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<-- back Mark Cousins, best known for his 15-hour "The Story of Film" (1), is invited to a film festival in Albania. He has never been there before, so he brings his camera. From the moment he boards the plane, he begins to film what he sees: a sunset at 30,000 feet, the book he is reading, then the view from his hotel, the street in front of it, a dog, a pyramid, the national film archives, later a group of kids, a puddle of water, and a car that disappears into the distance. What drives his film are not the books he has read or the movies he has seen, some of which he intercuts with his own footage, but that in fact he knows so little about Albania, and thus has to rely on his own eyes. He insists that when you make an image, there is something that can be seen in it (actually seen, as opposed to read, thought, remembered or projected), and from this astonishingly simple yet strangely controversial premise (who, other than a very small number of mostly French filmmakers and intellectuals, most of whom by today are either very old or dead, has ever in all seriousness insisted on the sense of seeing, on seeing with one's own eyes?), he proceeds to build an astonishingly simple yet strangely controversial film. Controversial for a number of reasons, above all because quite a few people rather strongly dislike Cousin's intonation, the way he slightly raises his voice at the end of every single sentence he speaks, which may occasionally mask as a profound statement of truth what is not much more than the admission of a banality, and gives some of his arguments a faint but audible air of faux-naïveté, as if the stories he keeps telling us were directed at children rather than grown-ups. The one thing Cousin is not guily of, however, is turning his travelogue into yet another boring, second-hand take on the genre of the "essay film", and he owes that precisely to the inescapable boredom of professional travel, and the obvious second-handedness of his ideas and materials. He should make more of these, since we have rarely seen anyone so obviously influenced by Chris Marker's "Sans soleil" come up with such a thoroughly convincing, easily reproducible and almost entirely unembarrassing form of filmmaking for themselves. (1) https://0xdb.org/title=the_story_of_film -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- pirate cinema berlin u kottbusser tor sunday, august 7, 9 pm here be dragons mark cousins, 2013, 77 mins trailer: https://youtu.be/I85hiKIRXRo 12 seats, rsvp first come first serve location in separate mail -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- () >< pirate cinema berlin www.piratecinema.org <-- back |