How are you watching it?
Thanks,
Joanna
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I've been watching Mark Cousin's The Story of Film. It's excellent. I think Michael Pollak said it was available on youtube.
In order to tell the story of film, he focuses on what he calls "Hollywood romantic" which he uses as a foil against which classical, realism, neorealism, surrealism, noir, etc. emerge as artistic movements in general, and are sometimes expressions of ethnic nationalism more specifically - such as the degree to which France invested heavily in film production, wanting film to be a kind of national signature to write on the world.
The artifice, "the bauble of the Hollywood Romantic," gets a bit wearing at times, but I'm thinking it must be necessary in order to tell some kind of story. Each section packs a wallop, didactic in a positive sense of the word: you're not only being educated by the narration, the interviews, and the clips, but also by the cinematography itself - though the narrator never points to it directly.
In addition to this history of film movements, you also learn about the technical developments which shaped the language of film. And with that, you learn about the way the camera is used to speak that language through lighting, cutting, masking, shadows, camera angles, depth, focus, etc.
He is also careful to show how Hollywood has always been a product of film production around the world - in China, India, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, ITaly, France, Sweden, Germany.... We are told that Hollywood is the only story of film in more popular narratives, and it is only through spunk that the rest of them have emerged to be a challenge to Hollywood. But this isn't so, and Cousins shows how Holllywood productions were influenced by people working in other countries.
One of his more provocative claims, with which he opens, is that film is not driven by money. instead, he advances the argument that film - the ones we love anyway - are driven by the conversation between filmmakers: The way the way various filmic devices get used over and over as nods to other filmmakers such as when Sonny Corleone gets whacked in the Godfather is a nod to Seven Samurai. (I've forgotten the technical term for this device)
Elsewhere, we've been discussing it, and others in the convo have called Cousin's doco an essay, not so much a documentary since it doesn't rely on the documentary conventions designed to provoke a sense of objectivity. In fact, Cousins begins "the odyssey" with this line: "A lie. To tell the truth. This is film." Which I liked for a number of reasons, but one is because it evoked Alice Munro's theme in her novels about Anglo immigrants to Canada who are deeply suspicious of fiction because it is seen as telling lies.
At any rate, I'm only about half way through this, it's 15 hours worth of footage, so back to viewing. :)
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