Mark Cousins is not only a film director and, perhaps, the most prolific of the time —celebrated three premieres this year, of three different movies, in three festivals: Cannes, Venice and Rotterdam—, but also a thinker of the visual, and one that thinks from the same audio-visual. Its The Story of Film: An Odissey, a monumental film essay by submissions, it is canon, and showed that cinema is a global art more expansion of what is believed. Now, even with their love letter to Orson Welles under the arm, the documentary about the facet pictorial of the filmmaker, The Eyes of Orson Welles, dare to go beyond, and from the history of things without which the image would not make sense: the look. Do another documentary? No, this time it’s an essay, a literary (and graphic), art and History of the gaze (Past & Present), colossal, comprehensive, and personal as The Story of Film.
Cousins (Belfast, 1965), in t-shirt and suspenders, his curly mane revolt, plant on the table, and next to his cup of wine, the last right boot that when worn by Welles —that you always carry with you, safe in your backpack— and he said no, that his book has nothing to do with Ways of seeing, John Berger, the closest thing to a precedent that could be pointed out. The trial of Berger, he says, “speaks only of the iconography, imagery, the use of the image for political purposes, or capitalists, or as something that we have to distrust it because it objectifies and tries to sell us something”. Their approach is, however, “celebration”, because “look makes it worthwhile to be alive.” “I agree in all what said Berger, but I do not speak of the use of the image, but of how we look, we look at each other, what is that to us look, how magical it is to observe something for the first time,” he says.
Your obsession with the look, which resulted in the film, was born in the yard of the school, where Cousins was the victim of ‘bullying’
His obsession with the look, which resulted in the film —and in the carry always a camera, because Cousins ‘ wheel, then there is—, was born in the yard Celtabet of the school. “I was a victim of harassment. I had a bad. But you get used to not being the center, to look from the outside to the rest, as if from another planet. And it makes you an excellent orchestrator of scenes. Scorsese also suffered bullying. It is No coincidence that good directors, the best look, have grown up in the margins,” he says. Cousins, so baroque, passionate, optimistic, and deeply human, as everything that touches, not seen as something horrible tsunami of images in which we live immersed. How blind the excess screens? “It has invaded our private space. It is true that now as we can never be in the bed, switch on your mobile phone and stand around by the world without moving us, but we have always been overwhelmed by the idea of what we can get to see,” he replies.
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A passionate journey for the cinema Venice only wants to principals of the past
Humanity
“I Think when you posted the first photos in a newspaper and I imagine my readers overwhelmed. But it should also sobrepasarles what they saw to those who walked by Babylon in his time. Walter Benjamin has written a lot about it. Not esnuevo. Our gaze is fragmented since the NINETEENTH century, although we now have more where to look, by the multiplicity of screens. What is inhumane? Yes. But there is something very human in a technology that allows us, for example, not to break a family because of the distance. My uncle emigrated to Australia in 1953 and spent 25 years without seeing him. Today we would not have spent a single day without seeing him. Technology has given us access to a kind of look that didn’t exist before, and has humanized,” he says. Believes that the human potential of the era of the thousand screens in which we live “is huge.” Trust in the new technologies because they do not force us to multiply the looks, but that allow us to do so. “The film is more democratic today than ever, almost anyone can make a movie, it has removed all borders between the cinema and the potential filmmaker,” he says.
Quote of Le Corbusier —and the point is the tattoo with your name and typography of old typewriter next to the left shoulder— and Virginia Woolf —and it points to a different tattoo— when he speaks of points of view and aesthetic, and judgment that the technology provides, above all, opportunities. “If, in the era of Franco, Spanish film makers would have had digital cameras there would be another type of film then, of struggle and fierce,” he says. Speech and, as you can’t do it without reflecting on what is happening and why —he is finishing the documentary film Women Making Films: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, the onset of which premiered in Venice and produced his friend Tilda Swinton— gives a slap on the wrist to the Spanish cinema because “it without giving opportunities to women”. Cousins, who is lynchiano the Velázquez of Las meninas —“the box that best defines the idea of being looked at”—, it is claimed, above all, as Rilke as a lover of the moment.
