Mark Cousins says ChatGPT presented him with an “exact summary” of a book he wrote almost 30 years ago, when he was researching his new film Story Of Documentary Film.
The Northern Irish filmmaker was speaking in a ‘A Morning With’ conversation at CPH:DOX, with Toronto film festival documentary programmer Thom Powers.
“When I started this project, I asked ChatGPT, ‘What is the history of documentary?’” said Cousins, in response to a question about his thoughts on AI technologies. “If it can do it, I don’t need to,” joked the director.
“You know what it did? It was an exact summary of the book I did 30 years ago,” said Cousins. “It had scraped my book and then just spat it out at me.”
The book in question was Imagining Reality: The Faber Book Of The Documentary, a collection of writings about documentary film collated by Cousins and Kevin Macdonald, first published in 1996.
“I don’t know enough about how AI works,” continued Cousins. “I’m reading with fascination and horror what’s happening. If modern technology can help me discover the great Egyptian films of the 1970s quickly, that’s good.”
Imaginative leap
Cousins is participating in the CPH:DOX Forum pitching event with Story Of Documentary Film, his latest exploration of film history. Earlier in the talk he had described a moment in the film that cuts from an Indian documentary to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
“Would AI looking at an Indian film jump to Taxi Driver? I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so,” said Cousins. “That leap I made was an imaginative leap. It was an unexpected connection. I don’t know if AI can do that. That’s called creativity. We shall see.”
Without specifically naming Cannes, Cousins hinted Story Of Documentary Film will be launching at a major festival soon. “We want to make a big splash with this project, we want to go to big festivals,” said the director, who hoped his work has lasting educational value. “We want to pass the baton, so that when I’m gone there’ll be other people who can use this.”
The Cannes lineup is unveiled on April 10. Among Cousins’s previous film history documentaries, A Story Of Children And Film debuted at Cannes in 2013; Women Make Film started at Venice 2018; while The Story Of Film: A New Generation and The Story Of Looking debuted at Cannes and Sheffield DocFest respectively in 2021.
Cousins said the latest project started via a suggestion from his producer John Archer, who said “we should have a go at a big global history of documentary, with the same principles [as their previous films] – passionately international, passionately feminist”.
A “rightward drift” in contemporary politics made the piece even more urgent, Cousins said. “The further that drift happened, the more we need a reality-seeking missile – the documentary format.”
Palestinian filmmakers
Cousins discussed documentary filmmakers from around the world, including Palestine. He called the recent assault of No Other Land co-director Hamdan Ballal by Israeli settlers, and Ballal’s subsequent arrest by Israeli police, “fucking disgraceful”. Ballal was released yesterday.
“[No Other Land] is so good,” said Cousins. “It’s disgraceful the way he was treated. The world has to call out that stuff.” Cousins also highlighted the work of another of the film’s four co-directors, Rachel Szor, who filmed much of the footage. “It’s magnificently shot,” said Cousins. “The best scenes are just the two guys smoking and talking.”
In the lively 80-minute conversation, Cousins expressed his distaste for drone usage in contemporary films. “God, if I see another,” said the director. “People do drone shots of somebody drinking a cup of tea. I do not need to be in the air to see [that]. Death to drone shots, that’s what I say.”
Technological advances have also allowed for “more crap documentaries”, said Cousins. “Not everybody can tell a story,” he said, using an example of people who say they are making a film about their grannie. “I’m sure the grannie’s a very interesting person, but you didn’t manage to capture that. It’s not easy to capture the story of another human being. The challenge is always to avoid banality.”
Cousins delved into his deep knowledge of cinema throughout the discussion, detailing titles including Kamran Shirdel’s 1967 Iranian documentary The Night It Rained, and Zelimir Zelnik’s 1994 Serbian film Tito’s Second Time Among The Serbs; as well as the work of German artist-filmmaker Ella Bergmann-Michel, a contemporary of and counterpoint to the influential Nazi era filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
The CPH:DOX industry programme concludes on March 28 while the festival wraps on March 30.
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