Enchanting Journey: The Story of Film - An Odyssey (2011)

This year’s tour de force at the Berlinale was the 15-hour-long The Story of Film, screened over two consecutive days. (Hard to imagine checking in a theater at noon and emerging, still wonderfully intoxicated, at nine in the evening … craving for more).

British film critic and historian Mark Cousins directed with flair what can be aptly described as a compendium of cinema’s still short history. But there is nothing stale or clichéd in his passionate handling of the sprawling subject or in his take on accepted historiographical conventions. An ebullient personality, and physically reminiscent of Eisenstein, Cousins introduced the screenings and had a lively Q&A with the film buffs in attendance, mostly young Germans (a variation of the Comi Con nerds, minus the costumes).

Made as a TV series presented by the British Film Institute, the documentary is divided in 15 one-hour episodes, not entirely stand alone, spanning 900 minutes. It consists mostly of film clips, sparingly used talking heads and extensive views of cities relevant to film history, from Lyon, France, and West Orange, New Jersey - the cradles of cinema - to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Bombay, Moscow, Tokyo, Cairo and Dakar. What holds together this unwieldy historical and geographical information is the director himself as a narrator (mercifully not a first person). With epigrammatic sentences, a wry sense of humor and a knack for distilling the essence of things in a verse cadence, Cousins is an enthusiastic tour guide through this place of wonder.

The delivery and content of the narration are one of the documentary’s guilty pleasures. It’s lovely to see how he nails a filmmaker with quick brush stroke: “Buñuel comes, guns blazing”; “Wajda disguises meaning by encoding meaning … but he is a shrinking violet compared to Polanski”. His visual statements are bold and funny, and always eloquent, such as the recurring red glass bubble hanging against the Hollywood sign, an image of self-contained fragile dreams, or the gorilla leitmotif made to symbolize sparking new ideas in film grammar or style.

Like Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and other documentaries on film history, such as the Brownlow-Gill’s Hollywood of the 1980s and the recent TCM Moguls and Movie Stars, Cousins uses the medium of film to tell the story. But he places his work squarely between the idiosyncratic modernist epic of Godard, and the formally conventional narratives about Hollywood, structured around clips, interviews and archival materials. In The Story of Film the relation between narrator and visuals is not always a congruent match: often image and sound go their separate ways, while keeping congruity at another level, in a playful nod to modernist strategies.

The goal of The Story of Film is laid out in the first episode and sparingly reiterated throughout the rest of the series: to show the artistic innovations that have moved film forward and continue to push it. (Asked if he had to add a new film along these line, Cousin said he would include Malik’s The Tree of Life). In this vein and moving assuredly across the decades, Cousins discusses for example, the invention of editing before Griffith (“over remembered”), the camera work in Ozu, and the genre experiments Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Consistently, the film makes the point that American cinema is not the only motor driving innovation. However, Cousins does not have an adversarial relationship with Hollywood, but he
does want to open up the game. Backed by a clip from the classic Mother India, he argues that Hindi cinema in the 1950s provides interesting innovations, as valid on political grounds as the subversions embedded in the Douglas Sirk melodramas of the same decade.

With degrees in history, art history and philosophy, Cousins noted in his conversation with the audience that the model for the documentary was The Story of Art, British historian Ernst Gombrich’s comprehensive account of how the visual arts developed across the centuries. This approach is already at work in the films history book of the same title Cousins published in 2004. Both Gombrich and Cousins offer a unified view of their fields, making connections across time. Granted that film history is merely a little over a hundred years old, and connections are more obvious, it is exhilarating to see the links, say, between Bresson, Tarkovski and Malik, or Antonioni, Angelopoulos and Bela Tarr , or Tarkovski and Sokurov in Russian matters.

The delight of The Story of Film is that the narrator explains the visual or sound connections while showing the examples – the end of Bresson’s Pickpocket alongside Schrader’s literal copies at the end of American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. The use of sound in the 1930s also offers a
wealth of clips and insightful observations to make the case of how innovation fosters creativity. An enlightened analysis of documentaries from Nanook of the North to Zidane (2006) shows that divisions between fiction and documentary cinema have no particular relevance – except to
point out that documentaries are always co-directed, as Cousins noted, by the director and reality – a useful reminder to young filmmakers.

For a film professor – always in search of clips to enliven lectures, and ideas to enrich
conversations – this documentary is a mother lode and a great pedagogical aid. Most of the clips from about 1,000 films, listed in the film’s website, came from DVDs, and were used invoking the educational clause in copyright legislation.

Above all, what The Story of Film brings to the table is an immense love of cinema, and an intelligent examination of a wide range of ideas. The film has been brought by the US distributor Music Box. And it will be worth every penny.