Acme11 Acme11
This is likely the most comprehensive "story of film" ever produced and the content is utterly brilliant. However, Mark Cousin's rather high- pitched, totally monotonous voice which lacks any tonal or volume variation whatsoever, combined with an accent which renders EVERY sentence a question, makes this a nearly unwatchable (or rather unlistenable) program. Ultimately, I wound up watching with the sound off and the subtitles on (no doubt missing much), as his voice became an aural ice pick to my hearing. EXTREMELY unfortunate. I would do ANYTHING for him to have hired an actual voice-over narrator to carry these duties. If the content had not been so extraordinary (and amazingly produced), I'd have given this far fewer than 6 stars based on the narration alone. One of the best remakes that could ever be produced would be this series with ZERO changes other than Peter Coyote (for instance) narrating it.
monkeytownhq
Why do the IMDb robots (currently) feature a 2-star review for a series that's rated 8-stars? A shame. Hire better robots...or humans!The complaints about Mark Cousins' accent are specious at best, moronic in practice. If you're looking for a PBS documentary style, please steer clear. Nothing against PBS, but this series has a voice and it's not just the accented narration. It's also the interstitial video work that provides a very personal take on the history of cinema. Yes, the rising inflection is not your normal, bland American voice-over. It's distinct and nuanced and, to my ears, warm. OK, enough with the narration non-issue.For anyone who's wanted a sweeping Film 101 course on the mechanics and effects of this infant art form, this is, to my knowledge the best you will get. Scorsese has attempted this in recent years and has had some ad hoc success (his PBS biography on Elia Kazan was a high point). What Cousins accomplishes is a poetic exposition on the grammars of the medium in a highly selective, yet globally inclusive trajectory of its history. The most telling and powerful tool in his belt is the way he's able to jump from the 1920s to the 1970s or 2000s, when he's explaining the inventions of technique and the matrix of influence from progenitors to the next generation. For example, to hear one of Ozu's actresses talk about his manner of direction is invaluable. His simple, somewhat comic video-quality recreations of the "180 degree" rule (as well as those who love to break it), makes all YouTube studies obsolete, and somehow doesn't disrupt the unworried, well-paced narrative.Good work, Mr. Cousins. Love your other films as well. p.s. Calling him just a film critic and historian does a disservice to this series as well as his other film work. He's a director. And that's why this film doesn't feel academic. Thankfully.
Daniel Karlsson
...rather than, what I initially thought, an odyssey through the greatest films ever made (but partially that as well).The best part of the film is the interviews. Here the director shows that he certainly is knowledgeable and he manages to get some interesting people on the screen to tell some interesting things.The footage is weird, avant-guard-style perhaps but could also be called amateurish, low budget with weird shots (interviewee heads are cut off and zoom-in on their mouths etc).The director should learn how to pronounce French accurately; it turns to some embarrassing mistranslation like "400 asses" instead of "400 blows" if I heard correctly.It is a long odyssey, might not be in everybody's taste, not even film buffs', but for those who have the time it still offers some good points like the interviews plus mentioning of cinema inventiveness and the important, sometimes lost, films that contributed to the evolution of cinema.
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.
