The Sto­ry of Looking

A decade on from his 15-hour mag­num opus, The Sto­ry of Film comes anoth­er chap­ter in the life and inter­ests of crit­ic-turned-film­mak­er Mark Cousins. The Sto­ry of Look­ing, is expand­ed from his 2017 book of the same name, yet this time the direc­tor lim­its him­self to 90 min­utes and adopts a more per­son­al perspective.

Writ­ten, direct­ed and shot by Cousins dur­ing lock­down, The Sto­ry of Look­ing is imme­di­ate in its inti­ma­cy. It opens with Cousins in bed watch­ing an inter­view with Ray Charles on his phone. While dis­cussing his rela­tion­ship with his blind­ness, Charles explains that he can trea­sure cer­tain things that he’s only seen once, and that there are plen­ty of ter­ri­ble sights he’s glad to have nev­er seen.

Along­side these state­ments as a spark of inspi­ra­tion, Cousins reveals that he has devel­oped a severe cataract to be sur­gi­cal­ly removed the fol­low­ing day. As some­one obsessed with the act of look­ing, he is forced to grap­ple with what vision real­ly means.

Woven from footage of Cousins’ own work as a doc­u­men­tary direc­tor, frag­ments of the films that have inspired him and a hand­held visu­al diary of the day pri­or to his surgery, The Sto­ry of Look­ing is scat­ter­shot but occa­sion­al­ly pro­found. Cousins loose­ly focus­es on the stages of vision that devel­op as we grow, from the blur­ry world that a new­born baby sees to the agony of scru­ti­n­is­ing your own reflec­tion as a teenag­er. But what unrav­els is more of a stream of con­scious­ness with his trade­mark med­i­ta­tive voiceover than a com­pre­hen­sive study of the sub­ject of looking.

Touch­ing on colour’s place with­in mem­o­ry, light as the focus of wor­ship and won­der, voyeurism and exhi­bi­tion­ism, the scope is wide but ulti­mate­ly not espe­cial­ly deep. Most arrest­ing is Cousins’ deci­sion to show the eye surgery itself in enor­mous, unavoid­able close-up. The image of the blade enter­ing his eye­ball is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly repul­sive and fas­ci­nat­ing, a clear chal­lenge both to watch and resist look­ing away from.

In a recent essay for Harper’s Bazaar, Mar­tin Scors­ese bemoaned the term ​‘con­tent’ being used to describe any and every form of visu­al media, flat­ten­ing a David Lean film so it’s bare­ly dis­tin­guish­able from a cat video. What does look­ing mean today when our eyes are more bom­bard­ed with ​‘con­tent’ than ever? Though he touch­es on self­ies as the mod­ern self-por­trait, Cousins isn’t espe­cial­ly con­cerned with the impact of the inter­net on visu­al cul­ture. This is clear­ly not so much the sto­ry of look­ing but his sto­ry of looking.

In the film’s most mov­ing sequence Cousins reads tweets from his fol­low­ers about their ​‘look­ing lives’, from what it means to see and be seen by a loved one, to the mem­o­ries of a teacher let­ting their stu­dents stare out of the win­dow at the banal but beau­ti­ful out­side world. Per­haps after months of star­ing at the same few walls and only see­ing loved ones through a screen, a light­weight but some­times touch­ing ode to the won­der of look­ing is enough.