Mark Cousins - The Story of Film

www.anovabooks.com

FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

When I wrote this book eight years ago, I had to pay $75, plus shipping, for a videotape of an Ethiopian film called Harvest 3000 Years to be sent to me from America. It took two weeks to arrive, and my anticipation built. When I finally watched it, I could see that it was a masterwork, and part of The Story of Film.

A moment ago I looked on YouTube, and there it is in all its glory. Also on YouTube, is a film I wrote about in this book but hadnt managed to see, Teinosuke Kingugasas manic, amazing A Page of Madness. Just eight years ago, film history was elusive, a detective story and pricey. Now its a click away.

This means that we dont need to long for great movies as we used to. Theyre just there. Hooray to that, but lets not get blas. Now that cinema is at our fingertips, cultural signposts, things that point me in the direction of magnificent films like Harvest 3000 Years, are more needed than ever. I hope this book is such a thing.

Although the form of film watching is changing, the content, the story, remains compelling. When I walked away from my keyboard in 2004, the digitisation of the film process was ongoing, non-Hollywood aesthetics were re-emerging in movies from Thailand, Russia, Denmark and Austria and, because 9/11 had out-Hollywooded Hollywood, there was what you could call the return of the real in movies. Steven Spielbergs War of the Worlds, Christopher Nolans The Dark Knight and others were casting new shadows over mainstream cinema, and film style was getting grittier.

Since then, James Camerons Avatar re-created 3D and made cinema more tactile, South American movies continued to excel, Terrence Malick made another numinous film The New World, Laurent Cantets Entre les Murs/The Class seemed even bigger than cinema, and Steve McQueens Hunger, Phyllida Lloyds Mamma Mia! and Mike Leighs Another Year showed what an exciting bag of ferrets British film is at the moment. And if one country somehow pulled all this together, marrying innovation with realism, quietude with millennial unease, it was Romania.

And as a footnote to all this, heres a surprise: In the last few years Ive been travelling around the world, my camera on my back, making a film version of this book, which is called The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Ive visited the Bengali village where Pather Panchali was shot, and the New York locations of Taxi Driver; Ive interviewed Stanley Donen who co-directed Singinin the Rain, and Kyoko Kagawa who was in some of the best Japanese films ever made, including Yasujiro Ozus Tokyo Story. The process of adapting the book for the screen has been much bigger than writing it more crew, more technology, more costs but also more intimate, in that as we edit, say, a sequence on Harvest 3000 Years or The Dark Knight, the films feel really close. Theyre right in front of me. I can see every pan, every cut.

Maybe youll see The Story of Film: An Odyssey in a cinema somewhere, or on TV. Maybe youll

How the first filmmakers devised shots, cuts, close-ups and camera moves.

The emergence of Hollywood, the star system and the first great directors.

Mainstream filmmaking and its dissidents in Germany, France, America and the Soviet Union

Movie genres, Japanese masters and depth staging.

Italy leads the way, world cinema follows and Hollywoods vision darkens.

Widescreen, international melodrama and new, early-modernist directors.

A series of new waves transform innovative filmmaking on every continent.

Revivals in German and Australian cinema and the emergence of Middle Eastern and African cinema; Jaws and Star Wars.

The influence of video and MTV; challenging films made in non-Western countries.

A global art form discovers new possibilities.

Above: Steven Spielberg (far right) directing the Omaha Beach D-day sequence in Saving Private Ryan. USA, 1998.

The measure of an artists originality, put in its simplest terms, is the extent to which his selective emphasis deviates from the conventional norm and establishes new standards of relevance. All great innovations which inaugurate a new era, movement or school, consist in sudden shifts of a previously neglected aspect of experience, some blacked out range of the existential spectrum. The decisive turning points in the history of every art form uncover what has already been there; they are revolutionary that is destructive and constructive, they compel us to revalue our values and impose new sets of rules on the eternal game.

Arthur Koestler

The industry is shit, its the medium thats great.

Lauren Bacall

This book tells the story of the art of cinema. It narrates the history of a medium which began as a photographic, largely silent, shadowy novelty and became a digital, multi-billion dollar global business.

Although the business elements of film are important, you will find few details in what follows of what films cost and how the industry organises itself and markets its wares. I wanted to wite a purer book than that, one more focused on the medium than the industry. As you read, therefore, you will come across works that you may not have seen and may never see. I make no apology for this because I do not want to tell a history of cinema that is distorted by the vagaries of the market place. There are mainstream films described in what follows, but mostly I have focused on what I consider to be the most innovative films from any country at any at any period.