'fail to film the nazi gas chambers'... probably best to credit godard?
also the movies invented flashbacks? not even dw griffith thought that.
― extremely loud and incredibly highbrow (history mayne), Sunday, 4 September 2011 22:11 (twelve years ago) link
- The good bits were the overlaying of visual ideas across time - e.g. Shoah's rail journey to Auschwitz/Kubrick's psych journey in 2001.
this was at best tasteless
― extremely loud and incredibly highbrow (history mayne), Sunday, 4 September 2011 22:16 (twelve years ago) link
Could never take Cousins seriously after thishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9crnz6vQg
― Number None, Monday, 5 September 2011 03:20 (twelve years ago) link
noticed this was on last night. lolled. didn't watch. fecking mark cousings.
― Frogbs (Pray Like Aretha Franklin (in Whiteface)) (Noodle Vague), Monday, 5 September 2011 03:46 (twelve years ago) link
i don't really know who mark cousins is, other than knowing his name, but the sight & sound article on this is terrific, in general - in talking about cinema as a kind of esperanto - and makes the series sound great. & i had no idea it was coming. so psyched to see it, not letting you guys get me down. has anyone read the book?
― cheerful sound ur (schlump), Monday, 5 September 2011 09:35 (twelve years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7s62-rmFic
tests on lab rats prove it's physically impossible to get more than about 30 seconds into one of these spiels
― Frogbs (Pray Like Aretha Franklin (in Whiteface)) (Noodle Vague), Monday, 5 September 2011 09:52 (twelve years ago) link
thought it was p lolsome that he made some bold claims in the intro abt how this was a *NEW* history of cinema etc etc, before rather dutifully trudging through edison, lumiere, melies, porter, griffiths, california sunshine, and so on. if anything, i was surprised by how little attention he paid to things like caligari and the glories of early european cinema, but maybe that's still to come. i agree that the stuff abt continuity editing, eyeline matches, reverse angle shots and the like was well-explained, and think he'd better off sticking to this formalist approach rather than all that gibberish abt money vs ideas, cinema as esperanto (erm...NO) blahdidblah.
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 5 September 2011 10:22 (twelve years ago) link
good for u schlump. this thread is really ilx at near its worst.
― zvookster, Monday, 5 September 2011 15:27 (twelve years ago) link
sorry mark didn't realise you posted here
― placeholder for weak pun (Noodle Vague), Monday, 5 September 2011 15:36 (twelve years ago) link
really y'all sound like resentful little jerks nv.
can u not watch it from my link schlump? i have US headers on my browser to watch daily show clips etc. but i can watch it.
between movie clips cousins films a series of shots in wide- or long-shot from a cam on a tripod, moving photographs beautifully composed in widescreen, while over the top he says in essence, and often in actuality, "look at this:", "look at this:" The effect is immersive. he barely moves the cam for the whole hour. i don't know how you can watch it while tabbing back to a msg board to update yr predetermined displeasure, checking yr email and glancing at the tentacle porn u downloaded earlier.
above it's somehow facile to note that "visual ideas more than money or marketing are the real things that drive cinema. sitting in the dark it's images and ideas that excite us." and at the same time, it's nonsense? i don't think it's a particularly controversial idea. it's clearly one that's gonna drive the whole series.
i presume "rather dutifully trudging" is a stock phrase lifted wholesale from tory newspapers or whatever. there's no evidence of dutifully trudging thru anything. he returns again and again to porter in facination. he recreates melies' lost magic trick. and so on. it's true the early innovations are well-tread territory, but had you seen, for instance. benjamin christensen film in histories before? there was quite a bit of the unfamiliar.
it was obvious from the whole show that its focus was before cabinet of dr caligari, itself hardly the be all and end all of anything. just in case it wasn't obvious, there was a huge graphic at the start reading 1895-1918.
probably best to credit godard? such a petty point u make, but what makes you think he won;t? no need of credit in a sentence jumping forward in time from edison and lumiere to future reverberations, c'mon son.
this was at best tasteless staggering that linking two visual ideas is tasteless if one of them is in Shoah. you might as well make the point that Shoah is tasteless for using visual ideas. in fact it would be better to try to make that point, since it would demand more than a glib anti-intellectualism.
Moviedrome intros were more than a decade ago, when cousins was young, nervous, awkward, and had two minutes to depart his enthusiasm. people around here get annoyed when you bring up something they wrote two years ago. that said, were they really so bad? his spiel for Force of Evil still haunts me. still, i don't see the point of a youtube when you can hear the narration of the actual series in my link. i've no problem to objections to listening to cousins in this series. if that's a personal thing that's not so much to do with what he's saying as his manner. but personally i find his voice, yes a little precious, but also quiet, measured, lilting, and diffident-sounding even when putting over the poetic or the opinionated. quite a pleasurable effect imo.
― zvookster, Monday, 5 September 2011 15:53 (twelve years ago) link
you presume a lot
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 5 September 2011 15:58 (twelve years ago) link
not on this evidence
― zvookster, Monday, 5 September 2011 16:01 (twelve years ago) link
i missed that opening credit, so mea culpa, but yeah, i have actually seen christensen mentioned in film histories before - haxan is available as a Criterion edition, ffs, he's hardly an ultra-obscure director or anything. I stick by my point, such as it is, that for a self-aggrandizing NEW history of cinema there wasn't much that was new to film scholarship or history - and agree with History Mayne that so far, he hasn't said much, at the theoretical level, that's actually revealatory or confounding.
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 5 September 2011 16:08 (twelve years ago) link
that edition only came out in like 2001 so yeah it is somewhat new to see his film in film histories. you're totally exaggerating "a self-aggrandizing NEW history of cinema" just for rhetoric btw. i'm surprised you're acting like you don't want things like this to be on tv, because of course you could do better lol
― zvookster, Monday, 5 September 2011 16:11 (twelve years ago) link
i'll defer to yr impassioned defence and give it another go zvook. i do think "visual ideas more than money or marketing are the real things that drive cinema. sitting in the dark it's images and ideas that excite us." is a contradictory pair of statements that are, at best, more than a bit naive about the way the film industry has always worked tho.
― placeholder for weak pun (Noodle Vague), Monday, 5 September 2011 16:19 (twelve years ago) link
well, i'd have to go back to the tv prog to check, but iirc Cousins stating pretty clearly that this history was designed, in part, to refute previous narratives/assumptions about the 'odyssey' of film(think he called some previous histories RACIST because of the way they downplayed non-Western/Hollywood forms of cinema, which might be fair enough.)
i don't think you know me well enough to know whether I could do a better job than Cousins - my feeling is, I'd be better at some things than him, and much worse on other things. i can certainly think of a LONG list of people who I would rather had done than job; at the same time, I'll keep watching (and yr righteous fury might've led you to miss the parts in my original post where I praised the prog.)
i do find your hostile caricaturing kind of off-putting to further discussion. it's almost as if you're...taking this personally
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 5 September 2011 16:22 (twelve years ago) link
Had never occurred to me that Bronson's character in Once Upon A Time In The West didn't know that Henry Fonda offed his brother throughout the entire movie.
― pandemic, Monday, 5 September 2011 16:36 (twelve years ago) link
wait does that work
― Jolout Boy (darraghmac), Monday, 5 September 2011 16:50 (twelve years ago) link
see, i don't think it does
― pandemic, Monday, 5 September 2011 17:14 (twelve years ago) link
it really doesnt, he drops names throughout the whole film right?
― Jolout Boy (darraghmac), Monday, 5 September 2011 17:55 (twelve years ago) link
i don't know how you can watch it while tabbing back to a msg board
i opened a second window, jeez
had you seen, for instance. benjamin christensen film in histories before?
yes, in this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1617347/
you're totally exaggerating "a self-aggrandizing NEW history of cinema" just for rhetoric btw.
no, at the top of the show he said: what we think we know is wrong (and racist). he absolutely said that what we thought we knew was wrong, which means he has to get things right. im not sure why im bothering to respond to you bc your post was weird, but there were things he said that struck me as wrong. like the idea edwin porter died a forgotten man, when he was credited in all the major histories as (pretty much) the inventor of narrative cinema. things like that!
more broadly, there's something odd about making it all about individual romantic geniuses (which im sort of OK with actually) but then bringing in a lot of very shallow identity politics. so hollywood is racist, sexist, heteronormative etc -- but also loads of 'male' genre films were written by women. he's sort of working both sides of the street there.
if it were only about ideas, and not about money, well, i guess he might have ended up mentioning the people who had ideas and no money (or no sense of how to use it), like william friese-greene. im not an expert on this, but when he said the lumieres invented the stop-start film-through-projector mechanism, i cd have sworn that they were not literally the first, but that they had managed to do it on a commercial basis. everyone needs money. that's why they call it money.
― extremely loud and incredibly highbrow (history mayne), Monday, 5 September 2011 18:05 (twelve years ago) link
re: Chistensen, again
now that I'm home i've checked my copy of A Pictorial History of Horror Films by Denis Gifford. There's a paragraph on Christensen ("one more Continental import whose creativity suffered in the cause of commercialism") which discusses not only 'Withcraft Through the Ages' but also his subsequent American-made horror films. This was written in 1973, published by Hamlyn, reprinted countless times and, along with Alan Frank's Horror Movies (1977, also with a paragraph on Haxan) devoured by British genre fans of a certain age (Mark Gatiss mentioned both books in relation to his excellent documentaries on horror films.)
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 5 September 2011 18:56 (twelve years ago) link
haxan is available as a Criterion edition, ffs,
lol because once something is issued by a niche label (in another country from where this programme is aired) it has entered public consciousness
everyone needs money. that's why they call it money.
props to this
when he was credited in all the major histories as (pretty much) the inventor of narrative cinema.
i think the idea was that, popularly, at the time of his death, nobody really knew who he was.
Anyway, the opening bit really annoyed me with its condescension (and, yes, his voice). As it went on, however, I began to really enjoy it. He does pretty well on a lot of things.
Also I'm a sucker for these kinds of movie histories, and he does about as well as you'd expect for this sort of thing. After all - and somewhat ironically given the ideas v money thing he talks about - you can't expect a 15-part TV documentary to be the kind of programme that will only cater to cinephiles who already know this stuff. The point of any TV documentary (maybe I should qualify that with a 'these days') is to appeal to a mass audience, and I think there's a lot of new/interesting stuff for said mass audience to take in. Don't know why anyone would actually bitch about that, and ftr, I think the bitching in this thread is more in a nit-picking cinephile way, not in a OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE HE DID THAT FUCK THIS ASSHOLE internet kind of way. If anyone actually begrudges that this exists they're obviously ---------.
I dug it a lot more than I thought I would, and I'm interested to see where it will go. It's not Histoire(s) Du Cinema, but nobody should have expected (or even, possibly, wanted) that.
― Gukbe, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 07:23 (twelve years ago) link
ayo
I'd be the reasonably ignorant masses. I was really looking forward to this, having heard about it. Certainly i'd have quite the opposite attitude to begrudging its existence. His intro, delivery, script, y'know- him- were really distracting, showy, kinda smug idk- imo basically everything i personally wouldn't want my floating expert in a project like this to be. The fact that the first couple sentences he then uttered as a statement of intent were pretty much, qgain, imo, rubbish was on top. And i'd never heard of dude before this.
― Jolout Boy (darraghmac), Tuesday, 6 September 2011 07:32 (twelve years ago) link
god no, i didn't want 'histoire(s)' -- i actually didn't mind it covering the basics, more the manner of doing so, the claim that everything said before was wrong.
i suppose edwin porter was not a 'household name' when he died, but 'forgotten' is simply wrong, especially in this context: cousins says g. a. smith and the rest of the brighton school 'invented' what porter was, at the time of his death, credited with.
the brighton school wasn't in anyone's consciousness till five years after porter's death -- it was invented specifically to scale back the claims made for porter. g. a. smith was known for his colour experiments but, i am as sure as it's possible to be, not for anything to do with film grammar.
obviously i don't expect these kinds of things to be discussed in the show. but cousins's annoying, fey style is unpleasantly accompanied by actually quite strident, non-negotiable claims that he shouldn't have made.
xpost
― extremely loud and incredibly highbrow (history mayne), Tuesday, 6 September 2011 07:32 (twelve years ago) link
i guess we're quibbling over the use of 'forgotten' which is a bit silly. porter was even talked about in the TCM docu series from a few months back.
i can understand a distate for the annoying, fey style though. i got used to it, but i was actively annoyed for the first part, and again, the writing and what he says in the opening are pretty poor.
but really i'm not sure what you're talking about with strident, non-negotiable claims.
― Gukbe, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 07:46 (twelve years ago) link
about his show, about dakar being more interesting than new york, about hollywood cinema being constitutionally racist/sexist etc (i guess 'it was' but then for some reason people liked it), about which individual 'invented' what*
*more sophisticated people than me say that individuals don't invent. whatever: but it does bear on the ideas/money thing.
― extremely loud and incredibly highbrow (history mayne), Tuesday, 6 September 2011 07:54 (twelve years ago) link
Ah, well, as I said, I didn't like that condescending intro either. But after that, and once I got used to his voice (both literally and presentationally), I thought it was quite good. Or at least enjoyable.
I should qualify that by saying that I absolutely adore Schama's A History of Britain, and I don't agree with a fair amount of it. So I might just be a sucker for series about things I like when they're done in a certain way.
― Gukbe, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 08:00 (twelve years ago) link
oh i like schama
some of this was just inane. 'the world was changing all the time in the early 20th century [unlike at any time in history]: the titanic sank, the first world war started. you might think the cinema was insignificant within all this, but you'd be wrong.' from memory, but pretty close: what is this shit?
― extremely loud and incredibly highbrow (history mayne), Tuesday, 6 September 2011 08:15 (twelve years ago) link
starting off w a sequence from Saving Private Ryan annoyed me, cos it seemed to right from the get-go signify an endorsement for a kind of cinema i don't really like v much, but i didn't have a prob w his delivery/manner (his emphatic way of speaking sometimes reminds me of Terence Davies, for some reason.) again, i have nothing against the prog existing, or cousins doing it, or it recapitulating the 'basics', or whatever - i'm sure there'll be things that are new to me, over 15 weeks, and some of the clips are gd! but progs like this almost EXIST to be argued abt - by cineastes, the 'general' audience, by filmmakers themselves - and the first episode def seemed to be inviting contradiction.
of course i wasn't suggesting that haxan being on criterion represents its entry into 'public consciousness', just that christensen's films have for quite a while been part of the accepted narrative of art film history, that they've been seen for a while now as something special, significant, worth preserving in 'special editions', even.
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 08:23 (twelve years ago) link
i doubt you get a series like this made these days unless it's sold upfront -- to execs as much as anyone -- as "everything you know is wrong": education-as-stunt
and the extent to which TV histories end up standing or falling on the individual mannerism and vocal tic of the historian-presenter is very much part of this
― mark s, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 08:36 (twelve years ago) link
i agree that the stuff abt continuity editing, eyeline matches, reverse angle shots and the like was well-explained, and think he'd better off sticking to this formalist approach rather than all that gibberish abt money vs ideas
he should stick to visual ideas in other words
― zvookster, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 13:06 (twelve years ago) link
Part of the "everything you know is wrong" strategy is making ridiculous patronising assumptions about what the audience knows.
― Science, you guys. Science. (DL), Tuesday, 6 September 2011 13:22 (twelve years ago) link
eh the focus on the bombastic intro itt is out of all proportion.
― zvookster, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 13:26 (twelve years ago) link
it's probably as far as a lot of ppl got.
― Jolout Boy (darraghmac), Tuesday, 6 September 2011 13:31 (twelve years ago) link
important point
― placeholder for weak pun (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 6 September 2011 13:34 (twelve years ago) link
cos, y'know, introductions are important
they should be but "reasons you really really should watch no honestly, compression of 15 hrs" that you have to sit thru before the real prog starts are not uncommon
― zvookster, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 13:37 (twelve years ago) link
and it's wonderful for msg boards since the assertions, if they're supported at all, are supported by the series not the intro
― zvookster, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 13:39 (twelve years ago) link
Episode 1:Saving Private Ryan (1998)Three Colours: Blue (1993)Casablanca (1942)Record Of A Tenement Gentleman (1947)Odd Man Out (1947)2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)Taxi Driver (1976)The French Connection (1971)Employees Leaving The Lumiere Factory (1985)Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat (1986)Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1985)Sandow (1896)What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (1901)Cendrillon (1899)La Lune a un Metre (1898)A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899)Shoah (1985)2001: Space Odyssey (1968)The Little Doctor and the Sick Kitten (1901)October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1928)Once Upon a Time in the West (19??)The Corbett-Fitzimmons Fight (1897)The Life Of An American Fireman (1903)Sherlock Jr (1924)The Horse That Bolted (1907)The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (1908)Vivre Sa Vie (1962)Those Awful Hats (1909)The Mended Lute (1909)The Abyss (1910)Stage Struck (1925)The Mysterious X (1913)Haxan (1922)Ingeborg Holm (1913)The Phantom Carriage (1921)Shanghai Express (1932)The Story Of The Kelly Gang (1906)The Squaw Man (1918)The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Falling Leaves (1912)Suspense (1913)The Wind (1928)The House With Closed Shutters (1910)Way Down East (1920)Orphans Of The Storm (1921)Birth Of A Nation (1915)Rebirth Of A Nation (2007)Cabiria (1914)Intolerance (1916)Souls On The Road (1921)
― koogs, Wednesday, 7 September 2011 09:44 (twelve years ago) link
^ typed the above out whilst watching, figured i should post it somewhere 8)
am hoping a lot of the early stuff is out of copyright and available on archive.org. haxan certainly is.
Orphans Of The Storm was on monday night. was surprised at it's length (3 hours with adverts)
― koogs, Wednesday, 7 September 2011 09:47 (twelve years ago) link
Totally forgot about this thread...
Ward you wd totally make a better series than this! :-)
As someone who has watched quite a lot (both foreign and Hollywood) but haven't read much film history and only read some film crit this is really welcome. Can pick it apart when I get to know more/read more. I haven't watched Histoire(s)... but wd like to.
I find Schama nauseating. If that's the reaction some people here have for Cousins I totally understand.
I would say the Shoah/Kubric was tasteless, as an example, but the overall idea (there were a cpl of other examples) was ok.
On the interview on More 4 site his basic take home lessons were:
- Lots of African cinema is great- Japanese cinema of the 30s is ignored in film histories (even now)
and something else, so that will be part of the deal. You may want to run away.
A couple of articles have called this the Civilization of film history but I think it will end up being like that ONLY AFTER attempting to be John Berger-esque about film.
Lots of car crashing expected in the coming weeks.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 10 September 2011 12:55 (twelve years ago) link
― zvookster, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 Bookmark
But if you're gonna say 'ideas not money' after showing a clip of saving private ryan...what?!
Rather have a leaner, even nothingy intro where any pecularities show in the comeing weeks -- the overvaluing of certain obscure-ish films over others.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 10 September 2011 13:03 (twelve years ago) link
to be fair civilisation broached no new ideas whatever, surely? and nor did the world at war...
to establish the compendium of received opinions is not per se a dishonorable activity (very much the opposite in the current intellectual climate, actually) (if cousins is claiming to be a cool-d00d iconoclast that's maybe annoying, but also almost unavoidable: it's the default mode for being paid mainstream attention and perhaps getting a mainstream budget) (and blimey, he's got a 15-part series out of this = a not-to-be-sniffed-at achievement)
schama is excellent at framing interestingly spiky questions which he then entirely drains of interest by the consensual mudge he steers the rest of the programme towards: the opening chapters of his books are often excellent and even exciting -- and the one on "the gothic" remains interesting till about halfway in
my objection to cousins on moviedrome back in the day was that it bled way too easily into the fanboy side of auteur theory -- i recall a particularly aggravating interview with roman polanski (by no means an uninteresting subject in principle ffs, but how are the constraints of getting the interview cleared by his people not going to trudge all over anything you might get out of it... and actually cousins is a poor interviewer, his research presents largely as sucking up, which is horrible to watch even when yr subject isn't an international villain)
this sounds -- i haven't watched any yet -- oddly more like the godard than anyone's letting on: in content if not in framing
― mark s, Saturday, 10 September 2011 13:21 (twelve years ago) link
(i think i'm just reiterating stuff other people said, which is esp.valueless given that i haven't seen a speck of this yet) (or read about it) (i been busy!)
― mark s, Saturday, 10 September 2011 13:37 (twelve years ago) link
Mark Cousins isn't bringing any new ideas here either. At one point, when he was going through film language I thought 'oh so that's what people learn at film school' (no idea if this is true) so i reckoned he was simply regurgitating.
He is bringing Identity Politics into it which I'm sure has been done to death in book form (I was thinking of the last ep of Ways of Seeing where Berger is talking to a few female art enthusiasts(?)). In the end I think the effect will be to put Godard etc etc in a case that says 'masterpiece' and shut it there (hence the comparison to Civilisation)
Really want to get hold of Haxan and Souls on the Road (anyone seen that one?)
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 10 September 2011 18:22 (twelve years ago) link
well, everything's been done somewhere (in academia) -- just not on more4 over 15 weeks innit.
THAT SAID, telling the story of storytelling -- how we learn to tell stories by using close-ups and reverse angles -- is the oldest story of all. he might have thrown in a word for the storytelling possibilities of staging-in-depth, an alternative 'strategy'. though personally i prefer the old-fashioned 'editing is all' business.
- Japanese cinema of the 30s is ignored in film histories (even now)
i mean... not really, not since noel burch in the '70s. if he's bringing it to a more4 audience though, brill -- just try not to suck at it.
― a hurrrr hurrrr (history mayne), Saturday, 10 September 2011 18:28 (twelve years ago) link
The other bit of cobblers (or what I thought was cobblers, but I didn't understand it) from Cousins was Casablanca vs an Ozu film from the 30s and playing around with the definition of a 'classic'.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 10 September 2011 18:40 (twelve years ago) link
presume that staging-in-depth might be filed under deep focus with welles & neorealism and whoever, tho he did talk about the framing a little in that ozu interlude.
moviedrome intros were distinct from the interviews, which were called Scene By Scene. Cousins was worse there than in the intros, tho the filmmakers were good, prob they respond well to nervous adulation to be fair to cousins.
― zvookster, Saturday, 10 September 2011 18:46 (twelve years ago) link
ideas not money because this story isn't about box office or budget jeeeez
also comparing visual ideas isn't tasteless because one of them is shoah and the other sci-fi jeeeeez
― zvookster, Saturday, 10 September 2011 18:49 (twelve years ago) link
Its probably just me. I can read about a film or a book beforehand and then watch knowing its ending w/out it mattering too much (unless I suppose its something like The Usual Suspects but that's just fkn dumb).
Usually because I will put another spin on the thing I watched..(Although wrt Ordet I haven't just really spent enough time thinking about it; I was numbed by that.)
Also I didn't feel that those scenes (some of which were endings, other which were not) felt like powerpoint at any point. The content was very rich for a start, and usually enriched, as you do feel these films were often conversing with one another.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 19:30 (nine years ago) link
The ending to Ordet has been spoiled, like, a million times. It's all everyone talks about. You say an ending was like Ordet, and everyone knows what you mean.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 19:32 (nine years ago) link
i really like thinking about the jesus-y, kind of john-cale-guy-in-straw-dogs guy in ordet. just roaming around on the moors.
― schlump, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 19:33 (nine years ago) link
Maybe if you hang around film buffs but I actually watched 2-3 Dreyer films before Ordet and had no idea of its ending until Cousins showed it (and I probably watched 70% of the films he talked about) (but that's the effect of not reading anywhere near enough film crit).
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 19:39 (nine years ago) link
i guess cinema is an artform of MOMENTS and memorable images, so 'old' films like Ordet are ultimately reduced to their 'iconic' scene or sequence - chess on the beach with death, the oddessa steps - and not to feature that scene in a 'history of cinema', however wayward, wld invite criticism carping. every 'clip' ultimately travesties the whole work.
this is how the film is sold in the UK
http://shop.bfi.org.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/360x360/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/5/0/5035673006658_2.jpg
― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Wednesday, 17 September 2014 19:42 (nine years ago) link
***SPOILER ALERT**The ending of Ordet is like the middle of La Jetée
― Colossal Propellerhead (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 17 September 2014 19:44 (nine years ago) link
I read this thing recently, on Stray Dogs I think, saying that a great thing about art-film is that they can't be spoiled, since they are experential. Does that make sense, or am I using a wrong word? Anyways: Artfilm can't be spoiled. The ending of A Man Escaped is immensely powerful, even though the title kinda spoils what happens.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 19:54 (nine years ago) link
Even an experiential film can surprise, even if that surprise isn't rooted in the machinations of the plot. It doesn't necessarily make a film worse to know what's coming, but the experience is different.
― polyphonic, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 20:20 (nine years ago) link
i hadn't totally intended to initiate this discussion, cause i know it's its own little thing, but just, when we talk of la jetee, or ordet, i think for me it's most useful for me to think of those films in which i hadn't had an awareness of whatever was coming (as is the case with the two mentioned), & to remember the effect each had on me - they were both really monumental, kind of breathtaking moments - rather than to assess whether or not i still enjoyed something that i watched with an anticipation or foreshadowing. i don't necessarily think things are spoiled by spoilers, but i think there's a kind of temporal, participatory event that one is lucky to feel, in a bunch of panahi films or in la jetee or w/e, it's something that exists kind of separate *to* the art-film or whatever & is more just a fact of existing as a human, & that the denial is just unfortunate.
― schlump, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 20:43 (nine years ago) link
i mean when i think of the moment in the sixth sense when i found out bru
one of the few advantages to having an awful memory is that Spoiler Alerts have no significance because i'll just forget anyway
― Karl Malone, Wednesday, 17 September 2014 20:46 (nine years ago) link
I saw Cousins' latest Life May Be that he made with Iranian director Mania Akbari. They take turns making short segments, and hers is so much better than his, but to begin with he speaks about her films, and he is such a great critic, he really makes it interesting. Wrote about it a bit more.
― Frederik B, Monday, 26 January 2015 11:55 (nine years ago) link
i want to see his other films but dont know how to. i saw the children in film one, which was interesting, but just a bit too typical in its essay film structure. i felt like i was just listening to someone narrate their actual essay on the subject. but he did get me to watch the boot for which i am forever grateful - one of the best films ive ever seen in fact. will always love mark cousins for that, even if his S&S column and tweets often are a bit too dreamy.
― StillAdvance, Monday, 26 January 2015 12:24 (nine years ago) link
i thought the children in film one was really weak sauce as an "essay," but it had one great value and that was to recommend some movies i hadn't seen
― I dunno. (amateurist), Monday, 26 January 2015 14:44 (nine years ago) link
I stayed up until the middle of the night to watch a lot of this and associated films on tcm. Acknowledge lots of the criticisms, and thought it got weaker towards the end (quite possibly because I know the material better, but maybe not), but it was v entertaining.
― Banned on the Run (benbbag), Tuesday, 27 January 2015 01:13 (nine years ago) link
def got weaker at the end, if only because he seemed to think inception was a good film :P
― StillAdvance, Tuesday, 27 January 2015 10:13 (nine years ago) link
nick james did a funny little parody of mark cousins' column in sight and sound a few months back which i thought was amusing and also surprising - who does a riff on one of their own writers?!
― StillAdvance, Tuesday, 27 January 2015 10:14 (nine years ago) link
where was that?
mark cousins is easy to mock, it's true. sometimes i want to slap him myself, especially when he starts flash mobs with tilda swinton.
― I dunno. (amateurist), Tuesday, 27 January 2015 10:37 (nine years ago) link
i think it was just in the opening editorial a few months back. he wrote something like 'there i was at ____ festival, thinking of time, godard and moroni'
― StillAdvance, Tuesday, 27 January 2015 10:55 (nine years ago) link
So many great films recommended in the Childhood doc. Saw Willow and Wind recently - easily the most harrowing film I've ever seen. Based on the reading list I'm keen to see What is this film called love?
― Stevie T, Tuesday, 27 January 2015 12:37 (nine years ago) link
the accompanying ebook is cheap on amazon uk at the moment
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Film-%C2%A0Mark-Cousins-ebook/dp/B00OZRQUK8/
― koogs, Tuesday, 3 March 2015 10:45 (nine years ago) link
Can't imagine it as a book but I'd love a catalogue of stills from a selection of the films in the series.
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 3 March 2015 10:49 (nine years ago) link
new book.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/investigation-looking-canongate-341346
― StillAdvance, Tuesday, 5 July 2016 07:12 (seven years ago) link
Since there was some chat on the Kermode thread: might give this another go.
First episode was one of the most frustrating things I've ever seen because it had a wealth of interesting films to discover but framed them in the dumbest way: Hollywood as a "bauble" and everything else as a reaction to it, like Japanese or French or German filmic traditions only exist as a commentary on Hollywood, embarassing stuff. And filmmakers who are clearly, gloriously in the bauble camp - Lubitsch! - still portrayed as part of some nebulous #resistance.
I saw his thing on female directors at the LFF tho and that had a similar amount of amazing discoveries but without a ridiculous thesis. Hope it gets distributed more widely somehow, would be a great thing to put on demand rn.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 3 April 2020 10:38 (four years ago) link
The bauble thing is the most obviously risible thing, not just cause of rongness but also just the continued cutting to a literal bauble (at one point doesn’t he film it falling to the floor and breaking in slo mo? lol)
― Microbes oft teem (wins), Friday, 3 April 2020 10:44 (four years ago) link
(at one point doesn’t he film it falling to the floor and breaking in slo mo? lol)
That reminds me: every moment of non-film footage in this looked so ugly!
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 3 April 2020 15:29 (four years ago) link
One of Mark Cousin’s most criminal juxtapositions in ‘Women Make Film’: moving from a colonial torture scene in Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga to a sailing competition in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia via the notion of the eye-line...— Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal (@anothergaze) May 26, 2020
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 26 May 2020 10:22 (four years ago) link
not instantly convinced Cousins is oblivious to the implications of that w/o having seen it tbh (I saw bits of Women Make Films at the LFF but this wasn't in it)
tho another annoying thing in History Of Film was him going "Griffith might actually be overrated by now" and then still wasting way too much time on the fucker
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 26 May 2020 10:31 (four years ago) link
what? if anyone can be skipped over due to being done to death already it's surely Griffith,
― Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, 26 May 2020 10:36 (four years ago) link
"might actually be" also is an insane level of hedging. he was a decent cinematographer with a lot of money, that's all, so many more interesting people to talk about.
― Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, 26 May 2020 10:38 (four years ago) link
I agree, but dunno if this was as popular a stance in 2011. Decades of worship for the guy somewhat hard to shake off I'm guessing. But yeah Cousins should've done better.
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 26 May 2020 10:44 (four years ago) link
a low-key virtue of this thread is that i spend the second quarter of at the top of my analytical ilxor game and the third quarter plain drunk on main lol
― mark s, Tuesday, 26 May 2020 11:44 (four years ago) link
Rewatching Women Make Film on blu and again feel like Cousins is invaluable as a digger/curator/tastemaker but quite frustrating as a critic. The conceit of it being a "road trip through cinema" cringingly literalized by car footage breaking up the film clips; making it a course on cinema through female directors is an interesting premise but he goes way too hard on it, with these stupid periodical "so we've seen that tone can be established through x, y and z"; and while having female narrators makes sense as part of getting as many women involved as possible*, there's something awkward about hearing Tilda Swinton's voice read out these texts that are so clearly Cousins all over.
Still would 100% recommend just because of the wealth of underseen cinema he showcases.
* yes yes yes of course this whole project should've been headed by a woman in the first place
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 27 April 2021 10:14 (three years ago) link
The Story of Film: A New Generation on Netflix. Think I'm kinda sick of this guy's shtick tbh, really not looking forward to what he has to say about Deadpool or Frozen; his biggest strenght as a cinematic digger prob not as relevant here.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 13 May 2022 10:10 (two years ago) link
i watched that the other night and have already forgotten everything about it
― ignore the blue line (or something), Friday, 13 May 2022 10:46 (two years ago) link
from a letterboxd review:
Starts out incredibly strong as Mark Cousins, without a hint of humour in his voice, proclaims, “he's dressed like a joker. A dangerous joker” as the Joker staircase scene plays out in its entirety. We then cut to a clip of 'Let It Go' from Frozen, prompting Mark to make the connection I'm sure we'd all already made in our minds; “The Joker could've sung this”.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 13 May 2022 13:39 (two years ago) link
lol
― gop on ya gingrich (wins), Friday, 13 May 2022 14:00 (two years ago) link
SpaceCowboys.jpg #OneThread
― Don't Renege On (Our Dub) (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 13 May 2022 16:28 (two years ago) link
https://pics.me.me/scott-aukerman-scottaukerman-follow-scottaukerman-theres-almost-something-chilling-about-24198437.png
― cajunsunday, Friday, 13 May 2022 16:31 (two years ago) link
🤨
― Don't Renege On (Our Dub) (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 13 May 2022 17:50 (two years ago) link
Did think of this doc when reading the tweet. Cousins' approach to let the clips speak and find a moment of a director's work to share.
there’s an essay to be written on the ways tumblr — and the quest for the perfectly shareable moment from a film — changed how people engage with cinema as the platform turned 15 this year. pic.twitter.com/OkaEZG54qj— maya cade (@mayascade) August 9, 2022
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 12 August 2022 10:30 (one year ago) link
I haven't bothered reading the piece yet but idk if it's a new way of engaging - artform of images lends itself to visual social media
― seo layer (Noodle Vague), Friday, 12 August 2022 10:49 (one year ago) link
One way it's different: modern streaming services offer subtitles, so a lot of tumblr-style appreciation of films is based on the text as much as the images.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 12 August 2022 10:56 (one year ago) link
tbf i do that with films where I need the subtitles anyway
― seo layer (Noodle Vague), Friday, 12 August 2022 11:14 (one year ago) link