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Tthe clear voice of the documentary filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins is resurrected again, to teach, to inspire, to challenge. His film history is an invitation to a séance, an opportunity to participate in the kind of joy or dream that Cousins himself goes to, almost freely from film to film but with a larger but definitely wise theme – or maybe a motif – and always something clever, appropriate and kind to say. I’ve never watched a Cousins film without thinking I learned something new, and it proved to be true.
In Karlovy Vary, he presents his new section The Story of Documentary Film, which consists of 16 hours of titles, and of these he is here to give us numbers Eight and 9, about the 1980s. The first of these begins and ends at Checkpoint Charlie on the Berlin Wall that came down at the end of the decade; Cousins captioned this article with a line from Robert Frost: “Something that doesn’t like a wall.” The theme here is compassion, climbing the barrier (or wall) of indifference or ignorance; and he talks about films that question the existing system and that removed the bricks that made the Soviet wall fall. The second part (the ninth chapter) contains the word “researchers”, about research articles that require answers, especially questions about the past war, and people like. Marcel OphulsClaude Lanzmann and Michael Moore.
Usually, Cousins can’t resist a cinephile gag. Ophuls, the director of Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), about the dangerous Gestapo officer, compared his dog attack to that of the TV detective Columbo – and Cousins is casting a movie of the famous police officer of Peter Falk, and he could not resist using the story told by Steven Spiel. However this section is also looking at music notes; it starts and ends on Jimmy Somerville and the Bronski Beat, the classic 80s classic.
These sections are a treasure trove. Cousins gives us some interesting films: perhaps the most interesting for me, is from The Last Judgment (1987), by the Latvian writer Herz Frank, a Dostoyevskian film about a man on death row for murder, who says in the end that he loves all people, but especially his killers. Also from Latvia is Juris Podnieks’s Is It Easy to Be Young? (1986), a film about a youth culture whose rebellious energy was a challenge to the sclerotic dullness and mediocrity of the Soviet government. But in the West, Jan Troell’s famous film Land of Dreams (1988) questioned Sweden’s indifference and its progressive and non-conformist politics.
The next section brings us the big monsters of campaign films, such as Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), which Cousins says delightfully follows the spirit of Frank Capra and small-town respectability. From Brazil, there is Edouardo Coutinho’s Twenty Years Later (1984) about the filmmaker’s quest to find the widow and children of a socialist leader who was assassinated twenty years ago. In Japan, Kazuo Hara’s dramatic novel The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) deals with Japanese war crimes and the director’s use of actors to pretend to be the victims’ relatives in order to stir up controversy.
But there are also funny and sad moments. I loved Cousins’ quote from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework (1989) where a child is asked if he likes doing homework or watching a foreign TV show – The Wombles! (I was hoping Cousins would give us a video of the Wombles.)
If there’s anything missing from these two episodes (well… that’s something Cousins can talk about elsewhere in the series) it might be this: how many movies were seen in the cinema? Was it all consumed on TV, and made for TV? Should the title of the series be a Documentary TV Story? What is the difference in writing on the big screen? (There should be – but it became more popular? As it happens, the rise of Michael Moore in the 1980s it led to a series of releases in the entertainment industry, both inspired by Roger and Me.) A rich and complex reflection here from Asuweni.
