Anyone who has ever tried to write a history of cinema knows what a daunting task it is. Once upon a time, perhaps, a single person might aspire to knowing all that could be known about the subject. That day has long since passed. Yet in theory, that is precisely what the author of any work called The Story of Film implicitly claims: that he or she knows all, and will from that vast store of knowledge distill for us what is most significant, what we need to know and experience for ourselves. So, an impossible task from the outset. Yet as the author starts to ask some essential questions, things come into focus a bit. Firstly, who is the work intended for? Are you writing it for yourself? Or for people like yourself, educated, even erudite connoisseurs of cinema? Or for that great unknown, the general public? In the booklet accompanying the DVDs of the Channel 4 series, Mark Cousins says that his preceding book, also called The Story of Film (Pavilion, 2004), was aimed at ‘‘a general audience, and young people.’’ But the TV series is clearly not for those who know nothing. Technical acronyms are not always explained (DP, for instance, or POV), and analyses of sequences, though often fascinating, can be complex and demanding. The question of the audience is vital, since you are forced all the time to make assumptions about what the audience might be expected to know already and do not need to be told, and what they will appreciate having explained to them. You don’t want to patronize, and you don’t want to mystify. If you know exactly who you are writing for, that’s a big help. My guess is that this work is made for people who are not put off by a film having subtitles, who as well as enjoying commercial movies have a passing acquaintance with contemporary European art cinema. They may have seen films by Almodovar or Haneke (though the former doesn’t get more than a brief nod from Cousins), but perhaps have only a vague idea of cinema in Africa, South America, or India; people, in short, who know enough to think it might be interesting to find out more. Once you have your target audience, you need to decide the framework. The title of this work is an indication of the approach; ‘‘story’’ suggests a chronology—a beginning, middle, and end, even if cinema itself has not ended. So Cousins elects for a comparatively straightforward structure, dividing the century and a bit of cinema up into decades and moving steadily ahead, starting at the beginning with the Lumiere brothers, ending with some speculation about what the cinema of the future might be like. Fortunately he doesn’t treat this schema as a straitjacket, and allows himself to flit around, making connections forward or back as seem appropriate. If you have a story, it needs to have a lesson. Cousins declares that his theme is innovation. He will tell the story in terms of individuals’ contributions towards the advancement of technique, technology, and artistry. And within that overarching theme he identifies two centripetal tendencies in film; the opposition between fantasy and reality (as often in film history, Melies and Lumiere are advanced as contrasting exemplars), and between romanticism and classicism. It’s as well that Cousins doesn’t apply any of these terms very rigorously, bringing them in when it suits him, but forgetting about them most of the time; for in truth, they are all so vague as to be incapable of structuring a work so large and various as Cousins has produced. ‘‘Innovation’’ can mean pretty much anything he wants it to mean, or he can forget about it entirely. Romanticism has a fairly precise meaning in the history of literature; in cinema it’s not at all clear if it means anything beyond a liking for strong emotions. Other terms occasionally bandied about, such as ‘‘expressionism’’ and ‘‘impressionism,’’ are similarly hard to pin down in a cinematic context. But this doesn’t matter much; the virtue of this work is entirely in its detail, in what it says about particular films and filmmakers, not in the metadiscourse it occasionally tries to construct about the history of cinema. That’s not to say Cousins doesn’t have a point of view. What comes across most strongly, and this is the true value of the enterprise, is his determined attempt to get away from the perceived bias of the mental framework governing how we in the West see cinema. One of the questions