The Story Of Film: tale (Story), not story (History). Voyage ulyssiac (Odissey), not chronicle or data archive (Report). It is Story of the Film: an Odyssey by Irish director Mark Cousins, 15 hours impossible to to regret. Unfortunately the masterpiece of Cousins is not yet available on streaming services aimed at the Italian audience, but you can easily have the recently returned 8 DVDs available in a new edition delivered to your home.
Six years of work
The "historiographical" principles underlying the monumental work created (in 6 years) by the Irish director Mark Cousins emerge right from the title of this documentary of over 900 minutes.
Like all methodological criteria, these too can, of course, be debatable, but the work of Cousins it has the enormous advantage of facing the long duration (necessary to analyze a widespread and long-lived phenomenon such as cinema) with the vivacity of the interested traveler and the competence of the academic, keeping the viewer's attention alive.
The approach Mark Cousins
By necessity, most documentaries on the history of cinema limit their scope to a particular period or movement, to technical evolution as it influenced the medium or, much more "trivially", reflect the personal tastes of the author or a “school”, as in the case of notable works such as History(s) du cinema by Jean-Luc Godard, Japanese cinema is 100 years old di Nagisa Oshima, To Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies o My Voyage to Italy also by the Italian-American director.
The approach of Cousins it seems more salient to us and "modern” because it somehow distances itself from the concept of authority who descends from above (albeit with an honest pedagogical intent) his vision of the theme (a concept of top-down cultural transmission) and instead decides to follow the path of innovation, not only of technology, but of ideas, feelings, ethics (“virtues e knowledge"). This last aspect poses propitiously The Story of Film: an Odissey outside that "magic circle" of critical judgments which, centering on very rigid principles of causality (postmodernity as the end of intellectual commitment; the media as an instrument of ethical-cultural barbarism), takes refuge too comfortably in simplistic formulas for publicity use ( in the Italian context the slogan Berlusconi = end of culture), forgetting that any human phenomenon is the result of a complex of factors that escapes a rigid deterministic and that evolution more often produces ambivalences than univocalities, not responding to dialectical distributions but to coexistences .
The journey of Cousins opens, therefore, by recounting the "miracle" of the double birth of cinema by the Lumière Brothers in Lyon and of thomas edison in New Jersey, to continue as a series of "lessons on light" (a physical constituent element of cinema, but - at the same time - very similar to a category of the spirit). The narrator (by the director himself) immediately reiterates that this will be a story of ideas, not about money: therefore, not so much the productions that gave rise to and made the Hollywood industry thrive are shown, but above all the films in which it has best manifested itself the grammar of cinematographic art (shot, cut, lighting), in its protean evolution.
Le women in movies
Ruan fabric Linyu, one of China's greatest actresses
But the discussion is not limited to cinematographic technique: among the most interesting (and unedited) aspects brought to light by Cousins there is the role of women in cinema (as screenwriters, directors and performers), especially in the silent era. We are reminded, for example, that one of the blockbuster of 1931, King Vidor's champion, with Wallace Beery and Jacky Cooper, also presented at the first edition of the Venice Film Festival, was based on a story by Frances Marion (which also won the Oscar); and we know the sad story of Ruan fabric Linyu, extremely popular diva of Chinese cinema (whose spontaneous interpretative modernity is compared to no less than that of Marlon Brando), who committed suicide at the age of only 25 with an overdose of barbiturates (her funeral procession in Shanghai apparently extended for kilometers and were at least five fake suicides during the ceremony: the "New York Times" called it "the funeral of the century"); let's get familiar with great actresses (otherwise destined for anonymity for the majority of western spectators, even among the least distracted) such as sharmila Tagore, muse of the greatest Indian director, Satyajit Ray: Kyōko Kagawa who worked with all the Japanese masters (that Cousins makes no secret of preferring over all), from Corpse a kurosawa, from Mizoguchi. a Yoshimura.
Le bubbles sow them
The method of detection in the footsteps of ideas that bounce, recall and reinforce each other even if geographically and temporally distant, it may even be impressionistic, but it allows for original and - for the viewer - highly stimulating combinations. Here then is the James Mason of The Fugitive who stares at the bubbles in a glass of mineral water, objective correlative of the crisis of his character, we find him even equal (even if the context is very different) in Two or three things I know about her by Godard and, still later, in Taxi Driver by Scorsese: and who remembered that glass of soda?
Le analogy hidden
This attitude of Cousins to find “hidden” analogies among the most disparate filmographies seems to me very close to the anti-academic positions exhibited by George steiner (Mostly in True presences, 1989, Garzanti 1992) according to which there is no truth that the criticism or the interpretation of the texts can find. Hermeneutics actually makes sense only for religious texts because it must define the "true" version. But then, once defined and imposed through dogmas, all other interpretations must be closed.
In reality, everything and the opposite of everything can be said about a literary or other work. For example Tolstoy considered trivial the Re Lear of Shakespeare. One can obviously disagree with Tolstoy, but it is not possible to prove him wrong.
Students - writes Steiner - must be told not to read the criticisms, but to read the texts. My whole book is a cry of horror for what is happening in the university world. My students in Cambridge have an exam where they discuss TS Elliot's opinion of Dante without having to read Dante, a single line from Dante. [...] What is needed is a dynamic interpretation, an interpretation that is action and not passivity. Reading the critique, reading the 'secondary' texts, means being passive, as in front of the television; it means renouncing responsibility for the action.
We feel Cousins:
My job as a writer [The Story of Film was born as an essay text, 2004] was to evoke a film in the mind of the reader. In the film, I don't need to do sleight of hand. Just simply show the movies. My creative contribution, on the other hand, was another: to show people the processes of language or imagination which then give rise to the final product.
To return to Steiner, paraphrasing him, we need to rediscover a "religious" link with the authority (the true presence) not of the interpretation, but of the text. The work of art is like a guest who arrives unexpectedly: towards it we must, guided by the "ethics of common sense", behave with courtesy and tact, with that love of the word - in our case of the image - ( lexical, syntactic-grammatical, rhetorical and semantic) which is true “philology”. The philological space is that of "waiting", in which we understand the "root of secrecy" which lies at the heart of the work. The study of the context will allow us to perceive the text through history, the attention to sociological phenomena and biographical elements will bring us closer to the decisive "encounter". Intimidated and perplexed, therefore, here we are before poetry, painting, music, cinema, confronted with an irreducible "otherness". With "gravity" and "constancy” we will then wait for the epiphany.
Without accepting mystical-ascetic tendencies (Steiner speaks of "religiosity" not of occultist impulsivity) or the rhetoric ofeverythinggoes whatever, it must be admitted that the method of analogical approach is more fruitful and illuminating than knowing what Martin Scorsese thinks of Elia Kazan (which is nonetheless an essential fact, but in another hermeneutic sphere, purely historiographical and academic).
Attention "other" cinematography
The "horizontality" impressed by Cousins (who leaves the major production centers as soon as he can: the United States and Europe) to his journey (the over 1000 clips and 43 interviews are "linked" precisely by tracking shots taken on board means of transport) is therefore probably the greatest merit of this documentary, with the due clarification that, in any case, all the great and recognized masters make their "expected" appearance and the director never gives in to sacrificing an undisputed and canonized authority on the altar of bizarre but sterile exoticism.
Surely there will be those who will measure (and contest) the "weight" given to Fellini, rather than to Bresson, to Chaplin, rather than Keaton, a Corpseinstead of a Tsukamoto or the fact that the likes of Sam Fuller, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivet not even mentioned!
Farid Shawqi in Cairo Station by Youssef chahine.
Personally I find it more exciting to have made the acquaintance of Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett (the first African American to shoot a film in the USA), having discovered the incredible expressiveness of Farid Shawqi in Cairo Station (1958) of Youssef chahine, the exciting vision of a clip (fortunately recovered from Cousins) taken from Narrow Roti (1969) by Kashmiri director Hands Kaul or the equally unobtainable Yeelen (1987) of the Malian Souleymane Cisse (awarded in Cannes then disappeared from circulation).
The history of films must necessarily stop today (the most recent film mentioned is Inception, but for innovation the last mention certainly goes to Alexander's Russian Ark Sokurov, dated 2002); but precisely the non-deterministic imprint applied by Cousins suggests the possibility of an "in-finite" work, progressively in progress, ready for the addition of new chapters, new analogies, correspondences and combinations.
In the epilogue, in fact, an imaginative leap is made in 2046 (cinematic year: see Wong kar wai) and reflects on the future of cinema (digital, 3D and how many other still unimaginable technical "marvels" will come to transform the medium). Immediately earlier we had seen the 116-year-old image of a man standing on the wings of a flying biplane (from Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels).
The author's belated adhesion to the prevailing "Christology" which dominates modern intellectual thought (and film criticism in particular), basting theories of a degenerative nature by interpreting the current state of the art as a sort of "expulsion" from the fullness and authenticity of origins?
Il movies e the way al digital
On multiple occasions Cousin he precised who resolutely considers cinema an art form and a language that is still very young and that digital is only a technological revolution in its infancy. “The Computer Graphicit simply means having more colors on the palette. The great directors may decide to use these colors expressively; the less talented will have more opportunities to express themselves”.
Welcome, magnificent doom e progressive!
