The Story of Film: An Odyssey

Mark Cousins tells the story of cinema, starting in this episode with the birth of the movies, telling the glamorous, surprising stories of early movi...

Movies in the Roaring Twenties: Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry with star directors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But t...

The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. The programme visits Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to explore the places where movie makers...

The coming of sound in the 1930s upends everything. We watch the birth of new types of film: screwball comedies, gangster pictures, horror films, west...

Mark Cousins explores how the trauma of war led to more daring creations for cinema, focusing on the darkening of American film and the drama of the M...

Sex and melodrama in the movies of the fifties: James Dean, On the Waterfront and glossy weepies. We travel to Egypt, India, China, Mexico, Britain an...

The explosive story of film in the late fifties and sixties: The great movie star Claudia Cardinale talks exclusively about Federico Fellini; in Denma...

The dazzling 1960s in cinema around the world: In Hollywood, legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler reveals how documentary influenced mainstream mo...

The maturing of American cinema of the late sixties and seventies: Buck Henry, writer of The Graduate, talks exclusively about movie satire of the tim...

The movies that tried to change the world in the seventies: Wim Wenders in Germany; Ken Loach and Britain; Pasolini in Italy; the birth of new Austral...

Star Wars, Jaws and The Exorcist created the multiplexes, but they were also innovative. In India the world’s most famous movie star, Amitabh Bachchan...

Protest in the movies of the 1980s: brave filmmakers spoke truth to power. American independent director John Sayles talks exclusively about these yea...

Film in the 1990s enters a surprise golden age. In Iran we meet Abbas Kiarostami, who rethought movie making and made it more real. Then, in Tokyo, we...

Brilliant, flashy, playful movies in the English speaking world in the nineties. We look at what was new in Tarantino’s dialogue and the edginess of t...

Movies come full circle: They get more serious after 9/11, and Romanian movies come to the fore. But then David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive becomes one o...