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.

Grumpy When the narrator began to speak I sat up in my chair and paid attention. No screwing around--this guy is speaking intelligently. And no apologies. No attempt to make it comfy for the fools in the audience. It's just him and me, having a conversation about film. A good conversation. If some viewers are alienated by this, and can't follow it--tough. Go away if this is over your head. Wow. That was refreshing. After the past decade of watching The History Channel and PBS dumb down everything, making medieval armaments into a back-yard competition suitable for a tailgating party, or taking Napoleon or King Richard III and making them into mini-celebs, complete with "secrets" to be revealed (yow!) it felt like a cool drink of water after a long walk in the desert to actually hear a man speaking intelligently WITH NO REGARD FOR THE SLOW KIDS. I felt a warm glow in my heart. I felt a kind of bliss. I know that somewhere somebody is upset because it makes them feel bad to know that they'll never get it. And I know that a mere TV show shouldn't make people feel bad like that--in theory. But is that really my problem? Should I care?I never would have discovered the incredible films of Claire Denis without this series. I would not have been aware of the work of Yasujiro Ozu. I would not have bothered to see the masterpieces of Tarkovsky. I would have missed out on a real education on film. My understanding of film has been genuinely expanded, exponentially, by the work of Mark Cousins. This series is gold. Solid gold.PBS used to show this kind of material, back when "American Experience" was "THE American Experience," and "Masterpiece" was "Masterpiece Theatre." What happened to that stuff? I used to enjoy watching Bill Buckley sparring with various "liberals." Now, anything intelligent is anti-American? How did this happen? We need more TV series like The Story of Film--many, many more.

George Roots (GeorgeRoots) Note: This isn't really a review, more of a shout out to a series I would recommend to any film lover.This Documentary is the work of Irish film critic Mark Cousins, and is based on his extremely thorough 2004 novel "The Story of Film". Though it has only recently been released, it is a production that really deserve to be looked at as it examines some of the very best and more obscure choices of world cinema rarely mentioned in the history books (Most pointed out are wrote by rich white men and can be considered "racist by omission").There are obviously many Documentaries that exist on making a movie, but few tend to explore a series of movies and take an "essay" approach to dissection and interpretation. Jean-Luc Godard's "Histoire(s) du cinema", featured a short but diverse list that has interesting points to make, though it remains a somewhat small production I feel is limited in what it has and could say. "The Story of Film" spends its first few hours covering the origins of technique, the recurring images film makers pay homage to and the start of the Hollywood business. As the series progresses, we see how countless innovations have been tooled with across the world as Mark either narrates or comments over many relevant clips. The running commentary also offers a short and sweet sentence on the state of the world at the time, and any other interesting notes behind the camera.I can really only see this series becoming tedious if you have no desire to eventually see these movies. At the moment I can somewhat agree that the series falters somewhere in the middle, only because I've yet to really explore Indian and Iranian Cinema in depth. I have no idea how long this production took to make, but many people are interviewed including directors ranging from Stanley Donen to Lars Von Trier, and even seeing actress Kyoko Kagawa was very pleasant as I've been watching her movies only recently.Final Verdict: I suppose this series isn't for everyone, but for those who are really passionate about cinema will definitely learn a thing or two. In 2011 I was 19 the first time I saw it, and I found it to be this wonderful 15 hour film course. Now I'm 23, and having seen a larger majority of these movies I come back to this series yearly and would recommend it to just about everyone. It will possibly start a new trend of how film history is remembered, but for now it stands as the great reminder of what the medium can be, and just how it continues to grow with us emotionally as well as technologically. 10/10.

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.