IT took five years of graft, passion and tears – not to mention countless flights to Brazil, Japan, China, Europe and the US – but finally, master filmmaker Mark Cousins, will land back in his native Belfast this month to unveil (part of) his new 16-hour epic The Story of Documentary Film.
Already lauded at the Sundance, Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals, it will be a chance for local audiences to soak up the first chapter of a “global story” which zooms in all that was happening in the early 1900s up to 1929 – in cinematic terms.
“It was definitely hard work, but it felt timely,” says Cousins from his home in Edinburgh. “I didn’t really want to go back and do another history of documentaries, but the time feels right.
“I started making this about five years ago, but as you know, fake news came along, Donald Trump came along, AI came along….so it’s harder, in a way, to believe our eyes. That said, maybe it’s a good time to do a deep dive into documentaries which have mostly been trying to be honest about the world and tell us about what it’s like to be alive.”
Sean Connery with Belfast filmmaker Mark Cousins
It was expansive subject matter to cover – from the end of the 19th Century to modern day – but, as ever, Cousins breaks it down into stylish, tasteful, palatable chunks. “It is a big story,” he allows. “If you ask yourself how cinema has told us about ourselves, it’s a big, complicated thing, but I enjoyed the challenge.
It’s now harder to believe our eyes
— Mark Cousins
“I have made 24 feature-length films and I think 40 shorts, but this has been one of the hardest to make because you are dealing with real world problems. There is a lot of war and atrocity and so I cried a lot as I was editing, but I think people who watch it to the end will be enriched by it.
“Also, I think the theme of my films is recovery – people get better, people are resilient. Overall, I am an optimist, even though there are load of reasons for being depressed about the world.”
Read more: Docs Ireland bringing documentaries, discussion and deal-making back to Belfast – The Irish News
The Belfast screening – part of the Docs Ireland international documentary film festival – will focus on the “magic moments” captured in film of 1920s Paris and Berlin and of the Russian revolution, as well as what was happening locally with the industrialisation of Belfast – alongside sectarian riots.
“It was such a fervent time and I have tried to capture that dynamism of the beginning of the 20th century,” says Cousins, whose prolific output over the years (he is now 61) includes The Story of Film: An Odyssey; I am Belfast and The March on Rome – the latter the subject of an unsuccessful banning attempt by the Italian government.
“It was a brilliant time and an awful time – but you could say the same about today. The full spectrum of life is there and documentary has never shied away from the sad things as well as the wondrous things, so that is what people will see.”
Mark Cousins filming in Kurdistan
For the award-winning filmmaker and author (his books include Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary and The Story of Looking), it is about “trying to be passionate about what movies can do” – and what they can show us about ourselves.
Read more: Belfast-born film director Mark Cousins to release book – The Irish News
“Back then, there was no easyJet, people couldn’t go anywhere,” he says, “so people lived in a kind of bell jar. Then suddenly, this art form called documentary came along which showed you what it was like to live in other worlds, what it was like to be an Inuit guy in the north of Canada or what it was like to be in Paris, in the Arctic or in Moscow. This was dazzling. This was the easyJet of its time.”
Mark Cousins and Tilda Swinton on A Pilgrimage
A graduate of Film and the Visual Arts at Stirling University, Scotland, he started directing in the 1980s, but a love affair with film goes back further than that – right back to his childhood, growing up in Northern Ireland.
“My passion for this art form came at an early age,” he recalls. “It was partly because, like many kids, I wasn’t great at words, but I had a really good visual memory and when I saw a film, I remembered it completely. It all started with an Orson Wells film called Touch of Evil which I watched on TV when we had moved from Belfast to Antrim.
“Years later, I was in Michigan in the US and this woman came up to me and said: I am Orson Wells’ daughter and I would like you to make a film about my father’ – and I did. These kind of journeys, from working class Antrim to Orson Well’s daughter, have always been fun for me.”
His work in film led to meeting many famous people, but rather than being starstruck when hanging out with the likes of Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot) or, closer to home, Tilda Swinton (with whom he pulled a mobile cinema across the Scottish Highlands as a “tug of love, cinema pilgrimage” in 2009), it was his Hollywood celebrity friends who ended up being impressed by this new director on the block.
Mark Cousins with Jane Fonda
“I got to interview many famous people over the years – I stopped doing that 25 years ago,” he says, “but it was brilliant and fascinating, especially because I came from working class Northern Ireland and I didn’t have fancy connections or anything.
“I became friends with these people, I was going to the pub with them or having burger and chips with them in New York or Edinburgh. I think it was slightly unusual for these big stars to meet an Irish-Scottish 20-something director who sort of knew their whole careers inside out and back to front and they were sort of impressed by that.”
A fan of naked night-time swimming, he tells how he once encouraged celebrity visitors to Edinburgh Film Festival “whose names I won’t mention” to try it with him when he was festival director in the mid-90s.
“Lots of us have difficulty dialling ourselves down,” Cousins explains, “so even though I was director of this big fancy festival in Edinburgh, I would say to people: ‘Who wants to go swimming naked?’ and there would be lots of willing participants. We would head up to Dunsapie Loch near Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and swim naked.
“There is a freedom in doing that – and it is always a great leveller. It was means of just ‘letting go’. I was always interested in letting myself go – and I still am.”
Currently, the heavily tattooed (with names of his artistic heroes) avant garde director, who has been known to show his more controversial films underground (Bigger Than The Shining), is ‘letting go’ in a new direction by writing an opera.
Mark Cousins with actor Tilda Swinton
It was, he tells me, conceived during a very uncomfortable flight when his tall frame was squished into one of the cheap seats “in 38F or somewhere”, during which he spent the entire time fantasising about being in a bath.
“It is a totally new departure for me, but I am always looking for the next story…you just want to see something that moves you,” he says. “And I really do love baths.”
:: The Story of Documentary Film by Mark Cousins will show at Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast, on June 20 as part of the Docs Ireland Festival. Full programme at docsireland.ie/programme/whats-on/