The Story of Film: An Odyssey

This opening part of The Story of Film: An Odyssey shows the birth of a great new art form, the movies. Filmed in the very buildings where the first movies were made, it shows that ideas and passion have always driven film, more than money and marketing. We hear the story of the very first movie stars, close ups and special effects and then we travel to Hollywood to see how it became a myth. The story is full of surprises, such as the fact that the greatest, and best paid writers in these early years, were women. And then there’s the glamour: the building of the great movie cathedrals.

This is the fascinating story of the movies in the roaring 20s. We see how Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry in these years, and how star directors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton emerged. But the gloss and fantasy was challenged by movie makers like Robert Flaherty, Eric Von Stroheim and Carl Theodor Dreyer, who wanted films to be more serious and mature. Filmed in Hollywood, Denmark and Moscow, looks at the battle for the soul of cinema and some of the greatest movies ever made.

The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema, and this is the story of that age. We visit Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to discover the places where movie makers were pushing the boundaries of the medium. German Expressionism, Soviet montage, French impressionism and surrealism were passionate new film movements, but less well known are the glories of Chinese and Japanese films and the moving story of one of the great, now forgotten, movie stars, Ruan Lingyu.

We see how the coming of sound in the 1930s upended everything. We watch the birth of new types of film: screwball comedies, gangster pictures, horror films, westerns and musicals, and discover a master of most of them, Howard Hawks. Far away from Hollywood, in England Alfred Hitchcock hits his stride and French directors become masters of mood. And we discover that three of the great films of 1939 – The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Nintochka – have something in common.

The Story of Film shows how the trauma of war made cinema more daring. The story starts in Italy, and then we go to Hollywood, discover Orson Welles and chart the darkening of American film and the drama of the McCarthy era. Screenwriters Paul Schrader and Robert Towne discuss these years. The director of Singin in the Rain, Stanley Donen, talks exclusively about his career, and we discover that British films like The Third Man best sum up these extraordinary years.

The story of sex and melodrama in the movies of the 50s. We discover James Dean, On the Waterfront and the glossy weepies of the time, but also travel to Egypt, India, China, Mexico, Britain and Japan to find that movies there too were full of rage and passion. Features exclusive interviews with the people who worked with Satyajit Ray, with legendary actress Kyoko Kagawa who starred in films by Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, and the first great Africa director, Youssef Chahine.