![‘The Story of Documentary Film’ Review: Mark Cousin’s Ambitious New Series Celebrates Documentaries’ Power To Connect & Enthrall [Sundance]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/25110750/The_Story_of_Documentary_Film-Still_1.jpg "‘The Story of Documentary Film’ Review: Mark Cousin’s Ambitious New Series Celebrates Documentaries’ Power To Connect & Enthrall [Sundance]")
Excited as we might be about ‘Dune: Messiah’ or ‘Wuthering Heights,’ the cinematic event of 2026 is more likely to be seen on a small screen and is about five times as long as ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash.’ The greatest chronicler of modern film and what it means to the world, Mark Cousins, has followed up his landmark series ‘The Story of Film’ with a new sixteen-parter, ‘The Story of Documentary Film,’ the first episode of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. If this initial taste is any indication, the next fifteen hours will be something glorious.
READ MORE: Sundance 2026 Preview: 30 Films We Can’t Wait To See
Cousins takes his usual circuitous approach. While name-checking expected pioneers of the form, from the Lumière brothers to Dziga Vertov, Cousins also casts a wider net. In the expansive introduction to the first episode—“Documentary Until the Late 1920s: Travelogues, Power and People”—he ruminates about the “ocean of documentary,” which has captured the world from the start of the form in the 1890s and can now include almost anything shot on a smartphone. Cousins links three bits of pachyderm footage—2021 social media video of an elephant in India being helped out of a ditch, Thomas Edison’s 1903 short of the elephant Topsy’s Coney Island electrocution, and the dancing elephant in Chris Marker’s ‘Slon Tango’ (1993)—to illustrate his capacious theme: “This is documentary.”
From there, Cousins takes viewers on an “adventure” into the early days of documentary, when it served as both a thrill ride and an education. Pioneers went out to capture things that excite and astound, and in the process created testimonies to vanished worlds. While devoting space to the experiential documentaries that emphasized movement like train rides or 1922’s ‘Finlandia,’ an oddly popular film about an icebreaker smashing through the frozen sea, Cousins is clearly more engaged by the filmed pieces of lost history. His eye for detail leads him to note how, in a French filmmaker’s bustling street scenes in 1896 Palestine, a passerby (having no idea what a camera is) looks not at the lens but the cameraman. Similarly fascinating shots from a Ginza street circa 1897 (horsedrawn wagons, traditional dress, unhurried pace) are placed alongside shots of the same corner as it looks today (the glass and sharp lines of modernity).
Cousins is more a ruminator than a fulminator. His hypnotic pacing and looping streams of thought sweep the listener along like a well-honed lecture from every freshman’s favorite professor. Sometimes he is a curator, inviting us to watch different and often little-seen moments, like the footage Zora Neale Hurston shot for ethnographic research or a 1928 snowball fight in St. Moritz. Delving into the political, he finds the balance between provocative and preaching. Cousins is fascinated by power, propaganda, and not just what is being shown but who is shown, why, and who is looking at them. Acknowledging the oft-referenced criticism that Robert Flaherty staged scenes for ‘Nanook of the North’ (1922), Cousins complicates the issue by explaining how some Inuit in the film were fascinated by seeing rushes of themselves and suggested ideas for scenes to Flaherty themselves.
Cousin’s interest in power dynamics also comes into play in Vertov’s work, which he presents as deliriously avant-garde and, at the same time, deeply intentional and structured Soviet propaganda. Another set of fascinating clips that Cousin ponders over are from Esfir Shub, an early Soviet documentarian whose ‘The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty’ (1927) compiled pre-Revolution footage into both a sharp piece of political messaging (this is the enemy) and a document of history (this is how the world once worked).
Despite the potential for cynicism here, given the manipulative means many early documentary films were put to for entertainment or propagandistic purposes, Cousins retains a chipper, ever-curious optimism about the form’s potential to open people’s perspectives and change how they see the world. “Documentary at its best,” he says, is about reaching out.” Finishing up with Mikhail Kaufman’s ‘In Spring,’ (1929), a rhapsodic look at everyday life, Cousins notes almost as an aside that the rhythmic “fable-like” flow of images is “proof that documentary can sometimes be closer to poetry than journalism.”
If the first episode of this limpid and essayistic series is any indication, the rest of ‘The Story of Documentary Film’ will be deeply, painstakingly journalistic in intent but lovingly poetic in its delivery. [A]
Follow along for all of our coverage from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival here.
