Episode 1
Birth of the Cinema
Mark Cousins tells the story of cinema, starting in this episode with the birth of the movies, telling the gla...
Episode 2
The Hollywood Dream
Movies in the Roaring Twenties: Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry with star directors like...
Episode 3
The Golden Age of World Cinema
The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. The programme visits Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo t...
Episode 4
The Arrival of Sound
The coming of sound in the 1930s upends everything. We watch the birth of new types of film: screwball comedie...
Episode 5
Post-War Cinema
Mark Cousins explores how the trauma of war led to more daring creations for cinema, focusing on the darkening...
Episode 6
Sex & Melodrama
Sex and melodrama in the movies of the fifties: James Dean, On the Waterfront and glossy weepies. We travel to...
Episode 7
European New Wave
The explosive story of film in the late fifties and sixties: The great movie star Claudia Cardinale talks excl...
Episode 8
New Directors, New Form
The dazzling 1960s in cinema around the world: In Hollywood, legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler reveals...
Episode 9
American Cinema of the 70s
The maturing of American cinema of the late sixties and seventies: Buck Henry, writer of The Graduate, talks e...
Episode 10
Movies to Change the World
The movies that tried to change the world in the seventies: Wim Wenders in Germany; Ken Loach and Britain; Pas...
Episode 11
The Arrival of Multiplexes and Asian Mainstream
Star Wars, Jaws and The Exorcist created the multiplexes, but they were also innovative. In India the world’s...
Episode 12
Fight the Power: Protest in Film
Protest in the movies of the 1980s: brave filmmakers spoke truth to power. American independent director John...
Episode 13
New Boundaries: World Cinema in Africa, Asia & Latin America
Film in the 1990s enters a surprise golden age. In Iran we meet Abbas Kiarostami, who rethought movie making a...
Episode 14
New American Independents & The Digital Revolution
Brilliant, flashy, playful movies in the English speaking world in the nineties. We look at what was new in Ta...
Episode 15
Cinema Today and the Future
Movies come full circle: They get more serious after 9/11, and Romanian movies come to the fore. But then Davi...