Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

"clean middle class kitchen"

real working class kitchens are dirty and amazing

i love roeg (+early funny roeg) but cousins is so his target not his approved explicator

cousins is the screamy fat girl

this is ep totallty reminds me of my first three years in london, when my sister was at film school

"a bloke's film" -- oh sampaws

radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical radical

MINIMATA, why not actually say the NAME, cousins you slippery coward

i am drunk and cross and suspicious

the shot he called the most imaginative in the history of film (mick jagger shot through the brain) now a throwaway bit of CSI...

haha ok cousins not in fact a coward for not saying the word minimata, just a sloppy critic

i am hungover and contrite and forgiving

the shot he called the most imaginative in the history of film (mick jagger shot through the brain) now a throwaway bit of CSI...

― koogs, Sunday, 6 November 2011 Bookmark

A lot of it has been adapted by TV (and vice-versa). There was another clip on this that reminded me of another TV program as well. I guess in years to come that will be seen as a big gap.

Where did you get your film listings from, btw? Need to look up a few of these.

This was an excellent ep, the usual failings blah blah are there. I see he is covering the blockbuster and the minefield that is bollywood on the next one.

Yes, I'm quite sad I saw it backwards (tho needs must when x-factor drives obv): I wanted more on everyone he featured, and his "cool team (RADICAL) vs lame team (BAUBLE)" does him no favours as an explanatory set-up, but the first is a function of his ambitious exhaustiveness, which is the opposite of a failing, and the second you can override by just not listening to the content of his voice, just its lyrical rise and fall haha. I find his "europeans discover sex! africans discover themselves!" a wee bit troubling as a connective concept (he's used it more than once now), but I actually do think there's a potentially fruitful argument to be made there, if only as a critique of the unexamined shapes and habits 60s utopianism fell into -- cf the way lindsay anderson used the missa luba in if...., of course <--- LA being very sceptical indeed about 60s utopianism! cf my book on same ---:D

personally i wanted more critical -- as opposed to uncritically celebratory -- exploration of third cinema, but tbf this is a hard act to pull off: introducing something hardly anyone watching knows much about, then including all the things that are wrong with it alongside what's great... you really don't want the newbie's takeaway to be "don't think i'll bother"

You can't trust anything he says, is what's frustrating. Even w/Europeans his differentiation between Italian and German cinema seemed wrong. But he is trying to cover so much, must have been a nightmare to write any of it.

Fine w/him being uncritially celebratory. I strongly suspect that you couldn't get him to be anything else.

> Where did you get your film listings from, btw?

transcribed from the tv, finger on pause button (and made infinitely harder because the progress bar that pops up is usually slap bang over the text i want to copy). i am several episodes behind (so much so that i've lost count of episode numbers, was #10 according to website) but here's last night's

The Story Of Film Episode 10

Fox And His Friends (1975)
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Fear Eats The Soul (1974)
The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant (1972)
All About Eve (1950)
Alice in the Cities (1975)
An Affair To Remember (1957)
Gods Of The Plague (1970)
The Second Awakening Of Christa Klages (1978)

Burden Of Dreams (Fitzcaraldo) (1982)
Arabian Nights (1974)
The Spider's Stratagem (1970)
The Conformist (1970)
Taxi Driver (1976)
A Woman In Love (1969)
Performance (1970)
Mean Streets (1973)
Persona (1966)

Walkabout (1971)
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)
My Brilliant Career (1979)
Minimata, The Victims and their World (1971)
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987)
The Black Girl (1969)
Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941)
La Nouba (1979)
Xala (1975)
Sinemaabi a Dialogue With Djibril Diop Mambety (1997)
Badou Boy (1970)
Hyenes (1992)
Kaddu Beykat (1974)
Harvest 3000 Years (1976)

Hope (1970)
Yol (1982)
The Battle Of Chile (1978)
The Holy Mountain (1973)

koogs didn't realise -- thought you got it from some website. Thank you :-)

"his differentiation between Italian and German cinema seemed wrong" -- no doubt correct, but he has kindled my interest in italian cinema, which (for some peculiar prejudiced reason) wasn;'t there before (prejudiced because i hadn't exactly seen much to "know" i wouldn't be interested)... so score for the man talking rubbish, really!

(i am increasingly wondering what he would feel if he read this thread, because -- despite there obviously being quite a lot of dismissive or scornful cineasmic hostility -- the fact of its existence is a compliment, and even an achievement, sorta kinda) (at least it is if he wants discussion to be more like "cinema! it's amazing, there's so much i don't know about!" rather than "mark cousins! he's amazing, everything he says is wise and knowledgeable and genuinely challenging!")

MC shows off his Eisenstein tattoo

http://vimeo.com/28058048

Latest ep -- can't help to be impressed that he is giving action films this serious a look as he gives 'art' cinema, but I think his take on them as a set of innovative action sequences is something to be reserved about. There is a narrative on a lot of those about the interaction w/the imperialist west. Its background to the action but it does accumulate when you see it across a number of those films.

(talking about Hong Kong cinema)

(x-factor again for me -- delayed by technical problems) (and i'm not waiting up either, till all hours, too much to do here in shropshire tomorrow) :(

tought times in shrops, huh?

haha no i'm having a very productive time but i have to crack on

Interview w/the screenwriter from Sholay (he's an Urdu poet) is kinda fascinating. xp = j/k

From Bachan "Indian cinema gives poetic justice in three hours". Well you get that in 90 mins in a Bronson flick you know.

Michael Haneke might want to have a word with you sometime.

Although he does carry on w/"you might not get that in a lifetime", which changes the tone but i was selfishly thinking about my crappy joke.

Chahine is hilarious, angriest talking head so far!

Amazing prediction of the Arab revolt here. Not sure how he's going to go on from this to Star Wars.

Well he'll just drop it and walk away and let us all chew on it -- that's fine.

Now I don't care for Star Wars but I don't buy this 'people wanted to switch off from activism, politics, new types of art' when those art films weren't selling the amount of tickets. Nowehere near, so people had nothing to switch off from! And Lucas might have been thinking of Kurosawa, but also surely of earlier blockbuster/epic types of cinema. There is a story of that kind of filmaking that employs huge amounts of labour and infrastructure. Good that he included it, but with a lot of that stuff you can still read a theme, an anxiety (oh i dunno be creative) that gets through the cracks when its trying to comfort or thrill (or is it?). Was he listening to that screewriter he ws talking to earlier or what? This stuff runs in parallel.

Really good for the talking heads but it ws mostly a bit like The bit on The Exorcist. I don't know enough about horror cinema, not sure Mark does either.

In other news this has had a v positive effect. Never thought I wd ever really get into silent films but -- partly as its also now available on youtube -- I have started watching them: Man With a Movie Camera is so witty, not just as a techie demonstration as to what film can do, even if it is quite exciting as demonstratins go. Also I hadn't quite realised that there is always some musical accompaniment to these (doh!).

Gonna watch Passion of Joan of Arc later.

And Haxan is screening on the 11th Dec, might go along...

the silent film thread

pash in particular has done sterling work on this for years

there's a huge number of silents available on DVD and elsewhere that are essential viewing if you care about "cinema" imo

Also there's this, run by ppl only a couple of degrees of separation from ilx

http://silentlondon.co.uk/

Great, thanks - such a cool blog, haven't actually read one in a while...

Will revive that thread later

I never see this thread title without thinking it is
Mark S's Cousin's The History of film: An Odyssey

Random comments after skimming:
Really wanted to like Häxan but it didn't do it for me.
Was present at the NYFF once when Youssef Chahine harangued the audience- well, our national viewing public, really- for our ignorance.

actually my cousin once-removed AND my second cousin both make films and documentaries, and i'd REALLY like to see their respective history of films -- i should talk to them about it

I just youtubed Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy from '36. The austere style is harder on me than someone like Ozu but the anger seeps through in this story of a woman who tried to do the right thing and got caught.

haha i like the way MC keeps saying "his mum" instead of "his mother"

YEELEN! This film is amazing.

segue from Yeelen to the Buggles!

Sequence: Spike Lee --> Sayles --> Besson --> Carax --> Almodóvar

MC means to affirm Sayles as the eminence grise of US indie integrity, but this juxtaposition makes him see much more worthily wearisome than he actually is. (The 80s are hard to write about...)

haha i saw greenaway's "Zed and Two Noughts" *with* my cousin! He hated it...

this idea of "film as provocation to the establishment" is self-regarding toss: on the whole the establishment ignored these films, quite unbothered by them, allowed and even encouraged them

But was that the case in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? Were there any other good brit films durng the 80s? I only really liked Greogry's Girl and Still Voices.. out of that lot.

Mark Cousins did point in an interview that he wanted to introduce people to more African cinema than they knew, and he's delivering on that w/sequences like the one for Yeelen - one of the best in the entire series. The Muratova was also brill. And when you see that cinema could really be this good you wonder why he's given so much space to the mundanity of Sayles. That interview didn't help.

Didn't know anything about Chinese cinema (apart from Hong Kong), so another plus. But again to praise well made tosh like House of Flying Daggers and then go on about denigrate films that come from a pop video background doesn't scan to me.

Wsn't able to see ths out due to ilx packing up in Dec, so a few points to conclude (didn't physically take notes so here we go w/my faulty mem):

- The ep with the MC waving hobbits as a sign of everything wrong w/cinema didn't convince. He does sound like a Bazin disciple - the pleas for realism got really tedious - but the problem is cinema surely is montage and realism and 'looks like our dreams' (as his intro used to say) so he needs to do better.

- His repping for Iranian doc/fiction (Makhmalbaf, some of Kiarostami's really strong early works) is another excellent discovery but they are gd films because of (among other things) the strng interplay w/notions of reality w/room for the 'poetic' and dreamlike, anchored to a mangled narrative that seems lived. This shd be distinguised from Von Trier, say, whose realism is derived from 'Homicide life on the Street'. Not that this is terrible - and hilarious when VT dropped this instead of confirming he was following on the footsteps of Godard - but 'Homicide...' has more going on in it than most VT films (cinematic TV was kinda missing here).

- Loved Clare Denis talking about Beau Travail. That ending is really great. Much more likely to buy her 'cinema is universal' than the Hollywood vs. rest of the world set-up that wsn't wrkng in the last few eps.

Since the thing finished I've been hunting down those African films on youtube: Yeelen and Hyenes are great. The stuff on non-martial arts Chinese cinema ws also pure gold, enjoyed Yellow Earth a lot.

Don't think he ever resolved that conflict he had between this notion of realism and fantasy. I mean he loves Baz Luhrmann, so it just seems that he likes them as long as it gives the whiff of auterism at work, just calls into the whole auteur enterprise into question really.

- He didn't cover enough Japanses cinema: Kinju Yoshida (Eros Plus Madness is one of the great '68 films), Masahiro Shinoda (Double Suicide has that reduced theatrical spatial staging that SHAMES Von Trier's attempts at doing so in Dogville) or Toshio Matsumoto ought to have been featured instead of Tetsuo. Not that I've anything against that but another weakness were his attempts to cover genre films - they had to be Japanese or from Hollywood in the 30s and 40s.

But but overall I did watch all the eps and found it all really worthwhile even if increasingly weak towards the end. Learned quite a bit and the concluding remarks were gd: we shd all talk about some of these films.

I left feeling in love w/films and cinema more than ever...

He does sound like a Bazin disciple - the pleas for realism got really tedious - but the problem is cinema surely is montage and realism and 'looks like our dreams' (as his intro used to say) so he needs to do better.

sorry what i was getting at is that cinema can be everything: montage or realism or a mix, etc.

gave up on this when i realised my irritation with the content was far outweighing any pleasure/insight i was getting. also came round to the idea that the subject is just too big for one person to properly tackle (and the fact that it's one person's 'personal' vision of film implies a unity and coherence that cinema, or any long-established artform, never actually has - ie it's a story of fragments, repetition, changes, diversions, false starts etc etc.) wld rather have seen different ppl tackling different genres/national cinemas and so on.

Yeah, agree, but then again it wouldn't be an auteur's auteur vision. Which I'm not sure TV companies would buy into. Collaboration wd still need an overall 'editor' of the histories into a streamlined style.

Hope there is another attempt at this. Doubt we'll see anything soon, its amazing MC got it off the ground...you can tell there is a bundle of energy there, even if scattered over the screen.

Keep checking this once a month to see what more I've seen:

- Daisies was another discovery.

- Badou Boy's, for its use of sound and rough imagination.

- Started making my way through the Japanese documentaries of the 70s - Minimata et al.

- Battle for Chile

- I am Curious (yellow)

otoh, the more I've watched (and I've watched more than ever these last 3-4 months) the more I see how little directors matter...I know they do, but it feels somehow oppressive to think about auteurs and artists blah. Much better to cover what it ws being said, not by whom, as there was a lot of common ground with the range of topics.

I know what I'm saying is rough and too general. All stuff I'm thinking about at the mo.

Embarking on this tonight--it'll be playing, two episodes at a time, for the next couple of months at the local documentary theatre. Hope I like it enough not to bail.

make sure you've seen all the movies made up until now before you watch because it spoils the fuck outta like most of them

Whenever they excerpt from the ones I haven't seen, I'll close my eyes.

First impressions after two hours: the narration's going to wear me down, and the construction is quite scattershot. Sometimes allusions across time are noted (most of them valid, a couple rather tenuous--Chaplin into Bad Timing struck me as a reach), sometimes not. I'd like to see that Iranian documentary from the early '60s that popped up.