sunday, august 7, 9 pm: here be dragons

[pirate cinema berlin]

Mark Cousins, best known for his 15-hour "The Story of Film" (1), is invited to 
a film festival in Albania. He has never been there before, so he brings his 
camera. From the moment he boards the plane, he begins to film what he sees: a 
sunset at 30,000 feet, the book he is reading, then the view from his hotel, 
the street in front of it, a dog, a pyramid, the national film archives, later 
a group of kids, a puddle of water, and a car that disappears into the distance.
What drives his film are not the books he has read or the movies he has seen, 
some of which he intercuts with his own footage, but that in fact he knows so 
little about Albania, and thus has to rely on his own eyes. He insists that 
when you make an image, there is something that can be seen in it (actually 
seen, as opposed to read, thought, remembered or projected), and from this 
astonishingly simple yet strangely controversial premise (who, other than a 
very small number of mostly French filmmakers and intellectuals, most of whom 
by today are either very old or dead, has ever in all seriousness insisted on 
the sense of seeing, on seeing with one's own eyes?), he proceeds to build an 
astonishingly simple yet strangely controversial film. Controversial for a 
number of reasons, above all because quite a few people rather strongly dislike 
Cousin's intonation, the way he slightly raises his voice at the end of every 
single sentence he speaks, which may occasionally mask as a profound statement 
of truth what is not much more than the admission of a banality, and gives some 
of his arguments a faint but audible air of faux-naïveté, as if the stories he 
keeps telling us were directed at children rather than grown-ups. The one thing 
Cousin is not guily of, however, is turning his travelogue into yet another 
boring, second-hand take on the genre of the "essay film", and he owes that 
precisely to the inescapable boredom of professional travel, and the obvious 
second-handedness of his ideas and materials. He should make more of these, 
since we have rarely seen anyone so obviously influenced by Chris Marker's 
"Sans soleil" come up with such a thoroughly convincing, easily reproducible 
and almost entirely unembarrassing form of filmmaking for themselves.

(1) https://0xdb.org/title=the_story_of_film

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                                                            pirate cinema berlin
                                                                u kottbusser tor
                                                          sunday, august 7, 9 pm

                                                                 here be dragons
                                                     mark cousins, 2013, 77 mins
                                           trailer: https://youtu.be/I85hiKIRXRo

                                                                  12 seats, rsvp
                                                          first come first serve
                                                       location in separate mail

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