Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

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.

good for u schlump. this thread is really ilx at near its worst.

sorry mark didn't realise you posted here

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.

you presume a lot

not on this evidence

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.

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

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.

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

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.

wait does that work

see, i don't think it does

it really doesnt, he drops names throughout the whole film right?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

Part of the "everything you know is wrong" strategy is making ridiculous patronising assumptions about what the audience knows.

eh the focus on the bombastic intro itt is out of all proportion.

it's probably as far as a lot of ppl got.

important point

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

and it's wonderful for msg boards since the assertions, if they're supported at all, are supported by the series not the intro

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)

^ 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)

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.

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 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.

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

(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 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?)

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.

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'.

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.

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

But films need money to be made, trends and ideas are driven by a lot of money (Blockbusters, epic films) or lack of (er, neorealism).

sorry zvookster, yes, yr quite right abt scene-by-scene and moviedrome, my memory is turning to shit

part ii in an hour, psyched

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, September 10, 2011 7:40 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

well this seemed like a terrible bit of occidentalism/orientalism to me. said 'casablanca' is romantic, ozu 'classical'. im not an expert but this seems to overlay a very western binary where it isn't needed. i think his point is that the 'classical hollywood narrative' isn't classical per, like, t. e. hulme's definition. i think ozu does need the hard sell and i hope he succeeds (i.e. with me, who has hardly seen any ozu).

haha ok well

a) i really enjoyed that! even tho i have a TON of gripes and plain disagreements w/MC it was just nice seeing all that stuff connected, inc.plenty of stuff i've never seen
b) w/o the argument upthread i probbly wouldn't have got caught up enough to remember to stay in and pay attention! so hurrah for everyone biting chunks out of each other!
c) evil and shamefaced teenage lol at erectile dysfunction ad half way through WHAT ARE YOU SAYING heehee
d) more in the morning when i'm not sleepy

Episode 2

Citizen Kane (1941)
Thief Of Bagdad (1924)
Desire (1936)
Gone With The Wind (1939)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
Singin' In The Rain (1952)
Maltese Falcon (1941)
Scarlet Empress (1934)
The Cameraman 1928
One Week (1920)
Sherlock Jr (1924)
Three Ages (1923)
Buster Keaton Rides Again (1956)
The General (1926)
Divine Intervention (2002)
Limelight (1952)
City Lights (1931)
The Kid (1921)
Bad Timing (1980)
Great Dictator (1940)
Mr Hulot's Holiday (1953)
Toto in Colour (1953)
Awaara (1951)
Sunset Blvd (1950)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Luke's Moody Muddle (1916)
Haunted Spooks (1920)
Never Weaken (1921)
Safety Last! (1923)
I Flunked But (1930)
Nanook Of The North (1922)
The House Is Black (1963)
Sans Soleil (1983)
The Not Dead (2007)
Five Obstructions (2003)
Blind Husbands (1919)
The Lost Squadron (1932)
Greed (1924)
Stroheim In Vienna (1948)
Queen Kelly (1929)
The Crowd (1928)
The Apartment (1960)
The Trial (1962)
Aelita, Queen Of Mars (1924)
Posle Smerti (1915)
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)
Ordet (1955)
The President (1919)
Vampyr (1932)
Gertrud (1964)
Dogville (2003)
Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

def got weaker at the end, if only because he seemed to think inception was a good film :P

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?!

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 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'

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?

the accompanying ebook is cheap on amazon uk at the moment

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Film-%C2%A0Mark-Cousins-ebook/dp/B00OZRQUK8/

Can't imagine it as a book but I'd love a catalogue of stills from a selection of the films in the series.

new book.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/investigation-looking-canongate-341346

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.

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)

(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!

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

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

what? if anyone can be skipped over due to being done to death already it's surely Griffith,

"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.

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.

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

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

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.

i watched that the other night and have already forgotten everything about it

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”.

lol

SpaceCowboys.jpg #OneThread

https://pics.me.me/scott-aukerman-scottaukerman-follow-scottaukerman-theres-almost-something-chilling-about-24198437.png

🤨

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

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

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.

tbf i do that with films where I need the subtitles anyway