Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

His lovely voice was back on TV last night - and not to present an intro to a spaghetti western.

Not seen much of a build up to this but I really liked it, w/lots of qualifications.

- The good bits were the overlaying of visual ideas across time - e.g. Shoah's rail journey to Auschwitz/Kubrick's psych journey in 2001.

- Really good script (apart from the intro): packed a lot in a short period of time, but never felt like it - 180 degree, the cut, etc. beginnings of film language. Worst bit was 'punctum', he shouldn't have said where it came from!

- The filming of old fields of greenary w/the "in 1910 this was the centre of the film world"!!

- Lots of identitiy politics that you can tell he is going to rub in people's faces. But, seriously, good bit from that academic on how women script writers wrote so many of the early films at the beginning of Hollywood. He allows the space for a person w/knowledge to make a strong contribution instead of loads of talking heads.

- The promise of what is to come: which is to say Xala pisses all over new american cinema, WHICH IS TRUE AND YOU KNOW IT.

There will be some cranky stuff - the intro was overreaching, you know he'll get tangled up when trying to talk about Hollywood post-Star wars. And the assertion that movies are about ideas and not money is just...

The whole thing might collapse but so far I just liked the talk on silent films, having not seen one.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-story-of-film-an-odyssey

story ;)

was really psyched for this but just couldn't listen to cousins, turned off after about ten mins. Will give it another try, maybe.

man alive his voice is annoying

i like the clips. most of what he's said so far has been nonsense.

this money vs ideas thing is beyond facile

'fail to film the nazi gas chambers'... probably best to credit godard?

also the movies invented flashbacks? not even dw griffith thought that.

- The good bits were the overlaying of visual ideas across time - e.g. Shoah's rail journey to Auschwitz/Kubrick's psych journey in 2001.

this was at best tasteless

Could never take Cousins seriously after this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9crnz6vQg

noticed this was on last night. lolled. didn't watch. fecking mark cousings.

i don't really know who mark cousins is, other than knowing his name, but the sight & sound article on this is terrific, in general - in talking about cinema as a kind of esperanto - and makes the series sound great. & i had no idea it was coming. so psyched to see it, not letting you guys get me down. has anyone read the book?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7s62-rmFic

tests on lab rats prove it's physically impossible to get more than about 30 seconds into one of these spiels

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)

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

yeah, i think you're right, it was charles barr duh

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/book-reviews/psycho_durgnat_barr/

thanks for that, i'd had problems finding, will read/add to precarious pile of unread articles

posting this apropos de rien rly, but here is rachael low, one of the major historians of british cinema, criticizing another, georges sadoul, in 1950:

‘Personally, I feel this places too much stress on the creative share of the individual, and tends to obscure the fact that there was a logic of development quite apart from the personalities involved.’

not really rien -- it's this 'everything you already think is wrong' bollocks again. what low says became a new orthodoxy, made a big deal of, in the 80s (i think) as 'the new historicism.' ok so it's probably not cousins's fault that we have to act as if people in the olden days was a knave or a fool but well there it is.

http://www.indiewire.com/article/first_person_mark_cousins_on_his_epic_story_of_film/

now screening as 5x3h films at toronto

Episode 3

Thief Of Bagdad
The Passion of Joan Of Arc
Robert and Bertram (1915)
The Oyster Princess (1919)
The Mountain Cat (1921)
The Marriage Circle (1924)
La Roue (1923)
Napoleon (1927)
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)
Tell Tale Heart (1928)
Lodger (1927)
A Page Of Madness (1926)
Metropolis (1927)
The Crowd (1928)
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)
Opus #1 (1921)
Entr'act (1924)
Rien que les heurs (1930)
Spellbound (1946)
Un Chien Andalou (1929)
Blue Velvet (1986)
L'Age D'or (1930)
Kino Pravda #19 (1924)
Glumov's Diary (1923)
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Untouchables (1987)
Arsenal (1929)
Earth (1930)
I Was Born But... (1932)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Record Of A Tenement Gentleman (1947)
Osaka Elegy (1936)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954)
Mildred Pierce (1945)
Romance Of The West Chamber (1927)
Scenes Of City Life (1935)
The Goddess (1934)
Centre Stage (1992)
New Women (1935)

Episode 4

Her Dilemma (1931)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
Der Golem (1920)
Frankenstein (1931)
Eyes Without A Face (1960)
Audition (1999)
The Public Enemy (1932)
Scarface: The Shame Of The Nation (1932)
Scarface (1983)
-
Seven Samurai (1954)
Once Upon A Time In America (1984)
The Iron Horse (1924)
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Twentieth Century (1934)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
The Man Who Made The Movies: Howard Hawks (1973)
-
Gold Diggers Of 1933 (1933)
Gertie The Dinosaur (1914)
The Adventures Of Prince Achmad (1926)
Plane Crazy (1928)
Snow White And The Seven Dwarves (1937)
101 Dalmations (1961)
Blood Of A Poet (9130)
Inception (2010)
Zero De Conduit (1933)
If.... (1968)
L'Atalante (1934)
Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)
-
Les Enfants Du Paradis (1945)
La Regle Du Jeu (1939)
La Grande Illusion (1937)
Limite (1931)
Adventures Of A Good Citizen (1937)
Two Men And A Wardrobe (1958)
-
Bas Blaue Licht (1932)
Triumph Of The Will (1935)
Behind The Scenes Of The Filming Of The Olympic Games (1936)
Olympia Part Two: Festival Of Beauty (1936)
Tiefland (1954)
The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl (1993)
Vertigo (1958)
Saboteur (1942)
Sabotage (1936)
The 39 Steps (1935)
Marnie (1964)
Ninotchka (1939)
The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
Gone With The Wind (1939)

things from that that i should look up: Golem, Quai Des Brumes, Eyes without a Face.

La Regle Du Jeu is the film they are showing on film4. (something i've never seen the appeal of...)

Enjoying reading this thread (sorta) but I have to say I could not muster much enthusiasm for watching this programme. I can't stand Mark Cousins' voice, also, though he seems sincere which is nice

Much more interested in micro/local histories at this point than the endless repetition of grand surveys

<3 Charles Barr though

Reckon it wd be tough to get anything more local than a history of French new Wave or Italian neo-realism, even then it wd need Martin Scorcese-like backing.

So watchable but now its getting to the stage of having have watched and knowing more beforehand => I am old now, i.e. the whole 'Zero d'Conduite' to 'If...' (but Ozu to Akermann not so much). Disappointing on Renoir as I wanted more on some of his other films just bcz (like Koogs) La Regle... didn't knock me out - I like it a lot, but maybe not as much as Casablanca. See more of the humanism bag and how that gives weight to filmic accomplishment in someone like Ghatak.

Loved the bits on Ozu and Japanese film in last week's ep and that Japanese actress is probably my fave interviewee so far => how many actresses or actors talk w/any degree of insight about acting and learning on set. Bu even then he spent all the time on tech and not much on the narrative of Ozu's films.

i am really behind w/this, 4od is super irritating, to me, & i can't find a download anywhere.
related: i just saw 'visions of light', which is obviously kinda similar, which was v enjoyable & en~~LIGHT~~ening.

i am really behind w/this, 4od is super irritating, to me, & i can't find a download anywhere.

www dot uknova dot com

http://gb.fotolibra.com/images/thumbnails/538146-red-bauble.jpeg

"do they smash the bauble of hollywood romantic cinema?"

^^^this specific tic/shtick is really annoying me: i don't need him to be radically supersmart or challopsy about romanticism versus classicism and/or romanticism versus realism, but i wish he wasn't dumb in one mode (his imagic shorthands for grand-sweep aesthetic history) when he's so interesting in others (his treatment of studios and the market as a machinery that produces effects, just like focus or types of colour stock). And -- as with von sternberg -- how the fuck is orson welles NOT romantic, in biography as much as film-style and film-content? MC's helped himself to a really unhelpful obfuscatory dichotomy which he can only complicate in terms of the one-off anomaly of genius... i don't mind when stanley donen says "it wasn't the camera that signalled the uplift of joy, it was the cameraman", but cousins is at his best when he's fighting to make the technical process the agent (this is where he ought to be taking his argument about "classicism" IMO)

it's still full of excellent and interesting jump-cuts: i don't like the word influence but i do like the lines of connection and memory and commentary MC points out sometimes

the section where he demonstrated different types of focus and camera-style using the church door from "rome; open city" was an excellent idea quite clumsily executed -- when he contrasted hitchcock's "real life without the boring bits" with italian neo-realism's "realism IS the boring bits" he should have added what he meant i think: "realism IS the boring bits -- EXCEPT THEY'RE NOT BORING"

nothing will persuade me that bog bogdanovich isn't an idiot: certainly no clips from that john ford interview

only seen the first and todays one of this but i love it. the romanticism of his vision of cinema is what makes him/the series so completely immersive. and yeah some of the non western names he mentions might be familiar but the context he places them in here is what makes this so refreshing, its all just film, and he ties it all together, rather than making it seem like hollywood/the west.... and then film from other countries. the overall effect of the series is quite wonderful to me. this isnt meant to be definitive as such, even if its focus is so grand/broad/sweeping, its a docu done in the way you used to see more tv docus on tv, more personal, less schematic, a complete break - thank god - from the standardised way a lot of docus get made, and i dont know if ive been missing a ton of great film docus in recent years, but ive not seen anything like this, or with such ambition in a long time.

and i dont understand the complaints about his voice. its hardly that intrusive. and its a hell of a lot better than someone like mark kermode who would be incredibly irritating. if nothing else you have to give cousins some credit, afaik he did this off his own back, with no funding, or little funding etc so make sure no one could dictate how it was made, or who he interviewed (ie no pressure to have big names).

von sternberg s/b von stroheim btw

also, last time i checked, jonathan ross or claudia winkleman werent interviewing Mani Kaul, Kyoko Kagawa or Abbas Kiarostami. so yeah film snobs can say 'whats REALLY new here' but this is still pretty brave and cool.

there was a pretty elegant documentary arc to this one, i thought, even if the "one on hand betty grable on the other hand dachau" was a bit of a tosser's trick (esp. as he isn't actually anti-romanticism, just pretending to be for not-very-good structuring of ah-but! type reasons)

(belatedly: thx so much alba, going looking, that's really helpful) x

lol i did wonder if bogdanovich was deliberately being a tool in order to provoke grumpy papa bear ford

i am SHOCKED that mark s is being so lenient with cousins' VERY carefree use of the word 'influence' throughout - especially gratuitious in the latest episode, when he airily claimed that Gun Crazy was an influence on Bonnie and Clyde (well MAYBE, but not anywhere near as decisive an influence as the French New Wave on B&C - and you could easily say that the historic fact of B&C was more of an influence on Gun Crazy!) i think the way that he transitions between clips is far more effective in communicating his idea of this grand interlinked chain of 'innovation' and commerce and romantic genius. in general, cousins is a much better filmaker/director than he is a scriptwriter or theorist - he seems to have a good eye, and can communicate technical workings v effectively - all the deep focus stuff was v good and in its way more 'groundbreaking' for a tv film doc than interviews with the latest art house auteurs, claudia winkleman notwithstanding.

he seems, on the whole, a v v poor historian of genre movies - the noir section was p weak, imho

Mark - I ws wondering last night whether you were annoyed by his use of the word influence -- good to know you weren't as I thought he showed connections well, good use of jump cuts. Then again seems easier to show this in a doc on the history of film.

The lense/focus args were excellent, learning so much here.

Given his tratement of Triumph of the Will last week it wd have been interesting to talk about that in relation to other propaganda films (like Casablanca :-)). After all, as the boring/non-boring args in relation to italian neo-realism show this is as much about evolution of plot forms alongside pure filmic technique (and how one shapes the other). xp

Ward what do you think was missing from the Noir section? I've seen a few and I think he did as much as he could in the time allowed. I think this was the section that he left the most to contributors (Towne and Schrader back-to-back)

thing is, when cousins says "influence" and then straight away shows what he means, i mind the word much less: because the usual titanic problem of "what influence means" is subsumed under the particular (apparent) consonance of technique -- and the actual similarity, of the gun crazy duo hopped up on adrenaline and B&C all squirmy with nervous anticipation, was right there, after all <-- it's true i think "influence" is a rotten, confusing word for this kind of link, but i don't feel cousins is actually handwaving any bigger allegiance out of it (let alone quality-inheritance)*; our attention is taken by the specific point and whenever he's talking about specific points he's interesting

(less maybe when he moralises a link to social-political generalities: i don't think the tipped camera in "the third man" represents "moral imbalance", it indicates the actual PHYSICAL imbalance of scrambling round a city which is half pounded into hills of rubble, and the disorientating effect this has on decent idealistic naive silly hometown boy holly)

have to say that -- for all his leaning so much on the west-o-centric button -- i haven't seen him exploring the social-political backdrop eg in japan that fashions eg mizoguchi's sensibility and/or content: yes yes the blacklist story retold at easy length for the millionth time, and ppl not clapping kazan-the-squealer's oscar - but the actual political turbulence behind italian neo-realism was dabbed at much more sketchily (i wanted to know more about the films made under mussolini, since eg cinnecita was started under mussolini); frustrating considering his argument that italian neo-realism was a world-changing new-thing-under-the-sun

*ie i find the phrase " as decisive an influence as the French New Wave on B&C" much MUCH harder to parse than what cousins seems to be claiming: which is at once much less ambitious -- a technique has been adopted by the successor, to replicate or improve upon or otherwise comment on the precursor's scene and idea and feel -- and much much more profound: this grand handover of a shapeless bundle of generalities from one grab-bag of foax to another always leaves me gasping for the concrete)

robert towne is a tool as well >:(

i haven't seen him exploring the social-political backdrop eg in japan that fashions eg mizoguchi's sensibility

I thought he did mention this in relation to Japan's imperialist past/wanting to knock 'samurai'/honour as a mask for something more sordid. He also talked about this in relation to his impoverished background and his sister working as a Geisha.

But yes he didn't explore the cinnecita (he only said it ws started in '31) under the fascists, then again he could have spent a lot more time on any of this. All the talk on Noir and not a mention of Obsession, which is a point of intersection.

Ward I doubt whether he'll go over any history of hammer/Italian horror :-)

a technique has been adopted by the successor, to replicate or improve upon or otherwise comment on the precursor's scene and idea and feel

This is v good BUT sometimes...there was one bit where Bad Timing was mentioned as a comment on how character interact with objects as a jump off from another film (trying to remeber specific details), and I couldn't see whether Roeg was really doing this (unless he of course specifically mentioned this to MC).

x-post

hiya xyzzzz, re noir: well yeah, i'm always conscious of "in the time allowed" with these things (it's the same as posting to ILX!) - but i don't think cousins made it clear that - unlike say the musical or the horror film - noir was a retrospective genre, a critical idea rather than an industry-led style. it also irritated me that billy wilder (again!) seemed to be given undue prominence, at the expense of equally influential figures like the writer cornell woolrich, or the cinematographer john alton. and yeah, it's nice that leigh brackett worked on the big sleep (which isn't REALLY a noir, imho), and rio bravo, and the empire strikes back - but i don't think cousins justified the link, this time round. and yes, robert towne was v boring!

mark s - i'm sure you know all this just as much as i do but - benton and newman, who wrote bonnie and clyde, were huge fans of the French new wave, deliberately set out to write a 'new wave' gangster movie, and tried to get both Truffaut and Godard to direct it, before settling on Arthur Penn. The way that B&C treats its romantic outlaw characters seems to have more in common with Breathless than Gun Crazy, and all nervous adrenaline aside, the jittery jump-cut style of B&C obviously takes its cues from the new wave rather more than from that long, interrupted shot of the bank raid in Gun Crazy.

tbf i've only watched the two eps i've commented on -- i was mildly saddened that he was pulling all the same pseudo-descriptive stunts with the terms "romanticism" and "classical" and "realism" in this one as he was in the 20s ep; these are words which need to be fleshed out and pulled apart and turned inside out and swapped around and actually EXAMINED, since (even more than words like modernist or post-modern) no two commentators use them quite the same way, and yet they're self-evidently badges of declared allegiance that many people reach for, to ground and justify their passions

the opening spiel that's repeated every week is poorly written given how much it has to do, as has been much noted: but (contra eg henry's complaints above) what he actually says is that passion and innovation DRIVE cinema, rather than money -- if "drive" had been offset against another verb (let's say "shape"), then he'd have a potently arguable proposition to explore i think -- viz that "while box office SHAPES the leisure industry, passion and innovation DRIVE it" <-- again, true or not, this is not a startlingly avant-garde proposition, but i think it fits better with the shape of his exploration than what he actually says, and establishes a basis of structured tension rather than the static dichotomy he claims to be elucidating (and actually doesn't believe in)

basically i massively approve of observing and indicating how specific shots work, and how unexpected items are like each other (again shots really, though he uses individual shots as a metonymy for an entire film; which is not MY line on creative works operate, but was e.g. aristotle's and is nearly everyone's since, and is a forgiveable shorthand i SUPPOSE) (in mine the camera lens and eg the microphone have different agendas and the result is the consequence of CONFLICT AND STRUGGLE*) -- it's a kind of masterclass in how eg DPs or sound recordists think of and frame scenes, and this is a filmic dimension of film that VERY RARELY gets onto TV ever

*to understand what auteur ACTUALLY means, think of the film as a firefly-class vessel, the director as mal reynolds, and the team he's gathered as serenity's crew: mal's job is to corral their skills towards the specific task and pasyload he's hired himself out to deliver; the story that unfolds is the product of the rival interests perspectives strengths and errors of the squabbling crew...

he uses individual shots as a metonymy for an entire film

yes! have also been bothered by this, and how - not unexpectedly, or unfairly - he almost always picks the most spectacular/stirring moments of a film, which drives home his point about innovation etc but actually ignores the boring and stupid and ill-judged shots/moments, which are also part of the story.

ok sure, re bonnie and clyde, writers be bein upfront about who they'd LIKE to be associated with in terms of artistic vanguadism (=respectability, for intellectuals), and this is one of the many meanings of influence: a declaration of allegiance that hopes it's a conduit for approval BUT benton and newman weren't the only people working on B&C, they got PENN not godard or truffaut (two quite unlike directors incidentall)y and what they hoped is not NECESSARILY what actually shaped the film. The New Wave were of course avid viewers of and borrowers from noir (it's a french word for a reason) and also westerns -- seems to me Cousins (or more likely someone with better dialectical chops) could easily demonstrate that what the "Hollywood New Wavers" took to be French perspectives, concepts techniques and attitudes had in fact largely passed THROUGH France from the US; from the non-arty "auteur" (again, a french term for a not-yet-named US phenom) world of production-line thrillers and cowboy flicks... and that since Penn's larger team would have been drawn from Hollywood's employment ranks, these "team-based" aspects would emerge in B&C more de-frenchified than the up-itself critical aspiration of the film's conceivers and makers were able to see themselves.

Influence! It's a problem not an explanation...

to be fair, though, MC did pick out the neo-realist dissent from commentary's habitual metonymy jonesing: and with a nice example, where the daddy (= the "auteur") doesn't at the time spot the peril and the lively humour of his son nearly being run over by two cars (= other elements on the film-making process!) (the mise-en-scenery fell on my head), or even care to be looking out for it -- as in "realism is stuff we don't expect or control or tailor or plan for or grasp"

(ps i'm being supersnide abt B&C's makers there, not because the film isn't great, inc. their contribution, but because declaration of influence by writers and artists should ALWAYS be treated as an opaque and highly agenda'd sleight-of-hand; these guys are ALL professional bullshitters or they'd never get any movies made ever, good or terrible)

how many actresses or actors talk w/any degree of insight about acting and learning on set <-- this, incidentally = i suspect a fair proportion would have plenty to say but they are very few of them ASKED this kind of question, from stars down to character actors or even extras

also: TRACY HAND TO THREAD d00d

(haha i went past a stall in the little market that's just started in st john at hackney's garden, and it was selling CHUTNEY, CHILDREN'S COLOURING BOOKS, and about forty theoretical studies of all aspects of Stanislavski!)

Well, the way the interview ws going at first it seemed she was being asked to say how great Mizoguchi and Ozu were and offered her own learning curve on set as an addition. Good on MC for keeping that.

cow-irker (super-smart and informed about fine arts but a newbie wrt to film) really liked the kazan/blacklist stuff, as she had no idea about this entire story, so fair enough it being in, i guess

Episode 05 1939-1952

Rome Open City (1945)
Stagecoach (1939)
Directed By John Ford (1971)
Osaka Elegy (1936)
Flesh And The Devil (1926)
Follow The Boys (1944)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Me And Orson Wells (2008)
Chimes At Midnight (1965)
Cabiria (1914)
Intolerance (1916)
The General (1936)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)
Code Unknown (2000)
Satantango (1994)
How To Marry A Millionaire (1953)
Un Homme Et Une Femme (1966)
Heat (1995)

Rome Open City (1945)
Raging Bull (1980)
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
Pin Up Girl (1944)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Portrait Of A '60% Perfect Man': Billy Wilder (1982)
Testament Of Dr Mabuse (1933)
Big Sleep (1946)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Star Wars: Episode V - Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Out Of The Past (1947)
The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Little Caesar (1931)
Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)
La Chienne (1931)
Scarlet Street (1945)
American Cinema: Film Noir (1995)
Gun Crazy (1950)
Bonnie And Clyde (1967)
L. A. Confidential (1997)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Shiva (2006)

Titanic (1997)
71st Annual Academy Awards (1999)
An American In Paris (1951)
The Red Shoes (1948)
Sing In The Rain (1952)
Flying Down To Rio (1933)
Gold Diggers Of 1933 (1933)
Indiscreet (1958)
Two For The Road (1967)

A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)
Post Haste (1933)
Listen To Britain (1942)
The Third Man (1949)
The True Glory (1945)
Taxi Driver (1976)

only just watched this. less of interest to me in this one. and a lot of things with <5 second clips (most of which, tbf, he'd mentioned before)

been watching on 4OD. the clips are great, the look of it is great, the juxtapositions are often lovely, if he misuses the word "classical" one more time i'm gonna hunt him down and punch him in the neck, his general argument is pretty effing weak imo, enjoying finding out that hollywood is the only capitalist film industry in the world tho

srsly kudos for doing this but in large picture terms the dude is a bit of an idiot

Tonight he is tackling the melodrama - shd be a riot.

oh god, a whole hour of "this is not realism therefore it has no connection to Leavis-esque Life"

One of the bits I liked from last week's was Stanley Donen being all punk rock saying "At the time, Busby Berkeley was the ENEMY, we DESPISED HIM, Singing In The Rain was totally relevant to the kidz maaan. Except I was watching Busby Berkeley recently, it's kind of amazing isn't it, that stuff? In fact it's AWESUMZ"

Maybe Mark Cousins will do the same thing w/Casablanca

Have a copy of Durgnat on Film. Avoided it for ages because I haven't seen many of the films and context but after watching a few eps I could certainly give it a shot.

http://www.worldbookmarket.com/images/books/00001/18875.jpg

Great start on Cairo Station. But also a bit weird: just two hours ago I was reading an intro to Mahfousz's Cairo Trilogy, checked this out of the library earlier.

very bold start! "the REAL james dean is this man, YOUSSEF CHAHINE!"

hi julio!!!

and guru dutt is "india's orson welles" <-- not the best way to dodge ethnocentrism

14 yr old sharmila tagore lowers her eyes in 1960, tagore today raises them -- nice (ok corny too)

lata mangeshkar singing in "mother india" -- i saw her sing live once, at wembley

hi mark!

Didn't get a lot from tagore's talk (partly bcz I've seen a cpl of interviews with her repeating the same sorta spiel). But really good 10 mins on Indian cinema (Ray to Mother India). Liked that mention of a film from the 30s (before neo realism), nice complication of history there I suppose. xp

wtf, did MC just diss ford's sense of visual poetry and atmosphere?

http://www.astronomynotes.com/nature/shoffner/MonumentValley3.jpg

No, I think he said he wouldn't get in the mud, show grey (?)

Slightly bizarre to relate the Chinese director's fall and then talk about Polanski!

not sure doing ALL EGYPT ALL CHINA ALL INDIA POST-WAR JAPAN in these 10 min bursts works quite the way he wants it to here: it's a bit reductive (writing as a veteran of the world music wars)

he said ford wasn't interested in visual atmospherics, something like that -- just a weird thing to say

WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE SCORPION!?

I think he said Kurosawa would embellish his films w/visual atmos but then compared the types of atmos and said a director like Ford wouldn't engage with heavy rain and sticky stuff, i think.

not sure yet how this is all working, he is not encasing it in a 'beginnings of world cinema' like i thought he might. xp

god this is a mess -- i want see all these films (now!) but MC's high-speed identity-posture riffle through world politics is all over the place, a flurry of incompatible cliches

(except: did he not bother mentioning ray, sirk and anger were gay?)

totally fair enough to contrast how ford and kurasawa deploy visual atmosphere -- i just thought he put it in a weirdly dismissive way

ok, he REALLY REALLY needs to be anchored by having to elucidate the specifics of a technique: "the 50s were swollen with the desires of their time, and something had to give" falls apart a bit when it turns out that the "desires of their times" means sex (also a desire of other times than the 50s, i feel confident in suggesting)

(lean and anderson also gay: this also not mentioned)

sure -- he is complementary of Ford elsewhere, maybe not this time..

Its all over the place, he is v excited to basically show a film prog where its just not about US cinema and only that. There is an arg about sex and the cinema right at the beginning and end, but then he went on about Pather Panchali for about 10 mins, when he should've spent more time on Devi. xp

One other thing I shd mention is the films they broadcast after these broadcasts -- it shd be Pather Panchali now instead of god knows at what hour on Film4.

Mash is ok i suppose.

It should be that Mexican one with the scorpion! I want to know what happened next!

haha well, bet that won't turn up on youtube either.

tempted to liveblog MASH now

maybe on a difft thread as MC won't get to it for another three eps

We could have compared to what MC will say in three weeks.

Morning after: the worst ep so far when it should've been one of the best. My prediction upthread of this one falling apart seems to be reality now and I don't like it one bit, and the more auteur-ish it gets the worse it will be.

> it shd be Pather Panchali now instead of god knows at what hour on Film4.

the monday film (00:50 in this case) is always repeated first thing on thursday (11:00). (which is just as useless. but, hey, video recorders...)

re Xie Jin, what he said was (something like) "In film, no one's career has had such amplitude, not even Polanski's" -- amplitude being the correct mathematical term for the range from highest to lowest value, of course, but a VERY peculiar word to reach for, and yes, a strangely unimaginative comparison... i wanted to know what "incorrect neo-confucianism" actually meant during the cultural revolution, that the maoists sentenced Xie Jin to cleaning the studio toilets

in other words, if johnny guitar was a swelling desire confounding and [stupid word alert] "subverting" eisenhower-esque norms, what swelling anti-social desire did "two stage sisters" manifest that needed punishment

i was actually quite pleased when he mentioned the bandung conference and the non-aligned movement -- plus defined "first world" versus "third world correctly, and knew that the "second world" was the communist bloc; clearly bandung doesn't get discussed enough, in or out of film history! -- but then his notion of anti-colonial sensibility was "smashing the bauble" of hollywood, which in ref the bauble-loving nation that gives us BOLLYWOOD is pea-brained (he tried to cough this problem away, but it won't go away just by coughing)

i also perked up when he started talking about lindsay anderson, obv (i was wondering if he was going to use ideas from my book!)* <-- if he'd compare-contrasted anderson's mandarin leftist disenchantment with the "masses" as he saw them into satyajit ray's or chahine's deep empathy/sympathy (or sirk's ditto, for those trapped in the more suffocatingly conformist reaches of the american middle class, or indeed whatever deviation it was the red guards felt that xie jin exhibited, this might have set up an interesting dialectic, for the emergence of a post-war and post-colonial dialectic (anderson was born in bangalore, of course: and belonged, if uneasily, to a layer of empire that was a lot less socially distant from eg the nehru's born-to-rule caste than modernising liberation rhetoric was able to acknowledge) <-- were any of the non-US directors in question (whatever their politics) actually of working class or peasant class backgrounds?

*he didn't >:(

"incorrect neo-confucianism" <-- don't think this was the actual term, btw

("an interesting dialectic, for the emergence of a post-war and post-colonial STANCE", i mean)

the monday film (00:50 in this case) is always repeated first thing on thursday (11:00). (which is just as useless. but, hey, video recorders...)

lolz didn't we talk about recording off Film4 two years ago. Still to get a DVD recorder.

Seems like were two separate topics that he ws trying to insert -- one ws the rise of world cinema, another was sex and cinema -- and it led to a lot of incoherence. If MC said "in the 50s there were two trends, etc" then he could've organised it better (?) The 10 mins on Ray were spent on Pather Panchali. Great as that film might be (and it is) I didn't know how it fit with the rest of his agenda. He could've discussed it w/neo-realism, he certainly should've mentioned that 30s Indian film alongside it, same for that Brazilian film from the 50s discussed yesterday. Same for the Bunuel. These eps are spread as timelines but he is v good at jumping across, and there was much less of that yesterday.

Could see how he might have wanted Freud to operate -- but wasn't Freud an obsession with a lot of film makers in 40s noir?

And incidentally I don't think Indian cinema is allowed to show bedroom scenes NOW, its incredibly conservative. Not something that Ray ws able to do much about, i think.

This has led to a orgy of short film watching over the weekend:

http://www.ubu.com/film/farrokhzad_house.html

[reposted from julio's LJ comments thread]

i really REALLY enjoyed r cousins last night [=on saturday night] -- i was home late-ish, so i missed the first ten mins and had to while time away till the repeat re-watching species

which taught me that his weak spot is getting started, really: the intro doesn't get any better, and he was piffling on about the "classical" and the "bauble" too much (ie at all) in that first ten mins -- but as soon as he gets into zone of the paying his main attentions to the visual*, he has my attention (and he did a real good job firing me about the italians, who've honestly always been my blank spot in the 50s and 60s)

putting tati third after bergman and bresson delighted me

(haha he said "authoritative" when he meant "authoritarian", of bergman's horrible dad)

*this actually happens when harriet andersen gazes out of the frame at us, in summer with monika, and gazes and gazes and gazes: cinema looking into the abyss of the buffs and perves and rubes

argh, spoilers. does he need to keep showing the ends of films?

otm. I watched last week's episode and then the next day The Passenger turned up from Netflix. Didn't really spoil it, tbh, but still.

As he is talking about modernisms and new waves i don't think revealing endings is at the top of his mind, and its not as if the endings of Tarkovsky films are understood in any way.

Last night's => much like my film going life, scarily enough...

Just a couple of points: I think he is too to quick to define the cinema of a country and then unthinkingly went into the cinema of a continent (Africa), whereas I would have preferred him to define Senegalese cinema as a thing in itself. Hopefully he'll be more specific as other African film makers emerge.

The end of Nostalghia should have been compared to compositions in glamorous ads -- probably outside his remit but I suspect that's where a lot of it went. Wanted some confirmation.

There was a lack of image matching: Jancso to Tarr, or Farrokhzad to [insert name of Iranian film maker here].

cage said the point of his music -- well, some of it -- was that there was "no best seat"

maybe the point of modernist ("modernist") film is that it doesn't matter if you see the end first: it's not shaped or driven by plot denouement

that said, i was out and missed the entire ep

Its on more4, if you watch that kind of thing.

interviewer: do you believe in a beginning, middle and end?

jean-luc godard: yes but not in that order

have missed the last cpl of these, hoping to catch up, but i am still kind of sulking abt that horrible comparison, mentioned upthread, between ford and kurosawa and their attitude to spectacle (cue vague invocation of 'innovation').

when i first took an evening film studies course, at Birkbeck College in the late 1980s, i was p much alone in having any kind of interest in, or knowledge, of film theory. most of the other ppl on the course - quite a gd cross-section - all wanted much more of a history lesson than they got, so i'm sure that this series will serve as a valuable teaching aid for a long time - which is why, imho, threads like this serve a gd purpose, to interrogate the 'standard work'.

i am so incredibly behind watching this that i think i will have to set aside a weekend to catch up.

though im annoyed at the bit i caught last week or so when he ruined the passenger's ending, which i still havent gotten round to watching.

he ruins the beginning and middle of a lot of stuff too tbf

well yeah. he assumes that of course we have all watched all these/this many films so there is no reason not to talk about endings. but i think after a certain no. of years, revealing endings seems okay to do. if i had read that guardian piece a few months back about spoilers - where they show a pic from the last scene of planet of the apes - without having already seen the first planet of the apes, id prob be a bit pissed off.

you might have fallen to yr knees and shouted about them blowing it up

i'm super behind w/this but part of what's frustrating about the spoiler debate isn't that it's argued or okay or whatever but that it's just usually unnecessary; he showed the *key shot* of ordet while talking about dreyer, and it really added nothing; all he needed to do was show a shot of ordet. you can make a case for not going all out on concealing a twist if it would prohibit you from discussing a film, but it can feel cavalier if you're just galloping through and dropping in endings when you could be using something else as easily.

there has to be a bit of a statute of limitations on spoilers though

the bible? jesus dies! (except not) <-- forgivable
that cock m.kermode telling you the scariest bit of "the ring" in the intro to its first ever showing <-- less so

s/b first ever BBC showing

a lot of intro writers for books, dvds and other critical editions seem incapable of not spoilering like crazy, i'm assuming it's cos description is a cheap way of meeting yr word count tbh.

but the obvious lesson is never look at crit of stuff you don't want "spoiled".

like whenever i get a penguin of something i've not read before, i read the intro last. also whenever i want to watch something made in Hollywood that i've never seen before, i make sure i haven't watched m. cousins wanking on about non-classicalist baubles first.

These films are 50+ years old.

Then again I always read the intros off Penguin paperbacks first.

if you're going to spend all this time interview robert towne, WHY NOT GET HIM TO TURN THE WASHING MACHINE OFF DURING THE INTERVIEW (or you know, slap an even louder musictrack over it so we can't hear him AT ALL: he's not saying anything very interesting)

thought this was a weak ep on the whole -- nice to see so much of charles burnett of course -- but the dialectic of radicals versus "assimilationists" was pretty ropily handled, pseudo-countercultural preening obscuring a much more ambivalent and tangled identity-pol story -- nothing like enough on formal content of films, as opposed to symbolic poses (at least till he was talking to burnett)

the "see the world upside down" trope got old fast (arising out of a very over-extended DO-YOU-SEE section on someone's children's book): haha at his response to hopper's the last movie ("but the stupid critics thought it was a fiasco": THOSE STUPID CRITICS!!), and, wel, obviously hopper was never that well behaved, but in what contentful sense beyond drug intake is he a radical (i've never seen the last movie, so am prepared to be schooled on this)

don't like him saying stuff like "an article in the new yorker said" w/o naming the writer (kael?) -- realised as i watched the clip that i will never love "chinatown", and wonder if i could ever formulate my resistance... (he uses the word "amplitude" AGAIN about polanski...)

there's really an excellent thesis to be written -- maybe it already has been -- about the countercultural response to film, and how incredibly sentimental and old-fashioned it WAS, once you got past its taste for sex and drugs and violence... there could hardly BE a more old-fashioned manipulatively ending film than "the graduate" (YOUTH IS FAB, old people understand nothing especially LOVE or ART)... of course kael was half-writing it at the time, and her aggressive support of directors like altman (and the "assimilationists") hinged on her own sense that the counterculture vanguard WASN'T making film better, it was falling for "far out" spectacle laced with preachy and self-regarding hippyish moralism

(to be fair cousins wasn't repping for petulia or el toro or the strawberry statement this week, those arguments do seem to have been won...)

Was kind of exasperated by this ep, didn't really have the strength to type up anything. Really pissed at the Dennis Hopper bit -- I always thought he was a real waste of time who got a bit lucky w/a few roles and the comeback in Blue Velvet. All a bit MC5 posing with their K-47s.

Apart from Burnett I liked Schrader, especially when he said how he'd like a return to existentialist cinema and then a second later exclaiming it would get old.

There was some gd formal content w/Taxi Driver and Malick, too. What this needed was a story to be told in parallel w/ other 70s films from other scenes and countries. This series has led me to watch quite a bit of experimental film, the best of which comes from Hollis Frampton. Tough, rigorous framing that is also (at its best) witty, the image and the idea often came together with a set of emotions. MAYBE he could've tied that with Chantal Akermann's work -- instead of restricting his geographical boundaries, which was a problem if you talk about narrative cinema of the time he was focusing on, but he needn't have left it as a weak lament.

Last week's one was a 'rest of the world' trip and I don't think this division (he's going backpacking again next week) really works.

oh yes, the peanut shells as locusts! i liked that bit

oh and the thing on "north lighting" in the godfather, i enjoy when he discusses stuff like that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helke_Sander

w/Akermann I'd say another key film is Sander's The All-Around Reduced Personality (from the late 70s). Love that one, v lucky to catch a screening of it at the Goethe Instiutt a few years ago.

i saw the last movie a looong time ago, when it was revived at the nft in the 1980s - my main memory of it is that the 'opening titles' didn't appear until abt twenty minutes into the film, which i guess was sort've radical. but yes, hopper was in many ways quite an 'inside' figure, someone trained in old school studio system filmmaking under ppl like henry hathaway, who hopper wld later be toughly sentimental abt. hopper, warren beatty and of course bogdanovich all played great hommage to american or american-based filmmakers from 'the golden age' of the studio system - and even someone like john carpenter, much more of an outsider maybe, fantasised about having the same kind of career as howard hawks - or an sentimentalised, idealised version of that kind of career. i guess we all want to be assimilated by 'the thing' (hollywood) at some level or other.

this is all without seeing the episode in question.

9am: thinking of turning the sound off at the intro :-)

pm I mean

oh sod it clashes with x-factor plus i am only a third of the way into my wine

ah, its a toughie, there is always the 1am repeat.

Man I love Fassbinder's scruffy intense face screen

Excellent beginning -- getting back to strenghts in comparing the American cinema that inspired German cinema in the 70s, although I think Fassbinder and Wenders genuinely adored that cinema a lot more than Cousins is letting on.

DAS IST NICHT EIN BAUBLE JETZ

ok i am a bit drunk

but have to watch misha b now

by 1am you will be even more drunk I'm sure -- don't disappoint me when I wake up :-)

And that Von Trotta film, saw that years ago -- so happy he's included that.

The best of:

Italian cinema: Identity and sex
German cinema: Identity and History.

Not sure you can generalise like this

christ I can't stand Ken Russell

PLEASE GOD LET HIM PLAY A CLIP OF "THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM"

The image matching from film to film is among the best I've seen so far. He's brilliant on The Conformist. That Bertolucci related story of his meeting w/Godard meet in a Paris cafe is good. Could have explored some of that with a 30 sec look at Godard's Vertov stuff.

Whenever he speaks the word 'identity' I die a little a little tho'. All bobbins, for real. xp

haha "she's like chas in performance shedding her clean-cut self when she meets a more vital human being" -- ok chas is a GANGSTER and the "more vital human being" was mick jagger MOSTLY IN BED

*sigh* at deploying "the raw and the cooked" to mean "the vital and alive and amazing vs the lame and entombed": MARK COUSINS YOU DO NOT EAT YOUR FOOD RAW you ponce

Weird to talk about that last scene of Walkabout (a scene I've liked in terms of pure film although it didn't make sense to me as Agutter character never shows that much feeling toward the Aboriginal kid).

Also I've been watching Mad Men all day (and for the first time). xp

That scene of Australians in a swimming pool next to the sea is a good find tho'.

SPOILERS she actually causes his death, though not intentionally -- i think the idea is that she is terrified and wants to get home while she's in the desert, but once she IS home and safe she realises she was caught up in something amazing, and relives

the key word in "performance" is the word performance, oddly enough -- and the aboriginal kid is just as caught up in it as jenny agutter (he's "performing" his own puberty ritual, iirc)

ok yeah that reading makes a lot more sense.

These Japanese docs...I just need to see 'em.

i've missed em all by writing too much, i'll have to watch them in the middle of the night (after "the thin red line" HOW WILL I STAY AWAKE?)

Yeah I was only partially watching, but an inspired move to go on about them -- he could've chosen to talk about a million other things going on in Japanese cinema at that time

distractoblogging

STOP SAYING RADICAL you nob

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Cinema

^Not heard of this...

haha love the colonizers leaving scene in Xala

the diop interview's terrific -- i've seen sembene's yeelen but that's all, i wanted to see more (when i was writing about african pop) but they were nowhere to be found, easily

the colonisers leave but sembene wants a "radical enlightenment" -- all these directors are from francophone africa, ie have had a french secular ("enlightenment") education

cousins should be saying this; the directors are well aware of their own contradictions, the films are about little else

"radical enlightenment" <-- raw or cooked?

Xala is on TV on Monday, btw.

Think I'm going to have to re-watch this on More 4 on Demand sometime. Lots of great clips.

Toasted?

chas was a clean-cut gangster tho, & clean-cut in his notions of proper behaviour, masculinity, sexuality etc despite being a violent criminal. mick jagger danced around with flourescents to the last poets and was in bed with quite a lot of ppl.

haha, ok busted, but i still don't buy that walkabout simply maps onto performance in an uncomplicated way -- jagger is the "cultured" "painted" creature and chaz the fellow caught in unquestioned ritual

cousins is great at stunt juxtaposition: jodorowsky is a magnificant (=insane) way to conclude this ep

ok i have to endure 2000 hours of t.malick to catch the start of this one now -- like malick, cousins's eye is superb; also like malick, he's a bit of an up-himself bonehead with a tin ear WHO I AM GLAD IS DOING THE STUFF HE IS DOING even if i get irritated by a good deal of it

Holy Mountain never appealed to me so I've never gone out of my way to see it, but he had to try and tidy up the identity narrative running through this ep somehow.

"hyenes" looks like the best movie ever

i totally recommend yeelen, i loved it

whisky is a killer app, just sayin

but i am ready oh yes

it loooooooooked like our dreams

lars von trier is fat

"most people"

"big, brillliant questions" <-- stop saying "brilliant"

"das is mein mann"

fassbinder, you should have him the centre, he really really is

"sneered at its lies" <-- you are such a dildo

"performance" <-- it is quite a giveaway you dimwit dick

god i love fassbinder

all the right films, all the wrong justification

anthony easton art thou living yet

can't decide whether m. cousins or c. nolan's dreams are duller

of course cousins thinks herzog is germany's wild man. not fassbinder

"a dangerous idea that people tried to make safer" -- THOSE STUPID "PEOPLE" eh, thank god we are not that stupid

haha, no cousins is diligent -- he is a careful student of bredth, this is no bad thing (except in his own hippy head)

this is a fabulous range and spread of films and ideas, cousins's panic comes with the narrative summary, he always reaches for the dreary USP, his instincts are good and then he markets them out of sight and mind

trust his eye and his instinct, not his words -- he is a crap writer

"influential" <-- not a word a a "radical" has intelligiible access to

KEN RUSSELL

haha

chas is a mod

"the most imginative shooting in the story of film" = oh wow it is powys square

i am drunk but cousins is dim

"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.

oh is that the house is black yeah i need to see that

That's the one--I was scrolling back, and someone said the same thing upthread. The friend I saw it with tonight says it's only 30 minutes long and available on DVD.

It is on YouTube, if you don't mind watching it that way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WL4w5ceO7w

Being so short, that might work until I can see it properly--thanks.

Parts 3 and 4 tonight. I like the obscure stuff the guy digs up (obscure to me, anyway): the Japanese film influenced by Caligari (A Page of Madness), the Brazilian film from the early '30s (Limite), the films of Ruan Lingyu. And I liked Blood of a Poet into Inception.

Realizing that you can't encompass everything, there are omissions that jar: Ford without Stagecoach, Disney without Fantasia, the '30s episode without Von Sternberg. (He made a brief appearance earlier.) The Hitchcock segment seemed quite scattershot. "Here are seven reasons why Hitchcock's so important"--a couple of times, I wasn't even clear what the reason was.

The two hours go by easily, though. I'm glad I'm not seeing it in three or four sittings.

I watched this when it was broadcast on UK tv this time last year, and the hour-a-week format worked really well for me; I tended to PVR it and probably had a couple of 2hr sessions as well catching during the run, but as you say it just slips by. The mid 20th century episodes were my favourites, esp. the wonderful interview with Kyōko Kagawa.

In honesty, despite the omissions and things one could take issue with, it kind of amazes me that a series like this could get made *at all* these days, so kudos to Cousins for getting funding and making it happen. A fair bit of the location footage seems to be him on solo travels with a camera, but the sometimes ramshackle feel of this was pretty beguiling too. Like a lot of people on this thread it certainly opened my eyes to a mass of films that I've never seen (or even heard of) as well.

Good point. Every time I complain about something, I feel a little petulant; he managed to get a serious 15-hour history-of-film made, and no one's going to see things exactly the same. I've already found out about a number of films I didn't know. (Which doesn't mean I won't have more petulant complaints for the next few Sundays...)

Part 5: A little sketchy on film noir, but he does give Stagecoach its due here. I don't think Capra was mentioned, but you could argue he belongs more to the '30s...except I'm not sure if he was mentioned in that episode, either.

Part 6: Film I most want to see from tonight: Cairo Station, in part for Hind Rostom. I liked the way he ended with The Searchers, Vertigo, Touch of Evil, and Rio Bravo as a group--those four films have always belonged together for me (as different as they are in many ways). The Apu films are among my favourites, but I thought there was a little too much time spent on Ray; Marilyn Monroe was barely mentioned. I partly associate the '50s with Biblical epics--not important, but maybe some acknowledgement of DeMille.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rmPgyCUMW8E/TkFEdGQMnlI/AAAAAAAABgI/wxAKUQIMV8I/s1600/%25D9%2587%25D9%2586%25D8%25AF+%25D8%25B1%25D8%25B3%25D8%25AA%25D9%2585.jpg

Lots of films I've got to see from parts 7 and 8. He's got a knack for choosing the right sequences, and the quality of the clips is fantastic--he'll show stuff I've seen and forgotten, and I'll think, "How did I not think that looked amazing at the time?" High on the to-see list: Trinka's The Hand and Chytilová's Daisies.

Things I puzzled over...I don't think of Tati as being on a plane with Bergman, Bresson, and Fellini (independent of my own feelings about each--just in terms of importance). Substituting Kurosawa or Dreyer for the pre-New Wave '50s would make more sense to me. Not mentioning L'Avventura is bizarre, especially as he often argues that this or that changed film grammar. Something schlump warned about upthread: his habit of excerpting endings. Black Girl, Nostalghia, one or two others--did no one tell him I haven't yet seen these films? The final segment on American film in the '60s was quite arbitrary, but I assume some of that will be smoothed over in the next episode on the '70s.

I can't complain, but sometimes I still do. I'm enjoying this quite a bit.

Catching up on your posts now Clemenza. Wish they put this on TV for a repeat, would watch. Makes me nostalgic for the time some of the initial participants sat down and watched this together.

I loved Davies. One of my 10 - 20 or so discoveries from watching this.

Daisies I mean -- spelling fails again :-(

Back at it after a week off. Once again, whatever carping I do does not mean I'm not enjoying this.

I knew I'd be extra nitpicky about the America-in-the-'70s episode. The following omissions wouldn't bother everyone, but to me they should be there: Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky, Alan J. Pakula, Michael Ritchie, Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, at least). (I'm assuming Spielberg and Lucas will be used as bridges to the blockbuster era--a bit unfair to Spielberg, I think.) Starting off with Catch-22, and devoting a good five minutes to it, was perverse. Somewhat surprised there was no mention of Elaine May, Joan Micklin Silver, or Claudia Weill, just because they would have fit into Cousins' goal of an alternate history.

Much more inexplicable: no Nashville or Bonnie and Clyde. When the latter didn't show up in the '60s episode, I thought that made sense--it would lead the '70s episode. But nothing. Those two are non-negotiable.

The film I'd most want to see from episode 10 is that Japanese documentary about the negligent chemical company.

Minamata: The Victims and Their World is really awesome, yes! Opened me up to a few other Japanese documentaries from that time.

Not as much American film in parts 11 and 12, so fewer complaints from me. Lynch and Lee are obvious benchmarks for the '80s; I would have maybe added Jonathan Demme, too. (And still no mention of De Palma.) I didn't think Sayles was a great choice for the turn towards indie films (implied, anyway)--would have gone with Jarmusch and/or Soderbergh instead. I could sense my friend squirming through the France-in-the-'80s segment, but he seemed to get Britain right. We were laughing about Canada turning up in the 12th hour: Cronenberg, skip back 40 years to Norman McLaren, forward to Jesus of Montreal, see you later.

Film I'd most want to see: I guess the B&W Scottish one from the early '70s about the old woman and her grandson (can't remember the name...xyzzzz?).

My Childhood--Wikipedia has a list of all the film clips.

All done. Good stuff from the last three parts:

--a few minutes on the ascension of documentaries starting in the late '90s; didn't expect that
--the segment on Japanese horror
--American coverage in the '90s was pretty good
--the segment on Sokurov

Carping:

--lots on the Coens, no mention of Fargo
--as always, lots of endings revealed
--calling Van Sant's Elephant one of the key films to come out of the '90s, two seconds before the actual date (2003) is flashed on screen
--so much time given to Baz Luhrmann...I've never seen a Luhrmann film; based on what I saw last night, I don't think I'd last five minutes

Anyway, on the whole, well worth the 15 hours.

his voice is kinda making me want to kill myself, along with a lot of his ideas, but i've been just sick enough in the last week (i.e. unable to do anything but stare blankly when i get home at night) that i keep watching.

so is this any good

nah

I don't know about watching a bunch at a time, but once a week (assuming you can get used to his voice and his style), I think it's enjoyable.

So this is on Netflix now, right? What's wrong with his voice? Is he Irish? Is that bad?

He's Irish. He just has a way of speaking.

An Irish way?

Have a listen to a little bit of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx3HAEq0gJs

Sounds Irish, with requisite voiceover portent.

Did you know that when they broadcast "Planet Earth" in the US, they replaced David Attenborough's narration with Sigourney Weaver's?

It's not that he is Irish. His voice his famously infuriating. But I got over it, for this.

the shot selection and the connections are almost all brilliant, his theorising about art and commerce considerably less so

also, spoilers a-go-go

Did you know that when they broadcast "Planet Earth" in the US, they replaced David Attenborough's narration with Sigourney Weaver's?

And for the subsequent Life, the voiceover script was rewritten for Oprah Winfrey.

"Critics in the nineteen sixties said..." is a big catchphrase in my house as a result of this show

I watched the first two episodes of this last night. Really great stuff. Some of the comparisons he makes are a little odd, but sometimes they seem inspired (his comparison of Ozu to Jeanne Dielman, for example).

Just started this and I know I'm going to love it, especially for the comparisons, which keep things fresh and personal. Have no problem with his voice.

but sometimes they seem inspired (his comparison of Ozu to Jeanne Dielman, for example).

I think its a fairly standard comparison but its worth talking about film in this way on TV...certainly not seen anything like it.

There are plenty of standard comparisons that I am unaware of.

Sure, same here :) Just wanted to say how he brings non-normal film talk on TV.

Ok, his voice is getting a little annoying, the way every sentence lilts upward like a question as he trails off. Still great, though.

Holy Toledo TCM: http://news.turner.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=6436

Turner Classic Movies (TCM), now in its 20th year as a leading authority in classic film, will present the U.S. television premiere of the acclaimed documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey this fall. The series, which tells the history of cinema through a worldwide lens, will be the centerpiece of TCM's most ambitious and far-reaching programming event ever. Over the span of 15 weeks, beginning Monday, Sept. 2, TCM will present The Story of Film: An Odyssey curated with a slate of 119 films and dozens of short subjects representing 29 countries across six continents.

Whoa that rules. I wonder which movies they'll show with some of the more esoteric episodes.

Note to self: read rest of article.

Wow, nice one TCM!

Time to get a DVR.

I watched some of the youtube clips of this and am kinda on the fence. altho he did convince me to see some Ozu.

That's how it works. You're like "hmmmm this guy and his voice" but then you're like "i wanna see all these dang movies"

haha yeah

his voice rules, I like to do impressions of it

I really enjoyed the first half of the story of film: an odyssey, beautiful to look at with some batshit assertions (all covered above by the brilliant mark s). Never saw the second half of a story of film: an odyssey (70s onward) cause I was busy, but I am broadly in favour of it. They showed the whole thing at the cinema in cambridge last year, I wish I could have gone to it. Also you could pay a load of money to attend a dinner at king's college with mark cousins at the end of the season! I wish I could have gone to that too. I could have impressed him by reciting the intro to the story of film: an odyssey by heart in an approximation of mark cousins's voice. He would have liked that I think.

I definitely like doing impressions of his voice.

I sometimes find myself saying "movies are a multi-million-dollar industry nye" to myself in a fey, lilting, bizarrely inflected voice

^yes I find myself talking to myself, elegantly put I KNOW

Already jealous of the innocent channel surfer who stumbles upon "Daisies" this fall.

i am jealous. think they showed about a dozen related films when it aired over here. (actually, i still have a couple to watch)

i love his voice. i find it soothing.

I'm about halfway through the series. Cousins is annoying but I can't say I haven't learned anything. His clip choices have been very good, too.

So many of these are worth a re-watch, so it's going to be tough keeping space on the DVR.

The TCM programming starts tonight. Got my DVR set up with two days to spare, can't wait to watch and record a bunch of this.

can you please rule on how annoying he is wmc, you are a trustworthy voice on this imo

nvr heard that thing to kick off part 15 abt in the past having a "wild man" on set to propose crazy ideas ?

is cool he picked things like oasis, larezcu & battle of heaven, i can dig his 00s nu-realism thesis

--the segment on Sokurov

^this was good too, kinda a blind spot to me

Did anyone see a story of children & film? I thought that was pretty cool

i like this

Been watching this on Netflix. Def. making me want to check out a bunch of things I've never seen before. Especially the 1920s-1930s Japanese stuff (I've seen all the famous Kurosawas and Hausu and Battle Royale and uh . . . . that's it), some of the less famous noir films and some silents.

i missed this completely when it came out, but it's up on netflix now so i've been blazing my way through it. i only read the first 10-20 posts itt because i didn't want to accidentally read something that would ruin a cool moment later in the series, but of those first 10-20 posts:

- i also rolled my eyes at the "film is about ideas, not money" theme, but then again, maybe that's because the vast majority of film that i know about (not much, i am perpetually a newcomer to everything) was made in the mid-to-late capitalist, post-jaws/star wars USA era. maybe $$ wasn't quite the driver in other centers of filmmaking, at various points? at any rate if cousins continues make his argument by showing awesome clips that demonstrate brilliant ideas and then following up with interviews with people who are inspired by that creativity, that's fine with me. i'm not sure that he'll win in a court of law but it's entertaining as hell.

- i like his voice.

for real: i only watched the first 10-20 minutes itf because i didn't want to accidentally see something that would ruin a cool moment later in the history of cinema

lol

life is so much better when it's a complete surprise

I love his dedication to showing the very final scene of every significant film ever

can't imagine i am not already somewhere upthread getting hysterical about this, but: i think when he's Teaching You Cross-Cutting it's okay, & that there are limits to the degree one which would subsequently benefit from watching like ... free cinema with fresh eyes. it's when he's just off-handedly mentioning that there's a really killer dreyer movie called ordet & not even saying so much about it but still choosing to show you the one revelatory moment that works as the film's crux. it goes SO HARD into this, & just bites chunks out of moment of innocence, vive l'amour, everything. i really like mark cousins, his sight & sound column is beautiful, he's such a wonderful advocate, but it is just so decadent in like ... powerpoint slideshowing through the LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER moments of cinema.

lol xp

ugh, limits to the degree to which one would-, btw

I've seen probably 15-20 more of the films he talks about since watching the series, including Ordet and it didn't spoil my enjoyment of them.

I suppose the ending of the Dreyer is amazing and great, its power wasn't diminished for me. Maybe because he doesn't really talk about the film in that much detail and impose a view on it.

i just kinda ... yeah it is not okay i think. i am glad you got to see it without feeling shortchanged!, but it feels hard to argue that some of the platonic effect of the denouement is contingent on us having a general expectation of what can/can't happen. even just tonally, like the film is so controlled & sober & is so self-contained; that shouldn't be overshadowed i don't think. i'm being prescriptive & narrow-minded here but it just seems like such a dick move.

probably should have written isn't contingent. sorry i am such a mess in this thread.

Its probably just me. I can read about a film or a book beforehand and then watch knowing its ending w/out it mattering too much (unless I suppose its something like The Usual Suspects but that's just fkn dumb).

Usually because I will put another spin on the thing I watched..(Although wrt Ordet I haven't just really spent enough time thinking about it; I was numbed by that.)

Also I didn't feel that those scenes (some of which were endings, other which were not) felt like powerpoint at any point. The content was very rich for a start, and usually enriched, as you do feel these films were often conversing with one another.

The ending to Ordet has been spoiled, like, a million times. It's all everyone talks about. You say an ending was like Ordet, and everyone knows what you mean.

i really like thinking about the jesus-y, kind of john-cale-guy-in-straw-dogs guy in ordet. just roaming around on the moors.

Maybe if you hang around film buffs but I actually watched 2-3 Dreyer films before Ordet and had no idea of its ending until Cousins showed it (and I probably watched 70% of the films he talked about) (but that's the effect of not reading anywhere near enough film crit).

i guess cinema is an artform of MOMENTS and memorable images, so 'old' films like Ordet are ultimately reduced to their 'iconic' scene or sequence - chess on the beach with death, the oddessa steps - and not to feature that scene in a 'history of cinema', however wayward, wld invite criticism carping. every 'clip' ultimately travesties the whole work.

this is how the film is sold in the UK

http://shop.bfi.org.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/360x360/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/5/0/5035673006658_2.jpg

***SPOILER ALERT**
The ending of Ordet is like the middle of La Jetée

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