mwakee While I can abide Cousins' anti-Hollywood viewpoint and I can abide the political slant to his series, I cannot abide his trumpeting of the film Hyenes directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, without even mentioning that it was based on a play by Swiss writer Frederich Durrenmatt. Not only that, but there was a previous film version, The Visit, directed by Bernhard Wicki in 1964, starring Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn. While Mambety created a brilliant film, he did not pull this film out of a vacuum by himself. It was an adaption and Cousins should have made us aware of this fact. It calls into question the veracity of the entire series, which I had enjoyed up until now. I'll need to watch the rest of the series with a far more critical eye.

UKscreenwriter Mark Cousins is a bright man and in the past I have enjoyed his documentaries about cinema. As this was his personal view I expected it to be idiosyncratic and I wouldn't particularly have a problem with that. I watched the whole series but I cannot recall a single interesting fact I learned from this series. I can unfortunately recall some poor shooting Mark Cousins misguidedly undertook himself and a couple of interviews that were disaster areas in terms of framing and sound quality. Overall this was so sloppy and poorly structured. Maybe he needed a experienced producer, director and editor to bang Cousins' vision into shape? Or maybe the scope was simply too vast?

rosewood-6 I just finished watching this series and was really disappointed in the IMDb reviews. Here are my pointers for those who are interested in seeing this considerable work.1. The majority of the people of the world have accents different than those found in America. If you can't get beyond a person's accent to hear the content of what he/she is saying, stick with Entertainment Tonight.2. This series is like a "string theory" of film- everything is connected to everything. While some of the reviewers could not follow the train of thought, much of what is documented is the initial use of what are now considered stock shots and plots and how they are still being used today. Film history is not just what films were made, but also the creation and evolution of the art form.3. This series also deals heavily in international cinema. Episode 3 deals with cinema in the 1920's in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo. Episode 6 shows works from Egypt, India, China, Mexico that was created in the 1950's. Episode 8 chronicles the birth of African cinema in the 1970's. There is more about international cinema in this series than I have ever seen in any program about film.So, if you want to see a comprehensive series on the history of film, as opposed to the history of Hollywood, this is the series for you.

bperry42 You have to hand it to Mark Cousins for even attempting something as ambitious as documenting The Story of Film. With such a pretentious title, you better know what you're talking about. Cousins doesn't. But first, let's get the really cloying stuff out of the way. His narration is beyond annoying as every sentence is given identical inflections including the uplift on the end of every sentence, making every declarative statement a question. His narration is laid over almost every clip, making the dialog impossible to hear. The film has myriad mistakes (by the way, Buster Keaton's The General was release in 1927, not 1926), unconscionable in a documentary of any merit. Cousins can't seem to decide on his film's structure as he wandering from decade to decade, genre to genre, country to country, theme to theme, and innovation to innovation resulting in a disorienting mish-mash. There are plenty of boring interviews and static, misleading location shots that add little to the film. Finally, since he doesn't have anything meaningful to say about most of the films, he simply uses a banal superlative, usually 'best' or 'greatest', like so: "… making (film) the (superlative) (qualifier) (qualifier) film of (time-period)." Trouble is they're not even right. Annie Hall's lobster scene is called "one of the funniest moments in American Cinema" when it's not even the funniest moment in Annie Hall. The real problem with The Story of Film is what Cousins considers important about film, namely the mechanics of filmmaking. The criteria for selection of the films and the focus of much of his narration is technical: depth of focus, lighting, camera angles, crane shots, color palettes, and fast editing. According to Cousins, the brilliance of Citizen Kane is due to the use of deep focus. Hitchcock's genius is reduced to a list of techniques (point-of-view, close-ups, silence, etc.) without ever mentioning his extraordinary ability to build suspense. Walkabout and Gregory's Girl are included in the story because the filmmakers turned their camera sideways. Cousins calls Russian Ark "perhaps the most inventive ever made" because it is 90 minutes long in one take. The Graduate is about camera angles; Chinatown and Inception are about color palette; 2001: A Space Odyssey is about special effects; The Bicycle Thieves is about realistic rubble; Spielberg's contribution to cinema is vertical tracking shot reveals; and Tarantino's style is defined as "surrealism of everyday talk", whatever that means. It's a film school version of cinema deconstructed to only include the visually interesting bits. My favorite moment in The Story of Film is in Episode 5 when Cousins suggests to Singin' in the Rain Director Stanley Donen that the uplift of the camera during Gene Kelly's titular song and dance "expresses the joy in itself, without Gene Kelly even being there." Clearly annoyed, Donen replies "It's not the uplift of the camera…it's what the camera sees that does it. The camera does nothing, it just does what we tell it to do…Does the pencil write the story? Of course it doesn't. And the camera is just the pencil that we're working with." This short exchange exposes how misguided Cousin's understanding of film really is.Meanwhile, there is so much missing. Frank Capra, Preston Sturgis, the Ealing Studios comedies, the message films and biopics of the 30's and 40's are all missing (no good camera tricks, I suspect). Animation gets cursory mention. Nothing on the 50's and 60's epics (e.g. Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia) is included. He doesn't give us a clue why Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, and Buñuel were so revolutionary. Comedy seems to have died after Billy Wilder. Bonnie and Clyde is only included in reference to Gun Crazy. The blockbusters of the 2000's (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and all the superhero movies) are ignored. There is little discussion of how acting, screen writing, and music contribute to film. By emphasizing technical minutia, Cousin misses what we really love about the movies: a good story. Without discussing story, you're barking up the wrong tree. Cousins dismisses Casablanca as "too romantic to be classical in the true sense." Really? Has he ever watched it? It's #3 on AFI's list of the Best American Films and many consider it the best screenplay ever written. But to Cousins, it's just another romantic 'shtudio' film.Granted, The Story of Film covers World Cinema better than most movie retrospectives. However, his commentary on the films I do know is so misguided and, in many cases, dead wrong that I don't trust his judgment on the films I don't know. Therein lies my real objection to The Story of Film. Some (I'm looking at you, TCM) may look to this documentary as an important, authoritative, revisionist film education. Please don't. Errors, exclusions, boring interviews and superlatives aside, it is a bizarre view of film history and not worthy of your time or respect.