It is a 15 part series and will run every Monday through December.
The first episode was quite good - not the usual “Hollywood only” version of the history of film, although they do show Hollywood films snippets and talk about that as well.
Just thought you might want to quickly set your VCR for tonight’s repeat of the first episode, and see what you think.
So far, so good - and lots of little stuff I had never heard of before.
Check it out!
BTW, any Brits around who saw the entire series when it was aired there? What did you think of it?
Infuriatingly, when it was broadcast in the UK, it was hidden away on one of Channel 4’s supplementary digital channels. I’ve only seen a couple of episodes, as I didn’t even know it was on. Mark Cousins does really know his stuff, and his passion for the subject is clear. I really need to watch the thing from the start though, but it is 15 hours long…
It’s been streaming on Netflix for awhile. I watched pretty much all of it last year. It is quite good. I especially liked how it doesn’t just focus on Hollywood or European cinema, but also showcases a lot of filmmakers from the third world.
I only happen to catch the first episode because my dad watches old movies on TCM all the time. The first episode was very good, detailed and smart not full of stars & clips & bullshit (always trust the Brits to do a documentary right!) Just added it to my Netflix queue…
Cultural peasant checking in! After about ten minutes, I was wishing Cousins had hired a narrator. I don’t know the term for that speech pattern – ending every statement as if it were a question – but it’s annoying and something I’ve heard before mainly from teenage girls. He’s not conveying information and opinion so much as he’s telling me something I don’t know. Which is fine – I’m watching to learn – but he’s coming off as pretentious.
That’s good to hear. I watched the first episode and I wanted to throw rocks at the screen by the end.
The pattern is technically called high rising terminal but usually called upspeak. HRT is also “a feature of several UK dialects, especially in the mid-Ulster and Belfast variants”, and Cousins is from Ulster.
But he should have hired a narrator. How can anybody so tuned to the minutiae of film be so blind (or should I say deaf?) to the effect of narration?
The effect is that I have to listen more closely, and add my own emphasis – sort of re-say the words in my head. It detracts a bit from what I’m seeing, when I spend so much effort listening.
But I’m learning. Before watching this, I thought that films had always been pretty much the same, except for the introduction of sound, color, and special effects. What he’s saying about continuity and point of view and other early film direction techniques is really interesting.
I thought that was very interesting as well - we take a lot for granted, but you have to remember this was a new art form and film cuts/edits like that could have confused the audience, or were perhaps out of the realm of film makers who had never considered that approach.
Slightly off-topic (TV instead of film), but I happened to catch an old “Magnum P.I” on a fringe cable network yesterday. Even when you watch some of the older TV dramas, you realize the much slower pace, the long pauses, the silly car chase/fight stunts - so even with TV shows, there has been a vast change in how things are filmed, and pacing, and effects. I think today’s audience expect to see various perspectives, points of view and interesting techniques - not just in movies, but even in television shows.
But back to the first episode of this series, it was also interesting to see how many techniques were discovered by accident, and how quickly other directors ripped off ideas from other films…bubbles in drinks, anyone?
*The Story of Film: An Odyssey *is a 15-part series being shown on TCM, and I was looking forward to watching it every week. So, I began to Tivo the first episode, and just sat down to watch it. As it progressed, I became more and more annoyed by the narration of Mark Cousins, who was also its director. Every single statement of his, no matter how short, ended with “high rising terminal,” a.k.a. “moronic interrogative.” This inflection is annoying as hell in itself, especially when used consistently throughout a lengthy narrative. I wanted to scream, “Don’t ask me, TELL me!”
I forced myself to watch about a half hour, then couldn’t take it any longer.
Fortunately the series is accompanied by the showing of some of the films mentioned in the program, so at least I’ll watch them.
The odd thing is that in the interview before the showing, he doesn’t do it quite so much. So it’s a deliberate affectation on his part, making it even more obnoxious. It became so irritating that I had to turn it off after the first half-hour.
Either he toned it down or I’m getting used to it – about halfway through the second episode and it’s not so bad.
But did you catch his mistake in the scene from Gone with the Wind? It’s the iconic scene with Scarlett and a man on a rise at Tara, looking at a sunset and the camera moves back and back. Cousins refers to them as lovers. It wasn’t Rhett with Scarlett in that shot; it was her father. Everyone knows that.