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September 09, 2022

The Story of Film: A New Generation

Mark Cousins

Mark Cousins - 2021
Music Box Films

Not really a sequel to Cousins' fifteen part documentary but a rambling review mostly of cinema of the previous decade. Unlike the organized chapters in The Story of Film which could be seen as a series of lectures, this new film is like a one-sided conversation that bounces from tangent to tangent before loosely tying things up at the end. Depending on one's expectations this is a feature rather than a bug.

What Cousins sees as worth noting about film in the past decade includes how various technical innovations have been used in narrative cinema, how genre conventions have been upended, and how the documentary film has been reshaped and given greater importance. So much has been packed into the 166 minutes that it may have been better to have assembled everything into smaller bite sized chunks instead of one huge meal. Certainly some of Cousins' assertions, such as stating that Aleksei German's Hard to be a God is somehow the end of cinema, will be subject of debate. I would like to think that Cousins does not consider himself the final authority or gatekeeper of film history, and is instead provoking discussion and curiosity about film in all its forms.

There is admitted fascination in seeing how actor Andy Serkis' face is transformed to that of the gorilla leader of the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Revealed is the complicated process involved in de-aging Robert De Niro in The Irishman. Even Fabrice Aragno's 3D cinematography for Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language is deconstructed. On the lower end of technology, Sean Baker's Tangerine is presented both for being filmed with a smart phone and for centering on marginalized characters. Among other films cited for challenging older narrative tropes are Under the Skin and Us. Cousins also refers to a handful of Bollywood films that have he finds innovative. One hilarious clip is from some DIY African filmmakers making fun of copyright infringement of Hollywood films in Africa.

Cousins is hardly the first person to have made the connection between Shoplifters and Parasite. And certainly Cousins should be commended for including films that may be unfamiliar to even the more adventurous cinephiles. The one point that may be most debatable is the resilience of the theatrical experience of film watching, even after the mandatory closures due to Covid-19. The audience that would most likely gain the most from A New Generation would be those who already have more than a superficial knowledge of film history and could respond to Cousins with connections and examples of their own, as well as the interest of investigating those lesser known films and filmmakers.

Posted by Peter Nellhaus at September 9, 2022 05:46 AM