Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

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