1930sSee how the coming of sound upended everything and created new types of film: screwball comedies, gangster pictures, horror films, westerns and musicals.
1918-1932, the great rebel filmmakers around the world. Novel and remarkable experiments in silent cinema; French impressionism and surrealism, German expressionism, Soviet, Japanese and Chinese ...
The Story of Film examines American cinema in the period of 1967-1979 also known as New American Cinema. Films of this time generally fell into three types: satirical films that mocked society and ...
Film critic and historian Mark Cousins uses film clips, interviews with filmmakers, and illustrative footage of locations around the world to take viewers through film and filmmaking history, from the late 19th century to today, with a particular emphasis on world cinema.Written by
agentstinky
Mark Cousins is an Honorary Professor of the University of Glasgow. See more »
Alternate Versions
Complete 900 minute version shown at the Toronto International Film Festival (in 2011), and the New York Museum of Modern Art in New York City (in 2012). See more »
Well let me admit I bought out of this one after three hours, at the point where the word "Sound" comes up in big letters.
Here are all the familiar titles and talents being trotted forth once more, this time in murky dupes spaced by some quite nice travel shots, that they thrash for no particular reason other than to get the running time up or justify the plane tickets. Poor Stanley Donen figures at intervals without saying anything notable - probably because he wasn't asked to.
We get to the end of the silent section without seeing a cowboy. Florence Lawrence has a (not bad) section. Bronco Billy Anderson doesn't. The writer-director-pundit ticks off the eight (count 'em) national industries that provide the qualities he can't find in Hollywood and, once again, we never set foot in the Balkans or the Hispanic nations. Ruan Lingyu stands in for Shanghai, three of the thirty "Expressionist" films for six hundred German titles.
You sit there waiting for the kind of "Hey, that makes sense!" moments that you got in the US CINEMA BBC series or the breath catching quality of the images in Enno Patalas' METROPOLIS documentary.
I don't know which is more depressing, this series or the much touted critics poll that an English magazine called Sight & Sound just ran again. Suspect achievements are lauded. Making notable talents invisible is endorsed.
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Well let me admit I bought out of this one after three hours, at the point where the word "Sound" comes up in big letters.
Here are all the familiar titles and talents being trotted forth once more, this time in murky dupes spaced by some quite nice travel shots, that they thrash for no particular reason other than to get the running time up or justify the plane tickets. Poor Stanley Donen figures at intervals without saying anything notable - probably because he wasn't asked to.
We get to the end of the silent section without seeing a cowboy. Florence Lawrence has a (not bad) section. Bronco Billy Anderson doesn't. The writer-director-pundit ticks off the eight (count 'em) national industries that provide the qualities he can't find in Hollywood and, once again, we never set foot in the Balkans or the Hispanic nations. Ruan Lingyu stands in for Shanghai, three of the thirty "Expressionist" films for six hundred German titles.
You sit there waiting for the kind of "Hey, that makes sense!" moments that you got in the US CINEMA BBC series or the breath catching quality of the images in Enno Patalas' METROPOLIS documentary.
I don't know which is more depressing, this series or the much touted critics poll that an English magazine called Sight & Sound just ran again. Suspect achievements are lauded. Making notable talents invisible is endorsed.