An eye operation sets the veteran cinephile out on a delicate and fascinating exploration of what it means to look at movies – and the world
On the eve of an operation to remove a cataract in his right eye – surgery which naturally isn’t free from risk – critic and cinephile Mark Cousins reflects on a lifetime of looking and visual rapture. And once again, this uniquely valuable film-maker has given his audience a treasure trove of insight about what it means to look – really look – at the world about us, and at art and movies, and not to take any of it for granted.
Cousins’ voice is as ever delicate, humorous and good-natured – but fundamentally serious. It is very personal and yet it does not reveal much about Cousins himself in the conventional way. Another type of documentary might have talked to Cousins’ partner, might have shown more about the ordinary day-to-day of his working life, might have asked him how scared he actually was of blindness. But The Story of Looking takes a different path: it avoids centring the discussion in terms of crisis and instead takes the impending operation almost as a dramatic pretext for a brilliant, free-associating critical rhapsody about what it means to look. Consciously avoiding the rhetoric of tragedy or self-pity, we begin with a clip of Ray Charles talking on TV about how he does not miss having sight.