Once again, one of the better films this year is a documentary. "The Story of Film" is a 15-hour "odyssey" across the length and breadth of film history.
TIFF is showing the entire piece in chunks during the festival and I saw the first three hours of it Monday morning. Although it's not strictly speaking a chronological history, the segments I saw took the story from the beginning work of Edison and the Lumiere Brothers up to the end of the silent era.
The creator is Mark Cousins, a film professor from Scotland and is based on a book by the same name. His intent is to give credit to the innovative work down across the globe and the portion I saw this morning provided several examples where a new approach in, say, editing, appeared in a country many years before it was adopted by the Hollywood studios.
If the first three hours is any indication, it's an engaging journey through cinema, suitable for the casual film goer as well as the hard-core cinephile. It's hard to say what form it will take, but it could appear as either a series of episodes on TVO or PBS or as a DVD set. During the Q&A, Cousins also spoke about developing material for the web to expand on the examples shown in the film.
Highly recommended.
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