The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011)

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a documentary film about the history of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total length of over 900 minutes. It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins, a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his 2004 book The Story of Film.

The series was broadcast in September 2011 on More4, the digital television service of UK broadcaster Channel 4. The Story of Film was also featured in its entirety at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, and it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in February 2012. It was broadcast in the United States on Turner Classic Movies beginning in September 2013.

The Telegraph headlined the series' initial broadcast in September 2011 as the "cinematic event of the year", describing it as "visually ensnaring and intellectually lithe, it’s at once a love letter to cinema, an unmissable masterclass, and a radical rewriting of movie history." An Irish Times writer called the programme a "landmark" (albeit a "bizarrely underpromoted" one). The program won a Peabody Award in 2013 "for its inclusive, uniquely annotated survey of world cinema history."

In February 2012, A. O. Scott of The New York Times described Cousins' film as "a semester-long film studies survey course compressed into 15 brisk, sometimes contentious hours" that "stands as an invigorated compendium of conventional wisdom." Contrasting the project with its "important precursor (and also, perhaps, an implicit interlocutor)", Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Scott commended Cousins' film as "the place from which all future revisionism must start".



^ Scott, A. O. (31 January 2012). "Your Film of Films: A Sweeping History of an Art". New York Times. Retrieved 31 January 2012.

^ Cousins, Mark (2011). "The Story of Film: An Odyssey - Real To Reel". Toronto International Film Festival. Retrieved 24 February 2012.

^ King, Susan (2 September 2013). "'The Story of Film: An Odyssey' gives a non-Hollywood history". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2013-09-03.

^ Sukhdev Sandhu, "The Story of Film, cinematic event of the year: Mark Cousins's 15-hour television series is an epic journey through the history of cinema, says Sukhdev Sandhu", The Telegraph, (UK) 2 September 2011.

^ Donald Clarke, "Mark Cousins’s Story of Film", Irish Times, 5 September 2011.

^ 73rd Annual Peabody Awards, May 2014.

Synopsis

L'histoire du cinéma international racontée à travers l'histoire de l'innovation cinématographique. Couvrant six continents et douze décennies, il montre comment les cinéastes sont influencés par les événements historiques de leur époque et par les autres cinéastes.

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