The Story of Documentary Film (Part 3)

The premier chronicler of all things cinematic returns with his latest plunge into film history – this time, shining a projectionist’s lamp on more than a century of reality-based storytelling.

From 1895’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory through the cinematic achievements of Leni Riefenstahl, Agnès Varda, Frederick Wiseman and Abbas Kiarostami, the history of film can’t be told without documentary. Interrogating “observational films, campaigning movies, portrait docs, archive-based films, personal essays, music films, journey documentaries, experimental and animated non-fiction cinema”, passionate celluloid historian Mark Cousins (Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, MIFF 2020) turns his lens on the vast corpus of documentary films. Fashioning unexpected connections and highlighting overlooked filmmakers, he reframes our ideas of truth, power and the pursuit of onscreen beauty.

With his 900-minute, Peabody Award–winning opus The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Cousins issued a groundbreaking audiovisual history of cinema, and he remains the definitive (softly spoken) voice of film scholarship. Tackling the “more shadowy” flipside to fiction’s glamorous past, Cousins’s journey into factual filmmaking follows a very different path from the conventional canon, and what he discovers there is guaranteed to surprise and intrigue even the most seasoned cinephile. MIFF is delighted to present, across three sessions, the first nine episodes of this towering new achievement – a cinematic smorgasbord that shouldn’t be missed.

[Warning: Contains archival footage of war and conflict]

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival