In The Story of Film, Mark Cousins traces the innovations and development of cinema’s first century. The book, published in 2004, spans roughly 400 pages with about as many photographs. Cousins’ 2011 documentary of the same name runs 15 hours and touches on 500-plus movies. Both projects are thoroughly researched and treat cinema as a global phenomenon practiced by every class, gender, race, and sexual orientation. For my money, The Story of Film: An Odyssey is one of the most invigorating and illuminating overviews of the seventh art. I imagine you could read the book, watch the doc, and still walk away not caring about cinema. Some people are also not cheered by a balloon. I don’t know what to do about those people.

Part of The Story of Film’s success is its scope and parameters. In his update, The Story of Film: A New Generation, Cousins looks at the trends that have developed in the intervening years. Technology certainly is one: What VR headsets will provide filmmakers is still being explored, while lighter cameras, such as smartphones, allow more people to express themselves visually. And that is, rightly, one of the things Cousins latches on to. Today, more people from more walks of life use images to tell stories. And consume them. Streaming is the other great innovation of the 21st century. As Cousins points out, in the 20th century, studios, distributors, and exhibitors told us what we could watch and when: “Movies on supply.” Now, the tables have turned and practically everything is on demand. But what effect that has, and will have, on consumable images is still developing.

And that seems to be the greatest handicap to The Next Generation: The story is still unfolding. One of the most engaging aspects of The Story of Film: An Odyssey is how a movie made in 1950 can simultaneously look backward, to a film from 1925, and forward, to a film made in 1975. I little doubt 2019’s Parasite will influence and inform many movies made in 2050, but how those movies deal with Bong Joon-ho’s acerbic story of haves and have-nots—and have-lesses—is unknown. Will they see the poor underground family leeching off the wealthy as the parasites? Or the other way around?

Cousins opens A New Generation with clips from two movies, both revolving around song and dance: Joaquin Phoenix in full clown regalia descending a Bronx staircase to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” and Elsa building her ice palace while singing “Let It Go.” It seems a safe bet that “Let It Go” and Frozen have lodged themselves into the collective cinematic consciousness, the same one that bleeds into everyday life the way quotes from The Godfather have found their way into management guides. But Joker? I’m not so sure. When Cousins was making A New Generation, Joker’s controversy burned white hot. Four years later, it seems to have withered into the all-consuming machine of new. It already feels like something from the previous century.

There are some other drawbacks to A New Generation. An Odyssey occasionally talked with filmmakers reflecting on their work, and where it sat in the greater scheme of things. There is none of that here. Instead, Cousins has to rely on prognostication and theories. Some make sense; some do not. So it goes.

The biggest of those is what the 21st century means to cinema. Is it technology? Is it access? Is it choice? I think one of the most interesting cinematic happenings of the past 20 years—well, the past 10 years, really—is how the 21st century has reclaimed the 20th. Our knowledge of cinema today is more diverse, more representative, and more available than ever before. Archives, festivals, foundations, streaming services, home video labels, and broadcast channels have expanded our definitions and understanding of 20th-century cinema well beyond anything we could have imagined at the close of the millennium. 

The canon isn’t dead, but it’s been put on watch. When I first watched A New Generation in 2021, the results of Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll of the greatest motion pictures of all time was still a year off. The previous poll in 2012 found Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo unseating Citizen Kane in the number one spot. It was big news. But the titles and names attached to those films featured in the top ten were familiar. They had been canonized long ago. And despite the handwringing, 2012’s poll resembled 2002’s, 1992’s, even 1962’s.

But 2022’s poll, with top honors going to Jeanne Dielman, didn’t look anything like 1962’s poll or 2012’s. The story of cinema keeps getting better. And despite a few shortcomings and quibbles, A New Generation is pretty damn good too. Because, as Cousins points out in his delightful Norther Irish brogue, what was the center of the film world in the early days of the 20th century is the same center two decades into the 21st: the human face.

The Story of Film: A New Generation (2021)
Written and directed by Mark Cousins
Produced by John Archer
Music Box Films, Not rated, Running time 160 minutes, Premiered July 6, 2021 at the Cannes Film Festival

---