At first, he was sure the left lens of his spectacles was clouding up. He would clean it again and again but the view was still hazy. Eventually, filmmaker Mark Cousins realised he actually had a bad cataract. He was going to need an operation. The doctor was going to cut into his left eye, suck out the lens he was born with, and replace it with a plastic one.
The operation is the framing device for Cousins’ new documentary The Story Of Looking (which closes the Sheffield Doc Fest next week). The film begins with him in bed in his home in Edinburgh preparing for the medical procedure the next day.
Cousins loves to look. “Looking has been my joy, my world,” the prolific filmmaker and author declares early on in the film as he takes viewers on a journey through some of his visual obsessions. As ever with Cousins, the frame of reference is huge. He discusses everything from selfies to Citizen Kane, from the colour scheme in Grease to the symbolism in Mexican feminist artist Frida Kahlo’s paintings; from Hitchcock’s use of green in Vertigo to Zhang Yimou’s blue palette for his martial arts movies.
Cousins himself films every single day and takes his camera with him wherever he goes. He has thousands of shots stored on his computer, a huge home-made archive which he can draw on as needed. Modernist writer Gertrude Stein once observed that “observation and construction make imagination.” Cousins takes this as his motto as he organises the vast amounts of material he accumulates.
The Irish-Scottish director points out that we are in a golden age of image making – and of looking. “It’s an extraordinary moment to be alive when we can make 4K images through the little black box in our pocket and we can have our eyesight restored to 20:20 vision within 20 minutes of an eye operation. Think of those thousands of years of people whose eyesights dimmed in their 40s and 50s and that was it. It was over for them. We are in a miracle time both in terms of looking and technology.”
In the documentary, Cousins can be seen discussing fine art one moment and citing statistics about the number of selfies currently being taken the next. There are apparently 30 billion or so each year, the majority snapped by women. Some sneer at them but Cousins sees selfies as a cause for celebration.
“My middle-class bourgeois friends…they are so snobby [about] working class people getting pissed in a pub taking pictures of themselves. When you really ask what that is about, if it is about narcissism, that’s fine. There is nothing wrong with a bit of showing off. Secondly, it’s often young people doing this…there is something glorious about celebrating your youth and vitality in the moment. The fact that young working class women are the key leader of the selfie – that is fantastic.” (Cousins adds, though, that he is no fan of apps and filters that people use to make themselves look more perfect.)
On a very different note, his film also includes a harrowing archive image of a middle-class German woman in Buchenwald at the end of the Second World War, averting her gaze from the heaps of corpses piled up in front of her.
“As part of my travels, I went to Buchenwald and I was shocked that it was so close to Weimar. It’s like 10 kilometres from Weimar which was the city of Goethe. I was always struck – and of course historians before me have been struck – at how close this atrocity was to the centre of German civilisation.”
Cousins’ book of the same title, The Story Of Looking, was published in 2017. At that stage, he wasn’t aware that he had eye problems. He had attempted to make a TV series based on the book but financiers wouldn’t support the project. “We decided to re-think it as a single film. Then, soon after that, I got the diagnosis of the cataract and I thought, ok, that becomes part of the film.”
The cataract operation took place in November 2019. Cousins added material to his film after that date to acknowledge the changes in living habits caused by the Covid pandemic.
“There are a few scenes in the film when I am in bed when I refer to Covid and they were inserted after Covid happened, but most of the film took place exactly as I described, the day before the operation. It was a way of trying creatively to ask myself could I make a film about looking that was mostly set in a dark room.”
Speaking to Business Doc Europe, Cousins says his new plastic lens has its advantages. “I no longer need to wear glasses when I go to the cinema. The new lens is brighter and bluer,” he explains. “Definitely, the new lens is a long focal length…it’s like having Robert Altman in your left eye.”
Cousins saw himself as following in a long tradition of storytellers who’ve spun out work from inside their own dens. (He cites Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Bo Burnham among the many other writers and filmmakers embracing the “you do not need to leave your room” philosophy).
The director has been hugely prolific in recent months. His documentary about legendary UK film producer Jeremy Thomas will be launched later in the summer. He has various other new films on the boil, among them a documentary about renowned Scottish modernist painter Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham. The film, Like A Huge Scotland, looks at the day she climbed the Alps and how that experience changed her life.
Cousins describes himself as “quite a loner in the way.” During lockdown, he felt as if he was in “a monastic retreat.” He cooked food for his partner (she works for the NHS) every evening but otherwise focused on his work. “So many people’s lives were ended or badly damaged by Covid but mine wasn’t…it was a very, very fertile time for me. I did a vast amount of work.”
The Story Of Looking is released in the UK by Modern Films. ‘The Story of Looking: In Conversation with Mark Cousins’ is hosted by Cíntia Gil Sat 12 June 14:00 at Abbeydale Picture House and online.
