The Story of Film: An Odyssey

1

Birth of the Cinema

Mark Cousins tells the story of cinema, starting in this episode with the birth of the movies, telling the glamorous, su…

2

The Hollywood Dream

Movies in the Roaring Twenties: Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry with star directors like Charlie Ch…

3

The Golden Age of World Cinema

The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. The programme visits Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to explore …

4

The Arrival of Sound

The coming of sound in the 1930s upends everything. We watch the birth of new types of film: screwball comedies, gangste…

5

Post-War Cinema

Mark Cousins explores how the trauma of war led to more daring creations for cinema, focusing on the darkening of Americ…

6

Sex & Melodrama

Sex and melodrama in the movies of the fifties: James Dean, On the Waterfront and glossy weepies. We travel to Egypt, In…

7

European New Wave

The explosive story of film in the late fifties and sixties: The great movie star Claudia Cardinale talks exclusively ab…

8

New Directors, New Form

The dazzling 1960s in cinema around the world: In Hollywood, legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler reveals how docume…

9

American Cinema of the 70s

The maturing of American cinema of the late sixties and seventies: Buck Henry, writer of The Graduate, talks exclusively…

10

Movies to Change the World

The movies that tried to change the world in the seventies: Wim Wenders in Germany; Ken Loach and Britain; Pasolini in I…

11

The Arrival of Multiplexes and Asian Mainstream

Star Wars, Jaws and The Exorcist created the multiplexes, but they were also innovative. In India the world’s most famou…

12

Fight the Power: Protest in Film

Protest in the movies of the 1980s: brave filmmakers spoke truth to power. American independent director John Sayles tal…

13

New Boundaries: World Cinema in Africa, Asia & Latin America

Film in the 1990s enters a surprise golden age. In Iran we meet Abbas Kiarostami, who rethought movie making and made it…

14

New American Independents & The Digital Revolution

Brilliant, flashy, playful movies in the English speaking world in the nineties. We look at what was new in Tarantino’s …

15

Cinema Today and the Future

Movies come full circle: They get more serious after 9/11, and Romanian movies come to the fore. But then David Lynch’s …