Mark Cousins
Through little-seen archival material and his characteristically cinematic analysis, Mark Cousins narrates the ascent of fascism in Italy and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. In The March on Rome, which is simultaneously an essay film and a historical document, Cousins contextualises history through the here and now, holding a mirror up to a political landscape marked by a creeping far right and manipulated media.
Directed by Mark Cousins, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock re-examines the vast filmography and legacy of one of the 20th century’s greatest filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock, through a new lens: through the auteur’s own voice.
A collaborative film by Aidan O’Rourke, Becky Manson and Mark Cousins. A musical melange of fiddles, friendship and a search for home. An evocative film about Edinburgh’s Old Town and the communities who have called it home. During lockdown, musician Aidan O’Rourke befriended his three octogenarian neighbours, all called Margaret. Inspired by their tales, with a renewed curiosity for his own roots, he takes a musical journey into the meaning of home and belonging. This celebratory film about folk music and its power to connect features a foot-stomping original soundtrack by O’Rourke and live performances by sensational Irish and Scottish folk musicians.
A personal meditation on Schrader’s film from the critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins.
As he prepares for surgery to restore his vision, Mark Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of the human experience, empathy, discovery and thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to the other lookers for their vision from lockdown, and he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.
A first encounter. At the Venice Film Festival. A second encounter. Again the Venice Film Festival. A crescendo of curiosity, wish to know and discover more. Months go by. A crazy idea. Dear Mark, can we make a documentary about you? The journey begins, Edinburgh in the background, an intimate film on the creative daily life of Mark Cousins. Director, writer, film polymath, teacher but, more than anything, Mark. Mark shows himself unfiltered, he lives his life in front of our camera, but he can’t help it, he must turn his camera on us. The subject becomes the filmmaker. The filmmaker becomes the subject. Questions, answers, doubts, truths and lies.
The final chapter of his exceptional 15-part documentary exploring the history of cinema, The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Mark Cousins builds a bridge between the “before” of the health crisis, and the “after”.
A yearly drive with the famous British producer Jeremy Thomas from London to Cannes, on his way to the... Festival de Cannes. A life in the service of cinema, a journey towards the discovery of new films and talents in the company of the cinephile director and author Mark Cousins.
Join filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins on a 40-day journey that explores the passion for cinema and aspects related to making films, including style, ideas, emotions, practicalities and other fun things. The universal language of cinema is explored through works that cross artistic and cultural boundaries.
The film marks 50 years since riots erupted across Northern Ireland, widely seen as the beginning of the thirty-year conflict known as The Troubles. Mark Cousins – who left Belfast at 18 – returns to his hometown to reflect on how the place and its history have been used and occasionally abused by cinema. He traces how the legacy of division has impacted on the nation’s cinematic imagination; and, in a city that once had one of the highest rates of movie-going in the UK, he scrambles around the ruins of Belfast’s once-grand cinemas.
A moment on Rose St, Edinburgh, where Margaret Tait used to live.
As told through clips from 183 female directors, this epic revisionist history of the cinema focuses on women’s integral role in the development of film art. Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Mark Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest filmmakers – all of them women.
Lena Horne's 'Stormy Weather' (1943) and Susan Hayward's 'With a Song in My Heart' (1952) blend together in a video essay.
In 2017 Tyneside Cinema turned 80.
Orson Welles trained as an artist before he become an actor and director, and continued to draw and paint throughout his career - character sketches, storyboards, set designs, pictures of the people and places that inspired him. These artworks are a sketchbook of his life, and most have never been seen outside his family and close friends. For the first time, award-winning director Mark Cousins has been granted access to this treasure trove of imagery, to make a film about what he finds there - the story of Welles' visual thinking, never before told. An exclusive new perspective on one of the 20th century's greatest creative figures, whose art and life continue to fascinate audiences today.
A documentary which explores the lives and tragic deaths of Marceline Orbes and Francis "Slivers" Oakley, the suicidal clowns who inspired Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
In this new documentary, Susan Kemp explores the life and work of the great British director Antonia Bird, who died in 2013. Bird blazed a trail from the radical hotbed of the Royal Court Theatre in the 70s, via the groundbreaking early days of EastEnders and Casualty in the 80s, all the way to Hollywood in the 90s and back again. She always had something urgent to say, but her career was a long struggle to get her voice heard. Featuring many of her close collaborators, including Robert Carlyle, Irvine Welsh, Kate Hardie and Mark Cousins, this documentary is the first to examine Bird’s legacy, and to place her where she belongs – among the most important British film, TV and theatre directors of her era.
Belfast, it's a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself.
Mark Cousins (The Story of Film: An Odyssey) reflects on questions concerning copyright and the extent to which a film can conform to the associations of the person watching it. Can two people ever really see the same film?
In Kino Klassika’s first film commission, British filmmaker Mark Cousins imagines a conversation between D.H.Lawrence and Sergei Eisenstein. This playful film essay carries forward Mark’s film dialogue with Eisenstein from his feature film about Eisenstein in Mexico ‘What is this film called Love?’
Stockholm My Love is a city symphony, a love letter to Stockholm, the fiction debut of director Mark Cousins and the acting debut of musician Neneh Cherry. It follows one woman's footsteps through the streets of her native city, on a journey of recovery from a bad thing that happened to her exactly one year before. It's an exploration of grief, identity and the power of architecture and urbanism to shape lives, and a celebration of the power of walking and looking to make us all feel just a little bit better. With new music by Neneh Cherry, old music by Benny Andersson (of ABBA) and Franz Berwald, and images by Christopher Doyle and Mark Cousins.
A young man's swirling thoughts as he contemplates the murder of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini shortly after the deed takes place.
Seventy years ago this month, the bombing of Hiroshima showed the appalling destructive power of the atomic bomb. Mark Cousins's bold documentary looks at death in the atomic age, but life too. Using only archive film and a new musical score by the band Mogwai, the film shows us an impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times - protest marches, Cold War sabre-rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima - but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how x-rays and MRI scans have improved human lives. The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too.
A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.
An epistolary feature film: a cinematic discourse between a British director Mark Cousins, and an Iranian actress and director Mania Akbari which extends the concept of "essay film" with startling confrontations in the arenas of cultural issues, gender politics and differing artistic sensibilities. A unique journey into the minds of two exceptional filmmakers which becomes a love affair on film.
To celebrate the online release of the British Council's Film Collection - an archive of 120 short documentaries made throughout the 1940s to showcase Britain to the rest of the world - we invited three contemporary UK filmmakers to respond to the Collection. John Akomfrah, Penny Woolcock and Mark Cousins each took a different view. 'But Then Again, To Few To Mention: A Life Of Bob' is Mark's response.
Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."
In 1993 Sarajevo was under the siege. Against all odds a small group of enthusiasts managed to open the First War Cinema in Sarajevo. For them this cinema was a distinction between surviving and being alive. Twenty years afterwards the marks of being alive resurface.
A meticulous essay on the presence and representation of children in the history of cinema, in which cinematographies from all over the world are analyzed.
What is this film called Love? is a passionate, 77 minute poetic documentary about the nature of happiness.
A documentary feature film that ties four narratives - from China, India, Scotland, and Tunisia - together with countless insights from venerable filmmakers and ordinary moviegoers. An aspiring actress in Mumbai battles to break into Bollywood; two friends in Scotland take a mobile film festival across the highlands; a young crew in Hong Kong embarks on the shooting of its first film; a Tunisian director anxiously anticipates the premiere of his controversial film at a major festival. These stories are woven together with scenes from video stores, projection booths, studios, cinemas, and slums into a vivid meditation on the power of cinema to shape our world.
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
An innovative 'magic realist' documentary set in Iraq. Filmmaker Mark Cousins, who was brought up in a Northern Irish war zone, travels to Goptapa, a Kurdish-Iraqi village of just 700 people on a tributary of the Tigris river, and tries to make a dream film about a place that is normally only portrayed in current affairs programmes. He gives the kids cameras. They make little movies about war, love, a fish that goes to a magical place, and a chicken who debates justice. Despite the production being stopped twice by the Iraqi secret police, The First Movie is about wonder and the power of the imagination.
The film was produced by Nick Higgins from Lansdowne Productions and Noémie Mendelle from the Scottish Documentary Institute and has 10 film-chapter directors for each of the 10 chapters of the film. The film's unifying theme is human rights in Scotland with each chapter illustrating one of the "New Ten Commandments" - 10 articles chosen from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 10 film chapters of The New Ten Commandments 1. The Right to Freedom of Assembly - Dir, David Graham Scott 2. The Right not to be enslaved - Dir, Nick Higgins 3. The Right to a fair trial - Dir, Sana Bilgrami 4. The Right to freedom of expression - Dir, Doug Aubrey 5. The Right to life - Dir, Kenny Glenaan 6. The Right to liberty - Dir, Irvine Welsh & Mark Cousins 7. The Right not to be tortured - Dir, Douglas Gordon 8. The Right to asylum - Dir, Anna Jones 9. The Right to privacy - Dir, Alice Nelson 10. The Right to freedom of thought - Dir, Mark Cousins & Tilda Swinton.
Film maker Mark Cousins visited northern Iraq in the summer of 2008. This is a snapshot of what he found there. An imaginative, soulful reflection of a beautiful complicated place.
A gripping story of love, deceit, betrayal and survival set against the backdrop of the Miners' Strike of 1984-85. Michelle (Christine Tremarco) is married to Gary (Jamie Draven), a young miner who goes on strike as soon as the dispute between the Thatcher government and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) begins. Meanwhile, her sister Linda's (Maxine Peake) husband Paul (Adrian Bower) is a local policeman. Paul becomes more and more voluble in his opposition to the strike, while Linda looks around her and witnesses the women of her community suddenly find a voice and independence. The scene is set for political and personal conflicts which would change their lives forever.
Mark Cousins invites film actors and directors to watch major scenes in their career to date, and to talk us through them.
Short video essay by critic/filmmaker Mark Cousins about the influence of Pulp Fiction. He discusses the influence of the film and his personal view on it, wich isn't without criticism. Includes some behind the scenes footage and comments from Quentin Tarantino on how he views the movie and his intentions
Nancy Franklin was so overwhelmed by the film 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945) that she traveled from New York to the Western Isles of Scotland to see the places where it was made and to find out more about the people who made it. This documentary retraces her steps on a subsequent visit.
Four young neo-Nazis travel across Europe discussing their beliefs and their disbelief in the Holocaust. They meet several Holocaust survivors on their journey, including Kitty Hart-Moxon at Auschwitz, where she had been imprisoned for almost two years.
Cult films receive interesting introductions from an expert, before the entire film is screened.
Abbas Kiarostami is the most acclaimed Iranian film director whose films have won prizes all around the world. In this film he gives a rare and frank interview about his work, and journeys out of Tehran to meet Babk Ahmadpoor the now grown up star of his famous trilogy which started with Where is the Friends House. On the journey Kiarostami picks up the camera himself, producing images of pure poetry.
Alexander is a lively Scottish boy. We see him as part of the natural world. Then, we hear from his parents, Claire and David, that he has a rare neurodegenerative disease. An innovative documentary with joy and sorrow.
