Parts Three and Four of Mark Cousins’s Looong Documentary
reviewed by Christopher Wood
The more I watch the sixty-second trailer that plays before every
screening at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, the more I like
it. This joyously frenetic promo takes characters from Fight Club, (500) Days of
Summer, and dozens more films and swirls them into colorful Busby Berkeley
configurations, all timed to a score that sounds like it wafted in from a 1950s
musical. (See it here: http://vimeo.com/40900362.)
Call the visual feast “kaleido-cinema-scope” I guess. Not the
cleverest of names, but like the toy this ad begs multiple viewings. Every time
I try to keep up with the many movie characters whooshing across the screen in
a breathless blur, and every time find myself wonderfully lost in sheer
spectacle all over again.
You feel something similar when taking in Irish director Mark
Cousins’s documentary The Story of Film:
An Odyssey - a few moments you might recognize, but the ones you don’t make
the experience a stranger, more thrillingly exotic ride. And out of all the
several hundred selections at SIFF ‘12, a one-minute celebration of cinema
introducing this nine-hundred-minute celebration of cinema seems the most
fitting.
Last Thursday, part two of Odyssey
left viewers hanging at the brink of Sixties cinema (my favorite era). So I
entered part three earlier this week with some anticipation, thinking this time
Cousins won’t dig up too many obscure films and instead dive straight into more
recognizable classics. After all, it wouldn’t hurt to see a familiar face now
and then on this trip around the world.
Alas, the director holds fast to telling his story from a truly
global perspective. The first two hours consist of foreign film after foreign
film I have never seen been, let alone pronounce the title. This isn’t to say I
haven’t had fun watching the groundbreaking jump cuts in France’s Breathless, or Italy’s Sergio Leone
elevating westerns to sun-and-dust operas. But in his multiple Magellan-like
quests, Cousins prefers to leave American cinema until the end of his journey,
as if devaluing its impact. This thinking, I think, at times lessens the
entertainment value of his project (at least for American viewers like yours
truly).
Bruising from part three’s disappointments, I played a little
reverse pysch on myself. I lowered my expectations for last Thursday’s part
four, and ended up enjoying myself substantially more. We enter the Seventies,
and Cousins’s pacing has slowed to a comfortable level. Now he takes his time
studying a nation’s cinema, no longer cutting away to another film from another
time for comparison. The years roll on, and the images continue to astound - a
POV shot of a bullet going through Mick Jagger’s skull (no joke) in Performance (an absolute must-see for
cinephiles, says Cousins); those lovable Indians breaking into random musical
numbers in pictures like the 1975 epic Sholay.
Hollywood usually has its day in the sun, but reigned for an entire decade with
three unprecedented blockbusters: The
Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), and
Star Wars (1977). (Psst! Exorcist director William Friedkin will
attend SIFF this Saturday, June 9, for a retrospective/screening of his newest
work, Killer Joe.)
Then came the Eighties with Reagan, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Top Gun. Not much else happened.
The present of filmmaking rapidly approaches with the epic
conclusion to Odyssey this Tuesday.
The one solid perk about this series is you can jump in at any point, so even
if you missed the first twelve hours you haven’t missed a thing. I just hope
SIFF staff has diplomas waiting for the rest of us.
(Part Five plays at 7 P.M.
on Tuesday, June 5, at the SIFF Film Center - 305 Harrison St., Seattle. Find
tickets and other information at http://www.siff.net.)
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