The Story of Film: An Odyssey (TV Mini Series)

New American Independents & the Digital Revolution (2011)

Mark Cousins: Self - Presenter

Quotes 

• [last lines] 

  Baz Luhrmann - Interviewee : That's where the romanticism comes in, is that we're making something that happens in life *better* than it is in life. Bigger than it is in life.

  Mark Cousins - Presenter : Better and bigger than life. Exactly what many movies makers aimed for in the last days of digital, at the end of the old millennium. The story of film was full of the fizz and feedback of those days. And the rapture of self-loss. But then came the 21st century.

• Mark Cousins - Presenter : The emphasis on the surrealism of everyday talk became know as Tarantino-esque, after the film's write-director, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino-esque somehow meant both more real, and less real than life, at the same time. And Tarantino wasn't only significant for his dialog. Like Scorsese, he was a "hyperlink" to film history.

• Mark Cousins - Presenter : 70s cinema had been about what we *wanted* to see. Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars. 90s cinema had become *can* see.

• Mark Cousins - Presenter : [blurry 1900s footage]  Real human courage and imagination goes into a shot like this. The camera and the guy are really strapped to the plane as it does a scary loop-T-loop.

  Mark Cousins - Presenter : [crisp CGI aerial approach from Gladiator, 2000]  Hard work and long hours spent in relative comfort, eating pizza, got a shot like this.

• Mark Cousins - Presenter : [about Moulin Rouge!, 2001]  Visually this is pure romantic cinema. Moon light, a roof-top tryst, reverse angle editing, two-shots. But the music is a wild 90s mash-up of pop songs used almost like dialog, as if reality had been remixed by a DJ.