Mark Cousins: The Story of Film

Preston Sturges, Hollywood's witty, whimsical wonder boy of the 1940s, once remarked: "It was the enormous risks I took with pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance that paid off so handsomely."

Mark Cousins' fluent, if strangely passionless, history of the pre-eminent art form of the 20th century adopts Sturges' philosophy as a watchword. This, more than many of the general histories which poured off the presses to mark the December 1995 centenary of the first public movie screening, is a book about creative risk. The films that are celebrated — most in passing, though some at length — are those in which the medium's potential and artistic expressiveness are somehow enlarged.

This approach enforces inclusions and exclusions that will alienate readers who want their favourite picture noted, but it brings into the light movies that made a difference to the movies. It is, says the author, "about the films that were influential [and] films that should have been influential".

Cousins, the former director of the Edinburgh Film Festival and a frequent contributor to the intelligent British Film Institute journal Sight and Sound, concentrates on what he calls "the central creative figure in film-making", the director. To do so is to beg a question or two. Orson Welles once remarked that "the notion of directing a film is the invention of critics — the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room". Many others have made the point that the writer is the only truly original creative person in film-making.

But refreshingly — and uniquely for an accessible, single-volume history aimed at a general rather than academic audience — this is not the story of American, or even English-speaking film. Japanese cinema, Italian neo-realism, the Germans and the Russians, the Middle East and Africa all get generous attention in a book that slots film-makers into artistic context rather than shunting them into dedicated chapters devoted to the exotic.

Cousins acknowledges Ernst Gombrich's seminal 1950 book The Story of Art as its critical model. This persuades him to distinguish between "classical" film-making ("when form and content are in harmony") and the closed "romantic" model of Hollywood which in "rejecting anything subjective, autobiographical, experimental or philosophical" gave rise to the "phenomenally successful brand of emotional excess".

It's a point he rather belabours and if the book has a failing it's that the author is more in love with movie theory than the movies.

The technical possibilities conferred by the arrival of widescreen or CGI are delineated with some precision, but there is no trace in these 500 pages of a film-maker whose icecream melted as he sat slack-jawed with wonder at a sight he'd never seen before.

Some glaring typos ("tradegy", "Jimmi Hendrix"), blunders (Bogart's character in The Big Sleep is called "Christopher Marlowe") and inanities (Brigitte Bardot is described as "desirous", though that may be a Freudian slip) are disappointing in such an expensive book but The Story of Film is a useful addition to any movie buff's library. 

* Pavilion, $59.99