Mark Cousins Archives | Otaku No Culture

Story of Film Final Poster On all major streaming platforms Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Google Play

Coming to Home Video on Nov 22.

Mark Cousins is no stranger to the history of cinema since he’s a producer. And in The Story of Film, A New Generation, what he presents is not only meditative but also entrancing. He updates viewers about movies that were released after his seminal series from 2011.

Although he contrasts modern storytelling with older motion pictures, what he contemplates is in how the narrative has and has not changed over the years. It’s hard to be innovative these days, and what Cousins reveals restores my hope in what filmmakers can do. This Irish filmmaker (and historian) knows his stuff, and the fact he’s very well versed in independent and international cinema shows he’s the right person to host. To follow it all is tough, and my hat is off to him. He manages to track down films even I haven’t heard of, and although my focus is with Asian cinema, he goes further and considers even more harder to find works.

But in terms of popular culture, not only does he talk about Frozen, Joker, but also Midsommner. Finding a list of the works he referenced is easy with the Internet, but to find a copy to watch is harder. We need specialty streaming services or a local video rental shop like Pic-a-flic in my hometown that carries obscure films. Not every work has to be made in the USA. Some come from other territories like Romania or Argentina.

Continue reading “It Continues. Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film, A New Generatio”

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

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The documentary, A Story of Children and Film might be better off named The Role of Children in Cinema, and it can easily become a textbook for the next cinema studies course at a university campus if Mark Cousins, Irish director and occasional critic, wanted it. He shares to the world his excellent knowledge of this subgenre.

In Cousins’ video essay, he delves into a nearly complete history starting from Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and wraps it around his own little video shoot of his visiting neice and nephew playing with a marble toy set. The juxtapositions he makes are interesting. When he delves into actual cinema, a few movies, like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) is missed for good reason – it’s an adaption of a book. But with more than a century’s worth of movies to sift through, this narrator successfully finds the movies from many countries (25 in fact) and representative of different eras to make his point with. He also uses it in a compelling juxtaposition when he includes footage of his neice and nephew visiting his flat and playing with a marble run.

Continue reading “[Victoria Film Festival ’14] A Story of Children and Film, a Documentary Review”