The Story of Documentary Film | The 2000s Part 2 – Trouble in the Water
Mark Cousins’ own documentary practice (A Story of Children and Film, I Am Belfast, The Eyes of Orson Welles, and more) is consistently witty, erudite, and lyrically beautiful. No one is better prepared than he is to undertake this stupendous, 18-hour project than he is. Cousins’ 120-year history begins with clips from silent era giants that include the Lumière Brothers, Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera) and ends in our own 2020s decade, where he observes that we’re in the world of “the everyday documentary” covered by 4.4 billion phone cameras and one billion surveillance cameras. Wryly, he asks, “Is life today a documentary waiting to be edited?” At one point, Cousins quotes Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán (The Battle of Chile, Nostalgia for the Light): “I am convinced that memory has a gravitational force. It is constantly attracting us. Those who have a memory can live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none don’t live anywhere.” We realize that in relating his Story of Documentary Film, Mark Cousins has, at the same time, fashioned an epic memory poem about the modern world. And he is helping us to survive and even flourish in it. —Larry Gross
Director/s
Mark Cousins
Belfast-born Mark Cousins is a filmmaker, journalist, author, and television personality. Among his documentaries are are Another Journey by Train (1993); The New Ten Commandments (2008); The First Movie (2009); the 15-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011); Here Be Dragons (2013); I Am Belfast (2015); The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018), winner of a Golden Eye Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival; Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (2018), winner of a European Film Award for Innovative Storytelling; The Story of Film: A New Generation (2021); The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021); The March on Rome (2022); My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (2022); and A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (2024).