Mark Cousins (filmmaker)

Cousins interviewed famous filmmakers such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski in the TV series Scene by Scene. He presented the BBC cult film series Moviedrome from June 1997 to July 2000. He introduced 66 films for the show, including the little-seen Nicolas Roeg film Eureka.[1]

In 2009, Cousins and Tilda Swinton created a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck which was physically pulled through the Scottish Highlands. The traveling independent film festival was featured prominently in a documentary called Cinema is Everywhere. The festival was repeated in 2011.[2][3]

Robert Osborne, Mark Cousins and TCM senior vice president Charles Tabesh in 2014, with the Peabody Award that TCM received for its presentation of The Story of Film: An Odyssey

His 2011 film The Story of Film: An Odyssey[4][5] was broadcast as 15 one-hour television episodes[6] on More4,[4] and later, featured at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.[7] In September 2013, it began to be shown on Turner Classic Movies.[8] Drawing on its exhaustive film library, TCM complemented each episode with relevant short films and feature films ranging from the familiar to the rarely seen. TCM received a 2013 Peabody Award "for its inclusive, uniquely annotated survey of world cinema history".[9][10]

After The Story of Film, Cousins's next project was intentionally a small-scale work: What Is This Film Called Love? is a self-photographed diary of his three-day walk around Mexico City, accompanied by his imagined conversation with a photo of Sergei Eisenstein and reviewed as "fatuous" by Variety.[11] Another low-budget, quickly produced documentary, Here Be Dragons, covers a short film-watching trip he made to Albania and was also poorly received as indulgent and "random".[12] 6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia is structured around an imagined letter from Cousins to the author D. H. Lawrence, who wrote about a 1921 visit to Sardinia.[13] Life May Be was a collaboration with Iranian director and actor Mania Akbari, again making use of Cousins's familiar structural devices of letters, travel imagery, and voiceover commentary, judged "self-advertisement".[14]

A Story of Children and Film was better received. Its origins lay in some footage he shot of his niece and nephew at play, and grew into a documentary about the representation of children in cinema.[15][16][17][18][19]

Cousins subsequently wrote and directed I Am Belfast, in which the city is personified by a 10,000-year-old woman. Portions of the film in progress, with a score by Belfast composer David Holmes were screened at the 2014 Belfast Film Festival.[20] He is also working on a three-hour addendum to The Story of Film, on the subject of documentaries, entitled Dear John Grierson.[21]

In 2019 Cousins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh[22]

Born in Coventry, England,[23] Cousins was raised in Ballymena, Northern Ireland (where he attended St Louis Grammar School), and graduated in film, television and art at the University of Stirling.[20][24][25] Since 1984 he has been in a longterm personal relationship with Gill Moreton, a psychologist, whom he met at Stirling; they live in Edinburgh.[26][27]

• The First Movie (director, 2009)
• The Story of Film: An Odyssey (director and presenter, 2011)
• What Is This Film Called... Love? (director, 2012)
• A Story of Children and Film (director, writer, 2013)
• Here Be Dragons (director, writer, 2013)
• 6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia (director, writer, 2014)
• Life May Be (co-director, co-writer with Mania Akbari, 2014)
• Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise (director, 2015)[28]
• I Am Belfast (director, writer, 2015)
• Stockholm, My Love (director, co-writer with Anita Oxburgh, 2016)
• The Eyes of Orson Welles (director, writer, narrator, 2018)
• Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema[29] (director, 2018)

• Scene by Scene (2002)
• The Story of Film (2004; re-issued in 2011)
• Widescreen: Watching Real People Elsewhere (2008)
• The Story of Looking (2017)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mark Cousins (film critic).

• Mark Cousins discography at Discogs
• Mark Cousins at IMDb
• Mark Cousins articles at Prospect magazine (registration required)
• Mark Cousins articles at The Guardian