When I meet Mark Cousins at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, we compare T-shirts. Mine features a cartoon pig from the Miyazaki film Porco Rosso, along with the line: “Better a Pig than a fascist.” Cousins is wearing a T-shirt that reads: “Documentaries Kill Fascism.” One thing’s for sure, we don’t like fascists.
“I’m referring to Woody Guthrie’s guitar: ‘This machine kills fascism.’ Documentary can’t kill fascism, but it can fight fascism. I call it a solidarity machine,” says Cousins.
He is here in the Czech Republic presenting previously unseen episodes of his new film: The Story of Documentary Film. Some episodes have already screened at Sundance and Cannes.
Cousins has one of the most distinctive voices in documentaries today, which you can take metaphorically and literally. From his early days on Moviedrome to his interview series Scene by Scene to his monumental The Story of Film: An Odyssey, he has chronicled and celebrated cinema with a distinctive autobiographical DIY aesthetic.
And at the same time, he has become known for narrating his films in his instantly recognisable Belfast accent. He is the Werner Herzog of Ulster.
Cinema is political, for Cousins. Of that there can be no doubt.
“One of my earliest films was about neo-Nazis, and I went underground, [Another Journey by Train made in 1993]. And then I made a film about Mussolini, which premiered in Venice in 2022 [March on Rome], and so I’ve been interested in the far right since my youth.
“The Story of Documentary Film is another way of challenging the mythology of the far right. Their constant idea is: those people over there are keeping you on your knees, and if we destroy them, we can stand up again. That’s obviously wrong. Documentary proves that.”
Having made documentaries about artists, writers, movies, children in film, male film-makers and female film-makers, he has now made a 16-part documentary about documentaries, which feels like the scene in Citizen Kane where the eponymous media mogul steps into a hall of mirrors. (Orson Welles was also the subject of Cousins’s The Eyes of Orson Welles.) Documentary has never been so widespread (see Netflix) or so in danger (also see Netflix).
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But Cousins sees the key moment as actually being at the end of the 1990s: “Before that, it was a ne’er-do-well art form, and then the Madonna film, Buena Vista Social Club, Michael Moore, a series of films came along, and people were pulling fiction films off the screen to put documentaries on. But with streamers now, what’s changed is the formatting. What used to be told in 90 minutes is now more likely to be six hours, for good and bad.”
The bad, he says, is the deluge of cliched true-crime series: “As a film-maker, it’s not hard to do that stuff, when you cut reasonably fast and make certain kinds of music choices.”
However, Cousins believes that on balance, the streamers’ influence has been positive. “The best thing about documentary today is that it’s more democratic than ever before. The river has become a delta, which is very good. But still, we have to push the streamers to make sure they don’t just repeat formulae because otherwise the art form will die,” he says.
What sort of formula? “Without naming the streamers, I am often in a position where they say, ‘Can you do something for us? But it needs to be really fast at the start.’ There are just certain requirements that are not great.
“The other thing is the big screen. We are giving more attention to what’s happening there than at home. One of the things that documentary does is cherish life, the human face, landscapes, cities, relationships.”
One of the benefits of documentary is in inciting film-makers to address the real world. “Gertrude Stein said: ‘Imagination is observation plus construction.’ That’s why documentary is so interesting. It starts outside and then constructs something inside,” Cousins says.
“I’ve argued for decades that art schools and film schools have got their teaching arse over tit. They’re all teaching that it’s self-expression. What if it’s not? What if self-expression is a dead end?
“Documentary doesn’t start with self. It starts with a city. Or a social problem… those early documentaries are just saying, ‘Look what’s out there’.”
It’s true that the first films were essentially documentaries. A horse gallops, a man jumps, a train comes into a station, but even that train coming into the station involved some artifice. It took three takes before the Lumière brothers had The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) nailed.
“There’s staging in almost everything,” Cousins says. “You could argue that most fictional films are documentaries. Bernardo Bertolucci famously said that Last Tango in Paris is a documentary about Marlon Brando’s face. Jean-Luc Godard said every film is a documentary. There’s huge overlap.
“There’s Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. There’s a whole genre of them in the early 2000s. My theory is it’s because of the influence of Iranian cinema, which is really strong by then. Abbas Kiarostami and Samira Makhmalbaf restaging things in The Apple, but it’s also the influence of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the idea of lip-syncing, as well. If you put Iran and RuPaul together, you get a new genre.”
Iranian cinema and RuPaul? It’s exhilarating to hear Cousins make these comparisons. His is a postmodernism grounded deeply in history and knowledge.
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But for all the enthusiasm, Cousins admits that making the 16-hour-long film was a gruelling experience. “This is by far the most difficult film I’ve had to make. I cried more in the edit suite than I have at anything, because you’re watching real things and such terrible materials.
“When you get to Bangladesh in the 1970s – you know, one million people killed in a few months, and it’s completely uncensored. We haven’t left anything out because it’s too much. I cried a lot. I probably drank too much alcohol to get me through it as well.
“Those years of sitting day after day with the blinds closed. But there’s always something life-affirming about a great documentary. Even if it’s about an atrocity, it’s still witness-bearing.”
