Some doors are portals to discovery.
One on Kredytowa street in Warsaw, Poland bears a sign that reads, “The door is heavy, but it’s worth the effort.” Manage to pull it open and inside the 19th century building you’ll find exhibits of the National Museum of Ethnography. During the Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival now underway in Warsaw, the museum serves as the home for MDAG Industry, a program of pitching sessions, panel discussions, and an unusual discovery — an “anti-masterclass” given by the noted filmmaker Mark Cousins.
For 75 minutes on Saturday, Cousins held an audience rapt with unscripted observations on photography, documentary, and inspiration, inviting those in the room to look at the world with fresh eyes. Karol Piekarczyk, the festival’s artistic director, moderated the event, initially clicking through a series of slides that he asked the filmmaker to react to spontaneously.
“I have literally no idea what’s coming up on screen,” Cousins said. “I’m just going to try and respond to it according to this man’s [Piekarczyk’s] imagination.”
The photo that came up first showed passengers on a subway car in New York City – a woman, embracing a man, with her eyes directed toward the camera. (As Piekarczyk explained later, it was taken in 1971 by the South African photographer Ernest Cole; Raoul Peck’s documentary about the photographer, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, is screening at the festival).
“Often as filmmakers when we are making an image, we’re looking [at it]. What if the image looks back at us, as she’s doing here?” Cousins pondered. “She is super sharp, as you can see. It’s probably a long lens. And the focus is right in the front plane… But her look is fantastic. I think that’s she’s saying, ‘I know you, I see you. I am doing something here.’ It feels to me as if, in a way, she’s the author of this moment.”
The second image that appeared depicted a statue of a Madonna and child, maculate from lichen growth in its outdoor setting (those familiar with the documentary Sugarcane would recognize it as a blanched and weather-beaten form standing near an Indian Residential School in British Columbia).
“Is that rust? It’s either rust or lichen,” he said of the splotches. “Lichen grows — every 10 years it grows one millimeter. Let’s say it’s a five-centimeter shot [on the statue] — that could be 50 years of growth.” He continued, “The Madonna has often got downcast eyes. The previous shot, the woman was looking right at us, but here the Madonna’s not looking at us; she’s looking down in a state of reflection in classic Catholic iconography. She already knows the fate of her child, doesn’t she. She knows he’s desperate to die.”
One of the projected photos Cousins knew was coming. He had taken it himself in Gdansk, a few days earlier. It showed a brick wall interrupted by a wooden door. Behind the wall stood a tree. Further in the background, sunlight cut angles on a wall.
“What is behind the wall? What is behind the door?” he recalled wondering. “When I was standing there looking at this door and taking a photograph, suddenly a woman came out of the door. I think she was probably 75, 76, 77. She was wearing an orange hat, and she went left, and she was pushing a pram. And I thought, fuck, what is her life? … She lived through Gdansk in the ‘70s of the shipyards. And she lived [through] Solidarity. She was born after World II, but boy did she see the Soviet Empire.”
Cousins posed a question to the audience. “How would I start to make a film about that door and what lies behind it and who this woman was and what her life was? Any thoughts or suggestions?”
That proposition triggered a flood of responses from audience members excited by the chance to explore creativity in the context of documentary filmmaking. One person suggested Cousins return to the spot on a daily basis and try to strike up a relationship with the septuagenarian pushing the pram.
“I thought maybe I should have put a notice on the door,” Cousins offered. “Maybe a friend of mine could translate it into Polish saying, ‘I’m a filmmaker. I’m just wondering, could I contact you to see if you’d be interested in participating, collaborating in a film?’” Another audience member rejected that idea. “Never ask,” she advised (in other words, shoot first, ask for permission later).
Another audience member questioned, “Is every story of an old grandma worth telling?” Cousins noted, “Way back in the birth of Italian neorealism in the early ‘40s, [Cesare] Zavattini said, ‘Every human being is interesting.’ …The reason for being interested in her is that basic idea that any life is interesting. I think, especially, an older person’s life is super interesting. I think an older woman’s life is super interesting. An older Polish woman’s life is super, super interesting because the layers that she’s lived through.”
The filmmaker took the discussion further. “Imagine this woman, maybe she’s 76 and I can’t find her. I leave a note, nobody replies, or her daughter phones and says she’s not interested. Maybe then I make a film about 76-year-olds, everybody who was born at the same time. Some of you will know Victor Kossakovsky’s masterpiece called Sreda (Wednesday). He made a film about everybody who was born on the same day as he was born in St. Petersburg. There were hundreds – [he devotes] one minute per person and it’s a complete masterpiece. So, maybe I go back to Gdansk… I just put up a notice in Polish saying, ‘Are you 76? Would you like to be in a film?’”
Then he pivoted to another idea. “Her hat was so orange,” he said of the older woman. “Her hat was the same color as the brick wall [in the photo]. And what if you go out now after this and just look for the color orange? Just look for orange. It’ll be amazing. Warsaw will reconfigure itself in your eyes.”
He continued, “I was struck by a woman with an orange hat. I’ll go into Gdansk and just look which newsagent that has got an orange front. I’ll go in and talk to those people. Who’s wearing an orange dress? It’s what Agnès Varda did in her brilliant film Daguerreotypes. If you know that film, she just went to everybody on her street. So, if we don’t have the woman, if we don’t have her permission, if we don’t have her, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s where the juices start to flow and maybe we can make something about what it’s like to be 76 or what it’s like to live in a city like this.”
Cousins was born in England and grew up in County Antrim in Northern Ireland. He began making films in the late 1980s, many springing from the restless creativity and omnivorous eye that was evidenced in the MDAG anti-masterclass. His latest documentary, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is also screening at Millennium Docs Against Gravity. It centers on Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who had a visual epiphany of the sort one could imagine resonating with Cousins.
“One day in 1949, a young Scottish painter climbed a Swiss glacier,” notes a description of the documentary. “The experience rewired her brain and transformed her art. Through a cinematic immersion into her art and life, the film explores themes of gender, neurodiversity, climate change, and the nature of creativity.”
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