Director Mark Cousins Brings ‘The Story Of Documentary Film’ To Cannes

Sundance, Berlin, Cannes – the world’s most important film festivals are embracing the latest work from award-winning filmmaker Mark Cousins: his 16-chapter The Story of Documentary Film.

At Sundance, Cousins premiered chapter 1 of the series; the Berlinale premiered chapters 2-4 (as well as screening chapter 1). In Cannes, the Northern Irish Scottish director unveiled two chapters on nonfiction films of the 1970s.

“It’s always good to aim high,” Cousins told Deadline of the ambitious project just before Sundance. “I mean, we can nibble at life and take it gingerly or we can gorge.”

There’s much to feast on in the 1970s alone and it’s an international buffet.

“In the ‘30s and ‘40s, there were only certain types of human beings who were making documentaries, mostly European men and things like that,” Cousins tells Deadline during an interview on the Croisette. “But now by the time we get to the ‘70s, look at the great Indian filmmakers, look at the great Japanese filmmakers, et cetera. So, the story is getting more complicated because more people are telling it, but also society is dealing with new ideas around environmentalism and second-wave feminism. And so that’s exciting for the documentary filmmaker. So, you ask who is pointing the camera and at what are they pointing the camera?”

Among the films Cousins examines from this era are those by Noriaki Tsuchimoto, who documented the devastating impact of mercury poisoning on people in Minamata, Japan, caused by the grotesque actions of a fertilizer company. He also highlights Sukhdev Singh Sandhu, the Indian director who made dozens of documentaries including Nine Months to Freedom, about the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Sarah Maldoror, a filmmaker of European and Guadeloupean background, receives attention for documentaries she shot in Africa and off the coast of the continent, including Fogo Fire Island. The range of Cousins’ inquiry reflects the decolonization of documentary in that period, as the medium moved beyond the strict parameters promoted by Scotsman John Grierson.

“It’s exactly a hundred years since Grierson first used the word ‘documentary,’ exactly a hundred years,” Cousins notes. “So that’s a nice peg in a way for this. Grierson’s central idea was that documentary is good for society. If we want citizens to vote, to understand the world and vote, they need to be informed about that world. And that remained [dominant] particularly post-war, after the crisis of World War. But by the ‘60s and ‘70s, documentaries are using cinema for perhaps less obviously civic reasons, like self-doubt. Think of Kazuo Hara’s portrait of his wife and lover, Extreme Private Eros [1974]. This is not a civic film exactly. This is about questions of how do human beings fail and how do they hurt themselves and other people? So, it’s becoming more private, literally. And I think that’s very interesting obviously and [in that era] we’re asking more complex questions about the nature of documentary storytelling.”

Cousins doesn’t ignore documentaries from the English-speaking and European world. Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple’s classic 1976 Oscar winner, gains scrutiny. Cousins delves into Daguerreotypes, the marvelous 1975 Agnès Varda in which she explored the neighborhood where she lived in Paris, on rue Daguerre. And Orson Welles makes an appearance for his fascinating 1973 documentary F for Fake. Welles and Varda ignored common perceptions that put fiction and nonfiction filmmaking into separate and unequal categories, with documentary occupying a lower rank. Cousins thinks that still-prevalent bias merits rethinking.

“When I was watching [the series] a few nights ago, I was thinking to myself, what if documentary is the heart of cinema and other types of cinema surround it?” Cousins ponders. “And I was remembering what Bertolucci used to say — that Last Tango in Paris is a documentary about Brando’s face. I remember that [Jean-Luc] Godard said everything’s a documentary. And I’m getting more and more bold and thinking that there’s something in documentary which is absolutely central to cinema itself.”

This is the fifth time a film or series directed by Cousins has been chosen as an Official Selection at Cannes. Thierry Frémaux, the festival chief, introduced Cousins for the world premiere of the 1970s chapters of The Story of Documentary Film.

“You are going to see a film that is really, really extraordinary,” he told the audience at the Salle Buñuel, “and that will reassure you. You will tell yourself, ‘I’m happy to be a cinephile, I’m happy to have chosen cinema, I’m so happy that an artist like Mark Cousins has allowed us to visit the history of the discipline that we have chosen.’”

At the Cannes photocall for the series, Cousins wore a t-shirt bearing the words, “documentary kills fascism.” It’s a point he underscores in early chapters of The Story of Documentary Film, while acknowledging that nonfiction cinema has also, periodically, been used to further the goals of fascists, as in the seminal documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl. At a macro scale, though, as Cousins told us in January, “If we care about human beings and we actually look, documentary has done such great work.”

He emphasized that point in his remarks after Thierry Frémaux’s introduction.

“Documentary is a kind of solidarity machine,” he told audiences members. “Something that maybe can help fight fascism.”

That message will soon resonate well beyond Sundance, Berlin and Cannes. Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to The Story of Documentary Film, with plans to release the 16-chapter epic later this year “on all platforms.” As Kino Lorber’s Lisa Schwartz noted, “Documentary filmmakers have captured the reality of our times since the earliest days of cinema, and celebrating and elevating their work feels more important than ever in our current era of fake news and manipulated imagery.”