As well as one of our most important film thinkers, Mark Cousins is emerging as an original, innovative non-fiction filmmaker. From his landmark epics The Story Of Film: An Odyssey and Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema to smaller-in-scale projects like The Eyes Of Orson Welles and A Story Of Children And Film, Cousins’ work is personal in content and idiosyncratic in form, but always manages to be provocative and entertaining in equal measures. His latest, The Story Of Looking, falls into this latter, more intimate bracket, a free-form exploration of how we experience the world visually.
The set-up is typically lo-fi. Set on the day before he is due to have a cataract operation, Cousins lies in bed — spoiler: he eats toast — talking to a propped-up camera about his (and our) relationship with looking. For someone who loves film as deeply and indiscriminately as Cousins, the thought of any eye jiggery-pokery is surely intense enough to have produced a horror film. Instead, Cousins goes another way.
Not all the bold ideas work, but as befits the subject matter, _The Story Of Looking_ is peppered with images both arresting or more mundane.
He carefully traces the “journey of our visual lives” from cradle (as babies, images are out of focus) to grave, examining selfies, rubbernecking at car crashes, pondering the world around us, and quoting everything from Cézanne (his idea of “the optical experience that develops within us"”) to Grease. Early doors, he also courts the opinion of Twitter, which sounds like the world’s worst idea, but actually produces some engaged, poignant reflections on the nature of viewing.
Of course, movies play a big part in Cousins’ thinking. A comparison between similar shots of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and Autumn Sonata illustrates the way seeing plays in our ability to remember and engage with the ageing process. He also makes cheeky use of the eye-slicing from Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.
Not all the bold ideas work (to investigate the act of looking in later life, Cousins imagines himself as an old man living in Iceland). But, as befits the subject matter, The Story Of Looking is peppered with images, both arresting (Japanese art, a motorbike ploughing through dirt, a collapsing nuclear power station) or more mundane (a bloke standing on a roof outside his window). As you’d expect, Cousins commits to his theme; at one point he goes full frontal lying in a stream to discuss being looked at as well as looking, and later allows the camera into the cataract procedure. As he goes in for surgery, a vulnerable film fan who might lose his sight, the tension is palpable.