The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a documentary film about the history
of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total
length of over 900 minutes. It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins,
a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his 2004 book The Story of Film.
The series was broadcast in September 2011 on More4, the digital television
service of UK broadcaster Channel 4. The Story of Film was also featured in
its entirety at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, and it was exhibited
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in February 2012. It was
broadcast in the United States on Turner Classic Movies beginning in September 2013.
The Telegraph headlined the series' initial broadcast in September 2011 as the
"cinematic event of the year", describing it as "visually ensnaring and intellectually lithe, it’s at once a love letter to cinema, an unmissable masterclass, and a radical rewriting of movie history." An Irish Times writer called the programme a "landmark" (albeit a "bizarrely underpromoted" one).[5] The program won a Peabody Award in 2013 "for its inclusive, uniquely annotated survey of world cinema history."
In February 2012, A. O. Scott of The New York Times described Cousins' film as
"a semester-long film studies survey course compressed into 15 brisk, sometimes
contentious hours" that "stands as an invigorated compendium of conventional wisdom." Contrasting the project with its "important precursor (and also, perhaps, an implicit interlocutor)", Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Scott commended Cousins' film as "the place from which all future revisionism must start".

List of episodes

1.1 Episode 1 - Birth of the Cinema
1.2 Episode 2 - The Hollywood Dream
1.3 Episode 3 - The Golden Age of World Cinema
1.4 Episode 4 - The Arrival of Sound
1.5 Episode 5 - Post-War Cinema
1.6 Episode 6 - Sex & Melodrama
1.7 Episode 7 - European New Wave
1.8 Episode 8 - New Directors, New Form
1.9 Episode 9 - American Cinema of the 70s
1.10 Episode 10 - Movies to Change the World
1.11 Episode 11 - The Arrival of Multiplexes and Asian Mainstream
1.12 Episode 12 - Fight the Power: Protest in Film
1.13 Episode 13 - New Boundaries: World Cinema in Africa, Asia & Latin America
1.14 Episode 14 - New American Independents & The Digital Revolution
1.15 Episode 15 - Cinema Today and the Future