Trailer for ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation’ from Mark Cousins

Trailer for ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation’ from Mark Cousins

by Alex Billington
July 29, 2022
Source: YouTube

“Do you watch movies to be sped up, or dazzled, or to see anew?” Music Box Films has revealed an official trailer for a documentary on modern cinema titled The Story of Film: A New Generation, opening in theaters in September. This is a follow-up to cinephile Mark Cousins’ fascinating doc series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which originally debuted in 2011 just over a decade ago. He’s already back with a full update. “An unashamed celebration of cinema as an art-form: Cousins is an aesthete,” one review states. This time, Mark Cousins offers hope and optimism while he explores different movies and talks about how technology is changing the course of cinema in a new century and how Covid-19 continues the process and has allowed filmmakers to create even more unique work. Made during the pandemic, this New Generation doc first premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last year and played a bunch of other fests throughout the last year. This trailer references modern cinema like Joker, The Babadook, Moonlight, and A Fantastic Woman. But goes beyond to discuss so much more. “Every generation has its stories: this is the story of us.”

Official trailer (+ poster) for Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: A New Generation, from YouTube:

A decade after making The Story of Film: An Odyssey, an expansive and influential inquiry into the state of moviemaking in the 20th century, Mark Cousins returns with an epic and hopeful tale of cinematic innovation from around the globe. In A New Generation, Cousins turns his sharp, meticulously honed gaze on world cinema from 2010 to 2021, using a surprising range of works—including Frozen, The Babadook, and Cemetery of Splendour—as launchpads to explore recurring themes and emerging motifs, from the evolution of film language, to technology’s role in moviemaking today, to shifting identities in 21st-century world cinema. Touching on everything from Parasite and The Farewell to Black Panther and Lover’s Rock, Cousins seeks out films, filmmakers and communities under-represented in traditional film histories, with a particular emphasis on Asian and Middle Eastern works, as well as boundary-pushing documentaries and films that see gender in new ways. And as the recent pandemic recedes, Cousins ponders what comes next in the streaming age: how have we changed as cinephiles, and how moviegoing will continue to transform in the digital century, to our collective joy and wonder. For more info, visit the official website.

The Story of Film: A New Generation is a documentary made by award-winning Irish cinephile filmmaker Mark Cousins, director of many cinema doc films previously including The Eyes of Orson Welles, Women Make Film, The Film That Buys the Cinema, and A Story of Children and Film previously, plus the original The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) series for Film4 & BFI. Produced by John Archer. This initially premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival lat year, and it also played at the London, Lumière, and Chicago Film Festivals. Music Box Films will debut The Story of Film: A New Generation in select US theaters (NY & LA) on September 9th, 2022 coming soon, then on VOD starting September 20th. Want to watch this?

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