The Story of Documentary Film (Episode 1)
(UK, 60 min.)
Dir. Mark Cousins
Prod. John Archer
Programme: Special Screenings
For decades, Mark Cousins has been a key chronicler of the history of cinema, crafting deeply personal surveys through the world of making films and watching them. Narrated with a soothing, almost hypnotic Northern Irish musicality, his documentaries achieve a kind of brand status, an engaging yet expected shtick where audiences are treated to impeccably assembled archival clips interspersed with newly shot footage that buttresses the philosophical and cinephillic conceptions that Cousins’ narration inspires.
Cousins’ 2011 15-hour long look at The Story of Film garnered a Peabody award following its premiere at Cannes. 2019’s Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema expanded his exploration even further, while The Story of Film: A New Generation in 2021 served as a more explicit addendum to his earlier work. In between, he has crafted dozens of shorts and features, often including filmmakers both famous and ripe for discovery. His latest work to take up this pedagogical mantle, The Story of Documentary Film, saw its first chapter debut at Sundance, with several subsequent chapters to land in Berlin in the coming weeks.
In many ways, a documentary about documentaries could be doomed to ouroborosian tautology, yet Cousins’ latest may be his most transformative work. After showcasing fiction films from around the planet, the nature of truth telling about non-fiction feels much more urgent and relevant at a time when even the very fabric of filmmaking is subject to artificial creation and generative manipulation.
This doc of docs starts at the earliest days of cinema, incorporating such famous clips as employees leaving the Lumière factory through to Flaherty’s iconic Nanook of the North¸ mirroring just about any Film 101 course that touches upon non-fiction.
Yet what makes Cousins’ films so compelling is how that even the familiar is scene through different eyes, and while not every pontification is nearly as profound as it may first appear, there’s something quite magical how his assemblage encourages a closer look at even the most expected sources.
Similarly, the work of Dziga Vertov, exemplified by The Man With the Movie Camera, shows how works from the 1920s can still feel explosively experimental a century after their premieres. Unsurprisingly, given Cousins’ proclivity for raising the profiles of voices that are often overlooked, it’s Yelizaveta Svilova, wife of Vertov and the woman responsible for the radical acts of montage, who garners significant attention. Cousins asks audiences not only to go beyond the proscenium of the film’s frame to consider additional factors, but also to avoid the narrow positioning of auteur status that limits the credit to the director.
It’s difficult to measure the entire project based on this early chapter, but it’s easy to see that Cousins and his contributors, including his own editor and long-time collaborator Timo Langer, have lost none of their drive. The restoration work for many of these films is also to be lauded, and while the history of early cinema is still hampered by the many prints lost to time, there’s still many films that would have almost unwatchable previously but are included here in a fashion rivalling their original presentations. Taking a moment to celebrate the often uncredited restorations teams that make projects like Cousins’ possible seems more than in keeping with the spirit of things.
For those already committed to Cousins’ journey there’s plenty to be pleased by. For some who may be slightly tired of the shtick, or believing they’ve seen it all before, there’s tremendous novelty to be explored here, especially given that the history of documentary is far less, well, documented than that of fiction films. It’s this factor that makes The Story of Documentary Film feel so urgent, and as a tease for the many hours to come, this early chapter provides a welcome and essential addition to Cousins’ canon.
