Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

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)

think it might be more fun to try to connect those films in order

Many more problems in this ep but those last 10 min on Dreyer were fab (apart from dropping in Vivre Sa vie for not really much reason). Great footage of him describing how he used the canteen lady's suggestion on Ordet

- But didn't think much of Wilder being overused here as a rescuer of mistreated talent.

- Thought he was playing around when introducing documentary as something to force reality onto the sreen and then sorta overlooking Nanook's staged scenes.

- and the melodrama vs innovation binary is not something I'm going to run along with: he should be 'interesting' on Fassbinder

- Keaton's crashing trains as 'innovation' - is he going to praise blockbusters when we get to the 80s?

Must see The House is Black NOW (or whenever I get the time to youtube this)

^^def agree with yr first two points, julio

i enjoyed the journey that we made from keaton to dreyer. i'd never seen that interview w. dreyer before, didn't know that such a thing existed, so good sourcing, tho' cousins, who likes to play the all-part-of-a-rich-tapestry card, missed a trick imho when he didn't compare shots from Ordet w/ strikingly similar moments in the Exorcist. and as you say, there was too much wilder, and far too much lars von trier ("dreyer is really great but i can't tell you why").

i think the Dreyer/Falconetti>>>Godard/Karenina connection comes from David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary, which seems to be another one of the models/inspirations for this series, along with yeah Histoire(s) - although Godard's great thesis is (partly) that cinema, and images, are always about MONEY ("Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He would have done better to give me some money.")

really liked the stuff abt those russian silent movies not by the obvious 'giants' - all new to me - but kinda wished he'd done the same for silent comedy, don't leave it to paul merton! and yeah, The House is Black looked amazing...

anita loos!

"that rare beast in hollywood, an intellectual": this is perhaps fair comment, but i think it muddles cousins's actual project -- because when it comes down to it (i've subbed his copy!) (ok, just once and long ago) cousins is no intellectual himself; he's something more likeable and useful really, an enormously generous enthusiast and connoisseur (i know people who know him and they say he's friendly and lovely)

anyway, what this means is when he embarks on an ambitious exploration of the interrelationship between realism, romanticism, romance, melodrama, innovation and ideas, it gets tangled up in itself almost immediately, because (i) he lets words like classical (a mess of a word at best) do a lot of explanatory heavy-lifting without at all filling in what he means by them, and then (ii) often seems to use them rather quirkily, or at least not terribly thoughtfully. And as ideas, all these words -- which are rich and roomy and fluid and contradictory, "realism" most of all -- are doubling back all over the place, and all over one another, as he tries to gloss a transition that's actually all still feel, a likeness that switches out of one of the intellectual category boxes into another.

viz: could the story of von stroheim itself be less wildly romantic, albeit a romantic semi-tragedy? This kind of contradiction is worth flagging -- haha lampshade-hanging -- because it allows you to observe how in hock to romance the ideologues and chroncilers of the tale realism may often be. (viz Anita Loos about the "one authentic genius"! arguably no word is more freighted with romanticism than the word genius; to be "wildly rebellious", as dreyer was in his deployment of white, is to be hero of the romance... )

If I were prologuing this, I'd have said something like, no, we're not going to view this story as if all that drives it is money, we're going to see what happens when you bring it down to the tradecraft level, and explore it as if driven by tropes and devices, technics and technologies (hence: the story of realism as a wayward concatenation of devices, with "the ability to capture reality and make it splendid and moving"). And of course as a result I wouldn't get approval for the programme to be made (tropes, forsooth!), so cousins is right to be imprecise and I'm wrong, at least tactically. Innovations at this level means "solution to technical or aesthetic problems": what's interesting is indeed the extent to which these shape matters against the path-dependent impetus, and hence conservatism, of a factory system. (It happens in industry also: hence the notorious war by battery makers against the arrival of the long-life battery: the new tweaked technology put the old manufacturers out of business...)

I rthink the framework Cousins has picked is incredibly fruitful, in -- given his tin ear for his own idea of how an "idea" works -- an almost random way: this is a strength for me (it's one of British television's strengths, the ease with which you can flick something random and ostensibly "outside" the project into the middle of it, at the touch of a button on the remote. The risk is meaningless transitions and juxtapositons -- and Cousins's explanatory gloss of his transitions is often a bit rubbish -- but as zvookster said way up-thread, this is as much as anything a masterclass in connections you should learn to notice. (Cousins is alluring on the what and very bad at the why...) (Because curiosity over-bolstered is very often curiosity smothered... )

lol @ "this was a nerdy look in those days" re h.lloyds' glasses

don't like the word "odyssey": it's an epic picaresque

yes thanks mr von trier for yr insightful commentary on von dreyer <-- only actual link is their names are so similar grump grump (nothing lvt does is not manipulative gamesplay -- it's his definition of art and his code of practice and he's a master craftsman in this territory and always fascinating as a result, though i've always felt the bulk of his arrtfulness, the actual aesthetic centre of gravity, is to be found in the stuff that is assumed to be subsidiary to the "films themselves"; ie his interviews, press releases, press conferences, manifestos, and performances in documentaries etc... the film is just the teaser single for the concept album of the rest of his life)

haha also i just remembered: did he claim that von stroheim got the idea of realism from watching "nanook of the north"? REALLY NOT SURE THIS IS TRUE

i just caught the first of these, &'ll try to watch the second stat so i'm not always bumping this thread with my week late already done discussion. i liked it. i didn't have any of the viscerally off-put reactions some here did; i mean the aspirational tompaulinism of his voice & it's gently foreboding marimba backdrop is obviously just a sad fact of the current age of tv production that's waiting to age badly, but it's fine, pretty generic & hard to imagine being truly deterred by, just more par for the course of like an adam curtis docu or whatever. i like the point upthread about his attempts at style - an immobile camera for location shots, giving experts a bit of room to make a thorough point (with a ozu-esque low-down camera position, lol).

about some of the content: it's strange to me to see his assertions so utterly slated, here; the 'cinema is ideas not money' thing doesn't, deep down, strike me as a controversial classification so much as just an establishment of the material he's going to be looking at, like seeing that a library has both 'fiction' and 'literature' sections, this docu clearly plumbing 'cinema', its practitioners, its innovations, relevant to 'movies' mostly as something that paved the way but remains a separate field, etc etc etc, it is the margins that hold the book together; either way it seems early to judge as i assume that we'll have a better idea of his original or prejudiced his, this particular, history of cinema is when he's done. similarly re: his agitations when naming originators or experts - i think he's read enough history books to understand at the least that there might be debate about who's who, who did what, but in this series he is making his arguments, to incite others rather than to end debate. as of ep 1 he's already calling ozu the 'best', etc, there isn't a stake for neutrality & its aim seems to be more to craft a chronology than to study every loose end.

disagree utterly with the idea that the shoah/2001 juxtaposition is tasteless!, but whatever. i think particularly considering that the aesthetic choices of shoah *are* calculated, just that, aesthetic choices, it seems bizarre to think it should be separated from discussions over practice. it used those filmmaking techniques. happy if someone wants to argue on this, i just don't quite know where anyone's coming from. would also be keen to hear your argument against cinema as esperanto, ward; in a very immediate sense, eg to the 'local' people seeing new places and clothes in the 1910s, it utterly is, and remains so, to me.

also lastly just wanna flag up this sentence, maybe for an ILF board description or whatever:

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

I am now genuinely looking forward to the next episode(s).

I think everything I'd want to say has been said above already, especially re: the money thing - which he explicitly addressed here. I agree with both Mark S and Schlump.

The messy, personal aspects and his (attempts at a) rather poetical style lessens the burden of needing to be straight-forward accurate in the way that, say, TCM's Moguls and Movie Stars series tried to be. I'm not fussed that he says Nanook died of starvation when that seems to have been a myth.

Von Trier thing was kind of annoying, especially as the rest of the Dreyer sequence was very good. That could be because, despite liking some of his stuff, Von Trier annoys me. And, as mentioned, his comments on Dreyer were...nothing. And that citing Dreyer's stripped-down aesthetic to the look of Dogville seems a bit of a stretch when "Our Town" exists.

I was very much looking forward to this programme, but after the first fifteen minutes I found Mark Cousins' idiosyncratic and relentlessly monotonous delivery too excruciating to continue. I have read above that at least one person positively likes the way he speaks, but I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it too distracting to be able to enjoy the content.

Schlump - Having now read the Sight and Sound article, it's actually Ian Christie who writes that "Film has always been global, with its earliest products swiftly transported around the world to be shown far from their origins as a kind of visual Esperanto." Aside from the fact that esperanto = an idea that failed (unlike cinema), that "kind of" kind of reveals the imprecision of this thought - Christie is saying that, because silent cinema was without spoken language it could be 'read' the world over, but film isn't in fact a universal system, even silent cinema was full of culturally specific content that couldn't easily be understood by everybody, and wasn't ever aimed at/intended to be used by a total world audience. Japanese silent cinema, just for example, didn't exactly travel widely outside Japan, and even today remains something of a thing of mystery to most of us. This is in addition to the problems, as always, with comparing cinema to a language (cf Durgnant's 'linguistic fallacy'.)

japanese cinemas (and others too iirc) had bros who described the action on screen, even in the 30s, which suggests a lack of universality

i really appreciate the rigour y'all are bringing to this, but i think we just relate to christie's claim in different ways (thx for the clarification, ward, though it was really the article rather than the series i was talking about; i thought those paragraphs were v expressive and thoughtful). that esperanto failed, & that there are many situations in which aspects of presentation or distribution would limit the cross-cultural suitability or visibility of a film, don't, to me, change the basic metaphor he's making, that it was often a very flexible projection just of an otherness, at a time when people were often very localised. and, per the on-screen expert flagging up that it wasn't paris but parisian fashions, differing behaviour of women and so on, so much stuff could be transmitted just by virtue of being shown. cinema is a hugely collateral artform and mechanism, something that can't help but recycle and transmit a great deal of info, which i think at some other point was one of cousins' claims for it as a preeminent artform, it working as a mirror, etc. if i watch a panahi film now i feel like it's functioning on some levels as a shared language because it's so effectively if not entirely purposefully transmitting a lot of information about another culture, in different forms - visual reference to a place, interpersonal dynamics, the psychological priorities that dictate framing &c&c&c. you're right!, & imma read up on durgnant, but i don't know - & i know this was my defence of some of cousins' more outre claims - that it was intended as a watertight analogue so much as a reference to the "kind of" casually communicative if not didactic power of film.

^apols for making you repeat my error - it is DurgNAT. I was referring specifically to his 'Long Hard Look at Psycho' book; funnily enough online you can find a review of the original edition where Ian Christie politely points out some of RD's hilar errors of fact.

the second edn is 'the one to get' yo

i really heart that durgnat book, errors or no: have to check which edition i have though

I have the second edition, tho' as far as i can tell the text has not been changed from the first - ie the errors that Christie points out are still there. Never mind, I bought it for the new introduction anyway :-)

heheh

im not sure it was IC who reviewed it and pointed out all the errors -- charles barr definitely did

they're doing, yet more excitingly, a new edition of 'a mirror for england' like next week

it's absolutely riddled with factual errors in a way you couldn't correct: his conclusions follow from false memories of films he hadn't seen for years

it's brilliant

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