This essential collection of essays from Mark Cousins, singular Irish-Scottish ruminator on all things film, presents, as its dust-cover image, the author draped across four cinema seats. Just as attractive is the volume within. The blue-black binding and gold lettering suggests, to this mischievous reviewer anyway, The Book of Common Prayer.
I would be surprised if Cousins objected to such a connection (and not just because, in this book, he describes himself as “an altar boy in the church of cinema”). He loves the unlikely, jarring juxtaposition. But Dear Orson Welles really does work as devotional tool. Gathering material written over the last 20 years, the book comprises memoirs of travel, ponderings on genre, tributes to the greats – Chris Marker, Paul Schrader and Welles himself – and speculations about the medium’s future. Running through all those pieces is a consistent voice: generous, playful, enthusiastic, unpretentious.
Cousins is, to continue the religious theme, evangelical in this support for the cinemas of Africa, South America and Asia, but he is never too far from an unforced populist reference. In a piece on memory he points us towards Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte, Chantal Akerman’s From the East and (why not?), “Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia!”
Enthusiasts for the vast flotilla of documentaries he has launched over the decades will find it impossible not to hear his soothing, keening vowels as they read. Born and raised in Belfast, Cousins has lived in Scotland since the early 1980s and vernacular from both places appear in his writing. He first gained fame hosting insightful TV interviews with the likes of Jack Lemmon, Janet Leigh and Rod Steiger. In recent years, writing and documentary film making have become the main jobs. His vast series The Story of Film is rightly seen as a classic.
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Cousins here claims he is “bad at words”, but the text, like his speech, flows with a fluvial rhythm that propels the reader comfortably from one argument to the next. Never more so than in a long piece from 2011 that, touching down in Cairo, China and Ireland, contemplates his “leaving the film industry”.
We are glad he stayed. What other intellectual would, without a credit, draw from Shania Twain for an opening epigraph. “Get in the action, feel the attraction” indeed.
Donald Clarke is a film critic for The Irish Times
