Mark Cousins on The Sto­ry of Look­ing and his screen epiphanies

I recent­ly made a film, The Sto­ry of Look­ing, about how I see. It got me think­ing about the movies I’ve watched through­out my life, and which moments in them struck me as gen­uine­ly new. I love genre cin­e­ma as much as the next per­son and genre’s plea­sures come from re-encoun­ter­ing famil­iar sto­ries, styles, char­ac­ters and actors. But what about the total­ly unfa­mil­iar in cin­e­ma? When I ask myself what have been the visu­al epipha­nies in my film life, what comes to mind?

I saw this on the BBC as a teenag­er. Like oth­er films, it had a sto­ry and char­ac­ters but, as I watched, I could see extra heft. It was car­ry­ing more than it seemed. I now know that behind the film was a kind of polit­i­cal shad­ow and, in its end­ing, when John Garfield goes down steps, then down more and more, the extra emo­tion I felt came from a mul­ti­pli­er which I now know as metaphor. My young brain hadn’t yet encoun­tered metaphor, but I could see that it wasn’t just John, in that descent on those steps. It was like a descent into hell.

Far right punk John­ny (Daniel Day Lewis) swigs fizzy wine, then drib­bles it from his mouth to the mouth young British-Pak­istani Omar (Gor­don War­necke) as part of a long kiss, dan­ger­ous­ly near peo­ple who would great­ly dis­ap­prove. I was 20 when I saw this and we were very under the cosh of Thatch­erism. Most polit­i­cal films of the time were earnest, but this moment felt like Andy Warhol’s soup tins – pop art, trans­gres­sive, dar­ing­ly in love with plea­sure. It was a turn­ing point for me, a kind of mock­ery. And sexy as fuck.

In some ways this Indi­an doc gave me the same kind of visu­al shock as My Beau­ti­ful Laun­drette. By the time I saw it, in my late twen­ties, I had been direct­ing for some years, and try­ing to rec­on­cile my sub­jects – neo-Nazism, Gob­r­bachev, cities, the first Gulf war – with my yearn­ing for form in cin­e­ma. Then I saw Kaul’s film which looked like it had been direct­ed by Luchi­no Vis­con­ti. It had gor­geous cran­ing shots and exquis­ite colour, and yet it was a non-fic­tion film. It seems obvi­ous to me now that there’s no con­tra­dic­tion between doc­u­men­tary and visu­al beau­ty, but back then it was rev­e­la­to­ry. It changed my filmmaking

By my mid-thir­ties, I’d been direct­ing for quite a while. I was get­ting tired, work­ing too hard and reg­u­lar­ly jet lagged. For two years in a row, because of trav­el­ling for film­ing, I didn’t see autumn, my favourite sea­son. I was unhap­py and scared. One night I was in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, re-watch­ing An Angel at My Table in advance of inter­view­ing Jane Cam­pi­on for The Sto­ry of Film: A New Gen­er­a­tion. Ker­ry Fox play­ing Janet Frame is at a black­board in front of a class of kids. School exam­in­ers are watch­ing her and she kind of freezes. Cam­pi­on films close as Fox stares at a piece a chalk between her fin­gers. Then she runs and cries.

The next day I asked Cam­pi­on what that scene was about. ​“It’s a pan­ic attack”, she said, and I felt stu­pid. Of course it is, but I hadn’t clocked that. I was lost in the scene the way Ker­ry was lost in the chalk. I don’t think I’d seen a pan­ic attack on screen before, or at least ren­dered in that way, as a kind of numbness.

As I’ve made a film about Holo­caust denial and am very inter­est­ed in how movies por­tray atroc­i­ty, I thought I’d seen most of the great films about Auschwitz-Birke­nau, but then I saw this movie. Jakubows­ka was incar­cer­at­ed in Auschwitz and then, just a year after lib­er­a­tion, she was back there, direct­ing this remark­able fic­tion film in the camp. In The Sto­ry of Look­ing, I use a pho­to of Ger­man Hitler-sup­port­ing cit­i­zens turn­ing their heads away from piles of dead bod­ies in Buchen­wald and cov­er­ing their eyes. It’s in a sequence about not look­ing, and why we wouldn’t look. Jakubowska’s film is an aston­ish­ing piece of painful looking.

The Last Stage remind­ed me, again, that some of the best things in film his­to­ry are unseen or under remem­bered. The same goes for the career of Ana Mariscal. A movie star in Span­ish and Argen­tine films for near­ly 50 years, she also direct­ed 10 films. A few years ago I was in a cin­e­math­eque in Spain, and asked the audi­ence how many peo­ple had seen the films she direct­ed. No one had.

I said that I was going to her grave the next day and invit­ed peo­ple to join me. Only one guy did. It was hard to find where she was buried, and the head­stone car­ried no ref­er­ence to her career. She didn’t entire­ly sep­a­rate her­self from Franco’s ideas, but she did lots of great cin­e­ma and was rem­i­nis­cent of Mau­reen O’Hara. The image of her grave is seared in my head.

I saw this in Cannes. It made me feel that cin­e­ma had been renewed. Makhmal­baf was in her teens when she made it, yet the way she told the sto­ry of two girls being impris­oned at home for 11 years using the actu­al girls to re-enact the events buzzed for me. The film was a like a bee­hive. Fel­low Iran­ian Abbas Kiarosta­mi had used sim­i­lar filmic ven­tril­o­quisms, but Makhmalbaf’s deter­mi­na­tion not to judge the par­ents for such an appalling con­fine­ment shocked and excit­ed me.

My new film is about those shocks and excite­ments. It says that, despite all the prob­lems of see­ing, look­ing has reg­u­lar­ly renewed my life. Russ­ian writer Vik­tor Shklovsky had an idea called ostra­ne­nie, the ​“de-automis­ing of per­cep­tion.” He meant the desire not just to see what you expect to see. He want­ed to desta­bilise look­ing so that the unfa­mil­iar can find a way in.

Wow. I’d like to do that. Dur­ing the mak­ing of The Sto­ry of Look­ing, I had a bad cataract removed, and we filmed this.

It felt like a metaphor for see­ing afresh.

The Sto­ry of Look­ing is released in the UK & Ire­land on 17 Sep­tem­ber via Mod­ern Films.