In His Visual Voyage, The Search History, Mark Cousins Reveals Pivotal Moments.

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How Marina Abramovich, Frida Kahlo, and Romeo and Juliet inspired the director’s upcoming documentary.
In her 1930 essay Street Haunting, Virginia Woolf runs away from her home to buy a pencil.

In this way, Wolfe drifts Visual Voyage through the alleys of London, exploring the balconies and realizing that “entering a new space is always an adventure.” As lockdown teaches, driving indoors isn’t just a lack of fresh air; limiting the possibilities for our eyes.

Yet when Wolfe writes his provocative prose, Visual Voyage perhaps with a new pencil, it may be his house, surrounded by four walls. “COVID has been a long-running taxi bug,” Mark Cousins told Zoom in early September. “But when you’re inside, it’s fun to imagine or think about all the things you’ve seen.”

In The Story of Search, Cousin’s latest visual odyssey, the 56-year-old director turns from his bed to the camera. After finding a cloud in his left eye, the director was less than 24 hours away from cataract surgery. Meanwhile, the charismatic cousin cannot leave the apartment and takes audiences on a memorable journey through international cinema, through centuries of art and philosophy, and search history.

There’s the green of vertigo, the blue of the hero, the colorful wheels of Goethe. There are personal recordings of cousins from around the world – and on the go too. Then there are Cousins himself, who swam naked in the lake and imitated Jenny Agutter’s back in Walkabout.

Cousin was born in Belfast and lived in Edinburgh. Cousin is a cameraman whose work includes “I’m Belfast,” “Women Make a Movie: A New Road Film Through the Cinema,” and the award-winning 15-part Peabody series, “The Story of a Movie: An Odyssey.” Seth Rogen once tweeted, “If you like movies and have about 14 hours to kill, I highly recommend (this one) – it’s great.”

In 2017, 90 minutes were easier to digest.

So instead of buying a pencil, he corrected his eyesight. “Getting a new lens is a metaphor, something to look at again,” says Bratovchedi. “I thought I would use surgery as an act to compose the film.” Despite its loose three-act outline, the film (My Cousins Tell Me When I Call It a Video Essay) deals with tone, rhythm, and mood.

Sometimes it’s very intimate when cousins stop to check their phones, and then it can suddenly translate into a poetic lyrical montage, aided by the sound of streams of consciousness. This will eventually become science fiction. “I was in Scotland and took a picture of this algae on my phone,” Cousins said. As I recorded it, I thought: this is the end. Why can’t I imagine being 30 years older, living in a different country like Sweden, and having hindsight?