Mark Cousins – MRQE

“Story of Film: An Odyssey, The”

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

A worldwide guided tour of the greatest movies ever made and the story of international cinema through the history of cinematic innovation.

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

One of the most important women in British modern art, the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was a highly inspirational figure, whose work was deeply impacted by a pivotal event in her life. In May 1949, this leading representative of the modernist St Ives group of artists climbed to the top of the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland, an experience which was to transform the way she saw the world.

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Directed by Mark Cousins, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock re-examines the vast filmography and legacy of one of the 20th centurys greatest filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock, through a new lens: through the auteurs own voice.

Marcia su Roma

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Through little-seen archival material and his characteristically cinematic analysis, Mark Cousins narrates the ascent of fascism in Italy and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. In The March on Rome, which is simultaneously an essay film and a historical document, Cousins contextualises history through the here and now, holding a mirror up to a political landscape marked by a creeping far right and manipulated media.

Here Be Dragons

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country’s film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins’ film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins’ road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: “If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet’s land.”

The Story of Film: A New Generation

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The final chapter of his exceptional 15-part documentary exploring the history of cinema, The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Mark Cousins builds a bridge between the before of the health crisis, and the after.

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Joining Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas on his annual pilgrimage to the Cannes Film Festival, filmmaker Mark Cousins gives an intimate glimpse into the life of the legendary icon behind some of the most controversial and acclaimed films of all time.

The Story of Looking

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

As he prepares for surgery to restore his vision, Mark Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of the human experience, empathy, discovery and thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to the other lookers for their vision from lockdown, and he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.

The Eyes of Orson Welles

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

A poetic journey into the visual world of the legendary filmmaker and actor Orson Welles (1915-85) that reveals a new portrait of a unique genius, both of his life and of his monumental work: through his own eyes, drawn by his own hand, painted with his own brush.

The First Movie

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

An innovative ‘magic realist’ documentary set in Iraq. Filmmaker Mark Cousins, who was brought up in a Northern Irish war zone, travels to Goptapa, a Kurdish-Iraqi village of just 700 people on a tributary of the Tigris river, and tries to make a dream film about a place that is normally only portrayed in current affairs programmes. He gives the kids cameras. They make little movies about war, love, a fish that goes to a magical place, and a chicken who debates justice. Despite the production being stopped twice by the Iraqi secret police, The First Movie is about wonder and the power of the imagination.