The Story Of Film: An Odyssey 3 + 4

In his documentary director Mark Cousins sets out to explore the history of cinema’s evolution. EIn seinem Dokumentarfilmprojekt begibt Regisseur Mark Cousins auf eine Entdeckungsreise durch die Evolutionsgeschichte des Kinos.verything builds on what has gone before it. Of course there would still be films without Lumiere, Griffith, Murnau, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Godard, Altman, Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. But what would the films at this year’s Berlinale look like, had it not been for the work of these directors? The Lumière brothers’ gardener, Eisenstein’s use of montage, Jean Seberg’s cry ‘New York Herald Tribune!’ and Robert Altman’s long takes have changed the language of cinema. In his documentary film project THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY director Mark Cousins goes on a journey through the evolutionary history of cinema. In interviews with Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann and Stanley Donen, the cinema’s pioneering innovations in technology and dramaturgy are described and analysed. The influence of Asian, Middle Eastern and African on film language is not forgotten, either. The universality and beauty of this language becomes clear when Indian director Mani Kaul and actress Kyoko Kagawa, or Kurosawa or Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami begin to talk about their work and their cinematic dreams.
by Mark Cousins United Kingdom 2011 480’