The Story of Film: A New Generation Review: Celebrating Cinema Without Nostalgia

It’s hard to think of another art form, except maybe the theater, that spends as much time and effort celebrating itself as film. From the That’s Entertainment! anthology to the AFI’s “100” listicle TV specials to the creepy “We Make Movies Better” ad campaign for AMC Theaters featuring Nicole Kidman, the filmmaking industry has long seemed to suffer from an insecurity requiring constant demands from the audience to please, please like it. Fortunately, Mark Cousins’s confidently sprawling new documentary, The Story of Film: A New Generation, feels no need to bang viewers over the head with the insistence that cinema is special, damnit.

An update to Cousins’s 15-part Channel 4 series The Story of Film: An Odyssey from 2011, A New Generation scans cinematic developments in the 21st century. A feature-length clip compendium in the style of Thom Andersen’s landmark Los Angeles Plays Itself, it’s stitched together by Cousins’s ruminative narration and a magpie approach to glimmering bits of modern filmic lore. The director and critic’s approach is appealing, in that he sounds somehow both serene and thrilled at once, like a sleep-deprived professor who stayed up all night crafting notes for a seminar and now dearly wants to communicate what he’s come up with.

Though Cousins’s viewpoint is highly auteurist, lavishing praise on the vision of filmmakers from Josh and Benny Safdie to genre maestros Johnnie To and George Miller, A New Generation is really not so interested in identifying the great directors of the 21st century. Rather, it presents an argument for the continued vitality of the form. Playfully contrasting the step-dancing sequence from Joker with “Let It Go” from Frozen (“No right, no wrong…the Joker could have written this”), Cousins finds a lot to be excited about, though given his repeated affection for more deliberately poetic works like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, relatively little that would play in a greatest-hits montage at the Oscars.

The first of the film’s two sections, “Extending the Language of Film,” is its most cogent. Looking to call out examples of films that he saw as breaking or extending the rules of film, Cousins gathers examples of experimentation into several loosely gathered groups before energetically expounding on their merits. The choices are by nature idiosyncratic and generally difficult to argue with. A section on comedies jumps nimbly from Rajkumar Hirani’s PK to Tim Miller’s Deadpool, praising the former’s brave tonal shift from slapstick to the political and the latter’s self-mocking title sequence (“the clichés fall like dominos”).

Elsewhere, a longer meditation on physicality and representations of the body takes several enjoyably unexpected turns. From the female gaze of Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers and the eroticism of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, Cousins shifts to the punishments inflicted on the body in newer works of horror like Ari Aster’s Midsommar. From there, he delves into lesser-known films, centering on works of “slow cinema” like Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth before detouring into the “golden age” of documentaries. Unsurprisingly, similarly discursive filmmakers like Patricio Guzmán come in for high praise. Referring to “essay” documentaries as “thinking films, they take ideas for a walk,” Cousins could be talking about his own work.

The connections between Cousins’s ideas can seem arbitrary at times. This becomes more noticeable in the film’s engaging but less cohesive second half, “What Have We Been Digging For?” Talking here about directors who “let us look anew” at the world, he ropes in a broad survey of cinema under that somewhat thin thesis. The individual pieces are often riveting, insightful, and close to joyful in their enthusiasm for the form. This is true whether the film is pairing the digital artistry of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Matt Reeves’s War for the Planet of the Apes, the “shadow selves” and social critique of Jordan Peele’s Us and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, or linking a specific shot in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Shoplifters with one from Ozu Yasujirō’s Early Spring. But when going further afield thematically, extemporizing about Covid lockdowns and the expansion of streaming, Cousins’s thinking is less well-defined.

Ironically, the filmmaker’s low-key and winding style ultimately makes his argument about the continued vitality of cinema far stronger than any amount of industry-approved razzle-dazzle pushiness. Indeed, the films collected in A New Generation speak for themselves even when they don’t necessarily slot neatly into Cousins’s curlicue thinking.