The exuberant film critic's tremendous new documentary The First Movie records the triumph of imagination, even over war
Not many critics also get to be accomplished film-makers, but one such is Mark Cousins, a brilliantly exuberant movie writer whose passionate, celebratory and sensual relationship with the cinema is, I think, a refreshing corrective to the over-snarky tendencies of Fleet Street criticism. Many will know him from the sadly defunct BBC series Scene by Scene, which ran from 1996 to 2001, from his excellent one-volume cinema history The Story of Film and also from his collaborative partnership with Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton. It was this partnership which gave birth to the Nairn film festival.
This was, and is, an ongoing experiment in reinventing cinema as a grassroots audience experience, a way of bringing the cinema to people without the intermediate commercial panoply of exhibitors and distributors. Cousins and Swinton created a travelling roadshow,...
Not many critics also get to be accomplished film-makers, but one such is Mark Cousins, a brilliantly exuberant movie writer whose passionate, celebratory and sensual relationship with the cinema is, I think, a refreshing corrective to the over-snarky tendencies of Fleet Street criticism. Many will know him from the sadly defunct BBC series Scene by Scene, which ran from 1996 to 2001, from his excellent one-volume cinema history The Story of Film and also from his collaborative partnership with Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton. It was this partnership which gave birth to the Nairn film festival.
This was, and is, an ongoing experiment in reinventing cinema as a grassroots audience experience, a way of bringing the cinema to people without the intermediate commercial panoply of exhibitors and distributors. Cousins and Swinton created a travelling roadshow,...
- 12/10/2009
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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