Almost 150 years after the invention of documentary cinema, it is hard to imagine the impact that its discovery would have had at the time. Director Mark Cousins made his return to the Central Scotland Documentary Festival this year to showcase the first instalment of his newest film, The Story of Documentary Film, a 16-hour film which looks at the history of documentary.
The Introduction of Documentary Film
Through a series of questions posed to the audience at the beginning of the film, the audience is urged to forget what they know about documentary film and see it with fresh eyes.
From Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory to Man with a Movie Camera, Cousins montages sequences from a plethora of documentaries to represent the evolution of documentary cinema. Through accompanying voiceover, Cousins constructs a narrative by contextualising seemingly disparate films and chronicling the introduction of the documentary genre and its global reception.
There is a large focus on the ways of seeing. Cousins uses motifs of eyes to represent the ability of the early documentary film to capture the unknown and inform global audiences of the different cultures in unexplored parts of the world. The documentary film in this era, as today, provided visual evidence of how different cultures lived.
Whilst Cousins’ voiceover suggests a certain element of admiration for this, he also criticises the ethics behind this genre of documentary and questions whether it exploits its subjects. Using the example of Moana (1926), he questions whether the documentary appropriates and exploits the Samoan culture for the entertainment of Western audiences, or if it attempts to restore cultural traditions that were forcibly removed by colonisers.
What do we Learn?
In all, the film is more informative than it is entertaining. Cousins’ open-ended questions do not give the audience the satisfaction of direct answers but instead encourage reflection. I do not have any particular problems with this approach but do question how it affects the integrity of the film’s informative nature.
Paired with his signature, yet somewhat monotonous, delivery, I wonder whether the opening segment of this film can be considered a documentary or, rather, a compilation of documentary cinema’s best bits. Which, of course, is not to say that the two must be mutually exclusive…
That said, I am intrigued by how the film will progress in the next segment, as it moves into the 30s, with Cousins hinting at coverage of propaganda documentary as this instalment came to a close. For those who are interested in the evolution of documentary cinema, this is an unmissable film that offers insight into the development of the genre and key theories surrounding it. However, outside of this group, I am unsure how it will fare.
Feature Image Credit: Macrobert Arts Centre
