09/09/2026
Our conversation with Mark Cousins moves through Auschwitz, Reagan-era greed, decolonisation, Marilyn Monroe, and AI, and somehow holds together as one argument.
Asked about a documentary that changed him, Cousins points to going undercover with neo-Nazis early in his career, confronting them at Auschwitz with the thing they were denying existed.
Asked why empathy matters to the 1980s section of his sixteen-hour documentary, he traces it to Reagan and Thatcher's «greed is good» era, and Eastern Bloc filmmakers documenting a different truth than their governments were selling.
On who actually held the cameras during Africa's decolonisation, he's blunt: most footage came from well-meaning French leftists, not Africans themselves.
On Marilyn Monroe's centenary, no celebration: «Cinema is on the side of the devils as well as the angels.»
On AI, he doesn't stop at caution. «We need the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath in medicine,» he tells Modern Times Review, every AI-assisted frame disclosed outright, no exceptions.
Read Marta Moneva's full interview:
Mark Cousins built a sixteen-hour documentary, refusing to separate images from the world that makes them. In conversation, he keeps reaching for objects scattered around him, as if the room itself were mapping cinema's connection to everything else.
