The Story of Film

Gif courtesy of hipster nonsense If We Don't, Remember Me (incidentally, the title is a quote from Kiss Me Deadly)

Hey Blogloteers,

Check out the first three episodes of The Story of Film: An Odyssey on More 4 while it's still available (although I imagine bit torrent will follow shortly...).

It's an adaptation/elaboration of Mark Cousins's awesome book The Story of Film that does a good job of telling said story in a non-academic but nonetheless rigorous manner.

Linearly enough for a true cinephile, he begins with Fred Ott's 1894 Kinetoscopic peep-show First Sneeze (literally, a man sneezing into the camera. 'Twas a time of simple pleasures):

And culminates more or less with Alexander Sokurov's 2002 one-take digital film A Russian Ark:

At least that's what he does in the book anyhow. The TV mini-series is more poetic, lyrical, political, and ultimately moving. The degree to which one might be moved by his narration is somewhat dependent on how you feel about Mark Cousins's voice, which is a love it or hate it kinda voice. An illustration by Adam & Joe:

The book has been my personal cine-bible over the past few years and so it's exciting to see filmed interviews with cinematic legends as well as choice cuts of seminal film history underlining the theories I've already digested.

Having watched a couple episodes however, I'm slightly disappointed to see Cousins's typically understated prose be translated to screen using heavy-handed symbolism. He paints Hollywood as a red bauble, a shiny fantasy that reflects what we want to see of ourselves, and then has a shot of said bauble literally smashing on the ground in slow-motion, a shot repeated several times throughout the series. He also tantalisingly proclaims Ozu, the japanese auteur, to be "possibly the greatest director in the world". Don't get me wrong, I like 'im:

And I do agree that Hollywood has become a big, sweaty, coke-fuelled whore, plopping illegitimate cash-cow dumpster babies out of its morally bankrupt snatch with wanton abandon, but in the book he expressed a much more nuanced sentiment, stating the he just wanted to give a voice to seldom seen films from World Cinema, and not simply to show that Hollywood was trash and that we underestimate the contribution of India, Iran, China etc...

This is ultimately a tiny niggle though, and my wife and I have been utterly won over by his beguiling mixture of archive footage and his own static wide shots of intriguing and cinematic real-life landscapes from around the world. It's also one of the most relaxing documentaries I've seen in a while, and the relentless superimposition of one exquisite film clip after another is utterly hypnotic, like a glossy photo-book of sleeping cats.

Aaah, lovely...