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7 hours ago
9
The unmistakable film-making voice of documentary-maker and critic Mark Cousins is raised again, to educate, to intrigue, to challenge. His histories of the movies are invitations to a seance, a chance to participate in the kind of ecstatic trance or dream-state that Cousins himself goes into, almost free-associating from film to film but with an overarching but discreetly emphasised theme – or maybe motif – and always with something shrewd, pertinent and humane to say. I have never watched a Cousins film without feeling that I have learned something new, and so it has proved again.
At Karlovy Vary, he is presenting part of his monumental new The Story of Documentary Film, which comprises 16 hour-long chapters, and of these he is here giving us numbers Eight and Nine, about the 1980s. The first of these begins and ends at the site of Checkpoint Charlie on the Berlin Wall which came down at the end of the decade; Cousins subtitles this episode with a line from Robert Frost: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” His theme here is empathy, surmounting the obstacle (or wall) of indifference or ignorance; and he talks about the films that questioned the existing order and which pulled away the bricks that caused the Soviet wall to collapse. The second part (chapter nine) is subtitled “detectives”, about the investigative documentaries that demanded answers, particularly to questions about the wartime past, by people like Marcel Ophuls, Claude Lanzmann and Michael Moore.
Often, Cousins can’t resist a cinephile gag. Ophuls, director of Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), about the horrendous Gestapo chief, compared his dogged sleuthing to that of TV’s rumpled cop Columbo – and Cousins drops in a clip of Peter Falk’s legendary detective, and can’t resist using the episode that was directed by a young Steven Spielberg. Yet this episode also focuses on music documentaries; it cheekily begins and ends on Jimmy Somerville and Bronski Beat, that most intensely 80s musical sound.
These episodes are a treasure trove of material. Cousins gives us fascinating clips: perhaps the most gripping, for me, is from The Last Judgement (1987), by Latvian director Herz Frank, a Dostoyevskian film about a man on death row for murder, who claims to the very last that he loves all mankind, even or especially the people who are going to execute him. Also from Latvia is Juris Podnieks’s Is It Easy to Be Young? (1986), a movie about youth culture whose rebellious energy was a challenge to the sclerotic dullness and mediocrity of the Soviet state. But in the west, Jan Troell’s epic essay movie Land of Dreams (1988) questioned the bland complacency of Sweden and its conformist and un-creative kind of progressive politics.
The next part brings us the big beasts of campaigning documentaries, like Moore’s Roger and Me (1984), which Cousins interestingly says channels the spirit of Frank Capra and small-town decency. From Brazil, there is Edouardo Coutinho’s Twenty Years Later (1984) about the film-maker’s mission to track down the widow and children of a socialist leader assassinated two decades before. In Japan, Kazuo Hara’s extraordinary The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) tackles Japansese war crimes and the director’s controversial use of actors to pretend to be the victims’ relatives to ignite confrontation scenes.
But there are humorous and downbeat moments too. I loved Cousins’s quote from the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework (1989) in which a kid is asked if he prefers doing homework or watching a certain foreign TV programme – The Wombles! (I was hoping Cousins would give us a Wombles clip.)
If there is anything missing from these two episodes (well … it is something that Cousins may well be addressing elsewhere in the series) it may be this: how many of these films were seen in the cinema? Were they all basically consumed on TV, and intended for TV? Should the series title be The Story of Documentary TV? Is there a difference in the documentary experience on the big screen? (There must be – but was it widely experienced? As it happens, the rise of Michael Moore in the 1980s led to a spate of theatrically released campaigning documentaries in the noughties, all inspired by Roger and Me.) A rich and complex meditation here from Cousins.
