


I reviewed “The Story of Film” back when it first made its way to the US via Netflix over a dozen years ago, and like everyone else who weighed in on it, called it “a film school” course in streaming form.
But it was a cursory review, based on the early episodes, and deadline pressures kept me from getting back to all of Mark Cousins’ fifteen (initial) episodes about film history, the innovators and revolutions and “golden ages” of the cinemas of America, Germany, China, Italy, Japan, Africa and so on.
In the years since, no series has come along — detailing the invention or discovery of continuity editing, the close-up, split screens and parallel structure narratives, the rise of this or that movie trend or national cinema or iconic, rule-inventing filmmaker — to challenge its place as The Best Film History Series of Them All.
So with the summer cinema of 2025 winding down, and that godawful “Titans” drama with a hint of “docu” series on Netflix now, I’ thought I’d track down Cousins’ series and finish it off. It’s available as part of Amazon Prime, now.
The Northern Irish Cousins is an idiosyncratic tour guide, gushing over this little seen corner of the world or that little-appreciated film or filmmaker. His quiet, flat, lightly-accented narration is somewhat sleep inducing.
And he wears out phrases like “golden age” and how this or that trend “would change the story of film.”
But this series is a film buff’s dream, a thorough, global appreciation of where the Big Ideas and storytelling novelties of cinema were first introduced. If your “understanding” of film history is warped by Hollywood mythology and an America-centric view of the movies, as mine was, you mind can’t help but have your eyes opened by learning Indian cinema beyond and before Satyajit Ray, the “revolution” that Egypt’s “Cairo Station” was and the ways Robert Bresson, Fellini, Ozu, Passolini and Kurosawa, as well as Welles, Ford and Hitchock, influenced decades of movies that followed their heydays.
Every episode roughly encompasses an era — usually about a decade long — from the earliest silents of the Lumiere brothers, Edwin S. Porter and Georges Melies to the vast leaps that German cinema and Scandinavian films made during the silent era, the earliest epics through the movies of China’s first cinematic “golden age” (the 1930s) and onward.
The French New Wave, New American Cinema of the ’60s and ’70s, Africa and South America’s earliest smashes, Japan’s pre-war films compensating for a cruel,imperialist culture and post-war embrace of the need to evolve, “An Odyssey” truly covers as many of the waypoints the movies have passed through as would seem humanly possible in one lifetime.
Here’s Cousins on the godfather of Hong Kong kung fu cinema, King Hu.
“If John Ford had been into Buddhism, ballet and zero gravity gravity (wirework flying martial artists), he might have made films like King Hu.”
“Muhammad: Messenger of God” earns a closer look for “innovations,” as do kung fu films, Bollywood action musicals and “The Horse Thief,” the “Fifth Generation” Chinese film that Cousins agrees with Scorsese was “the best film of the ’80s,” a “rebellious” decade when communism lashed out in dying gasps and conservative “lies” were challenged by an emerging indie cinema in the West.
The filmmaking team of John Sayles and Maggie Renzi are celebrated as “standard bearers” of
American indie cinema. “Intolerance” turns up as inspiration for scores of epic imitations ,”The Blair Witch Project” embraced as the ultimate “digital age” smash and Gus Van Sant appreciated for his consistently “out there” hits (“Elephant,” its inspiration and title are explained) and misses (“Gerry“).
Spielberg’s “signature shot,” that moment of “awe” in so many of his movies, is sampled. Mercedes McCambridge reveals the ways she inhabited the “entity” voice of Lucifer in “The Exorcist,” and Luke Skywalker trusting “the force,” his feelings, rather than reason and his targeting computer becomes the metaphor for American cinema in the ’70s and beyond, “feeling” no longer “thinking.”
As someone who reviews films for a living, I was more overwhelmed at the number of films referenced than such tidbits as the direct connections between Robert Bresson and Paul Schrader, who copied the ending of the French icon’s “Pickpocket” for “American Gigolo” and “Light Sleeper.”
The “idiosyncratic” label for all this suggests the subjectivity of film criticism and fandom. Cousins worships at the shrine of Ozu and highlights films (“The Last Movie,” “Performance”) and filmmakers (Library of Congress recognized pioneer one-hit wonder Charles Burnett) of his own choice.
The interviews he landed — a pre-“comeback” Schrader and Campion and Bertolucci, icons of Japanese cinema and Claudia Cardinale, Hitchcock pal Norman Lloyd, Buck Henry and others — nicely complement his take on the classic satire “Catch 22,” “Chinatown,” and the places of Polanski, Woody Allen, Werner Herzog and others in the cinematic history books.
More than a few interview subjects have died in the 14 years since the series aired, and his chats with Stanley Donen and others can be treasured for their insights.
The series is French New Wave heavy in that it’s director-centric, with plugs for favored cinematographers and lots of notes about who apprenticed under whom and who was influenced by whom.
Documentaries are peppered into a couple of episodes, and there’s a tendency of Cousins to bend over backwards to not overstate British film’s place in the pantheon, which means David Lean, Carol Reed, Powell and Pressburger and others get short shrift.
Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” is rightly heralded, and wrongly described as a conflict between “Black” and “Latino” culture in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Name two Italian-Americans who’d describe themselves as “Latino.” The late Soviet era “Come and See” is lauded as “the greatest war film ever made.”
And don’t get me started on the slim skip past “film noir” and those who made it and Westerns beyond Ford and Hawks. No, that would have cut into time devoted to ’50s melodramas, in Hollywood and abroad.
The “Odyssey” revisits classic locations, old film studios and ancient cinemas and the homes of some of the long-gone giants of international cinema. And Cousins uses the series filming strategy to demonstrate this sort of focus, that lens perspective and various modes and tricks of editing via the way a street scene is framed, shot and cut and jump cut.
It used to be, you’d lean on a book or two and visits to your local public library to track down the “classics” that every film buff needs to see before one dies. And that’s after the convenience of home video rendered rare Library of Congress and American Film Institute and local college film society and art cinema “revival” showings obsolete.
I take notes on most everything I review. And if you’re a serious cinephile, you’d best have a notebook, too. The titles, filmmaker names and sample scenes fly by in this 15 hour trek. You won’t want to miss jotting down something you simply MUST see. God knows I filled a few pages with such titles, even as I wondered how Cousins got to all this in one human .lifespan.
Rating: 18+, violence, nudity, sex scenes from movies, profanity
Cast: Paul Schrader, Claudia Cardinale, Stanley Donen,
Kyôko Kagawa, Jane Campion, Norman Lloyd, Robert Towne, Lars Von Trier, Sam Neill, Haskell Wexler, Buck Henry, Charles Burnett, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach, John Sayles, Bernardo Bertolucci, narrated by Mark Cousins.
Credits: Created by Mark Cousins, based on his book. A 2011 British TV series now on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 15 episodes @ :60 minutes each


