Monthly Archives: August 2022

  • The Story of Looking

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Cousins (2021)

    I was apprehensive about this documentary – I’d not previously got on well with Mark Cousins’s voice in any medium.  Thanks to his incantatory narration, I parted company with Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) long before the last of its fifteen one-hour episodes.  In more recent years, I regularly read his Sight & Sound column but found his passionate, supposedly spontaneous prose practised and wearying.  The Story of Looking, which largely consists of Cousins on the screen as well as the soundtrack, is a pleasant surprise.  Although its maker says plenty to query or disagree with, it’s hard not to be impressed by his wide frame of cultural reference and he’s genially stimulating company.

    Most of the film happens, or purports to happen, on one October day in 2020 – the day before Cousins goes under the surgeon’s knife.  In his mid-fifties, he’s suffering from a cataract (‘a bad one’) in his left eye.  The Story of Looking is pre-conceived in more ways than one.  Cousins hasn’t come up with the idea for it simply in light of his recently diagnosed eye condition:  he wrote a book of the same title in 2017.  He narrates lying in bed in his Edinburgh home.  By telling us at the start he never stays in bed once he wakes on a morning, he immediately admits that his position throughout most of the film is a pose.  It’s a far from empty one, though.  Cousins puts on the screen, and comments on, things and people he’s already seen, that he’s kept inside his head and on his camera.  He interleaves several cinema clips into this beguiling succession and diversity of images (which Donna McKevitt’s music supports very effectively).  Illustrating how what we see shapes our understanding of the world, Cousins describes in turn the visual experience of babies, young children and so on.  His bed serves as a contrastive still point from which to chart a ‘journey through our visual lives’.

    It’s important to the film that it was made in 2020.  Cousins refers more than once to life under Covid and his situation as narrator – in his home, apparently alone – resonates with the experience of lockdown.  His eye condition connects with it, too.  When The Story of Looking premiered (as the closing film of Sheffield DocFest) in June 2021, cinemas had only just reopened after their latest pandemic closure.  Watching it a year later is a rather different matter.  It’s evocative of a multiply dark time – for the world, for filmgoers generally and for Cousins, optically speaking, in particular – but the film has lost, at least for the time being, the immediacy and urgency it may originally have had.  Cousins decides at an early stage to send a tweet, inviting thoughts on looking, and reads out some of his followers’ responses.  If, like me, you find most of these, and Cousins’s reactions to them, unremarkable, it’s worth reminding yourself this kind of communication had more vital meaning in a time of enforced isolation.

    For me, the one poignant, memorable Twitter response came from a man called Dave Hollingsworth.  He begins with a self-effacing ‘I’m not sure if this counts but …’, goes on to report a lifelong ordeal of looking in the mirror, and leaves Mark Cousins uncharacteristically lost for words (or nearly so).  Cousins does well to include a tweet about loathing one’s reflection because his film otherwise leaves itself open to charges of narcissism.  Cousins is always shirtless in bed.  He runs the camera over his bare legs which he says are, along with his eyes, the best part of him (to be fair, he partly means his legs have carried him on many long walks).  In a sequence visualising his desire to ‘be’ a jellyfish, he lies in a human-sized rock pool, full-frontal naked.  As well as seeming very comfortable in his own skin, Cousins puts himself at a remove from physical unsightliness.  When he discusses the vulnerability of teenagers whose bodies are changing and describes his own adolescent insecurities about his appearance, we’re shown, more than once, the face of a teenage boy with severe acne but the boy isn’t Cousins.  What Dave Hollingsworth actually looks like remains, of course, a mystery but his powerful words suggest something harder to deal with than Cousins’s recollection that he felt his youthful chest compared badly with Robert De Niro’s in Taxi Driver (1976).

    I think Cousins mentions narcissism just once, when he takes issue with complaints about selfies.  He asks why they’re dismissed as narcissistic and silly when artists’ self-portraits never are.  It’s the comparison here that’s silly.  Painting a self-portrait tends not to be a facile undertaking, given the technical and creative skill liable to be involved.  And Cousins doesn’t follow through what he says anyway.  One of the art history works mentioned and shown is a Dürer self-portrait but Cousins doesn’t go so far as to suggest that the Christ-like look the artist gives himself is especially presumptuous or self-admiring.  It’s fortunate that this detour is also the only time Cousins comes on as provocative populist even though it’s not the only time he poses a question he shows no interest in answering.

    Later in the day, it appears that he does actually get up and go out – although this, too, may be an imagining since he doesn’t wear a face mask on public transport (surprising, given Scotland’s more disciplined approach to Covid restrictions).  The flow of images continues but Cousins’s face now suggests anxiety at seeing things for the last time, at least before his surgery next day.  This connects with the inspiration for the film – Paul Cézanne’s description of his own developing ‘optical experience’, a description written by Cézanne, says Cousins, near the end of his life.  Cousins films himself at the outset of his eye operation then shows close-ups of his cataract being removed and the cloudy eye lens replaced with an artificial one.  These close-ups are wondrous but hard to watch (even for a viewer who, like this one, has had cataracts removed from both eyes).  The eyeball and knife combination even upstages the notorious clip from the Luis Buñuel-Salvador Dali collaboration Un chien andalou (1929), which Cousins unsurprisingly inserts into proceedings.

    It’s an affecting moment when Cousins removes his eye-shield and registers with grateful relief that he can see out of his reconstructed left eye.  He doesn’t, however, attempt to replicate this new world on screen, even though he has mentioned being told things may well appear bluer as well as brighter immediately after surgery (as, in my experience, they did).  This touches on a larger challenge for Cousins.  His narrative has been propelled by apprehension about his impaired vision and imminent treatment.  Where does he go now those are behind him?  Well aware that he risks post-op anti-climax, he opts for a fantasy finale in which he imagines his own distant future.  He tells us that he emigrated to live in Sweden in 2030; it’s now around 2050, so Cousins is in his mid-eighties.  He makes a journey back to Scotland to see once more sights he cherishes.  Although this is at one level the most artificial part of the film, it’s a nice way of smuggling in thoughts that Cousins wonders if he’ll have in the years ahead.

    The cinema clips in this concluding part of The Story of Looking include two featuring Ingrid Bergman, in films made thirty-five years apart – Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1943) and Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978).  Both clips show Ingrid Bergman’s face at the same angle to the camera.  Linked in this way, the images prompt Cousins to muse on Bergman’s journey through her visual life.  This made me more sharply aware than anything else in Cousins’s film of how differently he and I seem to look at people on the cinema screen.  When I see these images of the same woman in her late twenties and her early sixties, I initially register that they’re both Ingrid Bergman – but I then see the face of an actress inhabiting two very different characters, each with her own individual history.  Cousins evidently sees Bergman’s face as an enduring movie image that transcends the difference between Ilsa in Casablanca and Charlotte in Autumn Sonata.

    The Story of Looking begins with a clip of Ray Charles, talking with Dick Cavett on the latter’s show in the early 1970s.  Blind from the age of seven, Charles was then in his early forties.  He tells Cavett that, given the chance to have his sight permanently restored, he would say no.  There are, says Charles, ‘a couple of things’ he would like to see, including the faces of his children, but he’d be content to see them only once.  Cousins is reasonably astonished by this, not only because looking is so fundamental to his own life but also by the implication that Charles, having seen something once, can retain it in his mind’s eye indefinitely.  Charles’s reason for not wanting his sight back is that there are things going on in the world he feels lucky he can’t see.  Cousins shows examples of such things in the course of his film, which he ends by conclusively refuting Ray Charles.  The octogenarian Cousins professes gratitude for everything seen in the course of his long life.  As he speaks these words – rather than replaying, for example, footage he’s shown of the beheading of a Saudi woman – he gives us ingeniously beautiful shots of a Scottish landscape reflected in water.   This is a jarring close to the film but it still left me not just liking Mark Cousins as I hadn’t before but wanting to hear more from him.   He achieves a real sense of intimacy with his audience, not by showing himself in bed but in the quieter, more reflective parts of what he has to say.  And he makes The Story of Looking a very fine picture show.

    14 August 2022

  • The Harder They Come

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Perry Henzell (1972)

    Among the reggae tracks playing in NFT3 before the screening was Desmond Dekker’s ‘Israelites’, whose lyrics include the line ‘I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde’.  That is almost how Ivanhoe (Ivan) Martin, the protagonist of the Jamaican film The Harder They Come, ends up.  When his dreams of becoming a pop star are thwarted Ivan (Jimmy Cliff) gets involved in marijuana running.  Threatened with arrest, he shoots and kills one police officer, then three more, then goes after José (Carl Bradshaw), the man who recruited him to the drugs-running network (and who Ivan thinks shopped him).  They hare down a street with Ivan firing at José, José running for his life and a pack of kids excitedly joining in the chase.  Ivan’s crimes give him the public profile denied him as a singer.  He was ripped off by the record-producer mogul Hilton (Bob Charlton) who now releases Ivan’s song, ‘The Harder They Come’, to cash in on his notoriety, while Ivan poses for photographs as a two-gun-toting outlaw.  He forces the photographer at gunpoint to develop the pictures immediately; while that’s happening, another man comes in, recognises Ivan and asks for his autograph.  After a failed attempt to escape from Jamaica to Cuba, Ivan is eventually ambushed by police with automatic rifles; he faces them, brandishing his own weapons, and is shot dead.  This ending of Perry Henzell’s film is more sudden than that of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  As soon as Ivan falls to the ground, Henzell cuts to black then to the closing credits, accompanied by the title song.

    The film has its place in cinema history as the first full-length feature shot in Jamaica by a Jamaican director and with a Jamaican cast – though it needs noting that Perry Henzell was, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Midnight Movies (1983), ‘a white, blond Jamaican who grew up on his father’s 22,000-acre plantation, went to school in England, and made 300 TV commercials (along with BBC dramas) before embarking on the first reggae musical’.  That first was important, too:  a Los Angeles Times obituary for Henzell, who died in 2006, claimed that The Harder They Come ‘introduced reggae music to an international audience’.  The title song was the only one of the main numbers written for the film – by Jimmy Cliff, already internationally successful thanks to his cover of Cat Stevens’s ‘Wild World’ and, as a singer-songwriter, hits like ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’, ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ and ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’.  The last two-named both feature on the soundtrack of The Harder They Come.

    Henzell, who raised finance from local businessmen to make the film, also produced and co-wrote the screenplay with Trevor D Rhone.  The Harder They Come captures in semi-documentary style major features of contemporary national life – poverty, church, music, ganja, guns – in Kingston and rural Jamaica.  (Ivan comes to the big city after the death of his grandmother, with whom he lived in the country; he returns there when he goes into hiding.)  Movies and their influence are another important element.  In an early scene, Ivan is part of the young audience lapping up Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western Django (1966) in a Kingston picture house.  Moments before Ivan’s own death, his mind flashes back to Django and the eponymous hero’s machine-gunning down a horde of antagonists.  A doomed man on the run, Ivan also has a kinship with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s anti-hero in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).  As the Hollywood Western inspired the Spaghetti Western, so American crime dramas fed Godard’s film-making imagination (and the French New Wave informed Robert Benton and David Newman’s screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde).  These connections enrich The Harder They Come but even mentioning them risks implying that Henzell parades his cinema-history references for the cognoscenti’s benefit.  He doesn’t at all.  The film’s raw dynamism is the opposite of academic.

    Ivan has hardly arrived in Kingston before he’s robbed of all his possessions.  He visits his wastrel mother (Lucia White), from whom he’s been estranged; when he tries and fails to find work, it’s she who puts him in touch with a local preacher (Basil Keane), who employs Ivan as an odd job man.  Ivan also takes a fancy to Elsa (Janet Bartley), the preacher’s devout, demure ward, and repairs a broken-down bicycle to use to run errands.  When he persuades Elsa to give him the keys to the church and rehearses his secular songs there, the preacher throws him out.  Ivan later returns to collect his bicycle only to find it’s been appropriated by another man, whom he challenges.  His adversary threatens him with a broken bottle and Ivan retaliates by slashing him with a knife.  Although he’s spared a custodial sentence, his punishment is ten lashes with a whip across his bare backside.  The episodic narrative then moves on to his attempts to interest Hilton, who monopolises the local music industry through payola, in his songs.

    The Harder They Come is stronger in its more documentary aspects, and when Jimmy Cliff sings, than in conventional dramatic storytelling.  Ivan’s motivation for staying with Elsa for as long as he does isn’t clear, except in order to – in their climactic exchange – deride Elsa’s Christian hope for happiness in the hereafter and assert his own determination to succeed in the here and now.  His signature song, though, has already made that plain:

    ‘Well, they tell me of a pie up in the sky
    Waiting for me when I die
    But between the day you’re born and when you die
    They never seem to hear even your cry

    So as sure as the sun will shine
    I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine
    And then the harder they come
    The harder they fall, one and all …’

    There are times in the last part of the story when Ivan threatens to become less an individual than a warning example within Jamaican culture of wanting to make it at all costs.  Yet Jimmy Cliff, who gives him a beguiling blend of insolence and urgent self-belief, ensures the character’s transitions are more persuasive than they might be, as well as involving.  His performance makes you sorry that, over the course of his long, successful music career, Cliff has done so little acting subsequently.

    The film features a cameo from another legend of Jamaican music, the seminal Prince Buster.  He appears as the club DJ who introduces Ivan’s song and mistakenly calls it ‘The Harder They Fall’ – the title also of Jeymes Samuel’s Western, released last year, on the eve of The Harder They Come‘s half century.  I recall reading about Perry Henzell’s film on its original release, when I was still at school.  I’d never got round to seeing it until now.  Better late than never, though – much better when the piece of work is as variously remarkable as this one.

    9 August 2022

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