 |
Mark Cousins: The Story of Documentary Film (Scotland/GB 2026). Agnès Varda frames the image in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (FR 2000).
|
Telluride Film Festival (TFF) 2026
Viewed at Masons Hall Cinema, 7 Sep 2026
Moderated by Jason Silverman.
TFF 2026 Program Guide:
Part 1 C/Fri 10AM - Part 2 C/Fri 2:15PM - Part 3 MV/Sat 8:30AM - Part 4 M/Mon 9AM Q&A
38 The Story of Documentary Film
Jason Silverman: "Mark Cousins, our most eloquent and prolific cinephile, has directed some 60+ hours of documentaries. His latest Herculean effort, a 16-hour film, exists in a class by itself, an encyclopedic yet poetic summary-analysis-celebration of non-fiction film that travels the globe and spans 130 years, from pre-Lumière experiments to today. He shares exquisite clips of city symphonies, ethnographic treasures, Fascist propaganda and personal essays in an endless, continually fascinating stream (the film would be a thrill to watch even as a silent reel). His narration alternates between astounding factoids, provocative musings, political insights and odd confluences (the film starts with shots of elephants, taken over the course of 100+ years). Cousins has gifted us more than the story of documentary: it’s a story of big ideas, of truth and truthiness, of history unfolding before our very eyes. Watching it, in part or in whole, will rewire you." –JS (Scotland/U.K., 2026, 960m, shown in four parts) In person: Mark Cousins,
John Archer, Joslyn Barnes
Chapter 12: The 2000s Part 1: One Day in September
Chapter 13: The 2000s Part 2: Trouble the Water
Chapter 14: The 2010s Part 1: Avenger Assemble
Chapter 15: The 2010s Part 2: Beyond Borders
Chapter 16: The 2020s: All That Breathes
AA: The last stretch of Mark Cousins's marathon of history and cinema is devoted to the 21st century. In Chapter 12 the focus is on the September 11 attacks in 2001 - al-Qaeda's suicide attacks against the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. Cousins meditates on the existential fear and the panic that ensued in the White House, leading to "endless wars" in the Middle East which last to this day.
Cousins reflects on the relationship of the incredible reality with monster movies such as King Kong. Discussed are major movies on the aftermath such as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (the Patriot Act), Jehane Noujaim's Control Room (based on Al Jazeera coverage), Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (the Iraq war) and Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (US torture practice in Afghanistan).
Rithy Panh is introduced with his stunning S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, about the genocide in Cambodia. Israeli occupation of Palestine is examined in Raanan Alexandrowicz's The Inner Tour, Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir and Avi Mograbi's Avenge But One of My Two Eyes.
The new subgenre of skating movies is represented by Stacy Peralta's Dogtown and Z-Boys. The montage movie expands into the kaleidoscope cinema of Tarnation, in which the director Jonathan Caouette comes to terms with family madness. Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans, about a family's legacy of incest, is included.
Another expansion of the montage movie is Thom Andersen's essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, consisting entirely of clips from entertainment films with an emphasis on the documentary reality of their location shooting. In contrast, Terence Davies crafts Of Time and he City, his wonderful collage film of his native Liverpool, from newsreels and non-fiction.
Ecology is a growing theme. The misunderstanding or maltreatment of animals is discussed in Werner Herzog's The Grizzly Man and Louie Psihovos's The Cove (dolphins). The epic scale of pollution is exposed by Xia Jangke in Dong (mercury contamination). The extreme danger in labour conditions and the exposure to poisoning is the subject in six chapters of Workingman's Death by Michael Glawogger.
I am surprised to discover here a Finnish film I was not aware of: Dariusz Kowalski's Luukkaankoski. It is a vision of "abstract nature": footage of a freeway at night transforming into a metaphysical vision.
Cousins kick-starts Chapter 13 with Jackass reality slapstick footage about self-inflicted pain, seguing into Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, the masterpiece about the corruption behind the 2008 financial crisis. We are back to madness (but perhaps we have never left it) with Slavoj Žižek and The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Self-inflicted pain is pursued also by Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me (a human experiment on himself at McDonald's restaurants). The timeless legacy of recycling is discovered as a philosophical principle by Agnès Varda in her masterpiece Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse.
Laura Poitras enters the story with Flag Wars, about the culture clash of gay white inhabitants with their black working-class neighbourhood.
Ecological calamity keeps expanding as a theme. The Hurricane Katrina is discussed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal in Trouble the Water and Spike Lee in his magnificent series When the Levees Broke. From Al Gore's classic PowerPoint lecture, An Inconvenient Truth, grows into one of the blockbusters of the documentary film, with a worldview changing impact.
José Padilha's Bus 174, about a bus hijacking in Rio de Janeiro, belongs to the cinema's notable sociological close observation studies. Likewise Judy Kibinge's Coming of Age, a growing-up story about democracy in Kenya. As well as Eva Mulvad's Vores lykkes fjender / Enemies of Happiness, about the first Afghan woman to enter parliament. Zhao Liang creates in Petition a stunning investigation about the Chinese government's persecution of people who defy it. Adam Curtis in The Power of Nightmares challenges received notions about radical Islamism. In West of the Tracks, Wang Bing records the downfall, "xiagang", of giant, formerly flourishing industrial districts in China. In nine hours, he tries to tell everything.
In 2005, the online video sharing platform YouTube is founded. The concept: broadcast yourself. With more visibility than any documentary so far. Upload to infinity and beyond. In 2007, Netflix enters, a subscription video on-demand streaming service. The reign of linear television is over. Apple's iPhone is launched in 2007, and the sales of smartphones jump around 2010.
Eva Weber's The Intimacy of Strangers is about the end of intimacy in overheard telephone conversations. De fem benspænd / The Five Obstructions by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth is a documentary experiment of five remakes of a 1960s movie by Leth. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Dokfa Nai Meu Man / Mysterious Object at Noon is another experiment, following the "exquisite cadaver" idea of random contributions to a folk story as a documentary. Knut Erik Jensen's Cool & Crazy is a study of male choir dynamics and self-discovery in Norway.
Just two chapters covered so far in this entry. The God is in the detail, and every detail counts.
In Chapter 14 we enter the global reach of BRICS in Petra Costa's The Edge of Democracy (Petrobras corruption in Brazil) and the epic The Salt of the Earth based on the mind-boggling photographs of Sebastião Salgado, about the exploitation of nature and the working masses, "a film almost mystical"
Citizenfour by Laura Poitras reveals that the reality of surveillance today makes George Orwell's dystopia look tame. Gestapo, KGB and Stasi were amateurs in comparison with the Patriot Act.
Cinema's Black awareness grows to a new high with films such as Raoul Peck's I am Not Your Negro. Zhao Liang's Behemoth (2015) shows the crushing power of industrial transformation in China. In his Petition we see hundreds of ghost cities emerging.
MTV in the 1980s and YouTube in 2005 changed the terms for shortform movies. Camera technology was revolutionized. Lightweight, high definition cameras could enter everywhere in China, Palestine and Iran. In house arrest, the persecuted Iranian master Jafar Panahi could make a film like This Is Not a Film. Found footage films found new audiences in YouTube. Dmitrii Kalashnikov made The Road Movie in Russia. Surveillance cameras mushroomed. In China there are more surveillance cameras than any other country. The end of privacy.
In Chapter 15 we meet Gianfranco Rosi recording the 2015 European migrant crisis at Lampedusa in Fire at Sea. Jack Macinnes and James Bluennel film Syrians leaving Izmir in Exodus: Our Journey to Europe.
In Chile, maestro Patricio Guzman makes Nostalgia for the Light, tracking down remains of the disappeared in the Atacama desert. Sarah Polley creates an autobiographical documentary in Stories We Tell about her own childhood family, revealing family secrets. Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie is a searing record of the director's own mother.
Raed Antoni's Ghost Hunting, made in Occupied Palestinian Territory, cuts to the history of torture and violence. Asif Kapadia's Amy is an intimate documentary of the singer Amy Winehouse's struggle with substance abuse. A different kind of close study is Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue, on Bob Dylan.
Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing took unusual measures to cover the extraordinary violence in the Indonesian massacres of 1965-1966.
Chapter 16, All That Breathes, starts with a ghost story: the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2023. "Reality seemed to lose some of its realness. Reality was stranger than fiction again". Sara Dosa makes a film about volcano lovers, Fire of Love. Shaunak Sen's All That Breathes is about involuntary extreme sports: living in the air pollution of Delhi.
De humani corporis fabrica / The Fabric of the Human Body tells about the fragility of human flesh. Laura Poitras features Nan Goldin in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about the opioid epidemic and the Sackler family. Housing problems continue to be a major subject, generations after Edgar Anstey's classic.
Authoritarianism is on the rise. Ai Weiwei documents Hong Kong's protest activism against Chinese oppression. Bobi Wine: The People's President covers the popular movements of Uganda. Russia's Feldzug into Ukraine is documented in remarkable movies including 20 Days in Mariupol.
A splendid panoply of topical and historical non-fiction is on display in the final chapter. The pandemic emerges as a standstill and a reset. Tik Tok videos rise as yet another platform for short form non-fiction.
The digital is fantastic for distribution and access. There is no one truth about the visual quality in digital. In general the digital image is clinical. This whole series is of course in digital, but one can see the difference in the original sources: a digital image from a good film source remains more vivid and vibrant; if the source is digital, it tends to be clear, clean and sharp but not equally lifelike.
I am left reflecting on the magnificence of the legacy of the documentary film. This is a series to be revisited over and over again. A must for film schools and media studies. A work of endless inspiration. Our age is exceptional because now everybody is invited to contribute to the legacy of documentary film. Citizen activism changes the cinema. It changes the world. Woody Guthrie's guitar motto "This machine kills fascists" has been adapted as the film's official t-shirt slogan.
