The history of cinema with exposure – Newspaper Kommersant No. 145 (7346) of 08/11/2022

A documentary film by Mark Cousins ​​”History of Cinema: The New Generation”, dedicated to films from 2010 to 2020, is being released in Russian distribution. This is a huge patchwork canvas, consisting of fragments of almost a hundred paintings, accompanied by the author’s commentary. It talks about new trends, technologies, themes, formats and faces in the films of the last decade and, according to Yulia Shagelman, Reminds me of why we love movies so much.

Edinburgh-based Belfast-born Mark Cousins ​​is a film historian, film critic, documentary maker and a man for whom cinema is his life. He started out making documentaries for television on a variety of topics, but by the late 1990s, he began to shoot, talk and write only about cinema. His heroes were Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski and David Lynch, whom he interviewed for the BBC documentary series Scene by Scene (1996-2003), Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles, to whom he dedicated individual films, Iranian filmmakers, women directors and children – and those who are shown in the cinema, and those who watch the movie.

But Cousins’ major work is the 15-hour A History of Film: An Odyssey (2011), which chronicles cinema since its birth and spans films from the silent short Leeds Bridge Traffic (1888) to Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). ). Film History: The Next Generation is a sequel of sorts, picking up where the final chapter of The Odyssey ended.

As a real movie buff, Cousins ​​is absolutely omnivorous. For him, there is no difference between artistic and documentary, authorial and mass, expensive and cheap, professional and amateur. In each film, he knows how to find, if not an interesting idea, then an unusual angle, if not a good joke, then a frame that stops time here and now. The Next Generation opens with snippets from some of the most pop movies ever: Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) and Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee’s Frozen (2013), but Cousins ​​pushes back from them to such depths that which not everyone gets. Multimillion-dollar hits released in Hollywood, Indian blockbusters with songs and dances, comedies filmed on a mobile phone with non-professional actors from Uganda, Korean action films, Disney cartoons, recognized festival masterpieces, visual experiments, the target audience of which will not fill even one cinema hall – all this for are equal pieces of the puzzle that make up the cinematic landscape.

Cousins ​​assembles this puzzle with childlike enthusiasm, juggling with allusions and parallels, finding unexpected similarities in things that seem to be as far from each other as possible. So, in his view, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) turns out to be the direct heir to Buster Keaton’s The General (1926). A documentary by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, The Mother of Pearl Button (2015), about the genocide of indigenous tribes and the repression of Pinochet, echoes Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey (1968). And “It’s Hard to Be a God” by Alexei German (2013) – with “Apocalypse Now” (1979) by Coppola. When looking at end-to-end footage, these comparisons seem logical and valid. However, the main thing that interests Cousins ​​in the cinema of modern times is not what brings him closer to previous eras, but what distinguishes him from them.

“The New Generation” is most like a free flow of associations, but the picture is still divided into chapters, each of which deals with a separate aspect of modern cinema: comedy, musical, horror, slow motion, physicality, virtual reality. Using the example of films that are rather arbitrarily assigned to one or another section (it is unlikely that the first thing that you think about when watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) is how the human body is shown there), Cousins ​​explores how the 21st century is expanding film language, the direction of the gaze is changing – both the author’s and the viewer’s, what new ways of interacting with the audience filmmakers find, giving it the opportunity to intervene in the events of the film and determine the fate of the characters. And sometimes he just talks about what he sees in the frame, which at the same moment we see. This creates the illusion of joint viewing – the very magic of cinema, for which we again and again return to cinemas.