Mark Cousins won’t be in Park City this week for the premiere of the first part of his latest, 946-minute epic The Story of Documentary Film (sold by Dogwoof and receiving a Special Screening in Sundance). The Edinburgh-based filmmaker is too wary about travelling to the US in the current climate.
“I love Sundance. It’s a total honour to have a film in Sundance of course. But one of the last times I went to the US, I was pulled into a room in Chicago O’Hare airport and interrogated about the stamps in my passport.” Cousins had been to Egypt, China and a few other countries that seemed to raise strong suspicions among US border officials.
“Obviously, I am not brown or black but I think that the rhetoric coming from the current US administration where foreigners are called animals and some countries are called shit-hole countries, doesn’t feel…” his voice tails off.
Rather than risk being detained, the filmmaker has chosen to stay at home in Scotland.
The Story of Documentary Film is 16 hours long in its entirety. Sundance audiences are being treated to the introductory chapter. It doesn’t begin as you might expect. Instead of a portentous prologue telling us about the social and political significance of non-fiction filmmaking, Cousins starts his magnum opus with footage of a baby Indian elephant caught in a ravine. A digger uses its spade to stop the elephant falling and to prod it back up on to solid ground.
“First of all, it’s really important when you are talking about cinema not to be snobby,” Cousins explains why he chose such an overture. “You could start with some very high art moment from documentary, but I just wanted to say there is no barbed fence around the art of filmmaking. The thing about documentary is its rawness, its there-ness…the ability to capture a real moment.”
This is a “celebratory” moment. It may come from contemporary social media but he sees clear parallels with the types of incidents filmed by early documentary. They too took “a generous, almost rapturous view of everyday life.”
“You don’t need to be an academic to understand documentary. You need to be alive to understand documentary,” Cousins continues.
The “impulse” behind the project was to communicate to audiences the director’s own sense of wonder about all the documentaries that have enraptured him over the years. “The magic is out there. There’s a world outside ourselves which is so complex – a full spectrum of everything we can imagine – the joys and sorrows of being alive.”
Cousins likes to quote a saying from modernist author Gertrude Stein: “imagination is observation plus construction.” That sums up his own approach to his craft: you start by observing the world, and then begin to shape it.
The Story of Documentary Film is drawing from a “vast amount” of material – more than 100 years’ worth of footage. As we are told, documentaries make up at least half of the films ever made.
The director has looked all over the world for material. One early sequence highlights work done by the Proletarian Filmmaking League of Japan. How did Cousins unearth such arcane riches? He explains he was tipped off by a colleague, Markus Nornes, a scholar of Asian cinema who is a professor in the film department at the University of Michigan.
“I filmed all over the world – and what I did was I piggy-backed. If I was getting some kind of lifetime achievement award or a retrospective somewhere, I would take my camera and film on the back of that. I was in Japan talking to Markus and he mentioned that to me.”
Cousins likes to joke that ignorance is his best friend. If he doesn’t know about something, he’s very curious to investigate. He shows Business Doc Europe an enormous chart he drew up to help structure the documentary. Decades are listed across the top. Regions and countries are drawn up nearby. “I’ve been making this [documentary] for four or five years. Everywhere I went, I would bring this sheet of paper.”
If he was in, say, Slovenia, he would find out everything he could about the country’s documentary tradition. Gradually, the chart would fill up.
“Those little films from the early years really make you feel alive,” he states. “The reason I am so pleased that Sundance is showing this first chapter is that you can actually work out a lot about the essence of documentary from its origins. Those filmmakers were interested in the moment – in movement, in landscape, in quirky everyday details.”
The Story of Documentary Film follows a “broadly” chronological path. However, as in his monumental earlier works such as The Story of Film (2011) and Women Make Film (2018), Cousins reserves the right to suddenly veer off course and throw in footage from a different era when the fancy takes him. For example, in the introductory movie showing in Sundance, after introducing us to early classics like Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), he suddenly puts a focus on Andrew Kötting’s idiosyncratic British road movie, Gallivant (1996), in which the filmmaker’s young daughter and elderly grandmother roam around Britain.
“When I come to a moment I think is worth expanding on, I expand on it and show what the antecedent was. That’s fun. I know audiences enjoy that…my brain seems to be one of those brains that makes connections between things, and so why not?”
At times, Cousins will take issues with the biases of film historians. For example, when it comes to “city symphony” documentaries, he doesn’t agree that Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) is the best.
“We need to be suspicious of received opinion,” the director cautions, adding that, to his mind, Mikhail Kaufman’s In Spring (1929) trumps the Ruttmann movie…and so does Alberto Cavalcanti’s Nothing but the Hours (1926).
The director acknowledges times are tough for theatrical documentary. Streamers have disrupted traditional releasing models. Taylor Swift concert films are among the few non-fictional works that are still attracting mass audiences. That doesn’t worry him. In the 1990s, he remembers that music docs like The Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and 1991’s In Bed With Madonna (aka Madonna: Truth Or Dare) “opened the genre up” and brought spectators to cinemas. Maybe the same will happen again now.
Nor is Cousins too downcast about all the true crime, thriller and celebrity biopics currently dominating the schedules. “The optimist in me says it’s better that these films – the good ones – are seen at home than not at all.”
He also notes that streamers show works of different lengths, not just features. “Of course, there are downsides. A lot of the documentary series are just kind of rubbish…but I think creatively that documentaries are in a pretty good place at the moment,” he insists.
Cousins was working with familiar partners on The Story of Documentary Film. The project is produced by John Archer at Hopscotch Films and edited by Timo Langer. After Sundance, four further hours of the work will screen in Berlin in the Berlinale Special Series section.
“We don’t see it as a series,” Cousins says. In effect, he has made the equivalent of eight features which are expected to screen at festivals throughout the year.
