The Story of Film: An Odyssey
                 
Director: Mark Cousins
Year: 2011
Rating: 7.5
This is an interesting if at times exhausting exploration of cinema from its very beginnings up to its production date in 2011. It is fifteen episodes of an hour each. I feel like I have walked for miles and my feet hurt. It is directed and narrated by Mark Cousins from his book about film. I have seen reviews extolling it like the Rosetta Stone and others tearing it into small pieces and blowing it into the wind. I can see both sides but the ones I don't are people saying that they knew all this, that it covered nothing new. Bollocks. There is so much covered in these 900 minutes with such a global outlook, that I find this implausible unless they are connected to an AI machine.



Cousins in his increasingly tiresome Irish lilt narrates the history of film. His version of it. Mine and likely yours would be different. We all come at cinema from different perspectives and biases. But there is so much here with much analysis and strong opinions that most of us should get something out of it. If you are willing to put in the time. It's a lot of time



Cousins takes us on this cinematic journey in chronological order beginning at the end of the 19th century. But he very much has his own agenda as to what to discuss. His focus is on directors that changed the course of moviemaking. That were innovative, challenged the audience, had their own vision, were transgressive and made us often uncomfortable. Many of the directors discussed are well known from Melies to Griffith to Welles to Godard to Scorsese to Wong Kar-wai and many others. Some though are generally obscure but according to Cousin's made films that were influential. What he usually ignores are actors, commercial hits, studios and genres.



He spends time on Italian films but it is Fellini, Visconti, Passolini which is as it should be but makes no mention of giallo, peplum or crime films. The same could be said about Japan with Akira Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi being examined but no mention of Zatoichi, pink films, the female action films of the 70s. To me those are transgressive films. Instead, he spends ten minutes on a documentary. I understand where he is coming from and his desire to drop in on film industries all over the world and not just the ones in the common canon of great films - Bollywood, Senegal, China, Hong Kong, Brazil, Eastern Europe - is admiral, but to be a real story of movies, you have to indulge us a little bit and talk about popular films.



He does in drips and drabs but you sense that he doesn't really want to or feels that films like Jaws and Star Wars had a negative impact. He is much more comfortable talking about Lars von Trier or Godard. Fifteen hours is a lot to fill. Too often he tells us this film or that film is the most innovative of the decade or presents relationships better than any film or it was the best film of the decade. Often about films you have likely never seen, so you can't really refute in real time. But he does a nice job of making connections between films of different eras and different geographies to show us that film is all connected.



Also, between clips of films, he inserts contemporary videos that he shot that have no relevance to the narrative. Still, if you have 15 free hours at some solitary point in your life and film is your passion, give this a go. Much of it may annoy you, his opinions may seem over blown but he has something to say about the wide breadth of movies and his passion for the art is obvious in every statement. As it got closer to the present, I became less and less interested but that could just be my preferences or that by hour 11 I was tired but did we really need 15 minutes on Baz Luhrmann?