BERLIN, winter 2026: the Berlinale film festival, with thick snow on the ground. But we\u2019re cosy in the modernist brick surrounds of the Akademie der Kunste. On stage, the man who knows more about cinema than anyone else in Scotland, the filmmaker Mark Cousins.<\/p>\n
Originally from Belfast, now long resident in Edinburgh<\/a>, Cousins is previewing four extracts from his new magnum opus \u2013 an ambitious 16-hour, 16-episode-long mega-project called The Story Of Documentary Film, produced by Hopscotch Films in Glasgow.<\/p>\n I ask if he remembers the first documentary that made an impression on him, and he\u2019s quick to zoom in on his childhood.<\/p>\n \u201cI was brought up in a home where there was never a discussion about culture or creativity. I mean, I didn\u2019t even know documentaries were directed.<\/p>\n \u201cGrowing up in Belfast, there must have been a Panorama about the Troubles, so when I was a wee boy, maybe about age seven, I remember seeing dead bodies from Belfast in coffins. And there was the shock in that \u2013 to see fear and war on TV<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew that there was fear in our community, in our city, but to see that TV could report this was probably the first moment I became aware of documentaries. That documentary had this power to shock. Combined with that, it had a moral seriousness.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in his Edinburgh flat on a Zoom call, I remind him of the Q&A session from Berlin and his pride in showing a large paper chart that outlined the enormous planning behind The Story Of Documentary Film: \u201cI always use charts on big sheets of paper \u2013 I\u2019m a visual person more than a verbal person \u2013 so any project must start, almost like a child\u2019s, with a big piece of wallpaper to get the shape of it.<\/p>\n “I realised I wanted to tell the story broadly chronologically. I could have done it by themes, but I felt most people don\u2019t know this chronology, so I put the decades along the top from the 1890s to 2020s and then down the side was the most important bit \u2013 the parts of the world \u2013 the countries, and the continents. It was crucial for me that the project was international and not Eurocentric or Atlanticist.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s passionate that Africa, India and South America should be represented. And he\u2019s an internationalist suspicious of those who say the greatest movies are all from America and Europe.<\/p>\n We talk too about how he has situated the decades quite specifically \u2013 rather than randomly \u2013 as for example using Egypt when he\u2019s talking about the 1950s, the age of decolonialisation. Or America in the 1960s, the time of Black Panthers. As for the 1970s, he homes in on Scotland because of the arrival of North Sea<\/a> oil and the first UK feminist collectives being set up in Edinburgh.<\/p>\n We digress into talk on Scottish directors and Scottish documentaries \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cScotland has always made good documentaries, and it\u2019s exactly 100 years since the sainted John Grierson came up with the phrase \u2018documentary\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cYou think too of Harry Watt and Night Mail (1936), most people don\u2019t know he was an Edinburgh lad. In the 1950s, there was Margaret Tait.<\/p>\n \u201cMore recently, there\u2019s Emma Davie and Graham Fagen too, with his Robert Burns film, The Slave\u2019s Lament. In each era, Scotland has made interesting work.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of my favourites is Thomas Riedelsheimer\u2019s film on Evelyn Glennie \u2013 Touch The Sound. We\u2019ve always done good work because the industry in Scotland has never been Hollywood; it\u2019s at the lower budget end: fertile ground.\u201d<\/p>\n I ask him to expand on the early rules of documentary.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a new type of consciousness. There was fictional cinema of course, but no-one had taken a camera and just pointed it at, say, the Pyramids, and asked, \u2018look at this space and time, this simple movement, this elsewhere\u2019. Quite simple but quite moving.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryday life elsewhere: where human beings could look at other human beings doing their daily business<\/a>. Documentary\u2019s implicit ability to show other lives in real time is magnificent.\u201d<\/p>\n We talk of the quotidian and how documentary says \u201cLook!\u201d, from Andy Warhol observing someone asleep to a TikTok clip he talks about featuring a young Scottish woman who\u2019s just bought a Chinese takeaway. Pointing at the meal, she\u2019s asking us: Check out the scran. He compares these episodes of micro-footage to the early experiments of the Lumiere brothers.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s witness bearing that says: look at what I\u2019m about to eat in Glasgow!\u201d<\/p>\n Unpretentious. So, this is real life. We move on to another Glaswegian \u2013 the artist Douglas Gordon \u2013 and a new documentary on his life and world directed by Finlay Pretsell.<\/p>\n Gordon once made a terrific study of an elephant, and this leads us to chat about animals in The Story Of Documentary Film.<\/p>\n There\u2019s elephant imagery here too, where one is about to be electrocuted and, in another disturbing sequence, we see a horse killed at a knacker\u2019s yard. Was this a deliberate rejoinder to the arguably overly aesthetic take on animal life as depicted by David Attenborough\u2019s films?<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve got some of that kind of imagery on show as with Luc Jacquet\u2019s March Of The Penguins (2005), but no, I wasn\u2019t trying to obliquely comment on TV documentaries about animals.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m awestruck at the range of The Story Of Documentary Film, and ask him about his omnivorous interests. Was anything off-limits?<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t used any pornographic imagery. Or \u2018mockumentary\u2019 because that involves actors. But that\u2019s about it. I\u2019ve tried to look at the full spectrum of life \u2013 the high and the low and the everything in-between, the public and the private. A portrait of the last 120 years through this medium.\u201d<\/p>\n I tell him that what I\u2019ve seen so far of his film reminds me of the idea we see our life flash before our eyes before we die.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I talk too in the other episodes about another big theme: the \u2018unseen\u2019 \u2013 the fact that film didn\u2019t catch the life of Jesus Christ and only very little of the traumas at Auschwitz. But \u2026 to be uplifting again, I love that phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson: \u2018A thousand coloured pictures to the eye\u2019. So, as such, you can see the project as one big, long kaleidoscope of visual moments.\u201d<\/p>\n I ask if there\u2019s a risk of desensitisation through over-exposure to traumatic imagery, as with the terrible scenes from Gaza<\/a> and Ukraine<\/a>?<\/p>\n \u201cI suppose people can become desensitised if profoundly disturbing imagery is repeated in certain contexts. Hence, Claude Lanzmann\u2019s strictures against visualising the horrors of the Holocaust in his documentary Shoah (1985). It\u2019s true that the context might flatten the moral seriousness of something. But if you see atrocity footage in the right context, it\u2019s as if you\u2019re seeing it for the first time.<\/p>\n \u201cVirginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin talk about how we might re-encounter the reality of something that is very familiar to us. How do we avoid becoming blas\u00e9?\u201d<\/p>\n He reminds me that he didn\u2019t think it necessary to show the actual electrification of that elephant.<\/p>\n \u201cYou show things if it\u2019s necessary, but you don\u2019t want to hurt people. But we can\u2019t protect ourselves from atrocity, and it often comes in unexpected ways.\u201d<\/p>\n First do no harm. We talk of the non-western documentarians he favours.<\/p>\n \u201cAbout three-quarters of the project is from the non-Western world. First, there\u2019s the Indian Mani Kaul and his masterpiece Siddeshwari (1989) about a Hindi singer. I\u2019d also champion Anand Patwardhan and the great Japanese documentarians of the 1970s; it\u2019s a global art form. Given the awful things going on in Iran just now, I\u2019d also highlight The House Is Black (1963), a film about leprosy, by Forugh Farrokhzad. I\u2019d mention too the Latvian Herz Frank and his film about a man on death row called The Last Judgement (1987). There\u2019s so much! You could spend your life just watching great documentaries and still not run out of them!\u201d<\/p>\n We close with a discussion about AI and its potentially damaging effect on truth-telling. I ask about documentaries and the nature of truth, and we both laugh at the crazy immensity of such a simple question.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople have spent their whole careers and professorships asking that! Documentary is broadly centrifugal in its imagination \u2013 it\u2019s interested in what\u2019s outside ourselves. It\u2019s generous. It\u2019s a solidarity machine that helps us to understand the struggles of others.<\/p>\n That\u2019s all good. But others have used it for bad reasons.<\/p>\n \u201cDocumentary can be on the side of the devil and the angel. It\u2019s a technology. AI is a technology too, and it is scary, but I suddenly realised it\u2019s a bit like photography when it arrived. Painters had to think quickly: \u2018What can I do that it can\u2019t do.\u2019 This is exactly where we are with AI.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve taken its arrival as a creative spur to try and think more originally about this great art form. I try to make new connections about documentary, and I\u2019m proud of that. AI should push people to be more creative. And do not use it to lie to the audience. You must say if you\u2019ve used it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BERLIN, winter 2026: the Berlinale film festival, with thick snow on the ground. 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