Mark Cousins – Magic Documentarism

Mark Cousins is a film creator-fanatic-critic, whose outside-the-box thinking has produced an ongoing stream of unique documentaries. I ask him about promoting films at the festival he used to run, holidaying with his dead role models, and skinnydipping with movie stars.

He is best known as the director of 2011’s Story of Film: An Odyssey, a 915 minute long (!) documentary (broken into 15 one-hour-long episodes) adapted from his own book. Here he travels to well-known places of film history, interviewing famous representatives of the art of film. With his unmistakable softly spoken, sing-song, Northern Irish voice, he introduces the universal history of film from a very new and unique point of view following his own stream of thought.

Just like his personality, his films are difficult to place in familiar categories. His documentaries can be interpreted as auteur films; no matter what they are actually about, we can always glimpse the director’s creative inner world. However, they can also be read as essay films, since his most beloved tool is to address various artists – as if writing a letter to them – and have an imaginary conversation with them. He thinks this kind of personal voice makes his texts much better. “I just love the direct address. I love imaging talking to people. When I imagine talking to Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Sergei Eisenstein – all these people who I addressed in my films – suddenly my writing style changes and it becomes more emotional, more intimate and more daring. It gets better. That’s why I returned to writing a book, called Letters to Dead Filmmakers, which – as the title suggests – is a whole series of letters written to dead filmmakers. For me this is a great way to write about something.”

This personal voice is a characteristic feature in his latest documentary trilogy, the Hibrow-Trilogy. The first part, Here Be Dragons, made in 2013, explores the decaying film archives of Albania. It was followed by Life May Be in 2014, co-directed by the Iranian Mania Akbari, consisting of a series of video-letters “written” to each other. The final part of the trilogy, also from 2014, is 6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia, discovering the writer DH Lawrence’s relationship to Sardinia. Through these films the philosophical essayism, written in a personal voice and recorded with a small hand-held camera, became trademark “Cousins-style”. The three films also relate thematically to each other. According to Cousins, most people never set foot on his locations: Albania, Iran and Sardinia. All three carry a sense of excitement of discovery and they pose the question in the present tense: What new things can I discover here? “If I never go to London again in my life, that’s fine, I have probably been there two hundred times. If I never go to New York again in my life, that’s fine, I have probably been there fifty or sixty times. If I never hear a Beatles song again in my life, that’s fine. I would much rather get on to new things. One of the best things that I know is my own ignorance. I want to explore it. It teaches me new stuff all the time. Jeanne Moreau did an interview once with the silent movie actress Lillian Gish. She asked her what was the most important thing in life and Gish said one word: curiosity. I think that’s the driving force for life as well.”

His curiosity is best described by the wide variety of his topics. He made a movie about Holocaust denial, taking a neo-Nazi group to the Auschwitz death camp. For this film he used fly-on the wall observational style and did not comment on the pictures at all. He has just made a movie about Hiroshima, using only archive footage and bravely adding the music of Scottish post-rock band Mogwai as soundtrack. Now he is planning to shoot a movie about Dürer and would like Tom Hiddleston to play him. Cousins loves to experiment, but very often he returns to his trademark style, to these very low-budget essayist travelling movies.

6 Desires…, the final chapter of the trilogy, having its Scottish premier at the Edinburgh film festival, focuses on a travel-book, Sea and Sardinia by the English novelist D. H. Lawrence, inspired by a journey that the writer took to Sardinia in January 1921. Cousins was both enthralled and repelled by this book. This ambivalent feeling inspired him to retrace Lawrence’s journey: “I think if you fully love something, that is not the best motivation. I felt very attracted to this book, but also repelled by some of its ideas, so I thought “Oh, that’s exciting”. That’s like life in a way, you love it and hate it at the same time. Life is tragic and also joyous. I felt this tension when I was reading this book. The passion and how he loved this space and yet he says terrible things about it… So I thought “Hmmm, that’s a juicy pond to swim in.”

In his movie he discovers Sardinia with the help of Lawrence – he often holds a black and white photo of Lawrence and his wife in front of the camera, as if they were our real guides. During this physical, but at the same time mental, journey, the viewer learns about the location and Lawrence, but also becomes familiar with 1920’s history, culture and influential personalities – from Cousins’ perspective. The film is structured according to the title’s six desires (does the D in D. H. Lawrence stand for Desire? – asks Cousins from Lawrence on their imaginary journey together).

The film is also interesting because of its innovative distribution method. The film was launched on video on demand platforms simultaneously with its festival screening. According to Cousins, film festivals create awareness for a lot of exciting films, but when the events come to an end, the awareness disappears. The TIDE Experiment, a distribution project supported by the European Commission, tries to create publicity for its films by making them available on the internet, simultaneously with their festival release. Cousins thinks this is a good idea; festival films not bought by a distributor will not get general cinema release and they will not otherwise be available on any platform after the festival. TIDE offers a solution to this problem. 6 Desires can be bought on iTunes for £5, which is approximately half of a normal price cinema ticket.

He does not think about the documentary film as a genre, rather a mix of different genres together. “It’s very hard to describe what documentary is, except that you take something from the real world that isn’t itself manipulated and you submit to that, let it be what it is and then you shape it. It’s that kind of passive-aggressive relationship that makes for a great documentary. I think I am kind of a passive person, but also quite an aggressive person and that combination really works.”During the Q&A, following the screening of 6 Desires in Edinburgh, one of the film’s producers told the audience that when they decided they were going to take the same trip Lawrence did to Sardinia, he suggested not to go in January, and to wait instead till the weather improved. Cousins wouldn’t hear of it:“No, let’s submit to what he did, with January and the cold. This is the more aggressive bit.”

Like his discursive thoughts, Cousins’ physical path often strays. He often takes detours of his own and thinks about the places where Lawrence had never been, or the thoughts he never thought. “When you are doing something like this, you don’t want to be too slavish. So four of the six days that we travelled were Lawrence days. Virginia Woolf said this very interestingly. She said that you always want to find a distance from your subject. You want to be really close to his world, but then find a distance from it. And that’s why we physically went off the path, that’s why the voice changes from male to female… to find a gap between your subject and you. Then you can look back from a distance. It’s like using a microscope-lens and then a wide angle lens. Use both and you get a better perspective.”

One of his earlier films, What Is This Film Called Love?, shot in Mexico (where Cousins addresses Sergei Eisenstein and philosophises about the nature of happiness) also features one of these male – female voice changes. Cousins stated that, if there was an easy way, he would gladly try what it feels like to be a woman. “If I could snap my fingers and be a woman, I probably would. Not because I am transgender or because I don’t feel comfortable in a male body, but life is so short and it would be brilliant to feel what it’s like to be a woman. The most influential people in my life growing up were the women: my grannies, my aunts, my mum… The men were just drinking and said nothing, whereas the women would express their emotions. I learned this from them. That’s why quite a few of my films will have a gender change in them. It’s a basic idea about identity. A lot of people think it’s rigorous, but I think it’s fluid and it’s changing all the time.”

Besides this fluid identity, bodies play a very important role in Cousins’ films. “I was brought up Catholic, and in religious imagery, in Italy or in Mexico, you see bodies all the time. You see the flesh of Christ, it’s very physical and exposed. Whereas if you think of Protestantism and Calvinism, the body is the prison house of the soul, the body is a bad thing. The soul is great, the body is awful. And I just realize more and more that your body is the best thing you have, if it functions well. It enables you to have a sensory response to the world. I like walking, I like dancing, I like swimming at night. If I dance or swim at the weekend, on Monday I feel better. Our bodies are brilliant sources of recovery. I think often in modern life, we get the balance wrong. We move less and less, we are so in our heads all the time and we have everything there on the internet. I am quite a happy person and I think it’s a lot because I am into the whole body thing.”

As festival director, each night he would take various people, including well-known film cast and crew members, up Arthur’s Seat, the city’s landmark urban hill, and they would all swim naked in a loch and then climb up the rest of the hill naked, admiring the city from above.

Revealing bodies was one of the central themes of his film Life May Be, presented last year at the Edinburgh Film Festival. He co-directed the film with the Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari, thus the movie is a sequence of video letters written to each other. “It was great working together with Mania. She did this extraordinary thing for an Iranian woman to appear naked. She got it. She had real reasons. I appeared naked in that film as well, but she had real reasons for it. She comes from a culture that doesn’t even allow women to cut their hair. She was doing something really radical. She mentioned in the film that she had double mastectomy, when she had breast cancer at a young age. So for her there were two reasons to show her body and to say “Look I have scars and I am great with that. Also, my culture doesn’t allow this, but I am going to do it anyway.” It was so bold of her; I felt really moved. I think the taboos about body and nakedness are not good for us. We should be more honest and open about it.”

After the trilogy, in 2015, Cousins directed a movie about his hometown, Belfast in Northern Ireland, where the city is personified by a 10,000 year old woman. Belfast in Cousins’ eyes – thanks to the women who played such an influential part in his early life – is a feminine city, whereas for most people it is usually associated with war and is thus very manly. It influenced him that in connection with Belfast, there is always a slight level of fear in people’s minds. “I have made films about many cities and then I thought I have never made one about my hometown, Belfast. I was in Mauritania and I was hearing the story of the griots. They are archetypal story-tellers, who not only know the stories of the present, but also of the past. But you get similar aboriginal culture about dream-like storytellers in Australia as well. So I imagined what if there was a woman, who is 10 000 years old and could say “I am Belfast, I will tell you the story of me from the long view, not only about the war, but I can give you the story from the beginning.””

I Am Belfast, whose cinematographer was Christopher Doyle, is another travelling film, where the director walked down every single street of the city. “I had just heard from Christopher Doyle, the great cinematographer, who did all the Wong Kar-Wai films, and he very nicely said that he would like to work with me. So he shot it and I walked every street in Belfast. Every single street over about a year and a half with my little camera filming. I Am Belfast is quite an unusual film. It is also a sort of essay, mixing documentary with magic realism.”

Cousins’ art cannot be described by rigid definitions, since they are so alien from his whole personality. He thinks outside the box. His unique perspective might help us to find a different angle to look at things, to see things differently for ourselves. Cousins’s favourite place in Edinburgh is the Innocent Railway line. It is not just a tunnel – like most of us would have think – but a venue that appeared in the “greatest Scottish films”, the Bill Douglas Trilogy. “I love it because it is a great place of cinema and it is also a great place to cycle and get the wind in your hair and go to the beach.”

So how did an activity as mundane as walking become such a strong motif in his films? “Nearly all my films are walking films or travel films. There a lot of great books about walking. For example there is this great book, called Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, which looks at the cultural history of walking. But if you think about the writing of James Joyce… Ulysses is a walking book. You have your best ideas when you are walking. That’s why I like to put lots of walking into my films. I think the most underrated Alfred Hitchcock film is I Confess, in which Montgomery Clift does a lot of walking. Walking and cinema is a really interesting theme.” Through his eyes even walking can be extraordinary. Let’s go on this walk with him.

The interview was originally published in print (in Hungarian) in the Filmvilág film magazine 2015/09. pp. 40-41.