Mark Cousins
Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish-Scottish filmmaker and writer. At the start of his career he directed TV documentaries on childhood, neo-Nazism and military training. His first book was Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary (“Indispensible” -Times Literary Supplement). His 2004 book The Story of Film, was published around the world. The Times called it “by some distance the best book we have read on cinema.” His 930 minute film, The Story of Film: An Odyssey (“The place from which all future revisionism should begin” -New York Times), played in the major film festivals and cinemas, and has had an influence on film education. Michael Moore gave it the Stanley Kubrick Award, it won the Peabody Award, was BAFTA Scotland nominated, and received other prizes.
He received the Visionary Award in Traverse City and the Saltzgeber Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. His film I am Belfast, about his home city, which has cinematography by Christopher Doyle, was released by the BFI. Variety compared it to the great soviet director Dziga Vertov. His BBC, BFI and Hopscotch film Atomic, a collaboration with the band Mogwai, played in Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Coventry Cathedral and the Edinburgh and Holland International Festivals. His newest films are The Storms of Jeremy Thomas and The Story of Looking.
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The Story of Looking
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • 2021 • 87 minutes
On the day before an operation to save his eyesight, filmmaker Mark Cousins explores what looking means to him, and the role our visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 1
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This opening of The Story of Film: An Odyssey shows the birth of a great new art form, the movies. Filmed in the very buildings where th...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 2
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This is the fascinating story of the movies in the roaring '20s. We see how Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry and how...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 3
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. In this part, we visit Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to discover the places wh...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 4
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
In part 4, we see how the coming of sound in the 1930s upended everything. We watch the birth of new types of film: screwball comedies, ...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 5
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This part of The Story of Film shows how the trauma of war made cinema more daring. The story starts in Italy, and then we go to Hollywo...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 6
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This part explores the story of sex and melodrama in the movies of the 50s. We discover James Dean, On the Waterfront and the glossy wee...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 7
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This is the explosive story of film in the late 50s and 60s. The great movie star Claudia Cardinale talks exclusively about Federico Fel...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 8
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This is the story of the dazzling 1960s in cinema around the world. In Hollywood, legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler reveals how d...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 9
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This is the remarkable story of the maturing of American cinema of the late 60s and 70s. Buck Henry, who wrote The Graduate, talks exclu...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 10
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This is the story of the movies that tried to change the world in the 70s. We start in Germany with Wim Wenders, head to Britain in the ...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 11
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
Star Wars, Jaws and The Exorcist created the multiplexes, but they were also innovative. The Story of Film: Part 11 explains how, and th...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 12
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
With Ronald Reagan in the White House and Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, the 1980s were the years of protest in the movies. This i...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 13
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
Few saw it coming, but cinema around the world in the 90s entered a golden age. The story starts in Iran, where we meet Abbas Kiarostami...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 14
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
This is the story of the brilliant, flashy, playful movies in the English-speaking world in the 90s. We look at what was new in Tarantin...
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The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Part 15
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Terence Davies, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant • 2012 • 61 minutes
In the final part of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, movies come full circle. They get more serious after 9/11, and Romanian movies come ...
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The Story of Film: A New Generation
Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • With Mark Cousins • 2022 • 167 minutes
A decade after The Story of Film: An Odyssey, an expansive and influential inquiry into the state of moviemaking in the 20th century, filmmaker Mark Cousins returns with an epic and hopeful tale of cinematic innovati...
