page_title: Mark Cousins (film critic)
section_title: Later works
hierarchical_section_title: Mark Cousins (film critic) / Later works
caption_attribution_description: Robert Osbourne and Mark Cousins with the Peabody Award for TCM The Story of Film
context_page_description: Mark Cousins is a director and film critic. A prolific producer and director, he is best known for his 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey.
context_section_description: His 2011 film The Story of Film: An Odyssey was broadcast as 15 one-hour television episodes on More4, and later, featured at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. In September 2013, it began to be shown on Turner Classic Movies. Drawing on its exhaustive film library, TCM complemented each episode with relevant short films and feature films ranging from the familiar to the rarely seen. TCM received a 2013 Peabody Award "for its inclusive, uniquely annotated survey of world cinema history".
  After The Story of Film, Cousins's next project was intentionally a small-scale work: What Is This Film Called Love? is a self-photographed diary of his three-day walk around Mexico City, accompanied by his imagined conversation with a photo of Sergei Eisenstein and reviewed as "fatuous" by Variety. Another low-budget, quickly produced documentary, Here Be Dragons, covers a short film-watching trip he made to Albania and was also poorly received as indulgent and "random".  6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia is structured around an imagined letter from Cousins to the author D. H. Lawrence, who wrote about a 1921 visit to Sardinia. Life May Be was a collaboration with Iranian director and actor Mania Akbari, again making use of Cousins's familiar structural devices of letters, travel imagery, and voiceover commentary, judged "self-advertisement".
  A Story of Children and Film was better received. Its origins lay in some footage he shot of his niece and nephew at play, and grew into a documentary about the representation of children in cinema.
  Cousins subsequently produced I Am Belfast, in which the city is personified by a 10,000-year-old woman.  Portions of the film in progress, with a score by Belfast composer David Holmes were screened at the 2014 Belfast Film Festival. He is also working on a three-hour addendum to The Story of Film, on the subject of documentaries, entitled Dear John Grierson.
  In 2019 Cousins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
caption: Robert Osborne, Mark Cousins and TCM senior vice president Charles Tabesh in 2014, with the Peabody Award that TCM received for its presentation of The Story of Film: An Odyssey
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