06/07/2021 - CANNES 2021: Mark Cousins adds a new instalment to his ground-breaking look at the history of cinema

The Story of Film is the standout work in the career of Northern Irish-born Mark Cousins, a one-time movie critic, former artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and lover of cinema. His paean to the seventh art started life as a book in 2004, which notably looked at cinema history through a broader context than the established American- and European-centric film canon. By 2011, he had adapted the book into the documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, presented on British television in 15 one-hour chapters. The Edinburgh-based critic has now created a 160-minute supplement to the series entitled The Story of Film: A New Generation [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which has premiered as a Special Screening and hors-d'œuvre to the 74th Cannes Film Festival.

Concentrating on films made in this current millennium, Cousins, in his now-familiar, deliberate voice-over style, asks: “What films stretched cinema conventions like mozzarella?” His answer is: many. Through clips from opuses such as Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Olivia Wilde's Booksmart, Cousins shows how cinema has broadened its horizons, telling a wider range of stories from a more inclusive group of filmmakers than before. That can only be a good thing for cinema, but it also presents Cousins with a minor obstacle. Part of the joy of his film essays on cinema is seeing the breadth of his knowledge on cinema history and how he has championed directors, especially women, who the mainstream ignored and forgot. Now he's starting to talk about an era where the mainstream has begun to mirror his taste, which has made it much harder for Cousins to showcase unheralded talents and provide hot takes on overlooked films. The new essay is full of movies that played well at film festivals, with most dropping at Cannes. There are fewer surprising choices.

It's tough creating a work about the present day, where there is little benefit of hindsight. It makes it far more challenging to deliver definitive arguments on the state of cinema. Nonetheless, it doesn't stop Cousins from trying, but the analysis is often only surface-deep.

Part of the problem is that Cousins' prodigious recent output makes his takes on films feel less surprising because it's easier to predict his approach to cinema. Like all artists, he has his staple diet and favoured mechanisms. Cinema is a bridge between reality and dreams. The tracking shot. The emphasis on how audiences watch is often more important than the context and subtext of the film.

This episode starts with a discussion of Joker and Frozen before he moves on to proclaim Mad Max: Fury Road as the “greatest action film of the decade”. He talks about the sexualisation of bodies on film, citing Hustlers and Moonlight. But there is not enough discussion on race, and he misses a trick by not broaching how the changes he champions here have affected established auteurs and changed the way they make films.

Where Cousins remains strong is discussing the formal aspects of filmmaking. The meaning of a camera move is a particular favourite. The section on documentaries is powerful. Some assertions are wild, such as that Aleksey German's Hard to Be a God “pushed film as far as it could go” and that audiences have rushed back to the cinema after the pandemic. A section on how technology changes filmmaking is more substantial on the topic of how it's changed filmmakers, rather than audiences. A look at virtual reality raises questions about what constitutes cinema. Also, the championing of the cinema as the ultimate viewing experience is very Cannes, but is it too restrictive in its examination of what defines cinema in the age of YouTube?

The Story of Film: A New Generation was produced by the UK’s Hopscotch Films. Its international sales are overseen by Dogwoof.