Series 1 (2011)

Birth of the Cinema
7.8

September 3, 2011 • 1h 3m

Mark Cousins tells the story of cinema, starting in this episode with the birth of the movies, telling the glamorous, surprising s...Read more

The Hollywood Dream
7.5

September 10, 2011 • 1h 3m

Movies in the Roaring Twenties: Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry with star directors like Charlie Chaplin and ...Read more

The Golden Age of World Cinema
8.7

September 17, 2011 • 1h 3m

The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. The programme visits Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to explore the places...Read more

The Arrival of Sound
8.3

September 24, 2011 • 1h 3m

The coming of sound in the 1930s upends everything. We watch the birth of new types of film: screwball comedies, gangster pictures...Read more

Post-War Cinema
8.3

October 1, 2011 • 1h 3m

Mark Cousins explores how the trauma of war led to more daring creations for cinema, focusing on the darkening of American film an...Read more

Sex & Melodrama
8.3

October 8, 2011 • 1h 3m

Sex and melodrama in the movies of the fifties: James Dean, On the Waterfront and glossy weepies. We travel to Egypt, India, China...Read more

European New Wave
8.3

October 15, 2011 • 1h 3m

The explosive story of film in the late fifties and sixties: The great movie star Claudia Cardinale talks exclusively about Federi...Read more

New Directors, New Form
8.3

October 22, 2011 • 1h 3m

The dazzling 1960s in cinema around the world: In Hollywood, legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler reveals how documentary infl...Read more

American Cinema of the 70s
8.3

October 29, 2011 • 1h 2m

The maturing of American cinema of the late sixties and seventies: Buck Henry, writer of The Graduate, talks exclusively about mov...Read more

Movies to Change the World
8.3

November 5, 2011 • 1h 3m

The movies that tried to change the world in the seventies: Wim Wenders in Germany; Ken Loach and Britain; Pasolini in Italy; the ...Read more

The Arrival of Multiplexes and Asian Mainstream
8.3

November 12, 2011 • 1h 3m

Star Wars, Jaws and The Exorcist created the multiplexes, but they were also innovative. In India the world’s most famous movie st...Read more

Fight the Power: Protest in Film
8.3

November 19, 2011 • 1h 3m

Protest in the movies of the 1980s: brave filmmakers spoke truth to power. American independent director John Sayles talks exclusi...Read more

New Boundaries: World Cinema in Africa, Asia & Latin America
8.3

November 26, 2011 • 1h 3m

Film in the 1990s enters a surprise golden age. In Iran we meet Abbas Kiarostami, who rethought movie making and made it more real...Read more

New American Independents & The Digital Revolution
8.3

December 3, 2011 • 1h 4m

Brilliant, flashy, playful movies in the English speaking world in the nineties. We look at what was new in Tarantino’s dialogue a...Read more

Cinema Today and the Future
8.3

December 10, 2011 • 1h 4m

Movies come full circle: They get more serious after 9/11, and Romanian movies come to the fore. But then David Lynch’s Mulholland...Read more