By Spencer. If you’re interested in film history and like the idea of a college-level survey course on the topic – without any of the homework or exams – let me suggest Mark Cousins’s 15-part documentary series, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey (also available for streaming on Netflix, I believe).

Starting with the earliest silent pictures of the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies and moving all the way through the digital film era of today, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey does a remarkable job pointing out all the little innovations over the years that, to the more casual moviegoer, are hiding in plain sight. I learned the very basics of composition – how cuts were first used to let the viewer know that two scenes in different places are connected by story; how close-ups and deep focus shots change our sense of scope; how directors actually had to learn over time such seemingly obvious concepts as orienting their shots so that two people speaking to each other in close-up are, you know, facing each other – and I earned my first introduction to such historically-groundbreaking (and often forgotten) films as Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, The Bicycle Thieves, The Third Man, and Breathless. I learned about the technical innovations that gave rise to Citizen Kane’s tremendous reputation, the shift from fantasy to gritty realism that took place in the 70s with films like The French Connection or Chinatown or The Last Picture Show, and the criminally uncelebrated contributions of the film industries of China, Russia, India, Japan, South America, Poland, and Africa. And for the first time, I started to get my head wrapped what filmmaking represents as a single historical project: a universal language evolving piecemeal through the collective influence of generations of innovators, speaking to each other from every corner of the globe.

Which brings me to Game Of Thrones.  Continue reading →