The Story of Film: An Odyssey (Season 1)

Watch The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) online on iFILM — fifteen hours of cinema history across fifteen episodes, directed and narrated by Scottish critic Mark Cousins, covering everything from the silent era to the early 2000s.

Cousins travelled across dozens of countries and sat with filmmakers including Jane Campion, Lars von Trier, Wim Wenders, and Alexander Sokurov. His approach is not a canon or a ranking — it traces live influence: how a cutting technique from German Expressionism resurfaces forty years later in Hong Kong action cinema, how Iranian films of the 1990s carry a debt to Italian Neorealism that went largely unacknowledged at the time. The series is opinionated, occasionally contrarian, and more useful for it.

Film students, industry professionals, and anyone who has ever wondered where a particular directorial style actually came from will find this reframes what they thought they knew. Stream The Story of Film: An Odyssey online on iFILM.