“A lie to tell the truth.” That’s one way that filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins describes the nature of filmmaking in the narration that kicks off the first episode of his epic 15 part, 915 minute long documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. He’s applying that statement to the Normandy Beach sequence from Steven Spielberg’s 1998 war film Saving Private Ryan. That movie conveyed the gruesome and graphic nature of combat in a way that few films before it ever had; in reality, Spielberg shot the scene at a typically peaceful, quiet beach in Ireland, transforming the location, for a brief moment in time, into a war zone.
Saving Private Ryan is the first of many, many movies from around the world that Cousins mentions and dissects in his 2011 documentary, which covers the span of film history from the birth of cinema in the late 1800s all the way through to the early 2000s, and which in the decade or so since its release has been heralded as both an essential course in the medium’s craft and history, and as a radical re-envisioning of the standard canon. In 2021, Cousins continued the story with The Story of Film: A New Generation, two more chapters that chronicled films from 2010 to 2021. Now, for the first time, Music Box Films has collected the series in its entirely on Blu-ray in a new set titled The Complete Story of Film.
The Complete Story of Film spreads the documentary’s 17 chapters (each approximately an hour long) across four discs. A 47 page booklet accompanying the set enriches the on-screen material further, containing a recent interview with Mark Cousins conducted by Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson, an index of all the movies referenced in each segment, and many of Cousins’ personal musings during the making of TSOF:AO, frankly chronicling the many hardships and joys that went in to traveling the world, tracking down many locations and people to provide further insight connected to the films discussed in the documentary. While Cousins structures the documentary chronologically from the 1890s onward, his primary focus is on innovation, and he and editor Timo Langer frequently connect images from films from different time periods and different parts of the world in a compelling fashion that reveals how the art form—a relatively new one, as Cousins often points out— developed, and how those early innovations either evolved over time, or, more often than not, continued to be effective decades later. For instance, in episode three of TSOF:AO, Cousins compares a man’s discovery of a disembodied hand in Luis Buñuel’s ground-breaking 1929 surreal short film Un Chien Andalou with a similar series of cuts that lead to the discovery of a disembodied ear in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet nearly 60 years later.
Such studies on the actual craft and art of filmmaking never go out of style, yet now feels like the perfect time to visit or revisit both parts of The Story of Film, thanks to something that Cousins says in that aforementioned interview with Jackson. Cousins makes it very clear in discussions in and around his work that he is interested in discovery, in venturing outside the mainstream and finding work from underrepresented groups, particularly from India and African countries. When Jackson comments on his “sense of rigor” and asks, “Is your intention to rewrite the canon?” Cousins responds, “More like to plant a bomb under the canon. It needs to be entirely exploded, doesn’t it?” This interview was conducted upon the release of The Story of Film: A New Generation in 2021, and yet it feels incredibly prescient thanks to the response to the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, a once-a-decade survey of critics and filmmakers around the world. Last year, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 French drama Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, an over-three-hour-long portrait of a single mother, surprised cinephiles the world over by being named the greatest film of all time, toppling previous mainstays Citizen Kane by Orson Welles and Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock—both white male auteurs. The idea that such a film by a female filmmaker that many people hadn’t seen, much less heard of, could ever be the greatest movie ever made scratched many canon purists the wrong way (writer and director Paul Schrader had some particularly misogynistic things to say about it). The wonderful thing about that Sight and Sound poll, whether you agree with the decisions or not, is that it throws a lot of films into the ether that many audiences likely haven’t seen, and gives them a new awareness of them and an opportunity to engage with them. Not everyone will agree with Cousins’ critical approach in The Story of Film either, particularly his decidedly subjective presentation of film history (his assertion in episode four that American animation pioneer Walt Disney became far less innovative after World War II, for instance); but it is a joyous celebration of the movies, and provides an endless watchlist of great world cinema to explore, and that is reason enough to give it a look.
The Complete Story of Film is now available for purchase from Music Box Films; for more information, click here. Runtime: 1123 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 
I think my fav. part here is the last sentence.. where you say runtime: 1123 minutes… I mean whoa! hahahaha this looks interesting though I realize everyone has their own idea of what the best film is..exploring it like this would be fun!
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