I am a huge fan of Mark Cousin's 15-part series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, so the new chapters in this "New Generation" addendum were a welcome documentary entry within my three days at festival, and did not disappoint in terms of what makes the original series so effective and oddly comforting. The excitement of Cousins documentary series is not so much his reading of the somewhat expected films/filmmakers--in this case, something like Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin or Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendor--but the attention to films that sort of floated past my eyeballs without much consideration, including a few that I had pretty negative responses to on first viewing--something like Tim Miller's Deadpool or Edgar Wright's Baby Driver. Cousins begins by juxtaposing Todd Philip's 2019 film Joker with Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee's 2013 Disney film Frozen, and uses the unexpected spark of connection between the protagonist's respective dances of liberation as a point of departure to discuss the themes and advances he sees as emergent in the cinema of the new millennium. Likewise, the structure of Cousin's discussion across the next 2 hours and 45 minutes creates a sort of liberated dance that leaps effortlessly, freely from film to film, weaving in film theory and new visions along the way.
One of the more unique aspects of The Story of Film series is that it's not just an assemblage of clips, but delicately sewn together with Cousin's own video work, and in the case of the New Generation, which was shot during lockdown, this includes a more diffuse set of images culled from distant participants creating images at home. The whole idea of including his own work as an element in this series, whether it be shot by him or someone else, is a risky one that entirely pays off--it makes it a more personal and creatively risky endeavor, and simply richer as a whole. Cousin's love for film is infectious, and his ability to create and highlight aesthetic links and conversations of ideas, identity, and performance across films is essential for a culture rethinking the very experience of cinema after months of streaming on the couch. Cousins has said in interviews that he was not going to return to this project, but the pandemic restrictions, coupled with technological expansions like the virtual reality experiments of Tsai Ming-Liang, sparked these additional two chapters to the series: “Extending the Language of Film” and “What Have We Been Digging For?” Far from being an unnecessary continuation of an already accomplished series, the New Generation left me feeling as if my perceptual batteries had been recharged.
