Watch The Story of Film: An Odyssey

The series concludes by examining current-day cinema, then goes beyond the present to look at what the future holds for moviemaking.

This is the story of the movies in the English-speaking world in the '90s. We look at Quentin Tarantino's dialogue and the edge of the Coen brothers.

Cinema around the world in the '90s entered a golden age. The story starts in Iran, where we meet Abbas Kiarostami, who rethought moviemaking.

This is the story of how brave filmmakers spoke truth to power. Director John Sayles discusses these years. We discover the growth of Chinese cinema.

This chapter explains how films such as Star Wars and Jaws were innovative, then travels to 1970s India to show how Bollywood was doing new things.

This is the story of the movies that tried to change the world in the '70s. We start in Germany, then head to Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan.

Paul Schrader discusses his screenplay for Taxi Driver, Robert Towne talks about Chinatown, and Charles Burnett explores Black American cinema.

As the new wave in cinema sweeps around the world in the 1960s, we discover the films of Roman Polanski, Andrei Tarkovsky and Nagisa Oshima.

We discover how French filmmakers in the late '50s and '60s planted a bomb under the movies and see how the new wave it caused swept across Europe.

Mark Cousins explores how sex and melodrama became prevalent themes in movies of the 1950s. He analyses the popularity of James Dean, On the Waterfront and Hollywood's sentimental romantic dramas, and looks at films from Egypt, India, China, Mexico, Britain and Japan that were fuelled by rage and passion. The presenter also interviews Japanese actress Kyoko Kagawa, who starred in films by Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, meets colleagues of renowned Indian director Satyajit Ray and talks to Youssef Chahine, who he regards as the first great African film-maker.

This chapter shows how the trauma of war made cinema more daring. We start in Italy, then go to Hollywood to chart the darkening of American film.

We see how the coming of sound in the 1930s upended everything and witness the birth of new types of film: horror movies, Westerns, musicals and more.

We visit Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo in the 1920s to discover the places where moviemakers were pushing the boundaries of the medium.

Film-maker Mark Cousins continues his story of international cinema. In the 1920s, Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry and witnessed the emergence of stars Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Meanwhile, directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer sought to make more challenging and mature films.

This first chapter shows the birth of a new art form -- the movies -- and the passion that has always driven film, more than money and marketing.