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| 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,
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