The Story of Film: A New Generation review – invigorating study of 21st century cinema
Critic and documentary film-maker Mark Cousins has returned to Cannes with another episode of his amazingly ambitious cinephile history The Story of Film, an illuminated patchwork clipquilt, accompanied by his inimitable incantation-voiceover. It’s another example of his unique approach: Cousins is subjective almost to the point of free-associating or even sleep-talking (maybe appropriate for the dream state of the movies) but also colossally well-informed, bracingly internationalist and genuinely educational. I have never yet watched a Cousins film without learning something and being a bit sheepish about what I didn’t know.
That said, Cousins’s style takes some getting used to – almost like a hyper-innocent form of criticism, wideeyed with wonder at cinema’s brave new world, a Miranda of the movies. Occasionally Cousins’s commentary verges on the superfluous, simply describing what is on screen, although there is almost always a shrewd insight there: he has a great section on a creepy travelling shot in David Robert Mitchell’s psychological horror It Follows.
Really, Cousins is notable for taking what is on screen at face value, transcribing what he takes to be the filmmaker’s exact intentions from what he sees, moment-by-moment, where another type of critic would deconstruct, attempt to see through and see past the imagery, to find other meanings. That is not really Cousins’s style and in a critical arena where everyone’s a cynic and an ironist, Cousins wears his heart on his sleeve.
The point of this film is to get a fix on where we’re at now with 21st century cinema: what has changed? Cousins wonders aloud about digital
camera technology and the new kinds of movies that this has made possible: films shot on iPhones and edited with a new generation of affordable desktop technology. There are the worlds of YouTube, gaming and Google Street View increasing cinema’s sense of how quickly the world can be encompassed, how quickly the images can be found and published. And cinema has had to respond with its own renewed speed and appetite for the world.
But then it has always had to, and it’s difficult to pin down or summarise exactly what this film is saying about how film has changed. (Cousins does not in fact restrict himself to clips from the 21st century, and this is not much different from his previous films.) Perhaps the subject itself is elusive. Oddly,
Cousins says little about something which, rightly or wrongly, is thought to be a great threat to the cinema: the streaming services of Netflix, Amazon etc. And for me, it was notable that this film didn’t touch what I consider to be the new century’s two great failed experiments in cinema: the revival of 3D, which was supposed to be here to stay but which has now been quietly dropped without anyone saying a word, and the dabbling with High FrameRate (48 frames per second), used by Peter Jackson and Ang Lee, and capable of staggering detail-definition, but also capable of making everything look like banal video without the richness and density of film. This, too, seems to have quietly abandoned.What is invigorating about The Story of Film is that each new clip, each new comment, is an exercise in back to basics, an exercise in looking, and looking again and looking harder – something that’s even more difficult when it feels like we’re drowning in content. And his focus on politically engaged documentaries is also invigorating. This is an unashamed celebration of cinema as an art-form: Cousins is an aesthete.
•The Story of Film: A New Generation screened at the Cannes film festival.