The Irish documentarian and film critic Mark Cousins has been making headlines for the past two years after his massive, colossally ambitious The Story of Film: An Odyssey premiered in 2011, both on television in the U.K. and at the Toronto International Film Festival. (In 2012, the series, which is currently streaming on Netflix, was also screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) Comprised of fifteen parts that add up to a running time of over 900 minutes, the basic goal of The Story of Film — “to redraw the map of movie history,” in an attempt to bring attention to directors and countries whose outputs are often sidelined in favor of discussion-hogging Hollywood — is so admirable it almost makes the entire project immune to criticism.
This isn’t to damn Cousins’s work with faint praise: one need only look over the list of TCM’s upcoming screening schedule to see how worthwhile the effort has been. Nevertheless, in most of the writing that’s been done on The Story of Film, it’s easy to detect an assessment-free tone, as if the majority of reviewers are simply stating their admiration for the concept and scale of Cousins’s film, rather than engaging with it on specific terms. (On Twitter, at least with respect to some of the folks I follow, it’s been the opposite: a consistent barrage of vague, fleeting swipes at Cousins.) Jonathan Rosenbaum’s mixed take for Film Comment is one of the few full-length pieces I’ve read on The Story of Film that is able to articulate some of the film’s flaws while also maintaining an appropriate measure of respect for the work at hand.
Personally, I tend to fall into the Rosenbaum camp, if not even a little more positive: though I can recognize some of the errors in The Story of Film (questionable comparisons, arbitrary assumptions and transitions), I also find it to be cleansing, thoughtful entertainment, and I’m grateful for some of the filmmakers to which Cousins has drawn my attention. This might put me in another minority altogether, but I’m a fan of his voice-over as well, which has drawn some complaints for its heavy, dream-like lilt; I especially take to it in the early episodes, where Cousins’s hypnotic drawl adds a level of mythic resonance to images of the silent cinema’s ghostly screen presences.
All these things were on my mind going into Cousins’s new companion piece, A Story of Children and Film, which had its world premiere at Cannes earlier this year. Knowing that the new film was a mere 100 minutes long (and that it had a single theme on its mind, stated in the title), part of me was expecting a kind of improvement over The Story of Film: with a shorter length and a more constricted thematic interest, it seemed reasonable to imagine that some of the previous work’s scope-based shortcomings would be absent from a film with a smaller, more manageable canvas. But the experience of A Story of Children and Film proved even more oddly structured, its gimmicky framing device frequently disrupting the overall rhythm and also paving the way for comparisons that are often more of a stretch than some of things Rosenbaum took to task in the earlier film.
Cousins’s inspiration here was a twelve-minute video he shot when his niece (Laura) and nephew (Ben) paid him a visit in Edinburgh. The video shows the two kids, humorously framed against a poster of The Mother and the Whore, playing with toys and marbles, and Cousins uses their activity — mostly their glances and fluctuating demeanors — as the starting point for an investigation of the history of children on film. Cousins’s first historical sequence, for instance, is founded on a look of shyness that the director notices in Laura. This launches a series of clips — from such films as Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1985), Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children in the Wind (1937), and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990) — that all postulate some form of on-screen shyness in child characters. For Cousins, this is a theme that the Japanese cinema does particularly well — an assertion that inevitably leads to a glance at some of the films of Yasujiro Ozu.
Later, Cousins, intrigued by the “working-class accents” of Laura and Ben, examines the relationship between class issues and children in the cinema. Cousins also uses his vast knowledge of world cinema to look at the work of Iranian directors like Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, [1995]) and Mohammad-Ali Talebi (The Boot, [1993]). In an interesting assertion, he finds that Iranian directors are uniquely adept at presenting the anger of children on film, a point he could’ve helped solidify by showing a minute or two of Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), which has one of the most effectively obnoxious child performances I’ve seen. Elsewhere, Cousins’s thematic focus turns to children’s performative instincts (including a look at the artifice of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kindgom [2012], as well as footage from Cousins’s own The First Movie [2009]), children’s ability to turn stories into fairytales (Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter [1955], Ken Loach’s Kes [1969]), and the loneliness that often accompanies childhood (Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon [1956]).
The interspersed clips of Laura and Ben are usually flat, and they feel like a crutch: I believe that they instilled within Cousins a desire to make this film, but I’m not convinced they needed to remain in the final product. Sometimes, he interprets their behavior rather loosely, so as to allow himself to move on to the next planned thematic section. (Cousins himself must have realized this, too — at about the film’s one-hour mark, the footage of Laura and Ben stops, and Cousins proceeds according to his own whims.) Another bizarre structuring device can be found in one of Cousins’s recurring reference points: Van Gogh’s window view at the Saint-Rémy asylum, where the artist completed what many consider his finest work, The Starry Night. Cousins interprets this as a reflection of the human tendency to find grand meaning in small gestures, essentially giving him license to read films in whichever way catches his fancy. It’s weirdly unclear why, or how, this window ever struck Cousins as something with a direct relationship to children in cinema.
However, for a film that should be better, A Story of Children and Film is never less than productive. Occasionally, Cousins seems to free himself from the limitations of his self-imposed narrative trajectory and just simply analyzes a sequence with insight and grace. My favorite moment might be his wonderful reading of a typically hallucinatory series of shots from Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975); predictably, Cousins’s voice is an ideal companion for Tarkovsky’s mesmerizing camerawork. Additionally, as with The Story of Film, you’ll surely leave the experience with a list of new must-sees; some titles near the top of mine include Kira Muratova’s Melody for a Street Organ (2009), Karel Kachyna’s Long Live the Republic (1965), and Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s Kiarostami-scripted Willow and Wind (1999). If A Story of Children and Film did nothing other than provide me with this list, it’d still be time well-spent.
A Story of Children and Film plays TIFF on September 5th, 6th and 15th. Watch the trailer above and see our complete coverage below.
