Earlier this year, I reviewed the first four episodes of Mark Cousins already epic The Story of Documentary Film for Business Doc Europe, when episodes two, three and four premiered at the Berlinale, following the screening of episode one at Sundance. My general observations – and my overall enthusiasm – regarding the series remain roughly the same, and won’t be repeated here. Suffice to say that Cousins continues his winning streak.
Episode four formed the first half of Cousins’ coverage of the 1960s. Now, episode five expands the scope of the narrative under the subtitle ‘More Than We Know’, highlighting the lesser-known documentary histories of Yugoslavia (with the remarkable director Želimir Žilnik), North-Vietnam (where East German directors Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann interviewed American POWs for their Pilots in Pajamas, 1968, under the most questionable of circumstances), and Algeria, noting the representational importance of a documentary like Dawn of the Damned (Ahmed Rachedi, 1966), in which “we” for once means the Africans and “they” the white invaders.
I particularly enjoyed how Cousins presents Krystyna Gryczelowska’s Polish documentary 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman (1967) as a precursor to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), with an almost seamless cut connecting the two films, as “a sign that second-wave feminist films are on their way.”
Eventually, Cousins moves on to the general “distrust” of the 60s, resulting in a mockumentary such as David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, 1967), William Greaves’ unbelievable ‘making-of’ doc Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), and the Iranian film The Night it Rained (Kamran Shirdel, 1967), in which doubts arise around the heroic story of a young boy risking his life to save a train – resulting in a cacophony of opinions which Cousins compares to a “meme spreading on social media.”
Although the storytelling remains consistently engaging, the wider scope of countries and subjects – as increasing numbers of creators from more diverse regions get access to the cinema apparatus – inevitably leads to a less focused, more fractured view of the genre. Which sometimes devolves into an enumeration of films Cousins admires. But usually he groups at least four or five together to make a point, demonstrate a trend, or draw an unexpected comparison.
And he will still, from time to time, make those grand, sweeping statements he excels at, such as when he proclaims, in his inimitable voice-over: “From its earliest years, documentary had tried to narrate history. To drag it into cinema. In the 1950s, filmmakers made this process of using cinema to narrate history more explicit. Around the world in the 60s, radical documentarists rewrote the stories of their countries and of power.”
Of course, you could organise a seminar around this statement discussing counter-examples and questions of definition. But this series isn’t titled The Definitive Story of Documentary Film. Rather, it is Mark Cousins’ Story of Documentary Film, and it’s exactly this kind of grand gesture that gives a sense of grip on the material.
Another thing Cousins does is almost the opposite: he repeatedly underscores the impossibility and futility of trying to pin down a documentary decade, which he does by jumping back and forth to earlier or later decades and even to fiction features. Instead of a linear progression through narrative and technological advances (which was still more or less possible in the early decades of documentary film, when production was relatively limited in number, styles and nationalities), in these episodes Cousins transitions to the process of weaving a tapestry, creating a network of connections between films, filmmakers, subjects, styles and countries, extending beyond decades and even beyond the documentary genre.
And thus, almost as a joke, Cousins starts both episodes of The 1970s with the same scene from Grease(1978) – both times setting it against documentary film: first, to contrast Hollywood’s nostalgia with the fifties with the 1970s revolutionary musical developments, and the second time, to emphasise how, in other parts of the world, other films were just as influential, if not more so. When he gets to Mustafa Abu Ali’s Palestinian documentary They Do Not Exist (1974), he looks back at the first time Palestine was captured on film, eighty years earlier, in Palestine 1896 by the Lumières’ Alexandre Promio. Similarly, the colour scheme and cosmic dreams of Kidlat Tahimik’s remarkably stylised Philippine essay film Perfumed Nightmare (1977) – “one of the most distinctive movies of the 70s” – remind Cousins of Méliès’ colourised A Trip to the Moon (1902). And Iranian Hossein Torabi’s revolutionary For Freedom (1979), shot with cranes on 35mm, draws comparison with the likes of Gone With the Wind.
When Cousins introduces the overarching themes of the decade, he mentions “environmentalism, gay rights, feminism and punk”. Later, he also points out the early roots of “identity politics” – which could indeed be seen as the modern-day extension of the 70s slogan, “the personal is political.”
Considering the era’s political strife, one of Cousins’ most striking examples of the genre is Minimata: The Victims and Their World (1971) by Japanese director Noriaki Tsuchimoto, who would go on to make seventeen documentaries about the horrendous health problems suffered by the inhabitants of Minimata, whose water had been polluted by a fertiliser factory; and Origins of a Meal (1979), in which French director Luc Moullet dissects the economic and social conditions behind a simple meal. The film ends with a moment of self-criticism which still hits home: “Film is made from gelatine which comes from the cheek skin of cows or pigs, without which there would be no Battleship Potemkin, no Gold Rush.”
A response to this surge of political statement-making, Cousins suggests, was the emergence of more personal portraits, such as Football as Never Before (1971), for which the cameras stayed on George Best during the entire match – just as Douglas Gordon would do 35 years later with Zidane (2006). After which Cousins, who has an obvious weak spot for the “radical immersion” of Japanese documentaries of the era, asks: “And guess where we need to go to find one of the boldest and most extreme portrait films of the 70s? You’re right: Japan.” He is referring to Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), for which director Hara Kazuo films the birth of his ex-wife’s new child, while his new girlfriend handles the sound…and the film makes clear he’s also trying to seduce his ex again. It is “the most intimate portrait film in our story so far,” according to Cousins.
It is with statements such as these that Cousins seeks to de-centre the Western view of documentary history. Just as, when he discusses feminist films of the 1970s, he subtly notes that women directors in Eastern Europe started making them years before their Western counterparts.
And then, of course, there are the films which just hit you with the immediate feeling of wanting to see them in full. In this category, I would like to mention Gamín (1977), in which director Ciro Durán films homeless kids in the streets of Bogotá with shocking intensity – possibly even more shocking now, wondering what became of them. I also definitely want to watch Vampir-Cuadecuc (1971), a stylised, ghostly, black-and-white look behind the scenes of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, starring Christopher Lee (1970). And the Vertovian shots in Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay’s propagandistic Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) look absolutely gorgeous – including the fantastic cut from the cracked skin of an old man’s heel to the cracked earth the dam is supposed to help irrigate.
Inevitably, as in previous episodes of the series, the show is stolen by such documentaries which, even in short fragments, manage to capture the imagination with their striking imagery, which, for lack of a better word, I will call ‘poetic’. Of those, pride of place goes to Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan’s shot of shepherds sliding down a snow-covered mountain with their sheep between their legs in The Seasons (1975). “One of the most beautiful moments in documentary,” opines Cousins, “this should be seen on an IMAX screen.” Later, he makes one of his most interesting visual comparisons, between this scene and the death-defying action in F.R. Crawley and Bruce Nyznik’s The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975).
There are key films, such as The Battle of Chile Part 1 and 2 (1975 and 1976) by Patricio Guzmán, writing history by documenting the US-backed military coup against president Salvador Allende, of which Cousins dryly remarks: “Cinematographer Müller Silva disappeared more than fifty years ago, and is still missing.” And then there are more solitary gems such as Johan van der Keuken’s Blind Child (1964), the visually stunning The Dislocation of Amber (1975) by Sudanese director Hussein Shariffe, and the experimental Horizons (1972) by Shadi Abdel Salam, suggesting the depth of Egypt’s cultural world.
As Cousins says: “White western critics hardly noticed, but the message was clear: in the 1970s, cinema was everywhere. Documentary in particular.” Towards the end, Cousins uses the famous essay Powers of Ten(1977) to zoom out into space and show the entire Earth – illustrating the subtitle of the second episode of The 1970s – ‘Everywhere’. Looking ahead, he announces: “In every chapter in our story from now on, new African docs will emerge.”
And he ends this two-hour instalment of The Story of Documentary Film with a cliffhanger: “The eighties are coming. They will be easier, won’t they? Won’t they?”
Stay tuned to find out.
United Kingdom, 2026, 119 minutes
Director Mark Cousins
Production Hopscotch Films
Producer John Archer
International sales Dogwoof
Script Mark Cousins
Cinematography Mark Cousins
Editing Timo Langer
Sound design Zoë Irvine
Music Donna McKevitt
