Written and Directed by Mark Cousins
Runtime: 2 hours and 40 minutes
Available digitally September 20 and will be on DVD October 18

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Many moons ago a fellow cinephile recommended Mark Cousin’s video essay series The Story of Film: An Odyssey. “It’s 15 hours long, but I think you would like it,” he said. 15 hours is a lot to ask of anybody, even the most hoity toity of film snobs, so I backburnered it into my, “I’ll watch it when I’m retired” list. And of course a year or so after that I had major neck surgery and I was stuck in one of these Ikea chairs for 3 weeks unable to turn my head living a sort of movie lover’s monkey’s paw curse. The first thing I put on was The Story of Film and I was entranced from the jump. In the series Irish documentarian Mark Cousin’s shepherds the viewer through the entire history of cinema. What’s most impressive is the wide net Cousins casts for this exhaustive series and where these sorts of “History of Film” things tend to focus on Western cinema, Cousins portrays cinema as a worldwide phenomenon. The film’s tagline—“A passionate ode to cinema, spanning 6 continents, 12 decades and 1,000 films”--doesn’t lie, and Cousins’ passionate narration in his lovely Irish lilt is what powers you through this massive paean to film. It’s as close as you can get to going to film school without going to film school.

The Story of Film: A New Generation is Cousins’ ten-year follow-up to his original series is more of the same, which in this case is an excellent thing. It’s pure film nerd comfort food with nearly three hours of Cousins guiding us through the ways film and the ways we experience film has changed in the second decade of the 21st Century in addition to covering the great films of the 2010s and tying them back to examples from the first 100+ years of film. It’s a schtick that might not work for everyone—for instance, the film’s opening has Cousins comparing the staircase dance sequence in Joker to Elsa’s “Let it Go” sequence in Frozen, and you can probably tell if you’re going to like this or not based on that juxtaposition—but for me, these three hours flew by. 

Cousins’ latest Story of Film installment is broken into two sections, with the first –”Extending the Language of Film”—being more of an extension of the original series, where the second—What Have We Been Digging For?--being more ethereal and focused on some of the more technological and philosophical aspects of modern filmmaking. The first half is a celebration of directors and films that pushed the boundaries of cinema as we knew it, and while the connections Cousins’ draws between films sometimes feel like a stretch, I never found myself unwilling to go with his thesis. Sometimes it bends, but it never quite breaks. There are 5 minutes on how Booksmart extended the language of comedy in the 21st Century which is a bold take, but one I was more than happy to hear Cousins’ out on. The most fun thing about Story of Film is the way Cousins’ can shed new light on movies you already love. He waxes rhapsodic on everything from Moonlight to Mad Max: Fury Road to Deadpool (where, I’m not even kidding, he analyzes the opening credits sequence and the way it plays with Superhero movie stereotypes in a way that is fascinating). 

The second half of the film doesn’t abandon the style of the first, but it is more abstract and about the content and creation of film rather than the form itself. Here we see Cousins’ take on a movie like Tangerine, which was shot entirely on an iPhone and Netflix’s Choose Your Own Adventure movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Cousin’s coverage of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence are the most endemic of the film’s second half as one of its core theses is the way reality and cinema have begun to dovetail more and more. While all of this is fascinating, there is a reason the original 15-hour behemoth was broken up into one-hour episodes and once we pass the second hour is where Cousins’ theses start feeling a little too disjointed. Even as a fan of Cousins I found myself fading down the stretch as he overstretched his material. I think the primary issue here is that where the original series has the whole history of cinema to draw from, giving it a natural structure, this addendum is more about how films have changed both formally and technologically within a limited timeframe. I will personally go wherever Mark Cousins wants to take me, but I can see a lot of viewers checking out when the ideas start getting a little more scattershot in the last forty minutes. 

The big question here is: do I need to invest 15 hours burning through the original Story of Film series (currently streaming on Hoopla and Tubi)? The answer: It depends! The Story of Film: A New Generation is a perfect sampling of Cousins’ style that you can check out before you commit to 900 minutes of passionate video essay filmmaking. And yet the experience is a lot richer if you have the original series under your belt as Cousins uses his new film to build on the story he crafted a decade ago. It’s really an ingenious bit of viewer versatility and honestly, if Mark Cousins’ vibe is your thing, it doesn’t matter which path you take up this mountain. If you’re like me, you’re going to end up with dozens of new movies on your Letterboxd watchlist and a deeper appreciation for the medium we all love around here.