The Complete Story of Film (2011 & 2021)
dir. Mark Cousins
Rated: N/A
image: ©2023 Music Box Films
I have a friend – who shall remain nameless – who, I think, enjoys trying to wind me up every once in a while with a particular movie hot take. Every so often in my presence, this person will say a slightly different version of, “Any movie made before 1993 is basically hot garbage, right?” (This person is known for making incendiary and facetious statements, and it’s always in good fun. The sage observation comes from a third party (whom I’ve never met) who said that Demolition Man is the Rosetta Stone here.) Each time this little nugget gets trotted out, a half-smile appears on my face, and I respond with some variation of, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter how many times you say that, I’m never going to agree with you.”
If there is any single work to once-and-for-all incinerate the notion that “old movies are bad,” it’s Northern Irish documentarian Mark Cousins’s epic, 18+ hour magnum opus The Complete Story of Film, a meditation on the greatest art form ever invented.
What began as The Story of Film: An Odyssey in 2011 was expanded upon by Cousins with his 2021 follow-up, The Story of Film: A New Generation, which covers the subsequent decade of cinema between the two releases.
The good folks at Music Box Films have produced a handsomely deluxe, four-disc Blu-ray set of Cousins’s astonishing achievement in cinema history and analysis. Music Box Films is a distribution company specializing in international and independent cinema releases that is owned and operated by the same company that runs the historic Music Box Theatre in Chicago. (I have yet to make it to this great American city, but if/when I do, the Music Box will be one of the first places I visit.)
I caught up with An Odyssey not long after its 2011 release – this was in the days before I had signed up for a Letterboxd account, and I can’t even remember at this point how I saw it, because, you know, I’m The Forgetful Film Critic – and was positively blown away by the scope and incisive quality of Cousins’s film.
I completely missed the release of A New Generation in 2021, discovering it was a thing with the announcement of the Blu-ray set of both films from Music Box. (Full disclosure: Music Box Films furnished me with a complimentary copy of their release in exchange for this review.) I slowly made my way through the entire 17-chapter journey over the course of the last two weeks in preparation for this piece.
In the opening minutes of An Odyssey, Cousins waxes poetic, in his melodic, sing-song delivery – detractors will likely denigrate Cousins’s voiceover narration as suffering from uptalk; I find it soothing – about how the movies do what they do by analyzing the opening Normandy Beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan. He uses the fact that this event, one of the most violent and deadly in human history, was shot on a peaceful beach in Ireland.
Saving Private Ryan, like much of cinema, “uses a lie to tell the truth.” Right from the start, Cousins imbues his sprawling documentary with a sense of lyricism that is often missing in film history and analysis.
Next, we move to an observation of bubbles. Cousins links three films – 1947’s Odd Man Out, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her from 1967, and 1976’s Taxi Driver – in their staging of the protagonist staring into the bubbles of a liquid as a metaphor for staring into their own existential crises. 2 or 3 Things director Jean-Luc Godard was a fan of Carol Reed, who directed Odd Man Out, and Taxi Driver’s director, Martin Scorsese, is a fan of both men’s work. This central idea, that all art is informed and influenced by what has come before it – an idea central to any artistic endeavor, really – gives us a sense of what an incredible and staggering art form cinema is.
Cousins’s main thesis, which he returns to again and again throughout both An Odyssey and A New Generation is that money and the business executives aren’t what actually drives movies, contrary to popular belief. (It’s impossible, though, in my mind, not to grant that money is all too often a primary concern; capitalism infects everything it touches.) What really drives the movies, what propels them into new and exciting territory, is innovation. That innovation comes in two forms: technological innovation and the innovation of ideas.
Throughout this examination of the thirteen decades of existing film history, Cousins links how new technologies in the story of film have propelled new ideas from film artists. These artists seize on the technological innovations – the inception of sound and color, crane shots, and the invention of the Steadicam are but a few – as a way to push storytelling forward; it’s the never-ending quest to surprise, delight, shock, or horrify an audience. That’s no mean feat in a society where everyone is looking at screens constantly. We are consuming more and more stories all the time, making it harder and harder for artists to break through the clutter.
Cousins also does a relatively good job at bringing in perspectives and milestones from marginalized communities within the story of film. To read some mainstream film histories, you might get the impression that no one in Africa so much as picked up a camera before the year 2000. Cousins puts the lie to that myth by extensively covering world cinema with a great deal of respect and seriousness.
He spends time with Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, who made the seminal African cinema classic Cairo Station in 1958. His contemplation of Satyajit Ray as the greatest Indian filmmaker is compelling. Cousins also goes in depth on world cinema luminaries like Ousmane Sembène – who used his films to critique the colonialism and racism in his native Senegal – New Zealand director Jane Campion, and French film pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché, a figure almost forgotten until relatively recently.
Women, Cousins tells us, were responsible for the overwhelming majority of films written and made in the silent era. As soon as the money men realized they could make a fortune, though, they pushed out those women and men dominated the fledgling industry.
The Complete Story of Film, and Cousins, do have a few irritating blind spots. The director goes out of his way in at least two passages of his 1123-minute opus to note that Roman Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, and their unborn child, were horrifically murdered by the Manson family in 1969. He talks about how this affected Polanski’s work. There is zero mention, however, of Polanski’s 1977 arrest – which subsequently led to the director fleeing the States, never to return in order to avoid a trial – for the sexual assault of 13-year-old girl. If you weave in one personal anecdote about an artist, why leave the other one out?
The same can be said for the film’s coverage of Woody Allen’s sordid past when it comes to child molestation. If all you knew of Allen came from this documentary, you’d think he was simply a visual stylist titan who delights in photographing his beloved New York City. There is no mention of Allen’s Manhattan outside of the gorgeous cinematography. That film includes the 42-year-old protagonist, played by Allen himself, essentially sexually grooming a 17-year-old girl, played by Mariel Hemingway.
It is inexcusable to elide this information. As a society, and as anyone who wants to wrestle seriously with the whole of art and the artists who create it, we must reckon with bad actors and their actions. To do otherwise is to perpetuate more suffering on the people – almost exclusively women and other members of marginalized communities – to whom these bad actors cause harm. (Another disclosure: I can still watch and enjoy some of Allen’s output, which is undeniably masterful, while simultaneously holding the idea in my mind that he is, at best, a complete creep and, at worst, an irredeemable piece of shit.)
At the same time, Cousins does honor the contributions women have made to the story of film. He includes one interview passage with Jane Campion in which she contemplates how female cinema differs in splendid and exciting ways from male cinema. Cousins acknowledges how part of the innovation of cinema includes expanding which voices are given the opportunity to tell stories and how that expansion makes the art form better. It makes the artistic rendering of the human experience – a central occupation of the art form – more complete.
I also want to gently push back on one statement Cousins makes during the film. While talking about Chinese cinema, he mentions that the footage of one man bravely standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square changed the world in a way that cinema rarely does.
I disagree.
I think cinema, and storytelling in general, changes the world constantly. It’s a soft, quiet, velvet (whichever is your preferred term) revolution, but that doesn’t make it any less real or powerful. For proof, look below at this series of Instagram infographic slides about Barbie:
(Here’s the original Instagram post, if you’re interested.)
Cinema has the power to change the world, and it does so in little ways every day.
With A New Generation, Cousins wrestles with how innovation has continued, and will continue, to push the boundaries of what we call cinema. In addition to covering important film movements, which he frames in terms of genre, instead of strictly by country – which is mainly how he frames An Odyssey – Cousins discusses advances in gaming, streaming, VR, and interactive forms of cinema that have been taking off in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
His passage on director Tsai Ming Liang’s 2017 VR movie experiment, The Deserted VR, is mesmerizing. That film was shot using a camera more akin to what Google Maps uses to capture 360° views of streets. When screened with a VR headset, The Deserted VR allows you to look away from the main action, taking in the entire world of the movie. It’s film directing as it’s always been, Cousins tells us, only much, much more of it.
Cousins also covers the rise, in the new millennium, of the Slow Cinema movement, one of my personal favorite flavors of movies. In the wake of the MCU and the constant bombardment of stimulation that our modern digital age offers, Slow Cinema is a way to reclaim contemplative character studies and deep moods in cinematic storytelling. He speaks lovingly and at length about the work of Slow Cinema master Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
In the last decade of film history, according to Cousins, filmmakers have focused on the best and worst of human traits, as exemplified in his study of pictures like the 2017 Chilean movie A Fantastic Woman and the 2018 Romanian film I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians. We can’t know what future decades of cinematic innovation, both technological and artistic, will bring to this ineffable, glorious art form, but through The Complete Story of Film, director Mark Cousins has proven his complete mastery over the subject.
Why it got 5 stars:
- The few quibbles I had with it aside, The Complete Story of Film is a staggering work of scholarship on the entire history (so far) of the greatest art form ever invented. If you ever want an answer to why I love the movies so much, give an hour or two (or all 18!) of this documentary a spin!
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The actual Music Box Films Blu-ray package is gorgeous. The four discs come in a beautiful box and a detailed booklet comes included that features several interviews with Cousins, as well as a complete index of every film he mentions in the doc, arranged by episode and in order of mention. It will be a crown jewel in my physical media collection. That’s saying something, considering I, like most everyone else, have almost completely abandoned physical media for the convenience of streaming. I’ve decided recently that I would like to keep a very select number of titles on physical media, and The Complete Story of Film is a perfect title to include.
- While the packaging and overall presentation of the documentary on the discs is splendid — the transfer quality of the clips Cousins included are all beautiful, unless, of course, the clip he is commenting on comes from a film that has not been as lovingly curated as, say, Casablanca — I did run into a few playback issues on disc three. Chapters 8 and 9 (or, it could possibly be chapters 9 and 10; I’m frankly too lazy at the moment to pop in the disc) has some issues with the subtitles. On those chapters, I had to (after quite a few minutes of not realizing there was an issue) turn on the full subtitles for the hearing impaired in order for the subtitles of foreign language film clips to display properly. Every other chapter plays the English subtitles with foreign language clips without needing to do that. When I realized there was a problem, it was easy to make the adjustment, but it was annoying. So, if you end up getting the box set, be aware of this potential issue.
- Am I a selfish asshole for hoping that Cousins goes back once a decade or so until he dies, so he can continually add to his work?!?
- Thanks again to the fine folks at Music Box Films for providing me a complementary set of the discs for review!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
You can find Music Box Films’s page for the box set here, and it is available to purchase here. Both parts of The Story of Film (An Odyssey and A New Generation) are also available for rent and purchase on most digital streaming platforms.