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.”
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