Award-Winning Director Mark Cousins Tells ‘The Story Of Documentary Film’ From 1890s To Present Day In Epic Series – Sundance Film Festival

Scottish Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins isn’t afraid to think big.

“It’s always good to aim high,” he tells Deadline. “I mean, we can nibble at life and take it gingerly or we can gorge.”

He gorges on nonfiction cinema in his 16-hour series The Story of Documentary Filman encyclopedic exploration of the medium produced by Cousins’ frequent collaborator, John Archer. Chapter 1 just premiered at Sundance (it screens again on Sunday in Salt Lake City); the Berlinale will host the international premiere of that first chapter and the world premiere of chapters 2-4.

“John and I, this is the third history of cinema we’ve done together. And each one we embark on with some trepidation, maybe,” Cousins notes. “When you make something like this, you need a system, you need a grid, you need some kind of scheme, otherwise you get lost in the labyrinth.”

The scheme here, as Cousins observes in voiceover in Chapter 1, is to examine “the innovative films, the boundary pushers” from the beginning of documentary (the beginning of cinema itself, actually) through to the present. He finds those boundary pushers not just in the usual places – Lyon, France, Edison’s New Jersey, Robert Flaherty’s frozen north – but in Palestine 1986, Spain 1912, Soviet Russia in the 1920s, and in later decades in Africa, India and elsewhere.

He’s confident audiences are looking for a compendious view of the artform, one that crosses national boundaries.

“We feel that people are hungry to want to know how things fit into the bigger picture,” he observes. “I’ve worked with a lot of young people and they want to know, ‘Okay, we’re in a political moment. Where did this come from? How does that fit?’ As we know, Michael Brewer is influenced by French cinema and French cinema is influenced by Arabic cinema. So, let’s tell full rich story rather than a sort of almost nationalistic sub story.”

Cousins brings fresh eyes to the pioneering work of the Lumière Brothers in Lyon. A clip of their 50-second-long 1895 film Baby’s Meal shows Auguste Lumière’s wife Marguerite pouring tea into a cup and sipping it. Except Cousins notices the teapot is empty and so is the cup. In that sequence, already we see the question arise of staging which will preoccupy documentary going forward. To what degree are documentary filmmakers tempted to fiddle with reality while ostensibly presenting a clear and unadulterated image of it?

The Lumière Brothers dispatched camera operators around the world to capture scenes people back home had never witnessed – the “roving eye” as Cousins puts it.

“The question is always, who’s telling the story from where, when, and why. And at the beginning of documentary, it was people from wealthy countries… It was people going outwards,” Cousins says. “They weren’t cynical people, those first filmmakers, those pioneers, they were just trying to say, ‘My God, look at this thing.’ But we had to get to a point quite soon after that where people out there in Egypt, in Palestine, in India, got their hands on the means of production themselves. And when they did — and that was roughly from the 1950s in Africa, and then the explosion of great Indian docs in the ’70s — when you get to that part… then the language enriches, the artform enriches.”

He adds, “We don’t need to be cynical or hate those early pioneers who said, ‘Look at the pyramids and look at these exotic people,’ but we can’t wait to see people of actual Egypt getting their hands on the camera and saying, ‘Look at our own story.’ …As we watch the story of documentary evolve, we feel these new voices, and it feels like the choir is getting bigger and wider and richer.”

Cousins says of The Story of Documentary Film“There’s a kind of optimism in this project.” And indeed, in a still photo released for the series, the director is shown wearing a T-shirt with the words “Documentary kills fascism.” That is not universally true, of course, and the series explores the work of Leni Riefenstahl, the German director known as “Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.” Her documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympiavisually stunning and influential to this day, were made in service to Nazi ideology.

Cousins says he spoke by phone with Riefenstahl several times before her death in 2003 at the age of 101. But he notes a dissenting voice of cinema from Riefenstahl’s time.

“There’s another great German female filmmaker in the 1930s called Ella Bergmann-Michel, and she’s doing beautiful documentaries where she’s filming people looking at the Hitler propaganda with a quizzical eye,” he says. “And what we can do is say, ‘Okay, we know Leni Riefenstahl. We can’t ignore Leni Riefenstahl. We can talk about her a lot.’ But at the same moment, in the same place, there was another female director doing brilliant humanistic work. So, this is a bit of widening, of opening the curtain, pulling back the veil to show actually, if we care about human beings and we actually look, documentary has done such great work.”

He continues, “Documentary has been on the side of the devils as well as the angels… There’s no denying that documentary’s done terrible things, not only in Germany, across Africa in many ways and in the Soviet sphere as well… [But] if somebody watches the whole of the story of documentary film, I think they can’t be a fascist. It’s impossible because you see such nuances, ways of living around the world, in South America and Africa, et cetera.”

Cousins will be attending the Berlin Film Festival, but at a time of growing authoritarianism in the U.S., he made the decision not to travel to the Sundance Film Festival.

“I’m going to get emotional here,” he prefaces. “America is not a great place to visit at the moment. The values that Robert Redford had when he founded Sundance Institute with others are being systematically undermined by Donald Trump and the current regime. One of the last times I went to the U.S., I went through Chicago O’Hare [airport] and I was taken into a side room for 90 minutes and really asked detailed questions about my passport and why did I have a visa for China? And I think Egypt, I can’t remember. And I’m not brown or Black, right? So, I get an easier passage than people who are brown or Black… When your government uses language — it calls people’s scum or talks about shithole countries — you just have a sense that the U.S. is not easy to get into at the moment.”

Cousins adds, “I should say, I love Sundance. I want to be there… I’ve also been outspoken. I’ve made two films about the far right, Mussolini, and about Holocaust deniers. And I don’t just want to get to the U.S. and then be rejected. We are honored, John [and me]that our film is in Sundance, and we passionately believe in the values of Sundance, but we need to understand that the U.S. has become a place that is risky for those of us who are passionate internationalists.”

The Story of Documentary Film comes at a time when there is both an explosion of nonfiction cinema and yet significant challenges getting that content to viewers. Streamers have shown an increasing appetite for biographical films about famous people.

“The celebrity doc is just depressing,” producer John Archer avers, adding in an apparent illusion to the new Melania Trump documentary, “Somebody gets, what, $40 million. What are they going to reveal?”

Archer acknowledges the current state of documentary distribution will impact how The Story of Documentary Film gets seen. “On The Story of Film [2011]we had Channel 4 who we were working with. There’s no way a broadcaster in the UK wants to take on something this big [the new series]. And I think that’s a shame. They have the space and they should have the breadth of imagination. For the price of one normal documentary, they could have 16 hours’ history on a streamer, on the BBCI Player, on All 4, or whatever the Channel 4 one’s called now, but it’s probably too serious for them. And too international.”

But Archer adds, “One of the great things about working with Mark is that the audience is international. So, even if we don’t make much of a sale in the UK, we know we [will] elsewhere, and people want to see what he does. So, it’s not as big a risk as it might appear.”

Cousins expresses confidence in the inherent appeal of the material. “I think also people want to know about the world because their time on this planet is quite short and you want to know about things, you want to know about how brilliant it is to be alive and you want to know what it’s like to be in the Amazon or to be in Iran, et cetera,” he notes. “I think that’s why the current U.S. government is completely, completely wrong about humanity because it thinks that people aren’t interested in things outside themselves. But actually, they are. Before we kick the bucket, as we say, we want to feel as if we’ve seen life and that’s what documentary can do.”