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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 the Marvin, Mountain Village, Village Market, 5 Sep 2026
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
AA: Today's stretch of the Mark Cousins marathon taken place in the farthest reach from the festival center. After the usual gondola ride to Chuck Jones's Cinema in Mountain Village I need another ride to the Market Plaza. The Marvin, a new festival cinema, was inaugurated yesterday.
In their introduction, Mark Cousins and John Archer show us the oversize grid of their impossible 16-hour film monument, as well the movie's official t-shirt with the motto "documentaries kill fascism".
In Chapters 8 and 9 of The Story of Documentary Film we reach the 1980s. The signature event: The Fall of the Wall. A unifying theme: empathy. This while covering the decade of Margaret Thatcher: "society - there is no such thing"; competition, not cooperation.
The second wave of feminism is represented with movies like For Love or Money: A History of Women and Work in Australia which appears to be a major survey on the subject. Electrifying samples are on display from La operación by Ana María García, about a clandestine sterilization programme pursued by the United States in Puerto Rico. The women submitted were not aware of the irreversible operation performed upon them. Atteyat Al-Abnoudy's Permissible Dreams tells about an undaunted woman farmer. "Human being is willpower". Mira Nair's Indian Cabaret brings empathy to its portrait of a stripper.
Empathy drives also Amos Gitai in Home (1980) about the reconstruction of a house in West Jerusalem, revealing tensions between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The Indian master Tapan Bose spent his life defending human rights in films such as Bhopal: Beyond Genocide (1986). Krzysztof Kieslowski enters the story with Talking Heads (1980), with simple eloquent power. What matters most? Penny Woolcock in her debut film When the Dog Bites (1988) registers the situation of the people when a factory is closed. The contrast in conveying working people is marked in her film and Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland.
The 1980s is also the decade of AIDS awareness. Rob Epstein brings us The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). In the same year, Robert Rosenberg and Greta Schiller craft a history of the gay and lesbian community in Before Stonewall. In Sweden, Jan Troell casts a critical look into the Swedish People's Home in Sagolandet (1988). In Poland, Solidarnosc is on the rise, covered in powerful documentaries. Anger grows in Eastern Europe. Is It Easy to Be Young? (1987) by the Latvian Juris Podnieks becomes a tremendous success. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 is covered in Vladimir Shevchenko's documentary Chernobyl (1987) including some of the earliest footage. The film itself suffered from radiation, as well as the director, who died the year after.
Chapter 9 has the subtitle "Detectives". Topics discussed include also MTV, music videos and music films, from Santiago Alvarez's Now to Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense. Music documentary discoveries include Assia Djebar's La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli (1983) and Mani Kaul's Siddheshwari (1989). To Mark Cousins, Mani Kaul's film is the most beautiful in this story so far. Included is also Maximilian Schell's Marlene (1984). "Was ist denn eigentlich echt hier!"
Michael Moore launches with tremendous success a new trend of confrontative, activist documentary in Roger & Me. In television, John Pilger launches a career of anti-colonialist activism in television documentary and is the pioneer in revealing the Cambodian genocide. Eduardo Coutinho's Twenty Years Later (1984) is a landmark exposé about the crimes of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Another celebrated documentary film detective is Errol Morris. In The Thin Blue Line (1988) he argues that a m an was wrongly convicted for murder. The innocent man was released. Judit Ember with her exposés has the record of banned movies in Hungary. The image of a railway track carries the chapter. Inevitably we reach Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann, a landmark in many ways. Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987) reveals shocking secrets of the Japanese army at WWII. Lanzmann could be intrusive in his interviews. Kazuo Hara even uses violence in the interview situations.
In contrast, Abbas Kiarostami enters the story with his short film Homework (1989). Robert Kramer's Route One/USA (1989) grows to a length of over four hours, blurring the line of fiction and non-fiction. Completely new dimensions are found by the Buddhist monk Godfrey Reggio in Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and the wizard of montage Chris Marker in Sans soleil (1983). Their work is about a Weltanschauung.
To be continued.
The visual quality of the clips in episodes 1-7 was often mediocre, in episodes 8-9 much better. The clips are poetry, the framing contemporary footage is prose.
The experience of this series is shattering in many ways.
It is too much for one man to digest in such a short time frame.
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