Right at the beginning of The March On Rome, a special screening in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, Mark Cousins draws our collective gaze to a piece of graffiti saying that ci…
draws our collective gaze to a piece of graffiti saying that cinema is most powerful weapon of all. It isn’t clear — to me, anyway — whether that joyful proclamation dates back to 1922, when Benito Mussolini led a Fascist march from Naples to Rome, or to some other eruption of historical optimism. Cinema isn’t as powerful as all that — if it were, Fascism would have been clobbered to a pulp by Chaplin, Lubitsch and all the other filmmakers who lampooned its vainglorious leaders.
Cousins makes documentaries so distinctive that they constitute a sort of genre. They are made up of archival material spliced together with the director’s observations — a familiar essay format — but their trademark feature is Cousins’ voice. Dreamy and discursive, it falls with the quiet insistence of the gentle rain from heaven, drenching everything we see in his quirky musings. Days after seeing a Cousins film, you may find yourself speaking in a comedy pastiche of his northern Irish brogue.
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