YES, there is such a word as “scotopia”. And yes, its dictionary definition is “the ability to adjust your sight to the darkness”. For the last few days, I’ve been in a state of scotopia with the Northern Irish/Scottish documentary-maker and film historian Mark Cousins.

Two of his new productions, tearing up Cannes at the moment are what he simply calls “stories”. One story is about the most original and innovative films of the last decade, the other is about the act of looking itself (and very much shaped by our recent pandemic year).

The more fortunate among us since March 2020 may have become cinephiles by default. Our round of pubs, clubs and meals out have been reduced to bubbles of couch-bound families and couples, watching furiously.

By now, we’ve probably strip-mined our available services of the quality series and films. You might be turning to online services like Mubi or players from film houses like the BFI, GFT and Curzon, who curate independent films.

So Cousins’s main documentary here – The Story Of Film: A New Generation – is a well-timed, high-end viewing guide. It constantly sends you scurrying off to source his rarer recommendations.

Mark’s intellectual intensity is also very welcome (at least in this house). As the biosphere pushes us in and out of our own streets, bringing us face to face with the costs of modernity itself, some of us may have an appetite to dwell on ultimate questions. What is community, bravery, selfishness, nature, greed, grace?

Ambitious and provoking movies help us handle these questions. And Mark is the best guide to these kinds of movies.

What’s delicious about his method is that he happily yolks together Hollywood blockbusters and the most obscure and marginal auteurs, if he feels they share a line of flight. The Story Of Film starts by comparing Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker dancing down the Gotham stairs with the heroine of Disney’s Frozen running along her own ice-balustrade. Both of them are “people who are desiring, who feel harnessed”, says Mark.

The first half runs under the title Extending The Language of Film and the gems that Cousins pulls out are genuinely exciting, from just about everywhere. He is explicitly not concerned with the best movies but the most innovative, ones that compel new ways of seeing.

We can have fun and a laugh while doing so. I had forgotten (until Cousins reminded me) of how witty the opening credits from the superhero movie Deadpool were – “starring God’s Perfect Idiot, a Hot Chick, a British Villain, a Moody Teen, a CGI character…” He has time also for Beyonce’s Lemonade, pairing it with the Bollywood musical Ram-Leela. Both productions vibrate the same bootays across cultural boundaries.

Cousins also delights in jump cuts which make film history come alive. For example, he shows those unearthly stretches of Under The Skin (where the alien seductress Scarlett Johansson submerges her prey into black fluid), then montages into the great surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s Orphee (1950) – the scene where a mirror transforms into a panel of water, allowing entry to the underworld.

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Yet delightfully, Cousins isn’t interested in sorrowfully dissing the last digital decade against cinema’s classic eras. He is fully alive – as any film historian should properly be – to the visual delights that new technology can bring.

He cites documentaries that attach GoPro cameras to fish slithering in the sea – and notes that this is “a Copernican revolution”. Never before have films been directed from a non-human point of view. Where will that take us?

Cousins notes the spontaneity of films shot entirely on iPhone using non-actors, like the sex-worker movie Tangerine. He takes us through the game dynamics of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, where the viewer is given options within the action (“Kill Dad?” “Move on?”). Those who were once directed are now directing themselves.

The digital motion-capture involved in The Irishman and Planet of the Apes – rejuvenating Robert DeNiro and making-simian Andy Serkis – is respectfully explained. By this point, Cousins has already filled your mind with filmic epiphanies. So he seems to be silently inviting film makers to make even more startling wonders out of this technology, as opposed to any Luddite call.

There is an educative stretch on the genre of “slow cinema” (where tiny social fragments are dwelt on for hours, the material sometimes spanning decades, whether documentary or fiction). Cousins also picks up on how filmmakers are becoming sensitive to a post-truth era, where reality and narratives about that reality become inextricable.

Mark reminds us to watch The Look of Silence and The Act of Killing, documentaries about either side of Indonesia’s mass political murders in the 60s, which queasily get the perpetrators to re-enact their carnage. But I didn’t know about New Zealand’s Propaganda, an elaborate hoax purporting to show a North Korea anti-Western film, its critiques of our way of life disturbingly acute.

So The Story Of Film: A New Generation is a “film-essay” which tries, in the best traditions of movie criticism, to trigger the making of more interesting and ambitious movies. The Story Of Looking is much more personal and intimate from Cousins – indeed, sometimes as intimate as physically possible.

ORIGINALLY intended to be a science-driven documentary of his book of the same title, The Story Of Looking was hijacked by Covid and by Cousins’s news that he had macular degeneration in one of his eyes. He spends some of the documentary narrating delicately from his bed, where he lies on the day before his cataract is to be removed, and a new lens inserted.

Given that the pandemic is like “living inside an edit suite” all the time, Cousins gets to work. He digs into the last ten years of total footage that his documentary work has generated, a finds a few sublime moments of found footage. An exploded power station becomes a dusty ghost, in a human outline. A man stands dangerously on the chimney pots of the roofs across from his Edinburgh flat. Staged? Actual?

Cousins is correct in his understanding of cognitive science, which says that our brains actively construct and try to anticipate what we see, rather than scenes just falling passively upon our senses. “We are projecting when we look,” in his words. Or as the painter Cezanne said, “the optical experience develops within us”.

So idiosyncrasy abounds in The Story Of Looking. Cousins holds up a dumb-phone, on which he captured his late gran in her open coffin – the phone itself has now gone kaput, implying a “double death”. He idly pursues the colours blue and gold in Japanese fight movies, Russian icons and Derek Jarman movies. He floats tummy-up naked in a Scottish stream, films his eye operation in glutenous detail (and can’t resist quoting Le Chien Andalou). Wine is drunk from a glass last sipped from by Hollywood legend Jane Russell.

But the most seriously playful part is when Cousins opens his documentary with a clip from the blind soul musician Ray Charles.

The great Ray states that he wouldn’t necessarily welcome his sight returning, because he’d already seen “his mother and the sun and the stars.”

With his new lens giving him even sharper vision, and with his exultation in the possibilities of film irrepressible, Cousins respectfully concludes this film by saying that Charles is wrong: it’s not enough just to see the best things once. “Throughout my life, movies have been my extra eyes”, he rhapsodises.

Keep an eye out for Mark’s dreamy, inspiring documentaries, as they find their viewing opportunities in the many screens of our lives. I love the phrase that Cousins tends to use for film: “the affordable sublime”. In the grind of this current moment, when we’re craving orientation about our next steps, that sounds like the right ticket to buy.