoppose characters-one brilliant, one mediocre-formal techniques-black and white and color-structure-stories from several different time periods that meet in a crucial middle.

The danger we face now though is that our digital effects innovations have made faux epic moviemaking the norm. Gone are the death defying stunts, the thousands of real extras, the choreographed battle scenes that took MONTHS to shoot, the production design, the danger, the battle to just surmount the production demands.

The poster seems to say the war was secondary to Leigh and Gable getting it on.

Pixels protect lives, budgets, scripts. To be sure. And no movie production is worth someone dying. 

But we're losing something when we bear hug convenience and economy as the final word. We lose the chance for people collectively to make something like a cathedral, like rebuilding a city after a bombing, that other people, the audience, can feel in the SHEER TRUTH of what they are seeing.

We lose a sense of wonder and awe. We need that wonder and awe. The world needs it.

This writer understands it's easy to write that. It's much harder to write the checks. 

But we need the roadshow. We need the pageant. We need the ceremony. 

We need it.

We need it.

Craig Hammill is the founder.principal.head programmer of Secret Movie Club.