In 2011, writer/director/essayist Mark Cousins released The Story of Film: An Odyssey, a 15-hour documentary covering the first 100 years of cinema’s story. In 2021, Cousins returned to his monumental work with a new supplement: A New Generation. 

I spoke with Cousins over Zoom in 2022 when A New Generation was being released theatrically by Music Box Films—the very company that brought both stories together this year for the Blu-ray release of The Complete Story of Film. And since The Complete Story of Film is one of the best home video discs of 2023, I’ve decided to run my full Sept. 25, 2022 interview with Cousins. As you will read, the date is somewhat meaningful, as it was the day Cousins inked the deal to make The Story of Documentary Films. 

The following has been edited for length, clarity, and Zoom garbles.

Michael Casey: In The Story of Film, you covered the first century of cinema through ideas and innovation. At what point did you think to yourself: Okay, we have enough ideas and enough innovation in the 21st century. Let’s put pen to paper.

Mark Cousins: Yeah, I didn’t really want to do it, to be totally honest. It was hard work to make The Story of Film—the original Story of Film. I backpacked around the world, and it was low-budget.

[At this point, Cousins, speaking to me from his editing suite in Edinburgh, notices that he’s losing the light. Always the filmmaker, Cousins reframes the Zoom camera, narrating as he goes, before carrying on.]

Cousins: But then a lot of good stuff happened, a lot of good stuff in cinema happened—not only in cinema but in society and technology as well. So all these rabbits were running, you know. There’s social change, technological change, and aesthetic change. And I thought: “Oh, why don’t we give it another go?”

Casey: You Tweeted back in 2015 after you’d seen Mad Max: Fury Road, about how you wanted to consider where you would have placed [Fury Road] in The Story of Film. And I think you thought about Stagecoach. Was that around the time when…

Cousins: That’s right. You’re right. Yeah, but when you see something like Fury Road, you know—I don’t want to keep telling the story of cinema, in some ways, because I’ve got other things to do. But when you see something like Fury Road… It was so magnificent, wasn’t it? And you think: “Oh, my God. Cinema has been rejuvenated.” It’s come alive, again, as a result of Fury Road. So, then, I think I need to go back to that story that I’ve been telling and update it a bit.

Casey: Can you talk a little bit about the process of making [A New Generation]? In The Story of Film, you have a lot of interviews with filmmakers, but not so much in A New Generation. Was that COVID?

Cousins: That was partly because I made it under lockdown, you know, COVID. And so there were no opportunities to travel. You see a little bit of other places in A New Generation: you see New York and you see Madrid. And so I had filmed that stuff before COVID happened. But then I’ve also changed myself, as a filmmaker, you know, I don’t—I find it harder and harder to make interviews cinematic. And so it wasn’t only COVID that forced me to do no interviews—this time—it was also my evolution as a filmmaker. I think that I can maybe pare it down and get closer to the analysis and the poetics by doing it without the interviews.

Casey: It feels more personal, kind of like some of your more recent stuff, like Story of Looking and even [My Name is Alfred Hitchcock].

[My Name is Alfred Hitchcock is a 2022 documentary Cousins made about the famous filmmaker. I had seen it earlier that month at the Telluride Film Festival, where Cousins received the festival’s highest honor: the Silver Medallion.]

Cousins: Thanks for coming to that. Yeah, it is more personal, you know, but I think it’s not that I’m moving in a more personal direction. It’s just some of the stuff is more intimate, and some of it isn’t. So [My Name is Alfred Hitchcock], I think, is not intimate. But this one, The Story of Film: A New Generation, is more—I would say less, not so much personal, but emotional. Because you remember, as I do, that during the COVID times we were forced inside our own apartments.

[Cousins moves the Zoom camera around and shows me his work studio, his “private space.”]

Cousins: But the private space is also a cinematic space. We go inside our heads. I think cinema was a kind of comfort. And we watched old movies to comfort ourselves in the bad times of COVID. If there’s a kind of slightly melancholic quality to the end of Story of Film: A New Generation that comes from that. It’s like: We feel vulnerable, and in the COVID times, we felt vulnerable in a new way. So that’s probably what the flavor is in the end of the film,

Casey: Was there something in particular you were looking for when you were making a new generation?

Cousins: Always innovation. Always innovation. You want to feel the aliveness of cinema. Jean Luc-Godard has just died, as you know. [Godard, who was known for movies like Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, Goodbye to Language, and dozens more, died at the age of 91 in his home in Rolle, Switzerland, on Sept. 9, 2022.] He, whatever you think of him, he was a kind of cattle prod into cinema. He electrified us and many other things as well. So I’m looking for the kind of electricity, I would say that voltage, that cattle prod. And it’s still there.

Casey: Is it more in—I don’t want to say art films, but maybe in more foreign films than it is in Hollywood studio films?

Cousins: Well, you can see The Story of Film: A New Generation is not an elite or snobby view of cinema. It starts with Joker and Frozen, you know. And hopefully, that raised a smile on your face when I connect those two. But you know, I’ve always tried to be category blind, Michael. So, I’ve always tried to make sure that I didn’t believe that only Jean Luc-Godard was the savior of the medium. When you see an innovative mainstream film, when they’re so exciting—so, no, the energy is not only an art cinema. Like, [2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse] film was so brilliant. To see the Spider-Verse film was in some way as innovative as Godard.

Casey: I’ll agree with that. One of the things I found most interesting about cinema studies in the past 20 years is that there’s been a great reclamation of voices that were left out of the 20th century—whether they were female voices or Black voices or marginalized filmmakers or filmmakers from countries that were overlooked. They’re now getting championed a lot more, whether it’s through restoration and release on home video and from some of the docs that you’ve been making. And I wonder, sometimes, if part of being in the 21st century is trying to recontextualize and understand what the 20th century was. I was wondering if this is something that comes across when you are going through and putting together your documentaries.

Cousins: Yeah, I think that’s a very interesting question. I have not been asked that before. I would say that it’s not a 21st century question; it’s an eternal question. What did we miss? What did we leave out? What, in our enthusiasm or worse, can we say chauvinism? What did we actually not realize? What was happening around us—that when I say us, you know, you and I are both white guys, right? And so, you know, we have to ask ourselves these questions as well, and in a stronger way. But yes, of course, when you look back with the benefit of hindsight, I can see what great things that were happening that were not in the conversation. And, you know, in my films about cinema, I try to challenge the conversation a little bit.

[Cousins flashes me one of his many tattoos, this one with the name of the great Ukranian filmmaker Kira Muratova.]

Cousins: Kira Muratova was not in the conversation when she died—one of the greatest ever filmmakers. Was she mentioned at the Oscars? No, she wasn’t. And I remember predicting that she wouldn’t be, and she wasn’t. And yet she was really great. But you acknowledged, quite rightly, that things are changing, and she is getting there. And she, Kinona Tanaka [the Japanese filmmaker], is getting there. And Forough Farrokhzad [the Iranian filmmaker]. There, there is a will to change. And there’s a kind of genuine, passionate desire to say, “Okay, we’re not going to blame all those people who ignored the great filmmakers, but we can incorporate them now.” And we can improve cinema as a result.

Casey: There seems to be a bit of a change of how people are watching movies, not just physically—whether what screens they are watching on, or whether they’re watching them in communities versus individually—but what audiences are trying to get out of movies. Whether it has to do with the voices telling the story or what the story is about. There’s a lot of focus on the content in the frame. And I was wondering, when you sit down to make one of your documentaries, how much do you think about what the audience might be wanting from your documentary? And how much you want to give the audience?

Cousins: Could you expand on the first part of your question by what people want out of cinema and just tell me a bit more about what you mean by that?

Casey: I was thinking along the lines of identity politics, whether it has to do with representation, whether it has to do with diversity, both in front and behind the camera. And also the idea of: This person telling the story, are they the correct person to be telling the story?

Cousins: I understand. Well, you know… Imagine you’re a 28-year-old woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s. And you see Calamity Jane, Doris Day, and you see “Secret Love,” her singing “Secret Love.” And maybe you’re queer? Maybe or maybe not. That might have been a profound emotional experience. Imagine if you’re in Iran in 1988 or ’99, let’s say 1995. And you see The Apple, directed by Samira Makhmalbaf. That would be a profound experience. Cinema has always been great at affirming somebody’s identity. And they’re multiple identities. So, yes, the conversation around identity politics is obviously accelerated, but it’s not new for cinema. Cinema has always been very good at that. I would argue, Michael, that cinema has been ahead of the game. Because what it has said is, you are multiple. When you watch a film, I don’t know if you feel this too, but I feel like I am several people at once. You know, the androgyny of cinema and the anarchic quality of cinema. People are catching up with what cinema has been able to do, which is to say, “Yes, this is you. Believe in yourself.”

Casey: I wholeheartedly agree with you. Now, I’m sure you were asked this question when you were doing the press tour for The Story of Film, and I imagine you said something along the lines that you didn’t want to do an update, but here we are now with A New Generation. I don’t want to ask you if you are planning on an update, but what would be what would it take to push it back into the forefront of your mind with so many projects that you’re working on? So many things you want to say and do?

Cousins: No, thank you for that. Thank you for your loose caveats. Yeah, you know… Okay, I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t said, so this is an exclusive, and I don’t know if it’s interesting, but it’s exclusive: Today I signed a contract for The Story of Documentary Cinema. Because there isn’t really a good international history—like a big, 10-hour history of documentary cinema—and I’m talking about Japanese cinema and Iranian cinema and, of course, American or European. But, just today, I signed that contract. So you’re the first person in the world that I’ve told you about that.

[At this point, Music Box Film’s PR agent jumps in to confirm that Cousins can A) reveal this information publicly and B) that she’s as excited as I am about the news.]

Cousins: I know, I know. I will call my producer after this, but yes, I’m happy to say.

Casey: That is exciting! I remember when Sight and Sound released their best documentary list, and you had a response to that about what was missing from the list. So this is exciting news to hear, indeed.

Cousins: Well, you know, every time we talk about cinema, we always have to say what’s missing, you know? When you talk about these lists of great documentary films. And there are no Indian films on there. And there, there are very few Japanese films—the best documentaries ever made are from Japan. So yeah, that’s the new thing.

Casey: When you sat down to do A New Generation, did you have a particular process? Like you were when you were talking about the My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, you showed us the lunchboxes. [Cousins is a big fan of bringing props to his Q&As. At the Telluride Film Festival, he showed the audience a series of lunchbox bags where he organized the documentaries governing themes.] Anything like that for A New Generation?

Cousins: Similar thing. Because you saw me there, you know I don’t like working on this computer screen. And I feel that’s quite confining. So I get a big sheet of paper or use other methods. And so this is the method for A New Generation.

[Cousins holds a large “scribble sheet” toward the Zoom camera.]

Cousins: So this sheet probably took about 40 minutes, certainly no more than an hour to make. And so it says here: surrealism and dreams. Hard To Be a God. Attenberg. And then see that big line there? That’s like halfway through the film. And that’s exactly what happened, you know. But this is the first part shown here. And then that line is halfway through, that’s where I talk about expanding and breaking the language. So always, always, always, there’s a big sheet of paper. Or there’s something which is not a Word document to help me. And this is my edit suite. So my editor writes there. And so I hang these paper up there. And then that’s that.