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