The Story of Film: An Odyssey

I don't think the reviews I have read on this site have been particularly fair or helpful. This is very much a personal odyssey but it is none the poorer for that. Cousins is a passionate cineaste and enthusiastic guide. Some reviewers seem to object to his lilting Northern-Irish tones. Get over it! What we have here is a fascinating series, tracing the history of film from its sideshow beginnings through to the global entertainment industry and modern art form we know today. I particularly like the way Cousins chooses to analysise the films he features in the series. This analysis is always in-depth, enlightening and very well illustrated by his choice of clips. The series is a must-see for anyone studying film or who is serious about film.

It was first presented on BBC, as were a lot of superb series. The episode covering the 1910s is as good as anything similar and much better than most.

Someone complained about the narration, spoken and written by the Irish Mark Cousins. I found it utterly charming and extremely perceptive.

Cousins has spoken close to the microphone so his voice doesn't sound loud as he casually reels off his observations. And it's true. The terminal contours of every utterance curl upward, as they do in parts of the American South, so that they sound like a series of questions. "The source light is on the screen? A gap opens in the curtains like a Vermeer painting?" I was enthralled. The writing is dispassionate but full of insights and is sometimes quite funny. Harold Lloyd was turned from a Chaplin imitator into a nerd with black-rimmed glasses, but "a ballsy nerd." The emphasis is on directors that most Americans haven't paid much attention to, although film critics have. I'd seen Carl Theodore Dreyer's "Joan of Arc" before, two times, but Cousins was able to point out one or two of the reasons I found it so impressive.

The clips he's chosen to show from the silent movies of the era are longer than we usually see them, and they're picked to illustrate a specific point that Cousins is trying to make.

It's different from any other "film histories" that I've seen -- different in the sense of more involving, more informative, less repetitive, more original in its editing and narration.

At least in this episode, he hasn't much to say about modern Hollywood products. I understand why.

I understand that Cousins Northern Irish accent takes some getting used to. However, trashing his work because of the narration is too harsh a judgment. I actually watched the whole thing. Twice. I was fascinated by a documentary that tries the impossible: a history of world cinema. The first two episodes alone deal with the era of silent movies. Try to find something else that goes so much into detail! It requires concentration and attention but I kept watching because I learnt something.

The Story of Film is a very personal take on the subject. Cousins often uses phrases such as "perhaps the greatest film ever made" or "perhaps the most innovative film..." And often such phrases refer to a Japanese or Iranian movie that I have never heard of. I am sure a lot of people would disagree. I don't have a problem with it. In the opening sequence of every episode, he says that he follows the Odyssey of film makers who are not driven by box office success. If you want to see the history of Hollywood Blockbusters, "The Story of Film" is the wrong program. If you want to know what kind of films were made in the 1980s behind the iron curtain in Eastern Europe, now you are in the right theatre.

Leaving all criticism on Cousins narration, possible inaccuracies or highly subjective opinions aside, here is a man talking who has probably more forgotten about movies than most people ever knew about the subject.

Well let me admit I bought out of this one after three hours, at the point where the word "Sound" comes up in big letters.

Here are all the familiar titles and talents being trotted forth once more, this time in murky dupes spaced by some quite nice travel shots, that they thrash for no particular reason other than to get the running time up or justify the plane tickets. Poor Stanley Donen figures at intervals without saying anything notable - probably because he wasn't asked to.

We get to the end of the silent section without seeing a cowboy. Florence Lawrence has a (not bad) section. Bronco Billy Anderson doesn't. The writer-director-pundit ticks off the eight (count 'em) national industries that provide the qualities he can't find in Hollywood and, once again, we never set foot in the Balkans or the Hispanic nations. Ruan Lingyu stands in for Shanghai, three of the thirty "Expressionist" films for six hundred German titles.

You sit there waiting for the kind of "Hey, that makes sense!" moments that you got in the US CINEMA BBC series or the breath catching quality of the images in Enno Patalas' METROPOLIS documentary.

I don't know which is more depressing, this series or the much touted critics poll that an English magazine called Sight & Sound just ran again. Suspect achievements are lauded. Making notable talents invisible is endorsed.

Finally, after six weeks, my endurance finally triumphed over the 900 minutes of Mark Cousin's "Story of Film: an Odyssey", a series of 15 one-hour documentaries starting with the same close-ups that set the documentary's tone of unpredictability to those who expected Scorsese or Tarantino to lead the show: Stanley Donen, Lars Von Trier, Amitab Bachchan, Kyōko Kagawa, Jane Campion and Sharmila Tagore. Not familiar with them? Wait, you've seen nothing yet.

First and immediate impression: it was an extraordinary trip, yet the ending was a bit of a letdown. I didn't expect the sight of people walking in circle, hand-in-hand, in some African town, to close such an epic tour, a tour-de-force as far as documentary is concerned but again, with this constant and sometimes infuriating tendency to surprise you. In fact, the last shot of Cousin's documentary is revealing of both his work's strength and flaw: it guides your eyes toward new horizons, where film-making was expressed to its fullest by artists who took the absence of means as a mean by itself and contributed to mark their country in International Cinema's map; on the other hand, it's a slap in the face of all the movie-buffs giving the most obscure movies the publicity that posterity didn't grant them.

For instance, there had to be a reason why "The Great Train Robbery" was the first film remembered for having used editing as a significant part of the narrative, yet Cousins pays tribute to an unknown movie about firemen. Watching his doc made me feel like the most confused movie fan ever wondering why some indisputable classics got the same treatment than some obscure Russian, Brazilian or Scandinavian movies. Hitchcock borrowed his use of suspenseful sequences and some low angle shots from Danish and German cinema while "Citizen Kane"'s use of backgrounds was inspired by Ozu. No star of the reel invented the wheel, cinema was only the result of a series of innovations, and Cousins' speaks like the advocate of all the pioneers whose creations were shadowed by the cinematic light of glory they generated a posteriori.

But then, as if he was exhilarated by his own subversion, Cousins goes as far as suggesting that "Casablanca" isn't a classic film, but a romantic of some sort... his statement is so bold it flirts with indecent blasphemy, the one that'd convince many viewers to stop watching (that, and from what I've read, an annoying voice-over but I saw it dubbed in French, so it wasn't an issue for me) Sure, the man is entitled to his own bias against mainstream or Hollywood cinema but I tend to agree with the angry crowd that some of his statements were particularly upsetting. Then, I looked at the documentary with more magnanimous eyes, and if in the worst case, it made me raise my eyebrows, in the best, I discovered some little gems I felt the urge to watch as soon as the documentary ended. That 'best case' is the odyssey's reason to be.

And the highlight of this incredible journey was undoubtedly the part about European radical directors in the late 70's and early 80's. It was an insightful introspection into the use of the camera as a social weapon. Generally speaking, the middle section of the film, from the 50's to the early 80's is the best part before the film loses its beat. Although I agree that the digital revolution canceled all the magic and the miracle of Cinema, I expected more flamboyance, something honoring the dream-like escapism it provided. And this comes from someone who's not too much into spectacular blockbuster, but I was probably one of the few to be upset because the film was on the same wavelength than I.

The 90's were the ultimate gasp of realistic cinema, with an interesting focus on Iranian Cinema, and a new Danish school of more austere and naturalistic film-making, borrowed from the heritage of Carl Theodore Dryer. As an aspiring film-maker, it comforted me (perversely, I confess) that I can make movies with basic tools and 'pretend' its Art. And in the 2000's the loop was looped, Cinema went back to its roots, understanding that its purpose is to show a form of reality that distorts the real without taking too much distance from it. It's also an extraordinary medium to extrapolate human's deepest fears and emotions, in fact, Cinema is a universe where human is in the center.

With that in mind, you forgive some liberties and analytical shortcuts. Some of my favorite directors were missing, Cassavetes (a quick glimpse on "Shadows" while the father of Indie cinema deserved more), Melville the one who didn't want to part of the New Wave and modernized the film-noir genre, John Huston, and Akira Kurosawa. I understand he's a fan of Ozu, but how can you neglect "Rashomon", the first film without a linear narrative and to use the unreliable narrator device. Did that annoying Christmas baulb metaphor make him lose precious minutes? But I guess out of 900 minutes, with a ratio of 1 learning from each, there are chances some ideas won't be 100% pleasing or even accurate, but remember what they say about education, it's what remains after you forgot everything.

Well, I'm not sure I'll remember everything from that 15-hour exhaustive documentary but there are many new movies I'm familiar with, new insights about the art of filmmaking, as the greatest art-form when it comes to express some emotions, on the use of the human body, a well-made close-up being worth a thousand images, it's about names that has sunk into oblivions but in their way took part the process that lead to the classics we adore now. It's a collective work where every piece of humanity, at any time, had a share of it..

And if only for that, I've got to hand it to Mark Cousins for having enriched my knowledge of Cinema.