When undertaking a sprawling 15-hour film (yes, FIFTEEN) about the history of global cinema, one can start just about anywhere. Mark Cousins, who wrote and narrates The Story of Film: An Odyssey, begins near the end, 103 years after the invention of motion pictures. For his documentary's first images he selects a segment from the long D-Day sequence in 1998's Saving Private Ryan. With a soft-spoken voice and accent that I can't quite place (Irish, perhaps?), Cousins lets us in on a secret: Spielberg filmed this scene not in Normandy, but in reality on a quiet beach in Ireland. "A lie to tell the truth" - this is the paradox of cinema, and its very essence.

Odyssey's creator also sees lies in the traditional telling of film history, a version he calls "racist by omission." So besides focusing only on American pioneers like Edison, Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton and the rise of Hollywood, he drops other names too, names you may not recognize - Ozu, Dreyer, Eisenstein - and their groundbreaking yet largely unsung contributions to this international art form.

The Seattle International Film Festival wisely decided to break Odyssey up into more manageable chunks, with 5 three-hour screenings spread out over two weeks. The first part last Tuesday evening whisked viewers along from cinema's thrilling baby steps in a new century to its creative maturation only two decades later, right up to 1928.

The calamity that befell film that year is the subject of part two (playing at 7 P.M. this Thursday, May 24 at SIFF Film Center), and the reason we can now more viscerally feel bullets pinging off helmets in Private Ryan: the invention of sound. Care to travel this cinematic odyssey with me? Yes, five round trips to Seattle for this mammoth production has hints of insanity. But when it ends, you'll feel like you just ran a marathon (and a century) without leaving your theater seat.

The details are here: www.siff.net/index.aspx