Watching with Mark Cousins - The Story of Looking

Abstract

Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish director and writer. Well-known for ‘The Story of Film: An Odyssey’ (2011, headlined as the cinematic event of the year) and A New Generation (2021)’. Both comprehensive chronologies of world cinema are praised for their detailed and diverse approaches. His esteemed film-making career spans five decades.

The following interview is presented as a discussion in response to the latter half of his film ‘The Story of Looking.’ The film meditates on the richness of visual experiences, framed around Cousins preparing for surgery to restore his vision during COVID. For the majority of the film Cousins narrates alone in the dark from his bed; as such, this interview was conducted via Zoom with us both in our respective beds. The hope was this exercise in free association and viewing would provide an emergent insight into Cousin’s film philosophy, hence our comfortable viewing locations to encourage us to pause the viewing and discuss thoughts freely as they came to mind. I collated the most striking thoughts relevant to the systems facilitating filmmaking; the still and timestamp from those moments are provided.