The Story of Film

Explores the birth of the great new art form of movies, revealing how ideas and passion have always driven film, more than money and marketing.

The movies in the roaring twenties, when Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry, and star directors such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton emerged. But the gloss and fantasy were challenged by movie makers the like of Robert Flaherty, Eric Von Stroheim and Carl Theodor Dreyer, who wanted films to be more serious and mature. Filmed in Hollywood, Denmark and Moscow, the programme revisits the battle for the soul of cinema and some of the greatest movies ever made.

The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. The programme visits Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to explore the places where movie makers were pushing the boundaries of the medium. German expressionism, Soviet montage and French impressionism and surrealism were passionate new film movements, but less well known are the glories of Chinese and Japanese films and the moving story of one of the great, now largely forgotten, movie stars, Ruan Lingyu.

The arrival of sound in the 1930s changed everything for cinema. This episode revisits the birth of new types of film: screwball comedies, gangster pictures, horror films, westerns and musicals, and discovers the master of most of them, Howard Hawks. Far away from Hollywood, in England Alfred Hitchcock hits his stride, and French directors become masters of mood. And the programme reveals what three of the great films of 1939 - The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Ninotchka - have in common.

This episode reveals how the trauma of war made cinema more daring. The story starts in Italy, and moves to Hollywood, from Orson Welles to the darkening of American film and the drama of the McCarthy era. Screenwriters Paul Schrader and Robert Towne discuss the era, while Stanley Donen, who directed Singin' in the Rain, talks exclusively about his career. The programme also reveals how British films such as The Third Man best sum up these extraordinary years.

The story of sex and melodrama in the movies of the 50s. The programme looks at James Dean, On the Waterfront and the glossy weepies of the period, but also travels to Egypt, India, China, Mexico, Britain and Japan, where movies were also full of rage and passion. There are exclusive interviews with the people who worked with Satyajit Ray; with legendary actress Kyoko Kagawa, who starred in films by Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu; and with the first great African director, Youssef Chahine.