If it's David Lean, we must start with a bold, widescreen establishing shot that sets out our stall. A vast expanse of grey tarmac, viewed dramatically from above, bordered by asymmetric shadows and a single motorcycle. A blonde figure in grey jacket carefully puts petrol into its tank and kickstarts the bike, along with the film, Lawrence Of Arabia. As the titles conclude he rides off into a chocolate-box English village and to his certain fate.
Or the imposing man-made curve of the walkway to a Soviet hydroelectric dam in Doctor Zhivago, grey-uniformed workers marching like ants out of the piercing light of a tunnel crested by a single red star, their shadows lengthening eerily against the hard rock.
Or perhaps, in expressionist black-and-white, the opening tableau of Great Expectations: wind blowing Dickens's pages asunder, then a dissolve to some ghostly Thames marshes straight out of a monster movie. Along the path runs a silhouetted Pip, the last vestiges of sunlight again twinkling off the water as he passes two unoccupied gallows, a sorry bunch of dry flowers in one hand, clouds smeared across the sky like oil paint.
No? How about Croydon High Street, south London, 1921. Grainy, newsreel black-and-white, stiff shop awnings, sky as interesting as tea crisscrossed with overheard tram wires, one or two parked cars, shuffling overcoats and - a beacon in all of this - the exotic promise of the Scala cinema on the right, advertising The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Eille Norwood as Holmes. Instead of Pip, it's the 13-year-old David Lean, running to make the two o'clock. His first ever trip to the cinema. His Quaker parents are in the throes of splitting up, and escape seems the main purpose of this excursion into the dark. It will change him forever. And have no less a seismic effect on cinema itself.
David Lean was born in March 1908, making this his centenary year, marked by a season of his films at the BFI in London in June and throughout the year at the David Lean Cinema in Croydon (a modest arthouse, inaptly enough), where a plaque has also been unveiled. He died in hospital, of pneumonia brought on by his treatment for throat cancer, after much 'effing and blinding at all the nurses', on 16 April 1991, and made such an indelible mark on film that it will always be impossible to use the word 'epic' and not immediately think of him.
Schooled as an editor and assistant director, it's instructive to discover that he directed just 16 feature films over 42 years. His last five, made with American money yet routinely claimed as the best of British, are the ones that thumbnail him: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984), all of them big and most of them clever. But he was more than just cinema's great choreographer of scale, the man Anthony Quinn likened to a general, commanding his troops and preparing for battle out in the blazing Arabian desert, or the unyielding Burmese jungle, or on the frostbitten Eastern Front.
Certainly, he set the bar high for heavily populated, location-shot period sagas from literary sources, but it would be shortsighted to see Lean's greatest achievements as the filmic equivalent of skyscraping architectural edifices: good because they're there. The people may look like ants when first glimpsed against the vast sand dunes of an exacting Lean composition, or the icy Russian mountains, or the concrete façade of a dam, but we are soon invited to alight upon individuals, and through the use of simple, visual clues, wonder about them and care about them. Late in life, he revealed to Kevin Brownlow, the filmmaker and historian who wrote the definitive Lean biography: 'Secrets are what you confide to people in the dark. I think one of the things we've lost in the cinema is intimacy. Now you see appalling things happening and high excitement, but you rarely get right into people.'
Not so with even Lean's biggest canvases. Out of the steady stream of female Russian workers in identical headscarves, we pick out an individual, or at least, she is picked out for us, to be brought up to Commissar Yevgraf and revealed to be the daughter of Yuri Zhivago and his great love, Lara. Played by the luminous Rita Tushingham, we long to know her story (which is perhaps just as well, as it will detain us for the next three hours). The next leap in scale occurs as we home in on a funeral party, literally specks against the unyielding Russian steppe, with the silhouette of a single, three-bar Orthodox cross meaningfully mounted in the foreground.
Homing in closer, the camera picks out a 10-year old boy - the young Zhivago. The procession stops at an open grave, and the boy watches as his mother is lowered in her open casket to the ground. He clutches some white flowers, just as Pip had done on the way to a graveyard, just as the mute Michael will clutch his in Ryan's Daughter and a servant in A Passage to India will gather up a bouquet of blossoms from schoolteacher Fielding's ornamental pond.
Now Lean takes the boy's point of view. That moment of intimacy in the dark. We see the bearded priests mordantly intone of the 'vessel shattered, voiceless, emotionless', then the boy is distracted by the wind in the trees, just as Pip was, just as Rosy will be during her woodland tryst in Ryan's Daughter. (Once you start looking for threads in the work of Lean, you can't stop. There's more here for scholars than his bank-holiday-TV-staple image would suggest.) Amid wailing and incense, the coffin is brutally nailed shut; Maurice Jarre's score jars, and the finality of death is conveyed in the boy's troubled face - just as the horror of state cruelty against demonstrators will play there later in the story.
The hard, stony ground is heaped into the hole, then a serene cut to his mother at lace-shrouded peace inside the coffin. Yuri's gaze turns back to the sky, peppered now with dry fallen leaves (a premonition, perhaps, of the petals cast before the viceroy in A Passage to India). Not a cavalry charge in sight. No bridge being blown up. No siege, no revolution, no procession of elephants, just a boy staring orphanhood in the face and distracted by the trees.
For me, Lean ranks alongside Ford, Wilder, Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini and Fassbinder. (We haven't produced enough truly great directors in this country, so it's nice to be able to place one in that pantheon.) Others find it all too easy to dismiss him - or at least take him for granted. A grudging Pauline Kael described him as a 'super-technician'. He was cold, they argue, which reckons without the significance of the husbandly hand on Sarah Miles's shoulder in Ryan's Daughter, or the sheer subversive danger of the kiss in the station subway in Brief Encounter. He doesn't show us sex, but it's always there, under the nightclothes of decorum.
Lean's most obvious cinematic successor may be the equally sex-shy Steven Spielberg, which never helps the argument for artistic ennoblement, but we really need to get over that. Lean was raised on silents, Spielberg was raised on Lean; both men were born unto cinema. Spielberg saw Lawrence Of Arabia in the summer of 1962, aged 15; his parents were also in the process of splitting up, and the cinema in Scottsdale - let's call it the Croydon of Arizona - was his refuge. 'I really kicked into high gear,' Spielberg later said of the experience of seeing Lawrence.... 'This I gotta do. I gotta make movies.'
While the Spielberg of popular myth is Mr Nice Guy, Lean was known as an obsessive, cantankerous tyrant who didn't much like actors and was only truly happy locked away in the editing suite. Six times married, 'David always had to have a girl on any film he worked on,' said one associate, and he was not a great father, cutting his first wife, Isabel, and only son, Peter, out of his life like he might excise a strip of unwanted film. (While in pre-production on ...River Kwai in Sri Lanka in 1956, Lean received a telegram from the estranged Peter announcing the birth of his first son - and Lean's first grandchild. No return cable was sent.)
He was married to his art. Ronald Neame, the producer and cinematographer turned director who worked with Lean on In Which We Serve (1942), once described him to me as 'deadly serious and deadly earnest'. 'He made films, period. There was nothing else in his life. If, let's say, he was working on a screenplay and somebody came in and said, "Your mother has just died, David", he'd say, "Look, please don't worry me at the moment, I'm much too caught up in this."'
This makes for a deficient human being, but if we expect great art, sometimes we have to live without the social niceties. After all, those formative experiences at the Scala, with the 'powerful beam of amber-coloured light, stabbing through the cigarette smoke', were spent alone. 'I had suddenly discovered life through the movies,' Lean recalled. 'Intercut that with Croydon and you have an idea of how exciting it was.' According to Brownlow, he 'was delighted by the huge photographs which moved, and thrilled by the silhouettes... alive with magical phosphorescence'. His extraordinary visual sense was thus honed. Quinn recalled: 'It was almost as if one of his eyes was a camera, he looked at you as if through a camera.'
On his eventual return from boarding school in 1926, Lean's mother had to put up with him developing his own cine films and hanging the negative out to dry in the sitting room. That year, he saw King Vidor's First World War spectacular The Big Parade in the West End, a regular haunt for the teenager. A real epic at two-hours-plus, using 200 army trucks, 100 planes and 4,000 soldiers - and the highest-grossing silent movie of all time - it would resonate across his own eventual canon.
The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which enshrined the showing of a certain percentage of British films into law and led to production of the 'quota quickies', saw Lean taken on full-time by Gaumont-British. Graduating from the tea urn to 'number boy', snapping shut the clapperboard, his appetite to learn was voracious. He moved up to editing and worked the Moviola on 25 films, including Powell and Pressburger's The 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft is Missing, before earning his first credit as co-director on In Which We Serve, wartime propaganda that dealt with the sinking of a British battleship. Noel Coward had written it, and planned to direct and star, but he needed someone to point the camera when he was in front of it.
'I had a lucky break,' Lean remembered. 'Because Noel got terribly bored.' It resulted in a royal command performance, a big hit and an Oscar win for Coward. In the Sunday Times, Dilys Powell wrote admiringly of the Dunkirk sequence ('conceived with a fine sense of pictorial narrative'), coincidentally the first Lean had directed solo.
His first urge to make a costume drama came in 1945, but Coward cautioned against it: 'My dear, what do you know about costumes?' So he made Brief Encounter, his first best director Oscar nomination. Whether viewed as a museum piece from a less sexually expressive age, or a timeless English romance, or alternatively as a key gay text, as Richard Dyer suggests in his BFI Film Classics monograph ('the subject matter - forbidden love in ordinary lives - makes an obvious appeal to gay readers'), Brief Encounter is iconic: the clipped voices, the Banbury cakes, characters actually called Dolly and Myrtle. Two handsomely mounted Dickens adaptations - Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) - gave Lean the confidence to broaden his portfolio. Financial woes, not unconnected with his accumulating pile of ex-wives, forced him into tax exile in 1955. Still, the world became his playground, the Hollywood studios Columbia and MGM his new patrons.
It's too easy to imagine Lean, with his handsome, eagle-like features, pressed white shirts and chinos, striding around the globe like some colonial relic, making films set in a more amenable past, casting white actors, usually Alec Guinness, in foreign roles, and doing so in an ideological and artistic bubble.
But consider this famous edit in Lawrence of Arabia. The insubordinate, dandyish Lieutenant TE Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) is in the palatial Cairo offices of the Arab Bureau's Mr Dryden (Claude Rains) to discuss secondment with the Bedouin. Earlier, we witnessed his party trick, lighting a match and putting it out between finger and thumb ('The trick is not minding that it hurts'). Dryden warns him that, for 'ordinary men', the desert is 'a burning, fiery furnace'. Lawrence strikes a match and rolls up his sleeve as if to perform his stunt. But he confounds expectation and theatrically blows it out, at which we cut to the desert, a russet band of sand and an orange band of sky, between which the sun begins to appear.
'I think that's one of my favourite cuts,' Lean declared. Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker, laid his cards on the table: 'If you don't get this cut, if you think it's cheesy or showy or over the top, and if something inside you doesn't flare up and burn at the spectacle that Lean has conjured, then you might as well give up the movies.'
I spent a captivating half-hour discussing it in detail with Lean's editor Anne Coates for Radio 4. In the shooting script, the stage direction reads 'DISSOLVE'. But Coates had convinced her boss to check out a couple of these new-fangled nouvelle vague films, 'Chabrol and that sort of thing'. Rather than be affronted by their subversive jump cuts, Lean was enamoured, and embraced the French style. 'DISSOLVE' became 'CUT'.
As well as Spielberg, Lean's work spoke to George Lucas, who counts Lawrence... among his all-time favourites, despite missing its release in 1962 while convalescing after a car accident. But Lean visited the University of Southern California, where Lucas was studying film, to discuss Doctor Zhivago in 1965. Spielberg met Lean on Concorde in 1985 and enthused about producing whatever the elder statesman wanted to direct. At Lean's behest, he acquired the rights to Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard, but, after working on it for a year, Lean realised he couldn't divine a screenplay out of Ballard's book ('It hasn't got a dramatic shape,' he complained) and bequeathed the project to Spielberg. The torch was handed on.
When the American Film Institute bestowed the Lifetime Achievement Award upon Lean in 1990 (he made the trip to LA despite failing health), Spielberg paid tribute from the stage, saying of Lawrence...: 'It made me feel puny. It still makes me feel puny.' Martin Scorsese gushed: 'His images stay with me forever.' So the movie brats owed him one. When Francis Ford Coppola opened The Godfather Part II with the funeral procession of young Vito Corleone's father in Sicily - ant-like figures, barren scrub, a boy profoundly affected by the death of a parent - he must have been thinking of Doctor Zhivago.
What might have been Lean's final film, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, ran into funding difficulties. Because of Lean's age, 81, the budget had to include life insurance, and a reserve director who could step in if he inconveniently died during production. Lean's illuminating first choice was another Seventies luminary, Robert Altman ('very nice, real gent'), although in the end, after considering John Boorman, Peter Yates, Arthur Penn and even Kevin Costner, whose Dances With Wolves Lean had admired, Bond director Guy Hamilton went on the paperwork. As it happened, a tumour was discovered in Lean's throat before filming started and the project went on ice, permanently.
It was an unsatisfactory end, but at least his final film had been A Passage to India, which restored his reputation after the kicking he got for Ryan's Daughter. Admittedly a little hokey, as films about the Irish by the English tend to be, it categorically did not deserve the backlash it received: 'The art it represents belongs to that school of very classy calendar art supported by airlines, insurance corporations and a few enlightened barber shops. It doesn't transfigure the world. It embalms it,' wrote Vincent Canby of the New York Times, one of many negative reviews. Director Nic Roeg, who worked with Lean, said he went into a 'state of catatonic shock' after the reviews. The public stayed away, too. 'I went travelling around the world,' Lean explained. 'I didn't make a film for 14 years. I thought, "What's the point?"' In truth, in that time he attempted to get others' films off the ground, including Gandhi and The Bounty. He also directed a 40-minute documentary about Captain Cook's anchor for TV, Lost and Found, which writer Robert Bolt considered 'beneath contempt'. These really were his wilderness years.
In his profile in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane concluded of Lean: 'Thank God he was not around for the iPhone.' This is a reference to Jon Stewart's gag at the Oscars, in which the host claimed to be watching the 'awesome' Lawrence of Arabia on his mobile. But the 21st century would not be all bad news for a reincarnated Lean. Two of this year's big Hollywood Oscar movies nod to his craft. Think of the exquisitely framed West Texas landscapes that open No Country for Old Men, with more specks brought closer through the binoculars of Josh Brolin, or the wordless opening, stunning vistas and tactile set-pieces of period epic There Will Be Blood. What these films share with Lean's best is a post-CGI desire to actually stage things for real. The only fake image in Lawrence of Arabia is a single painting of the sun, which Lean wanted to shoot naturally, but proved technically impossible. Even when the figures on their camels are dots on the horizon, it's actually Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole. 'It was not just sadism,' recalled Sharif. 'I think he wanted us to feel what it was to be out there in the desert.'
Lean wanted all of us to feel what it was to be out there in the desert. He belonged to another age, when trains were powered by steam, affairs were conducted in tunnels and Alec Guinness could play an Indian without comment ('I've got to have Alec, I can't direct an Indian'). This does not preclude him from relevance from where we're now sitting. He understood how cinema's engine worked, and he understood that to make cinema as big as The Big Parade, you had to get 'caught up in it'. In his Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech, he begged the 'chaps in the money department' to protect the new generation of film-makers and allow them to take risks. 'If we don't, we're going to go down and television's going to take over.'
David Lean's still big. It's the screens that got small.
At the BFI on London's Southbank in June and July there will be a retrospective of the 16 feature films David Lean directed. See www.bfi.org.uk