Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Openings”
With examples from 1943 to 2013, from China to Iran, Australia to Finland, we look at how to open a film: from mysterious, direct, floating, foreboding beginnings to plunging straight in. All are instructive in how to create an immediat...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Believability”
It’s easy to spot, but not so easy to understand. Believability is about simple human stories, truth about life, real emotions, responding to the world. How do directors create a reality without it feeling fake? True stories can he...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Conversation”
A basic human interaction—how to make it cinematic? Angela Schanelec directs us to focus on body language in PLACES IN CITIES, Cecile Tang uses the zoom as guide through the emotional shifts in THE ARCH, and Sofia Coppola in THE VIR...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Staging”
Scene staging is an element of film form pointing clearly to cinema’s origin: theater. Kinuyo Tanaka uses staging in THE MOON HAS RISEN to shape the scene’s invisible geometry, accentuating the tension between characters. Maren Ade stage...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Adult/Child”
Most famous movie genres—war pictures, westerns, etc.—are about adults, but in this chapter, Jane Fonda narrates the story of eighteen films about children, from Germany, Belgium, Mongolia, Sweden, Russia, Canada, Senegal, Argentina,...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“POV”
Is cinema the art of point of view? Jocelyn Moorhouse, Ida Lupino, Edith Carlmar, Sofia Coppola, Liliana Cavani, Kelly Reichardt, Larisa Shepitko, Jennifer Kent, and other great directors demonstrate the art of POV.

“Close-Up”
Films from Be...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Bodies”
Bodies in cinema can be enticing, athletic, or brutalized. Jane Fonda narrates this chapter about how some of the great directors—including Agnès Varda, Andrea Arnold, Marva Nabili, Pirjo Honkasalo, Márta Mészáros, and Wanda Jakubowska—ha...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Home”
Refuge, shelter, or prison? Sharmila Tagore narrates the story of home on-screen in the great films of Edith Carlmar, Lynne Ramsay, Mai Zetterling, Liu Jiayin, Forough Farrokhzad, Antonia Bird, and others.

“Religion”
Narrator Sharmila Tago...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Politics”
Another aspect of everyday life. From silent cinema to the twenty-first century, movies from the visually astonishing THE ENCHANTED DESNA to DIVORCE IRANIAN STYLE to STRANGE DAYS have gained their energy and attack from their politics.
...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Melodrama”
A genre as popular as comedy, but what are some of the great scenes in melodrama? Sharmila Tagore narrates a story that takes us from the silent American film SHOES to Kira Muratova’s brilliant CHEKHOV’S MOTIFS to Binka Zhelyazkova’s v...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Tension”
Thrillers, and so much more. We look at gripping scenes in films as diverse as Joel DeMott’s documentary DEMON LOVER DIARY, Kathryn Bigelow’s BLUE STEEL, Carol Morley’s DREAMS OF A LIFE, Mimi Leder’s THE PEACEMAKER, and Marleen Gorris’s ...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Reveal”
How does Lynne Ramsay do a reveal, in MORVEN CALLAR? How does the great actor-director Kinuyo Tanaka? Or Sarah Polley? Or Alice Rohrwacher?

“Memory”
As cinema is a kind of time machine, it’s no surprise that it’s great at representing me...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Life Inside”
Novels are great at describing thoughts, but how do films do so? In this chapter, we see how great directors from France, Ukraine, the UK, the U.S., New Zealand, and Algeria have illuminated inner life.

“The Meaning of Life”
In the ...

Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom

“Death”
The biggest subject in life, the most universal subject—no wonder that Japan’s Kinuyo Tanaka, Canada’s Caroline Leaf, Spain’s Ana Mariscal, Holland’s Paula Van der Oest, and other great filmmakers in this chapter embrace it.

“Endings”
We ...

Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1912 • United States
Starring Magda Foy, Marian Swayne, Mace Greenleaf

This family melodrama echoes aspects of O. Henry’s 1907 short story “The Last Leaf” and depicts the clever attempts of a concerned young girl trying to save her older sister, who is dying of con...

Directed by Lois Weber • 1916 • United States
Starring Mary MacLaren, Harry Griffith, Mattie Witting

Decades before the artistic triumph of neorealism and the cultural revolution of the feminist movement, director Lois Weber expressed the seeds of both in what is perhaps her greatest work: an al...

Directed by Lois Weber • 1921 • United States
Starring Claire Windsor, Louis Calhern, Philip Hubbard

The last film made under the banner of Lois Weber Productions, this moral drama, also written by Weber, is a biting commentary on economic inequality. Through her portrait of the Griggs family—an...

Directed by Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov • 1927 • Soviet Union
Starring Kuzma Yastrebitsky, Olga Narbekova, Yelena Maksimova

Returning to a pre–Russian Revolution mode of narrative storytelling, this melodrama focuses on two peasant women—one the victim to an abusive father-in-law and t...

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1938 • Germany

More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history. Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic e...

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1938 • Germany

More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history. In part two of OLYMPIA, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo...

Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid • 1943 • United States
Starring Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

Cinematic trance-maker Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid launched an underground revolution with this avant-garde landmark—shot in their Hollywood home, but a world away from the co...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1955 • France
Starring Silvia Monfort, Philippe Noiret

The great Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complic...

Directed by David Eady, George More O’Ferrall, Wendy Toye, and Orson Welles • 1955 • United Kingdom
Starring Orson Welles, John Gregson, Elizabeth Sellars

Three strange and sinister tales of murder and supernatural mystery make up this atmospheric omnibus chiller. First, a museum worker crosses ...

Directed by Margot Benacerraf • 1959 • Venezuela

A work of such overwhelming grandeur that Jean Renoir told director Margot Benacerraf after viewing the film, “Above all . . . don’t cut a single image,” this poetic documentary-narrative hybrid is a landmark of both neorealist and feminist South ...