Where to begin? Which is what Mark Cousins must’ve also asked himself when he started off on his 16-episode series The Story of Documentary Film, of which the first part premiered at Sundance, and the next three (covering the period up to the 1960s) are debuting at Berlinale 2026.
Cousins starts his first episode (up to and including the 1920s) in Paris with the Lumières. This is a traditional choice, which implies a stance on some long-standing debates. Should we really consider the first paid public screening of French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, on 28 December 1895, as the start of cinema? The German Skladanowsky brothers may have had inferior apparatus, but they nevertheless welcomed a paying audience already on 1 November 1895 in Berlin. But even they were trumped by the even lesser-known Ottomar Anschütz, who screened moving pictures on 25 November 1894 at the Postfuhramt, also in Berlin.
Is this important? For a certain audience, yes. But for most people, probably not – and Cousins is aiming for the broadest and most inclusive audience possible, avoiding both jargon (he doesn’t commit to a definition of ‘documentary’, for example) and the splitting of hairs (such as differentiating between Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité). Also, he already decided to begin the second episode of the series in Berlin, for obvious reasons (it covers the 1930s and 1940s), and one likes some diversity in these matters.
This is all to sketch Cousins’ general approach to the subject. He avoids academic debates, aims for a wide audience, and intercuts his archival material with contemporary shots of the various places he visits. By thus framing his overview within the current moment, he continually underlines that it’s less a claim of definitive scholarship, and more a historical and subjective re-contextualisation, that he is interested in, Cousins’semphasis on the work and representation of women and non-Western filmmakers a clear sign of our times.
Other aspects of his approach will be familiar to those who know his previous anthologies, such as his equally monumental The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011). Some people seem to have difficulty with his Scottish-Irish voice-over, although it seems calmer, steadier this time; he tends to name the things you’re seeing, which can get a bit annoying; he loves pointing out unexpected connections and contrasts between films, and interchanging famous titles with lesser-known ones; and, when we arrive at some of the best-known documentary titles, he prefers to choose an off-centre example (case in point: he doesn’t use the famous shots of Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist Triumph of the Will, 1935, but a lesser-known, and therefore fresher, beautifully poetic running scene from her Olympia, 1938).
So, back to the Lumières. Again, Cousins doesn’t show us their most famous film (L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1896) which was a documentary, as most early films were. (Indeed, Cousins claims, without providing a source, that half of all the films ever made are/were docs.) Instead he chooses the Lumières’ Repas de bébé, of 1895. This allows him to introduce immediately one of his favourite topics, the ‘acting for documentary’, as Marguerite Lumière is clearly pretending to drink from an empty coffee cup, while the baby who is being fed by her husband Auguste Lumière, is behaving completely naturally. “The unstaged is more vivid than the staged,” Cousins notes, before connecting it to a comparable scene from another part of the world, Washing an Indian Baby (1904).
Similarly, Cousins doesn’t show the most famous scene from Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922) – the one where Nanook is sitting in what actually was only half an igloo (to leave room for the massive camera). He chooses instead a lesser-known, and thus fresher, shot, while at the same time downplaying Flaherty’s well-known example of documentary ‘fraud’, describing how many other scenes within the film did in fact capture Nanook’s reality.
His analysis of Flaherty’s Moana (1926) is even more nuanced, describing how the tradition of Polynesian tattooing had already dissipated decades earlier, and was performed solely for the documentary, for money, and on a reluctant subject. Which gives Cousins the opportunity to mention another recurring theme: the power structures behind the documentary process. However, he also notes that this tattooing tradition had disappeared under pressure from European missionaries, only to more recently return – making Moana also an example of ‘salvage ethnography’, and this complicating our moral judgement.
These are moments when Cousins is at his best. Taking slightly longer to focus on a single film, within the broader arguments presented, helps to clarify the points he’s making and also reminds us to enjoy the beauty of the documentary art and acknowledge the lives depicted. Similarly, the intermittent shots of modern-day locations (possibly near the film festivals that Cousins visited) create mental time-outs, before hurtling us forward through time again.
Because that’s the thing: even over the course of an eventual sixteen hours, there’s still so much you’ll have to skip: not just famous films and filmmakers, but whole periods, countries, artistic styles. Which is why I don’t feel much like nit-picking over some detail I disagree with (there’s some questionable artifice, including the unacknowledged addition of sounds, music, and some upscaling I believe, but nothing too shocking), or championing some unmentioned film. Rather, it’s precisely Cousins’ personal touch, his willingness to choose, combined with an effort to include more diverse voices outside of the traditional canon, which I appreciate.
Instead, I would like to mention a few films, of which fragments are shown, which piqued my curiosity; the amazing shots of In Spring (1929) by Mikhail Kaufman (who was also the actual Man with the Movie Camera in his brother’s classic from the same year); the early, lively candid camera of In the Street (1948) by Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb and James Agee; the strangely contemplative Japanese propaganda film Fighting Soldiers (Kamei Fumio, 1939), which Cousins dares to call “a Zen movie” (and which was shelved by the military). Or simply the gorgeous nightly rabbit in the snow in A Divided World (Arne Sucksdorff, 1948). There is René Vautier’s scathing Africa 50 (1950), which did the opposite of the proposed celebration of French colonial progress, or the ponderous imagery of Alain Resnais’s Toute la mémoire du monde (1956). There’s the rhythmic beauty of Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959), taking us to Venezuela, or Chris Marker’s predictably clever Letter From Siberia (1958), in which he repeats the same footage three times with different voice-overs, each time with a different stance on the Soviet regime.
Talking about fun connections: jumping from Nanook to March of the Penguins (2005) made me smile – some things don’t change: people will always love seeing penguins on ice. Or going from one Louis to another, spanning over a century: in A Street in Tokyo (1897), produced by the Lumières, we witness the same Ginza district which today, as Cousins shows, is dominated by an enormous Louis Vuitton store. There is also the powerful kinship between the classic documentaries Titticut Follies (Frederik Wiseman, 1967) and The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963), both concerned with the treatment of the institutionalised – what a double bill that would be. Or see how Cousins contrasts the animated instructional film The Expanding Airport (1958) by the Eames Brothers with “one of the first great protest docs”, Record of Bloodshed: Sunagawa (Kamei Fumio, 1956), where the handheld camera plunges amongst the demonstrators against the expansion of a US military base in Japan: American planes aren’t equally welcome everywhere.
I especially appreciated this inclusion of the oft-ignored animated documentaries, ranging from Margarita Barskaya’s early use of animation in Who’s More Important, What’s More Necessary? (1930) to the strangely effective stick-figure animation of Patricio Guzmán’s Long Live Liberty (1967).
Speaking very generally, Cousins is more concerned with the content and politics of the films than with their technological aspects. That said, he does include avant-gardist and experimental work, which enriches the audiovisual rhythm of the series. But his emphatic focus on the power structures behind documentaries and who gets to make them, and his repeated insistence that documentaries not only capture the world but help to create it, are not simply subjective preferences, but are also clear signs of our times – and ones with which I strongly agree.
United Kingdom/United States, 2026, 240 minutes
Director Mark Cousins
Production Hopscotch Films
Producer John Archer
International sales Dogwoof
Script Mark Cousins
Cinematography Mark Cousins
Editing Timo Langer
Sound design Zoë Irvine
Music Donna McKevitt
