by Allan Fish
(UK 2011 945m) DVD2
It looked like our dreams
d/w Mark Cousins ph Mark Cousins ed Timo Longer narrated by Mark Cousins
with Sharmila Tagore, Kyoko Kagawa, Lars Von Trier, Stanley Donen, Xie Jin, Youssef Chahine, Norman Lloyd, Jane Campion, Amitabh Bachchan, Robert Towne, Bernardo Bertolucci, Yuen Woo-ping, Paul Schrader, Baz Luhrmann, Terence Davies, etc.
There was a kids TV programme when I was growing up called Why Don’t You? It showcased kids doing various things to amuse themselves and featured a theme song which told its viewer to “stop watching TV, turn it off, it’s no good to me”; the only TV programme that was basically repudiating its viewers.
Writing this essay gives me that feeling twice over. This work is supposed to be a trawl through the great works of the moving image, but Cousins presents one with a dilemma; namely, that if the reader is coming to this as a beginner, he could do no better than to leave the screen or page they are reading and get the DVDs of this series and watch this before you start. The problem is that even then I would be plagiarising Cousins; he told his readers to do exactly that in the book the series was based on, telling them to go off and watch certain Hitchcock films if they haven’t already.
The whole purpose of my work was to remove the blinkers, to say that, while canons and accepted film histories are fine and focus the would-be film student to certain definitive works, they also blinker, blur the periphery and lead to myopia. As Cousins himself again said, setting out to show that movie history as we know it was “racist by omission.” The purpose of Cousins’ original book was akin to trying to throw a lasso round the moon like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. To put all of film history in one single volume – it was an impossible task to begin with, but there are times when the attempt itself is significant and this was one such time.
I’d first seen Cousins like many of my generation as the presenter of BBC2s cult movie series Moviedrome and his inimitable, deliberate Belfast drawl either enchanted or infuriated. He set about filming the documentary to go with the book the year it hit the shelves – 2004 – and interviewed dozens of people and visited countless locations in search of illustrations to the printed word. Several of the interviewees listed after the ‘with’ had passed on several years before it came to air.
Then in the autumn of 2011, with little to no fanfare, it was shown on More4 in the UK prior to a film festival tour in 2012. The pacing was ruined by those goddamned adverts that make almost all non-BBC TV impossible to watch with enjoyment and make you wait for the DVDs or Blu Rays. While bemoaning the omissions from conventional film histories, many will be aghast at the absences here – no film noir, no Sturges, to name one to represent dozens – but the same had been true of Scorsese’s A Personal Journey for the BFI in 1995. The difference was that Scorsese apologised for the omissions and listed them, much like I do in the Final Apologies here; Cousins makes no apology, and yet why should he? It’s his personal journey after all, and the breadth of clips is amazing even to an old cynic like me who thinks he’s seen or heard of just about everything. From the Lumières to Inception, from continent to continent and more establishing shots than a whole season of Alias, and with its capital seemingly in Dakar, Senegal, this is not for the complacent. In his intro to each episode, he talked of how movies are “a multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry now. But what drives them isn’t box-office or showbiz, it’s passion and innovation.” And there we come to the crux of the matter. Movies are all about money; art be hanged. In Hollywood, the talented cannot escape the curse, they’re contaminated – the bauble, as Cousins would say. This fifteen hour piece is his crusade against that, and anything written by the likes of yours truly cannot hope to have the same impact. Yet like Cousins, I still write because, when failure is inevitable, how gloriously you fail matters. And this is a truly glorious failure.
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Best series…ever.
I just received this about a week ago (thanks again), and as of right now I am only familiar with the first episode/part. Obviously its charms are already readily apparent, and I can’t wait to see the rest. Thanks for making me aware of this. Truly yeoman, necessary work by both you and Mr. Cousins here.
The marathon series has been highly praised by others as well, making year-end lists from Srikanth (Just Another Film Buff) and Drew. It’s a considerable time investment, but one well worth investigating I’m sure.
Tish and pish. 15 hours. A mere sprint.
This is getting a UK DVD release on the 23rd of April.
Yes, I heard, David. Pleasantly surprised. I’ll get it over the summer.
Sorry, that was a rather brief post caused my a tired mind last night. I should have added that this was an excellent piece which very much makes me look forward to the DVD release as I missed the series when it aired on More4 here. I’m a long time reader of WitD who is usually quite content to lurk and enjoy and be educated by the erudite pieces and resulting discussions; thank you Allan, Sam and all other contributors for continuing to provide such illuminating reading.
…by a tired mind. I’m still tired tonight!
Tired mind…a feeling I know very well, when I feel like I even have a mind…
Thanks so very much David, for the kind words. Thrilled to have you aboard, and delighted you’ve been watching.
Really cool that this is getting a proper release. Not that the copy I have is poor or anything but perhaps it can grow in stature this way.
(an edited version of the email I sent Allan after watching):
Overall, I loved this documentary. To begin with the scope and ambition are applause-worthy at a time when people tend to think small and avoid taking too grandiose an approach. Hooray for grandiosity I say.
I gather from a lot of the flak the doc has gathered on message boards that Cousins’ viewpoint rankled some but I thought the idiosyncrasy was both refreshing and well- thought out. I think a bit of the complexity was lost from the book (a lot of viewers were confused by his seeming conflation of the terms “classic” and “classical” – his argument about Hollywood being “closed romantic realism” rather than “classicism” comes off much better on the page) but hardly what one might expect in translating ideas into an audiovisual medium.
I really thought the doc was a lovely balance between impressionism, information, and entertainment. For the most part his handling of Ozu-style pillow shots (which became the stream of the narrative so to speak, upon which clips and interview fragments could float) and talking head footage was clever without being overbearing – just the right amount of subtlety.
At any rate, as compared to the middle five (the weakest section, maybe because it was already well-trod ground; and what was with the focus on Buck Henry & Catch-22?), the first five episodes and the last five episodes were very involving and refreshing – the first for its reoriented take on the roots of cinema and the last for its cohesive take on an era that can be hard to make coherent (his observations on the 00s cinema – impressionistic on the one hand, realistic on the other, and sometimes combining the two tendencies, was imo right on the money).
Cousins was generally strongest when veering from the main line of cinema history, or at least when mixing a healthy dollop of more obscure cinema (at least from a western point of view) with more famous classics. Much like your countdowns, come to think of it. This is the approach I love – taking in or taking on everything from Casablanca to Diary of a Tenement Gentleman to Yeelen to Black God White Devil to Star Wars to Curse of the Golden Flower and finding value or at least interest in them all.
My one complaint in this department is that he WAY overlooked animation – other than a bit on Disney and CGI, he just completely missed the boat there. But documentary got a lot of attention, and the avant-garde got a fair shake.
Best of all, of course, and deriving or at least in the same spirit of commentary brought on by the digital age (from the better DVD commentaries to the new form of video essay taking off on the internet), Cousins was really able to take on the films FORMALLY, not just discuss them in abstract of general terms, as tends to be the norm in prose, but to specify and illustrate points with direct reference to the footage itself – harmonizing his narration with the clips. Rather than bury the subject in narration, he’s actually able to bring it out even more. It’s like Godard said in the old days, the best way to criticize movies is to make another movie. Cousins has done just that.
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And in addition I would say, working from an extremely small selection pool, that Story of Film is my favorite “movie” of 2011. Highly recommended.