The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a 2011 British documentary film about the history of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total length of over 900 minutes. It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins, a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his 2004 book The Story of Film.
The series was broadcast in September 2011 on More4, the digital television service of British broadcaster Channel 4. The Story of Film was featured in its entirety at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, and at the 2012 Istanbul International Film Festival. It was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in February 2012. It was broadcast in the United States on Turner Classic Movies, beginning in September 2013.
The Telegraph headlined the series' initial broadcast in September 2011 as the "cinematic event of the year", describing it as "visually ensnaring and intellectually lithe, it’s at once a love letter to cinema, an unmissable masterclass, and a radical rewriting of movie history."Sukhdev Sandhu, "The Story of Film, cinematic event of the year: Mark Cousins's 15-hour television series is an epic journey through the history of cinema, says Sukhdev Sandhu", The Telegraph, (UK) 2 September 2011. An Irish Times writer called the programme a "landmark" (albeit a "bizarrely underpromoted" one).Donald Clarke, "Mark Cousins’s Story of Film", The Irish Times, 5 September 2011. The programme won a Peabody Award in 2013 "for its inclusive, uniquely annotated survey of world cinema history."73rd Annual Peabody Awards, May 2014.
In February 2012, A. O. Scott of The New York Times described Cousins' film as "a semester-long film studies survey course compressed into 15 brisk, sometimes contentious hours" that "stands as an invigorated compendium of conventional wisdom." Contrasting the project with its "important precursor (and also, perhaps, an implicit interlocutor)", Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Scott commended Cousins' film as "the place from which all future revisionism must start".
Episodes
Birth of the Cinema The Hollywood Dream The Golden Age of World Cinema The Arrival of Sound Post-War Cinema Sex & Melodrama European New Wave New Directors, New Form American Cinema of the 70s Movies Change the World The Arrival of Multiplexes and Asian Mainstream Fight the Power New Boundaries New American Independents & The Digital Revolution Cinema Today and the Future
Critical reception The film earned critical praise. Shawn Levy, writing for The Oregonian, compared it to "a tour through a museum with a deeply passionate and engaging guide." Mark Feeny, in The Boston Globe, described it as "wildly ambitious, often extremely good, occasionally maddening, and always stimulating."
Criticism Some critics took issue with Cousins' speaking style, and with portions of his analysis. Village Voice critic Nick Pinkerton argued Cousins took an inconsistent and iconoclastic stance against Hollywood in favour of realist or innovative cinema, stating "for all its claims of rewriting, [The Story of Film] is too reliant on received film buff wisdom". Writing for Film Comment, Jonathan Rosenbaum was specifically critical of Cousins' view of experimental film, stating "Cousins has a weakness for overwrought yard sales, as his unswerving devotion to Baz Luhrmann, Christopher Nolan, and Lars von Trier repeatedly demonstrates — as well as an obvious lack of ease and fluency when it comes to experimental filmmaking in general, a discomfort that someone like (Matthew) Barney banks on by providing a “digestible” mainstream alternative, rather as Nolan’s Memento provides an unthreatening crossword-puzzle version of the early features of Alain Resnais."
Accolades 2013 Peabody Award Runner-up for Best Documentary Feature—2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival Stanley Kubrick Award—2012 Traverse City Film Festival
2021 follow-up A 2-hour-and-20-minute follow-up covering films from 2010 to 2021, titled The Story of Film: A New Generation, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in July 2021. It was released in UK cinemas and on streaming platforms in December 2021.
References
External links
The Story of Film: An Odyssey at Channel 4 The Story of Film: An Odyssey on Letterboxd