The Story of Looking
- Description
- Reviews
- Citation
- Cataloging
- Transcript
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On the day before an operation to save his eyesight, filmmaker Mark Cousins explores what looking means to him, and the role our visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, through a kaleidoscope of imagery across cultures and eras, drawing on art history, biology, neuroscience, psychology, poetry and philosophy. As he goes under the surgeon's knife, he suggests that we are in the midst of a looking revolution more powerful than any which has gone before, which has the potential to change the world — for better or for worse.
At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, when the value of looking is increasingly under question, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of human experience, of empathy, discovery and thought. He shares the pleasures of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. And as the Covid-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to other lookers for their vision from lockdown. And in a startling final shift, he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.
Citation
Main credits
Cousins, Mark (film director)
Cousins, Mark (screenwriter)
Cousins, Mark (director of photography)
Bell, Mary (film producer)
Dawtrey, Adam (film producer)
Other credits
Editor, Timo Langer; composer, Donna McKevitt.
Distributor subjects
No distributor subjects provided.Keywords
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T/C |
Vision |
Sound |
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10:00:01 |
CAPTION: CREATIVE SCOTLAND
ALBA | CHRUTHACHAIL |
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10:00:08 |
BOFA logo animation plays |
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10:00:16 |
Television archive of Ray Charles on the Dick Cavett Show in 1972. |
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10:00:17 |
Ray Charles dialogue. CAPTION: Ray Charles (at 10:00:19) |
RC: If you were to say to me: I can wave a wand and you can see right now. And it's gotta be a forever thing, I might turn it down. If you were to say to me: I can wave it and you can see for a day. I might accept that. Only because there are a couple of things that maybe I would like to see once, you know. |
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10:00:43 |
Mark a slender man in his 50s watches the clip on his phone in bed – RC dialogue continues |
RC: Just so I really would know what's really happening. That I haven't seen, because you know,
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10:00:48 |
Return to the clip of Ray Charles CAPTION: The Dick Cavett Show Daphne Productions Inc ABC 1972 |
as I said, I've seen the stars and the moon and the sun, and I remember my mother... So I think basically I would probably like to see... you know, just for once, because I see them anyway all the time, like my kids, for instance. |
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10:01:06 |
Return to Mark watching the clip |
Just to physically see them. But actually I'm not all that hung up about seeing things, |
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10:01:12 |
Return to the clip of Ray Charles |
because I do everything I want to do, I go everywhere I want to go, and with some of the news I hear about today, I mean there are some things I just absolutely don't want to see. And I feel sorry for you guys who have to put up with it. |
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10:01:25 |
Return to Mark in bed |
Audience laughter and applause |
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10:01:31 |
Mark speaks to camera |
MC: I remember seeing that years ago is the colour of TV back then, that lovely blue and burnished minky colour and stuff like that. And the slow camera move gently tracking Ray Charles. But of course it's what he says. The content is unbelievable, for somebody like me who has always loved looking. He says that thing, you know: "I've seen the stars and the moon and the sun." And like, I imagine if I close my eyes now, apart from a bit of light there, I can sort of see, in the back of my eyes almost I can see what looks a wee bit like the cosmos, like stars and moon and things like that. But I'm not actually seeing them in front of my eyes. It feels as if I'm dragging them up from the back of my head somehow. Like I'm kind of projecting or something. But there's certainly a pleasure in that. I can see that. And you know, when he says he'd like to see his kids, I don't have kids, but I totally get that, you know. And then he says: "I've seen my mother", you know. As if when you see something once, that's enough. Maybe it is. You know, if I close my eyes now can I see my mother? She's still alive. Yeah, I can. I see her quite regularly. But it's sort of an idea of her, a sort of fuzzy kind of charcoal sketch of her or something. And actually... You see that makes me think of something. Hold on, let me show you something. Back in a sec...
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10:01:38 |
Caption: Mark Cousins |
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10:03:15 |
He climbs out of bed to go get something |
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10:03:22 |
Caption: THE STORY OF LOOKING |
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10:03:26 |
Caption: a journey through our visual lives |
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10:03:29 |
Mark returns to the bed holding a phone |
MC: It makes me think of this. Now this sounds weird. It's one of those old phones. It goes like that. But when my granny died... You know, in Northern Ireland we leave the coffin open, and so I found myself on my own with her dead in her coffin. And I didn't know if it was the right thing to do. Probably it was bad protocol, but what I did was I used this phone to take a picture of her. And I had it on this phone for ages. My dead granny." But then... the phone died. And so... she was like doubly removed. She's in here somewhere digitally, I guess, I don't understand exactly. But, you know... When I hold on to this phone, I sort of think my granny is in there. Is that sort of similar to Ray Charles' glimpse of something?" I'm thinking of the glimpse of my granny's dead body. And then it is no more. Is that similar to the glimpse sort of branded on your memory, and it's there forever? I don't know. My plan for today, before I watched that Ray Charles thing, was to try and get up, have a shower, get dressed, and go out and talk about looking, about the visual world. Because A: I love it. B: when I open my blinds in the morning I feel it's good for me. I never lie in bed. I never lie in bed. As soon as I wake, 6:20, I get up. So I guess my plan was to get up today, go out into the world where I live, this city of Edinburgh, and talk about looking, talk about visual culture. Because something is going to happen to me tomorrow." Ehm... Should I tell you now? No, I don't think I'll tell you what is going to happen. But quite a big thing to do with my eyesight is happening tomorrow. But as I lie here I wonder... what would happen if I didn't go out today? What if I just lay here in this dark room? Ehm, you know they called it "camera obscura". What if I lay in this camera obscura and just imagined what I see today, who I might bump into, what I might think about? What if I just closed my eyes and thought about visual culture, all the things I've seen, the sunsets I've seen, the dead bodies I've seen, the things I wish I hadn't seen? Ray Charles was talking there in 1972, that was the height of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and I remember seeing on TV, almost I'm sure in '72, a dead body on TV and it haunted me for years. So, the things he talks about, the things he doesn't want to see, maybe I shouldn't have seen that. Anyway, these are my options for today. Do I go out, walk around, see the city, and think about all the visual stuff, how we enjoy looking, the dangers of looking, etc.? Or do I lay here and close my eyes, just imagine it all?
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10:06:49 |
Mark closes his eyes. Voice over. |
MC VO narrator: An autumn day. |
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10:06:50 |
Handheld shot of Mark’s window at 6am |
I waken. My eyes open and my world begins. |
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10:07:00 |
Handheld shot of the view from his window |
My visual world. My eyes look outside. What's that orange light?
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10:07:19 |
Handheld out of focus shot of an orange dawn |
Narrator: Seeing it reminds me of an orange dawn some years ago. A dawn I'll never forget. How many dawns have I seen? |
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10:07:25 |
POV shot of a field of tangled grass, flushed with crimson. |
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10:07:30 |
Back to the shot outside marks window |
Back in my bedroom, my eyes see a tree. I’ve seen it for 20 years. I’ve lived in this flat, in this city, for decades. When I see the tree, he feels alive. When that tree is still going, growing, the world is still going, growing. |
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10:07:55 |
A shot of Mark looking out the window, covered in a crimson hue |
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10:07:58 |
Close up of Mark’s right eye |
My brain isn’t quite awake, but my eyes are. |
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10:08:00 |
View out of his window again |
Together they flash pictures in my head |
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10:08:04 |
Branches of a tree covered in thick snow |
A lifetime of looking. |
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10:08:08 |
Close up on the side of a window |
That feather I saw on a train. |
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10:08:11 |
Show of a snowy landscape blurred by the vapours of a fire |
Those thermals. |
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10:08:17 |
A classy lake from the edge of pier |
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10:08:19 |
Shot of a moving train window |
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10:08:20 |
Return to the closeup of Mark’s eye |
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10:08:22 |
Shot of a sandy hill face, watching a dirt bike race up it. |
My eyes saw a motorbike draw a line on a hill. |
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10:08:35 |
Mark’s reflection in a river bubble |
Myself in a bubble. |
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10:08:38 |
A car submerged in water |
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10:08:40 |
A shark suspended by a rope from a ship’s hull. |
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10:08:44 |
Close up again on Mark’s eye |
My eyes stared and stared |
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10:08:47 |
A colossal chimney explodes into dust and tumbles in slow-motion to the ground. |
at a power station near here, on the day it was to be blown up. Decades of coal dust seemed to make a ghost. |
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10:09:08 |
Steamed up shot of Mark in the shower |
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10:09:10 |
Mark is reflected in his mirror after having a shower |
After my shower, my eyes see this. |
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10:09:13 |
A figure standing on a chimney stack. |
The scene reminds me of the power station. Of many things. |
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10:09:22 |
Workmen abseil down a church tower. Solitary figures sitting beside water. First people, then a robin. |
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10:09:34 |
Mark continues to watch the hooded figure standing on the chimney stack. |
Is the man over there OK? What can he see? I can’t take my eyes off that guy. This shot makes me want to look. To go around his city for a day, with my eyes wide open. To ride the thermals of looking. I love this idea. But it’s not the only reason for wanting to look, today. Looking has been my joy, my world. But that world might be closing a bit. |
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10:10:12 |
Shot of Mark’s expression as he uses his laptop |
Some months ago I did a DNA test and found that I have one of the genes for macular degeneration. The centre of my eyes might dim. |
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10:10:20 |
Mark now wearing glasses with his head on a pillow looking to the camera, |
I found out something else. For ages I’d been trying to clean the left lens of his glasses. It was always dirty. Then I discovered...it wasn’t dirty. My eye had gone cloudy. |
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10:10:48 |
Diagram of an eye’s anatomy |
I got a diagnosis, It’s a cataract. |
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10:10:50 |
Montage of windows and views blurred by rain |
DRIPPING SOUND I suddenly felt old. |
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10:11:02 |
Return to the grass field covered in an orange hue |
Would I stop seeing those orange dawns. |
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10:11:08 |
Morning view out of Mark’s window |
That tree? I felt sad, |
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10:11:12 |
Back to the guy on the chimney |
like the guy on the roof looked sad. Or was I exhilarated? |
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10:11:17 |
Handheld shot of mark on a beach |
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10:11:21 |
Shot of a park bench overlooking Edinburgh |
Both. Today these emotions are intensified, because, tomorrow morning, |
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10:11:26 |
Close up on Mark’s eyes and nose as he walks through his flat. |
someone’s going to cut into my left eye, suck out the lens that I was born with, and add in a plastic one. It’ll be a fixed width, so my brain won’t be able to full focus from close up to far away. |
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10:11:45 |
View out of another window in Mark’s flat, this time at sunset. |
And it might make the world look bluer than my right eye does. |
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10:11:53 |
Back to the closeup of Mark’s face as he walks around his flat. |
My sight dimming and the idea of my eye being cut open is making me think about what I’ve seen. |
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10:12:00 |
A thistle blowing in the wind for a second before returning to the view out of Mark’s window. |
In the day before my operation, I’d like to tell a story of our looking lives |
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10:12:10 |
Painting of Paul Cezanne, followed by a shot of Cezanne’s letter. |
The great French painter Paul Cezanne wrote in a letter the “optical experience that was developing” within him. Did he mean developing like a photo develops in a darkroom? |
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10:12:24 |
Ray Charles clip |
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10:12:26 |
CAPTION: The Dick Cavett Show Daphne Productions Inc ABC |
In that lustrous revealing TV clip Ray Charles talked about stopping seeing." But I didn't stop seeing. |
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10:12:30 |
Collection of shots, a bridge of a winter’s day, colourful balloons on a door, a road covered in snow. |
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10:12:43 |
Mark descends the stairwell from his tenement flat and emerges into the busy street. |
So what has developed in me? How has the visual world grown in me? And, how has it developed in you? |
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10:12:50 |
Various shots of Edinburgh, interspersed with a POV perspective of what Mark is seeing. Ends with There Will Be No Miracles Here sign. |
The brightness of the day, the bustle, the buzz. I feel hit by these things, by the everyday street outside in my city, Edinburgh, and by its vistas. So much to see here. Where do I begin to tell the story of my looking? |
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10:13:12 |
Marks in bed eating toast. Speaks to camera. Shows a sculpture of Shiva. |
MC: So, as you can see, I didn't really go out. What you've just seen is me sort of imagining or... remembering other days out and what I thought, and... I actually decided to stay in and eat toast. But the thing I said about going under the knife, the cataract removal, that's actually true and I'm slightly, "you could say worried or trepidatious about that happening tomorrow. That's why today is sort of an important day for me. Ehm... And I suppose we should go back out again "into the world and start asking the question about where did looking start, how did looking start. I love the story of, ehm... Shiva, the Lord Shiva, who danced the world into existence. This is him dancing and this is the world on fire." I love the idea that the world started with a dance. And was formed by a dance, what a visual thing. In terms of my own first visual memories, where I started; the very first thing I can remember is |
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11:14:20 |
A black and white photo of a beach, and another b&w photo of a beach |
a beach in Ireland, a big empty beach in Ireland. I think we had a dog with us and I just remember running, running into the space. |
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11:14:30 |
Return to Mark in bed |
So, ehm, I'm going to finish my toast, and then we'll go outside and start thinking of the origins of looking. |
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11:14:35 |
A gorse-covered hillside, half in sunlight, half in shadow. |
MC VO: So where does our story start? |
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11:14:44 |
Close up shot of a baby’s eye |
I started life as a baby, of course. In real life, a baby first sees blurs. |
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11:14:53 |
A clip from persona CAPTION: Persona Ingmar Bergman Svensk Filmindustri |
When I later saw Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, I wondered if I ever reached out to my mum’s face like this. Did I want to touch the blur, the out of focus world? But blurs are failures, aren’t they? |
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11:15:13 |
A lake covered in fog, Venice waterways covered in fog, mountains towering over a loch shrouded in mist, a blurred video of a child’s eyes. |
Babies see blurs because their eyes haven’t developed. When I shot this in Venice, I remember wishing I could see the buildings more clearly. A blurred photo is a rubbish photo. Or is it? |
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11:15:37 |
A painting by Hase-gawa To-haku |
I think of this Japanese painting from 1595 by Hase-gawa To-haku. Seven of the pine trees are blurred. The image is at its best in its blurs. It’s like the out of focus trees are ghosts of the others, a world floating around them. Italian painters called their similar blurring sfumato. Fumo means smoke. A smoke screen. Cataract art. |
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10:16:06 |
Mark lies in bed again clutching his head |
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10:16:10 |
Turner painting, Thames Above Waterloo Bridge. Out of focus leaves |
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10:16:21 |
A clip from Sunset Boulevard CAPTION: Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder Paramount Pictures |
When I saw this famous movie as a kid, I remember thinking that the ending looked like a smoke screen. But it wasn’t a mistake. It was expressive, an enhancement. |
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10:16:36 |
A montage of shots of nature interspersed with a baby’s eyes, white curtains blowing in the wind, a tree falling, |
And then the blurs developed, Like Paul Cezanne’s optical experiences developed. I glanced. I saw…a mobile world. A lifetime of motion began. |
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10:17:34 |
A family of toadstools shake in the breeze. |
Did we really see that? Shimmer. Tremble |
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10:17:38 |
A phenakistoscope shows a horse galloping |
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10:17:42 |
Back to the baby’s eye |
The relationship between motion and emotion |
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10:17:45 |
Gene Kelly dancing in Singing in the Rain. CAPTION: Singin’ in the Rain Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen MGM |
Art was made to show this emotion. A man’s joy, and a frame filming him which moves to echo the joy, to ride its thermals |
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10:18:04 |
Montage of shots all containing different visual elements, including insects, planes |
Often the movement I saw seemed abstract, like an insect: Dreamlike My whole life as movement. |
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10:18:29 |
POV of Mark walking around Edinburgh |
Today, the day before my eye operation, I’m so aware of movement. The number of eye movements when I do this every day thing. Cross the road. My head on a pivot, scanning for safety. A bit trickier now that I can’t see well with my left eye. |
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10:18:50 |
A shot of a camera focusing on a baby |
Blurs then movement. What was the next visual step in my infancy? A magnetic attraction to the eyes of others. |
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10:19:00 |
Grass at sunset blowing in the wind, homemade footage of a tiger at a zoo behind glass |
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, on the savannah grasslands, there were about 2 people per square mile, but far more animals, so humans looked more into the eyes of animals. |
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10:19:17 |
Clip from Ivan’s Childhood CAPTION: Ivan’s Childhood Andrei Tarkovsky Mosfilm – Trete Tvorcheskoe Obedinenie |
Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky gives us a flash of this, a solitary boy sees a goat’s eyes, square on. |
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10:19:25 |
Shots of goats looking at the camera, a shire horse in a blanket, cows interested in the camera, sheep also interested in the camera. |
Are we scared by this look? Or do we feel like the animal? Included in its visual world. |
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10:19:37 |
View of the Edinburgh skyline |
In this city of Edinburgh, in which we’re travelling in today, there are nearly 5000 people per sq mile. It’s hard to avoid the electric shock of a look. |
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10:19:50 |
View of the much larger New York skyline |
In the New York Savanna there are 26,000 people per sq mile. Eye saturation. Glances everywhere. Bring a book on the subway to avoid them. |
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10:20:02 |
Shot of Marina Abramovic in a red dress staring at a man. CAPTION: |
And so artist Marina Abramovich sat for 736 hrs in the Museum of Modern Art in Ney York, not avoiding the eye contact. She stared at people like Tarkovsky’s Goat, for what seemed forever. She cancelled out the avoidance, the flight from looking. It was exhausting. Tears came. |
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10:20:35 |
Mark lies awake in bed, his hand pressed against his furrowed brow. |
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10:20: 38 |
Return to the baby’s eyes |
After blurs, movement and eye contact, what did I notice next? How did my visual world advance? Through colour. |
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10:20:50 |
Under the chin shot of mark spinning around looking at the sky |
One of the first colours I will have seen in my life, One of the biggest colours I have seen in my life. Blue. I’ve been seeing blue all my life of course |
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10:21:00 |
A vintage blue campervan |
My car was blue, |
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10:21:05 |
A completely blue house |
I couldn’t take my eyes of this house recently |
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10:21:10 |
Handheld footage of Niagara Falls |
All those blues when I went to Niagara Falls. |
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10:21:15 |
Shots of the sea, and the seaside, intertwined with a bust of Homer |
But is blue everywhere? Not once are the sky or sea called blue in Homer’s writings, or in the Bible. Homer says the sea is wine coloured or has a sheen. |
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10:21:28 |
A Greek town under thunder clouds, A Greek monument under construction. |
Maybe the sky and sea were so big, so bright, so distant, that their blueness hardly registered for ancient writers. |
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10:21:40 |
Yves Klein’s blue hand , recreated by Mark |
It certainly registered for French artist Yves Klein who, in his teens, lay on his back and signed the Mediterranean sky with his finger. |
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10:21:50 |
The colour blue followed by a shot of a blue sky |
The number of times I’ve laid on my back and looked up at a summer sky. It’s black up there, but I see blue, refracted. Hard to focus on, oblivious. People threw meaning at blue. They played with it. |
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10:22:12 |
Clip from Hero CAPTION: Hero Zhang Yimou Beijing New Picture Film Co – China Film Co-Production – Elite Group Enterprises – Sil Metropole Organisation – Zhang Yimou Studio |
I think of one of cinema’s great colourists, Chinese director Zhang Yimou. He staged a lake fight. Distant blue, then under water, cast blue. Then their costumes. The shades of blue multiply. And the water, aquamarine. A fight for it, and a tear on her cheek. |
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10:22:50 |
Detail of Van Gogh painting |
And blue registered for Vincent Van Gogh, who knew that most shadows aren’t grey, they’re…blue |
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10:23:06 |
Da Vinci painting – Virgin of the Rocks |
And blue mattered for Leonardo da Vinci. The virgin’s dress and the blue of the rocks and sky, so strong, such an affinity for each other. This could be called a study in blue and gold. Talk about affinity for each other. |
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10:23:20 |
Emami mosque in Iran |
They’re everywhere, blue and gold. I saw them in the Emami mosque in Esfahan in Iran, the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen. When I walked around it, I thought of the beaches of my childhood. |
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10:23:35 |
An Irish beach, a blue stone |
Maybe that’s what Paul Cezanne meant by optical development? Unlikely visual connections being made? Colours encrusting with memories. And blue and gold occur a lot in nature. |
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10:24:00 |
Goethe colour chart |
The great writer Goethe understood such affinities of colour. Colour on opposite sides of his colour wheel long for each other |
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10:24:08 |
Clip from Vertigo CATION: Alfred Hitchcock Paramount Pictures |
green light in the centre, purple shadows to left and right. and her shadow is pink, purple. Alfred Hitchcock and his team understood how colours desire each other. |
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10:24:27 |
Shot under Mark’s chin, standing under a yellow tree, A cherry blossom tree, a pink shop in America, a wall in Albania, an inflatable ball, the wings of a moth, pink flowers on a grey wall in LA, a pink plastic bag in grass. |
On my walk, I think of the colours I’ve seen on my travels. A cherry blossom tree here in Edinburgh is the same as a shop in America. Muted in Albania. Grey and red in Los Angeles. |
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10:24:55 |
Two shots of the same mountain over a loch, one in a pink sunset, the other in a blue sunrise |
And back here in Scotland. On a holiday a few years ago, I saw the same place in two colours, transformed |
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10:25:05 |
Marks sitting up in bed speaking to camera – he writes a Twitter message on his phone. |
MC: So, I was thinking: How do you tell the story of looking when you sort of can't go out and look?" So one of the things I thought was why don't I use social media? So what I'm going to do now is tweet about what I'm actually doing right now, and ask people something... I don't know what yet, but ask people something about their visual lives. "A bit weird, but trying to do something about outside world without going outside. What role has looking played in your life? Has looking made you happy? Taught you about life? Send me images, thoughts. |
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10:25:54 |
Craggy Hillside in Edinburgh |
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10:26:00 |
Marks checking his phone in bed. He shows an image on his phone that someone has sent him. |
Time to look at Twitter, I think, to see... Social media, to see if anybody has responded to... what I asked about looking in their lives. Michael Ewins said: To make a film you have to get up. And this is an image, I recognise who that is: Chantal Akerman. So he sent me a picture of Chantal Akerman saying "Get out of your lazy bed!" Okay, thank you for that Michael. Laura Cumming, she is an art historian, and she's the art critic of The Observer and she's written very good books. She said: "Looking is absolutely everything to me." Pure joy, total gratitude. If I had no more speech, writing, music or movement," I would still have the active life of looking … Of seeing. And the replay in dreams at night. Insatiable lust constantly fulfilled." Wow. Wow! ""And since you ask, I've spent lockdown looking at one postcard, trying to work out why the picture is so modest, magnificent, so limited, inexhaustible." And look what it is. Very famous Vermeer painting. |
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10:27:25 |
Vermeer painting |
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10:27:32 |
Mark in bed |
Thank you, Laura. Stephen Clarke says: "I enjoy looking at things that take time to happen like a pint of Guinness settling or my face aging." How lovely, Stephen. Thank you. "Any time I've been around violence I've kept my eyes open,any time I've been kissed I've kept my eyes closed. Perhaps if I was kissed violently I'd keep one eye open." Makimono says: "I love to look at daily things from the weird points of view. During the lockdown I shot a trip around my room, I looked at the white wall because it was the most uninteresting thing that came to my mind. When I boosted the saturation, a new universe emerged." |
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10:28:21 |
The cloudy image is flecked with yellow and purple dots and streaked with red lines. |
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10:28:36 |
Students on a foggy sports pitch |
And Conor Murphy says: "Looking out my classroom window on to the sports pitch," "looking at my students looking out the window and ignoring them, letting them enjoy the moment when there's no sports out there. Watching the flock of birds roaming the field looking for insects to eat." |
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10:28:52 |
Back to Mark |
"There are different ways of looking at the pitch. "Sometimes it's full of students playing organised sports, sometimes P.E., sometimes breaktime nonsense, sometimes nature has taken over, birds and wind and growth. Sometimes the robot lawn mower is slowly twirling from end to end." Wow, Conor. That's a film. Mia Bays says: "Being able to look at another, really look, is part of the passage into adulthood." Wow. "Some people are thirsty to be seen and others shrink from it. I learnt to be defiant with my gaze, to retaliate from the burden of girlhood, when you're looked at so much but not really seen." Woah! Lynne Myfanwy Jones. I met Lynne in... Sarajevo during the siege. She's a great activist and psychiatrist. "Being able to see clearly, that gives so much joy. Right now I want a fishing boat to pass, a breeze ruffle, budding leaves, and make a jackdaw lose its balance on the branch. And I know I'm alive and well. Forget mindfulness, just look. Here's this week's butterfly." Lynne Jones! |
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10:30:35 |
Picture of a butterfly |
That's beautiful. |
|
10:30:40 |
Return to Mark in the bed, followed by a photo of woman standing by Leigh Docks |
And then my friend Kevin Williamson says..." He sends a picture. "Very happy, the colours, the sky. "Our place in the world, yesterday at Leith docks." |
|
10:31:02 |
Photo of Mark’s shoulder with a sketch above it |
Emma Fletcher: "Beauty everywhere, stay safe." Oh wow, she's taken a picture of my shoulder and added something onto it. |
|
10:31:10 |
Mark continues his dialogue |
Chris says: ""As a youngster in a fairly dysfunctional family, I would often seek refuge at my desk in my bedroom. I sat next to a window and it overlooked a railway line and a modest industrial estate. I would spend hours watching the dynamics of this environment. And it provided much solace." CLEARS THROAT I know I'm just reading all these out, but there's a lot of emotion in here. A lot of people talking about looking as a kind of lifeline or something, or as a kind of... anchor thrown onto something, to life or to safety. I'm quite touched by all of that. People took my question seriously, which I'm slightly surprised by sometimes," 'cause people think I'm a bit daft, but... Also people are relating looking to living," and aliveness. And consolation. I love that word, "consolation". It's like an old Victorian word that we don't use so much. How do you console yourself or somebody else? And usually consolation is about touch. Or a hug. And we can't do hugs. I've hugged only one person... in what, five months? And maybe under this weird situation where... Obviously I could go out of this room, but.. "You know, this sort of dark room is a symbol of the lockdown process. Maybe looking is a way of dealing with things, when you can't actually physically touch people. Or it's a bit of a consolation. Look at this from Dave Hollingsworth. He says: "I don't know if this counts, but looking at myself in the mirror has been nothing but difficult. When I look or have to, I see a nightmare. I just loathe the way I look. I guess looking has been hard, really hard for me. That's an understatement. |
|
10:34:37 |
Mark still in bed, but time has passed, the room is lighter and he is no longer looking at his phone. |
Just as that clip of Ray Charles talking really challenged me about looking and what I thought about looking," so a woman that I met a few years ago really challenged me about colour. I was in Newcastle, her name was Clare Murphy, I was doing a Q&A for one of my films and she put up her hand and said:"Excuse me, you've been talking a lot about colour here, I'm colour blind, I don't see colour." And of course I knew about colour blindness, but I'd never really talked to somebody about that. So I got her email address and we had an email exchange. I've got some of it here. If I can find... Okay, so ehm... |
|
10:35:45 |
Clip of A Matter of Life and Death CAPTION: A Matter of Life and Death Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger The Archers |
We started talking about that Powell and Pressburger film,"A Matter of Life and Death, which is in colour and black and white." And so I emailed her and she replied: "Dear Mark, I didn't know that Powell and Pressburger chose to mute colour in A Matter of Life and Death." |
|
10:36:00 |
Mark in bed reading his emails |
"I'm a fan of the film, but have clearly enjoyed it in my own way. If a description of a garden mentions reds and purples and greens, I would consider it in my imagination to be vibrant and alive.To hear descriptions such as moss, apple, mint, olive, etc., all to define green is baffling for me. How is it that these can all be the same colour but different? I'm sure to you it is perfectly clear. I'd be interested in your thoughts on watching" The Wizard of Oz in black and white. |
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10:36:37 |
Clip from The Wizard of Oz CAPTION: The Wizard of Oz Victor Fleming MGM |
How will you like the grey brick road?" And so I did watch The Wizard of Oz in black and white, because she asked me to. "Dear Clare, I watched The Wizard of Oz in black and white, and I was shocked. |
|
10:36:55 |
Return to Mark’s bed, with the occasional cut back to The Wizard of Oz, in black and white and in colour. |
"The soundtrack of course changes when Dorothy opens the door to Oz, but in black and white the visual contrast seems to reduce after she opens the door. I guess that's because the colour in the Oz sequence is doing the intensity work, the lighting has relatively less to do. But what really surprised me is the reduction of the emotional uplift. The shift in colour creates a sudden happiness for me. The tomato red of Dorothy's lips, the copper of her hair, and the blue gingham in her dress. Sorry for using words that you can't see. These things make her look fresher, more alive. Like she's had a blood transfusion." So I just...I think I started thinking of colour, appreciating colour more after that. But in this film, in this story of looking, from colour to light, why don't we start thinking about... light. |
|
10:38:00 |
The top deck of an Edinburgh bus moving through the city |
When, in my visual development, in my looking life, did I first notice light? Maybe the cosy glow of a Christmas tree? |
|
10:38:15 |
Clip from Mildred Pierce CAPTION: Mildred Pierce Michael Curtiz Warner Bros |
Maybe in an old Hollywood melodrama on TV when I was about ten? People unveiled, and veiled. Light made life gorgeous and shocking. |
|
10:38:35 |
Mark looks out of the window on the same bus, intertwined with shots of Edinburgh is its various seasons |
I began to realize that light’s not one story, its lots of stories. In a city like this, which is dark in winter…You look for light. It lifts you if you’re low. Like a fresh start. I remember the lift of dawn light when I was in primary school. Like you’re docking. Or turning into something else. I loved those feelings. I’ve carried them with me. |
|
10:39:15 |
A view of Edinburgh Castle from the bus |
From my bus today I see this kind of acropolis in our city, our Athens of the North, and think of the other Acropolis. |
|
10:39:20 |
Video footage of the Acropolis in various lights |
What if we think of it not as a temple or a fortress, just as something transformed by light: Light that lifts, that celebrates |
|
10:39:48 |
Mark half in shadow on the bus again |
And in the middle ages, they talked of two different types of light. The first, Lux was everyday light that you see with your eyes |
|
10:40:00 |
People milling into a church sped up, followed by images inside the church a painting there. |
The second, Lumen, was spiritual light, the sort of light that took you to rapture or pain. I know more about rapture and pain now than I did when I was 10. |
|
10:40:20 |
An Ancient Egyptian Carving |
This Egyptian Pharaoh on the left had a religious conversion about light. He became a worshipper of the Sun – Aten – and so changed his name to Akhenaten. Arrows of sunlight go out to him and his wife, Nefertiti |
|
10:40:40 |
A light overlooking a canal at night, a Chinese shop made luminous by its sign, an electric light turning on, a photograph of a couple confused by the lightbulb, Notre Dame looking dull and unlit, The Eiffel tower at night sparkling |
Lifting, transforming, celebrating, worshipping. Electric light brought something new again. It meant people could work longer into the night, and often be exploited more. Home life became brighter, more extended. And cities Lightscapes. |
|
10:41:10 |
A dead tree leaning over the water in some northern hemisphere city. |
From childhood I’ve preferred Northern cities. The South in the summer is blinding. In Finland |
|
10:41:17 |
A Clip from Concrete Night CAPTION: Concrete Night Pirjo Honkasalo Plattform Produktion Magic Hour Films OY Bufo |
In Finland, a boy, the kind of northern evening I’ve always loved. The lightscape behind him, the sky’s gloaming. No colour, just light. Then the train’s light. and water like sparks, like falling light. Sci fi light. Dream light. |
|
10:41:49 |
Mark’s in bed with a glass of wine |
MC: I've also got a little glass of wine here on the go. This ain't no ordinary glass. A great movie star, Jane Russell, you might have seen her with Marilyn Monroe in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There's a famous scene where they walk out wearing red dresses against a blue background." And it's that heightened colour of Hollywood. You know, we talked about blue earlier. And Jane Russell, that woman, came here to this flat. And she stayed for a couple of days in Scotland and we had a lot of fun.She was a lovely woman. And she drank iced tea out of this glass. And I hardly ever use it, but since I'mjust lying here thinking about looking, I'd look at her...And is it possible to say that I'd look at this glass and I'd think of her?" The answer's yes. It's not 'cause the glass looks like her, but I realise that she touched it and it's one degree of separation." And it's that sort of... It's a memory image. I used to get emails from her. Jane Russell. |
|
10:43:22 |
Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in red dresses |
|
|
10:43:25 |
Mark continues his bed dialogue |
I have been in bed for hours. I don't know when I last just lay in bed all day." And, you know, we've been talking about lots of stuff," and it feels to me lying here in this dark room that I've been like a projector. You know the projector scene in Sunset Boulevard, |
|
10:43:50 |
Clip from Sunset Boulevard CAPTION: Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder Paramount Pictures |
"where they're sitting and you can see the smoke in the projector," as if it's their thoughts. |
|
10:43:55 |
Back to Mark in bed, intercut with 3 photos of his adolescent self |
It's almost like that's what I've been doing today. And we've talked about colour and we've talked about light." Light. You know, and childhood and fuzziness and everything. But now we have to get on to the next stage in people's lives, my life, your life, which is adolescence. That... time where you feel kind of... CLAP...smashed in some way, by reality and life You start looking at yourself. You look at yourself and you think: "Oh God..." You know, "How ugly!" You look at this thing, your face, and you look for a kind of ideal in it and you don't find the ideal. And I think in the era of Snapchat, that and selfies, you know, even more so, there are ways of seeing the landscape of anxiety in your own face. There's a way of seeing failure in your own face, as well." And so we have to talk about that. And of course you also start looking at bodies. Your body and other people's bodies. And voilà, lo and behold, you begin to see, potentially, failure there as well." Ehm... I remember... |
|
10:45:30 |
Clip from Taxi Driver CAPTION: Taxi Driver Martin Scorsese Columbia Pictures – Bill/Phillips Italo/Judeo Productions |
I remember when I was a teenager, seeing Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro." There's this scene where he's got his shirt offand he's standing with a gun, and I saw his chest and I thought: "That's what a male chest is supposed to be like." |
|
10:45:35 |
Mark shows off his own naked chest in bed, then his legs followed by a shot of Mark walking. Then various shots of the places he describes waking through. |
And then I looked at my chest... "nd I thought: "Uh-oh, it's not like that." Failure, failure, failure. And that's one of the bad bits, one of the terrible bits about looking:" that sense of when you compare, you disappoint. But there are good things, you realise as you get older, there are good things about your body as well. You know, my eyes, if I've already said, the pleasure it's given me. And my legs... The best thing about me by far is my legs. I've walked across some of the great cities in the world: New York, Berlin, Moscow, Los Angeles, Paris... Mumbai, Delhi. "London, Belfast, Cardiff, all those cities, Dublin. Tehran. So if we're talking about bodies, I think the best things about me, the most nourishing things about me are my eyes and my legs. Anyway. That's the next bit of our story, I guess. Adolescence and teenagers. And, are you ready? Do you feel like dancing?” |
|
10:47:10 |
Clip from Beats CAPTION: Beats Brian Welsh Rosetta Productions CAPTION: SCOTLAND 1994 |
VO: Scottish lads in their teens, they're like firecrackers. Their bedrooms, their worlds. their rooms like stage sets, or rock pools. From here they imagine their lives. |
|
10:47:55 |
A spotty teenager looks towards the camera, and then rotates his head. |
I grew up. Became a teenager. I saw myself. My visual world developed again. It became more excited and troubled. |
|
10:48:14 |
A self portrait of French painter Gustave Courbet – The Desperate Man |
Whatever else there is, there’s always something of a shock when we look at ourselves. French painter Gustave Courbet seems shocked here. what does he see? – his ego? Beauty? Neurosis? Aliveness? He pulls his hair back and seems to say is that really me? He was about twenty-four. |
|
10:48:38 |
A self-portrait of Marie Genevieve Bouliard |
Marie Genevieve Bouliard saw something else when she looked at herself in the late 1700s. Was it self satisfaction. Her head lifted and turned a bit to glimpse its shape, its setting, her setting. |
|
10:49:00 |
A self-portrati of German artist Albrecht Durer |
Here, the German artist Albrecht Durer sees beyond the shock or pleasure of self. He sees Jesus Christ in his symmetrical, handsome stillness. There’s no flicker here, no rush to the canvas. The self portrait as an act of love. The word “mirror” comes from “mirari” in Latin, which means to marvel at. |
|
10:49:29 |
A self-portrait of Freda Kahlo – On the Boarder Between Mexico and the Unitied States |
Frieda Kahlo was less edified by what she saw, but was compelled to look. Here she is, in a self portrait on a plinth on the border between Mexico and the United States. The smoke, factories and skyscrapers on the right show the America she hated. The flowers and cacti, ancient sculpture, pyramid and electric spark between sun and moon on the left are symbols of the elemental Mexico she preferred. Or are they? Is it that simple? Kahlo was a modernist and leftist, so she was not averse to smoke stacks. It says FORD on them, and she’d just had a miscarriage at the Henry Ford clinic, so the image starts to seem as much about loss as nation. The sun, top left, has its echo in the orange heater in the bottom right. Kahlo is like the balancing act in this nation-dream. I feel a bit between countries too. I’m Irish, Scottish, British I suppose...The imagery of those different places. I’m in each place. |
|
10:50:48 |
Back to the teenager staring at the camera |
I see myself in each place. See yourself. It’s hard not to these days. |
|
10:51:00 |
A woman takes a selfie at a temple, a group of young teens crowd round to take a selfie, a woman takes a selfie on a wall, a young group of adults take a selfie, someone taking a selfie at the acropolis, an elderly couple taking a selfie, a girl sleding down a snowy hill taking a selfie, |
30 billion or so selfies are posted each year." The majority are by women. Some people say that selfies are narcissistic. But isn't there snobbery in such denunciation? It's okay when artists picture themselves, but when, for the first time in human history, most people can, it's called banal. Yet look at what people take selfies of. Either themselves having fun, or in famous places. Or celebrating a feeling trying to hold on to a feeling. Pleasure, being there, or the moment. Isn't that universal? And even endearing? |
|
10:52:04 |
The teenager rotates his head |
A love of the moment? A response to time passing? And beyond myself in my teens, what else did I see? People I liked. Other bodies. |
|
10:52:10 |
A clip from Romeo and Juliet CAPTION: Romeo + Juliet Baz Luhrmann Bazmark Films – Estudios Churubusco Azteca Twentieth Century Fox |
These two teenagers are looking through the fish tank but also through their own emotions, anticipation. |
|
10:52:30 |
Clip from Grease CAPTION: Grease Randal Kleiser Paramount Pictures – Robert Stigwood Organisation Alan Carr Production |
I was 13 when I saw this. The desire to run after a body. Her satin hips. His lips. He was floored by looking.The joy. The submission. There was danger ahead of those teenage years. Black against yellow. You could almost see the force field |
|
10:52:57 |
Blurred screen as someone scrolls through a pornographic website. |
On the internet, now, bodies are everywhere. Too much to see, to shock, to exploit, to distort. |
|
10:53:10 |
Old footage of a man blindfolded |
It’s bad to look this much at bodies, isn’t it? It’s always been so. |
|
10:53:19 |
Religious Italian renaissance painting – Diana and Actaeon by Cesari |
So the Irish Catholic world said when I was a teenager. A story from the ancient world tells us something about how we look at bodies. Actaeon, on the right, has been hunting with his dogs. He comes across the goddess Diana, on the extreme left, and her companions. They’re naked. To punish him for looking, she turns him into a stag. The antlers on his head show that the transformation has started. When complete, his dogs tear him to pieces. |
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10:53:50 |
The teenager continues to rotate his head, then shot of a deer |
Punished for looking! Is that what we are when we look? Stags? |
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10:53:58 |
Clip from Walkabout CAPTION: Nicolas Roeg Max L. Raab Productions Si Litvinoff Film Production |
When I was a teenager I saw this scene in an Australian film, Walkabout. I wanted to be with her, but also be her. Aquatic, free, innocent, weightless. Did that make me a stag? |
|
10:54:16 |
A red jellyfish floats in clean shallow water |
I recently saw this jellyfish, and wanted to float weightless like it, so I floated near it. I loved it. |
|
10:54:23 |
Mark floats naked in the water |
I was naked, as you can see. I’m the opposite of the goddess Diana |
|
10:54:27 |
The Painting of Diana & Actaeon by Cesari |
in the painting. I don’t mind being seen naked. Does that make me an exhibitionist? Or an object in your eyes And does it make you a voyeur, a stag? |
|
10:54:45 |
Clip from the Holy Mountain CAPTION: The Holy Mountain Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstahl Berg und Sportfilm Universum Film |
Nazi-era photographer Leni Riefenstahl, writhing in front of someone’s camera lens. She sympathized with a violently racist regime, and then, |
|
10:54:58 |
A picture Leni Riefenstahl being help over rocks by a Naked Black man in the Sudan |
as a photographer, went to the Sudan and became interested in images like this. She was Clothed, white, female, European and in her 70s. He was – what – 19? And naked. She had the power. He looks like a byzantine Christ icon. and she leads him like a child. |
|
10:55:30 |
A small boy crawls along a patch of dusty grass, glancing at the camera. Clothes are drying on the wall behind him. |
A boy called Adam. The Idomeni Refugee camp in greek Macedonian border. I ask her mum if it’s Ok to film him. Yes, she says. They’ve travelled from Syria. |
|
10:56:00 |
The toddler stares into the camera, he plays with the camera, occasionally it drops into the grass. |
His eyes, his looking, are taken by my camera. It keeps on recording. Regardless. Regardless. I don’t take my camera from him, because it’s a toy now. Is this without regard? Is this bad looking? Voyeurism? It’s so easy to see, now. But what do we do with this seeing? |
|
10:57:29 |
A picture of a woman avoiding looking at corpses in a Nazi concentration camp. |
Are we like this woman on the left? She’s from Weimar in Germany. It’s the end of World War 2, and she’s been taken to the concentration camp of Buchenwald, to be shown the bodies of some of the 56,000 murdered with her assent. But she turns her head away, and covers her eyes - a double refusal to look. She should look. |
|
10:58:05 |
A car flipped over with fire fighters and paramedics around it. |
But should we look when we slow down as we pass a car crash? |
|
10:58:10 |
A woman about to be beheaded in Saudi Arabia |
Or should we look at this. Purportedly a woman being beheaded in Saudi Arabia in 2019. Do we force ourselves to face this atrocity? Does showing the footage around the world help women like her? |
|
10:58: 27 |
Mark videos his bins. |
When I was having my shower this morning, I saw a homeless woman I know looking through our bins outside. It was very early. She didn’t want to be seen. Did I violate her by seeing her? |
|
10:58:46 |
At dawn, he tramps up a grassy Edinburgh hillside, before turning the camera on himself as he gazes smiling at the sunrise. Intercut with brief flashes of Un Chien Andalou, the eyeball cut scene. |
I wanted to get to the end of my story of looking today, before nightfall, before my eye is cut open. But October is doing its thing, warming the light, sinking the sun, hardening the ground, lengthening the shadows. I wanted to talk about politics and adulthood today. But, instead, I’m starting to feel afraid. I don’t want someone to stick a knife in my left eyeball tomorrow. I can’t help thinking of a 90 year-old movie eye slice, moon slice, cow slice. A dream that Luis Bunuel had had. I look every which way. Can you look in panic? What images have developed in me after all these years? I try to think of the picture of my granny on my phone. Ray Charles. |
|
11:00:05 |
He swivels his head, watching a bird in flight. A portrait of a bearded man. |
|
|
11:00:18 |
Lightning flashes above an Edinburgh night sky, which turns from black to purple with every burst of light. |
|
|
11:00:30 |
CAPTION: THE NEXT DAY |
|
|
11:00:35 |
Shot of Mark walking into the eye hospital |
|
|
11:00:42 |
A brief glimpse of the acne-afflicted teenager. |
|
|
11:00:49 |
He sits beside two surgeons, wearing surgical scrubs and a hair net. |
Surgeon: “So I want you to lie down, head on here. So what I'm going to do, Mark, is put my hand on the back of your neck If you're gonna cough, give us a bit of warning.” Mark: “I'll put my hand up.”
|
|
11:01:14 |
Mark is lying on the medical bed |
MARK VO: I can feel my heart beating, so I try to think of places I love.
|
|
11:01:15 |
A loch side, a dusty mountain, a church, a muddy ditch, a motionless pond, A frosty lane, a modern building, a hillside forest |
|
|
11:01:31 |
A selfie as he spins round on top of a hill. A cottage beside a murky loch. Watery Edinburgh sunshine. A potholed road through a glen. A barren, dusty hillside. A woman strolling through a field of tall grass. |
|
|
11:01:47 |
His hospital bed. |
They give me a sedative. As they prepare to cut into my eye, I think of what it’s seen, Cezanne’s optical development. |
|
11:02:01 |
His surgeon studies his eyes through a microscope. |
Dr Pankaj Argawal. He’s Bengali, from Calcutta. A place I love. |
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11:02:17 |
Clip from Devi CAPTION: Devi Satyajit Ray Satyajit Ray Productions |
I think of the Bengali film Devi. A dream sequence I’ll never forget. Three drawn eyes in the darkness, then two disappear, then Sharmila Tagore, lit from below. Her stare. Throughout my life, movies have been my extra eyes. |
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11:02:49 |
Clip from Rien que les heures CAPTION: Rien que les heures Alberto Cavalcanti Neo Film |
I think of another film, Rien Que Les Heurs. A screen full of eyes, like cut outs. The film is about Paris, the eyes tell us that we look at the city in loads of ways. Like I looked at Edinburgh yesterday? And as the operation begins, my mind combines Sharmila’s eyes and the Paris eyes, and comes up with the dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. |
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11:03:15 |
Clip from Spellbound CAPTION: Spellbound Alfred Hitchcock Selznik International Pictures Vanguard Pictures |
Eyes like stars. Designed by Salvador Dali. Is the sedative making me visualise? |
|
11:03:30 |
Mar’sks operation continues |
Even if I went blind today, I’d have those eyes, those movies, in my head. Is that what Ray Charles meant at the beginning of this film? I’d be able to play those picture games in my head. How intimate. |
|
11:03:49 |
A close-up of the cloudy eye, as the scalpel circles then pierces it. |
Pankaj cuts through the front of my eye. |
|
11:04:00 |
An icy rural landscape seen from the window of a passing train. |
|
|
11:04:04 |
The pupil of the eye is perforated |
He breaks up my cataract. |
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11:04:14 |
The train rattles onwards, past heathery moors. |
|
|
11:04:21 |
Return to the close up operation |
He inserts a new folded up lens. It looks like the birth of an insect. The lens has curvy arms. I feel like I’m underwater. I see what looks like a cave. I draw it later |
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11:05:00 |
Mark’s painting, and then two bright colourful painting from previous patients |
Days afterwards, Dr Pankaj sends me pictures of paintings of what some of his other patients saw as he removed their cataracts |
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11:05:12 |
Mark’s operation is finished and he is taken out of the operating theatre. |
I’m under the knife for 21 mins. Long enough for your mind to wander, your inner-eye to wander. Thinking of Dr Pankaj and Sharmila Tagore, made my mind skip to another Bengali film, The Music Room. |
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11:05:25 |
Clip from The Music Room CAPTION: The Music Room Satayjit Ray Satyajit Ray Productions |
It’s about an old man. His life is narrowing. He stands in his music room and sees its chandelier reflected in his whisky glass. A tiny world, a microcosm. |
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11:05:44 |
Clip from 42nd Street CAPTION: 42nd Street Lloyd Bacon Warner Bros |
The scene makes me think of a dance number from the film 42nd Street. Geometric. Like a flower. Another microcosm, another rock pool. |
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11:05:50 |
Close up on Marks bandaged eye, Electron Microscope images, dot painting by George Seurat, The Eye of Ra, Nazars Bounce, the ceiling of Haghia Sofia, Painting of an eye from Iraq in the Middle Ages, which is animated with curving red lines into the eye. |
And from that my mind’s eye goes to electron microscope images. New types of seeing, way beyond the visible world. A microverse. Like we’re underwater. This is a marine alga covered in scales. And the thought that this is a kind of dot, made me think of dot paintings like this. George Seurat seemed to want to make his pictures out of atoms. Writer Gertrude Stein said that “Seurat’s eyes... began to tremble at what his eyes were seeing, he began to doubt if - in looking - he could see.” My eyes are trembling. I’m scared again. In much of the middle east and North Africa, there’s the evil eye. In ancient Egypt, the Eye of Ra showed the destructiveness of the sun god. Nazars bounce such bad intentions back on themselves. And look up inside one of the world’s great buildings – Haghia Sofia a mosque that was a church – and what do we see? An eye, surely. The islamic dome makes me think of something else. Iraq. In the 800s, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, lived there. He wrote The Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye. In one drawing in the book, the eye’s in the middle. the outside world is below, the inner world of the brain is above. Hunayn said that a kind of circulatory air – he called it pneuma - travels out from the brain, down the red curving lines in the image, enters the eye from the back, then travels out, into the world, hits an object, and is reshaped by it. Then the reshaped pneuma travels back into the eye and further back to the brain. And that’s how Hunayn thought we see. |
|
11:08:17 |
A bank note with Alhazen face |
150 years later, also in what is now Iraq, a man called Alhazen argued the opposite. He said that when we look, rays come to us not from us. Looking is a kind of invasion, it colonises us. |
|
11:08:30 |
A busy marketplace |
It is a submission to the world. We spend our lives managing that invasion. |
|
11:08:37 |
Alhazen’s crater on the moon |
Alhazen has a crater on the moon named after him. And his face is on Iraqi money. |
|
11:08:42 |
X-Ray of someone’s brain |
We now know that Hunayn was wrong to think that waves come out of our eyes. And yet. New studies are showing that in a way he was not far off. Neuroscience has found that, when we look, twice as many electrical signals move from the back of our brains to the front than from the front to the back. |
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11:09:08 |
Clip from Sunset Boulevard CAPTION: Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder Paramount Pictures |
We’re projecting when we look, like Norma Desmond, we see what we know, what’s in our past. It’s more about us than the outside world. |
|
11:09:18 |
Mark back at home after his operation, montage of different eyes, |
That’s why, under the knife, I was seeing so much. A few hours later. My eye feels sore, like it has broken glass in it. I want to rip this eye mask off. What did I see yesterday and today? What is the story of looking? Just as we have our work lives, our family lives, our sex lives, we also have our looking lives. How many sunsets have you seen? How many dead bodies? They are inside you those things. We add to them sometimes. And, often, we project. |
|
11:10:07 |
He peels off the tape holding the eye mask in place and levers it up, revealing his bleary red left eye. He blinks and his eyes dart around the room. |
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11:10:26 |
As he peels off the last of the tape, he trembles, and his eyes fill with tears. |
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11:10:46 |
A snowstorm coats a forest, with deep snow clinging to every trunk and branch. |
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11:11:14 |
An open window in a rainstorm, looking out into a vast garden. |
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11:11:21 |
He paces slowly across leaf-strewn grass, approaching a tree with his hand stretched out in front of him. |
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11:11:27 |
Clip of Ray Charles singing, cut with previous shots from the film |
Ray Charles song - Ruby |
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11:12:50 |
Images of Mark’s tattooed hands. His left hand bears a symbol and the right the word ‘Mull’. Cut to an old man’s hands with the same tattoos. |
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11:12:57 |
An elderly man with hunched shoulders and wrapped in a heavy coat, scarf and hat, stares directly into the camera. |
That feels like half a lifetime ago. I moved to Sweden in 2031… and, no wait, before that I should tell you that the operation back then was a success. They showed me scans of my left eye before. And after. I could see so clearly with my new eye. The world looked fresher. And it’s still there that plastic lens. My right eye has faded a bit, but the macular degeneration was treated and is OK. This left eye? 30 years after its lens was replaced? It’s seen many Swedish summers. And about ten years ago, it saw this. In Varmland |
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11:14:14 |
A white moose crosses the road |
It went into the picture book in my head. Paul Cezanne never came here, to Sweden, so he never saw a white moose. |
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11:14:33 |
Self-portrait of Paul Cezanne |
I just recently discovered that he wrote that phrase “the optical experience that develops in us” in the last year of his life. He was old when he realized that his looking life had developed, like I’m old. And in this old age he felt as if he’d only started looking properly, acutely! |
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11:15:00 |
Handheld footage of Mark snapping of a branch |
I went to his house in France and snapped off a bit of branch. When you’re old, you’ve seen a million things. |
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11:15:14 |
Clip from Autumn Sonata CAPTION: Autumn Sonata Ingmar Bargman Personafilm - ITC |
Ingrid Bergman aged 63, here in Sweden. Her red eyes and lips. Warm, aged colours. She looks left, to the thing that moves her to tears. |
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11:15:34 |
Clip from Casablanca CAPTION: Casablanca Michael Curtiz Warner Bros |
1942. Ingrid again, 36 years earlier, over a century ago now. Same composition, again looking left. More burnished lighting. It’s almost mythic. What would older Ingrid think of when she looked back at her younger self? She’d see thirty six years of looking |
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11:16:09 |
An Oscar in shadow, the moon reflected in a lake, a view from a plane, a lavish tiled roof, a lake in fog overlooked by winter trees, a complexly laid-out house in the woods, a snowy forest with a river flowing through it, a hill in Los Angeles, a swimming pool. Then a return shot to the two movie clips. |
She might think “what those eyes have seen.” She was brought up in the dark winters of Sweden but then became a movie star in California’s constant sunlight-floodlight. She’d know what that woman in 1942 wouldn’t know – that the Nazis would be defeated, that she’d have four children, that she’d reject Hollywood gloss to make new, more visually realistic, movies. Perhaps only when she was older could she see herself young. The waterfall of herself. Always the same waterfall, never the same water |
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11:17:02 |
A woman looking into a still lake from a pier, A waterfall, a desert path, a snowy path, the old man still walking, snowy trees, old eyes |
Perhaps she’d see calm because she’d known tumult. Perhaps she’d feel loved, because she’d been unloved. She’d see the story of her looking. I’ve come to realise that late looking is often comparing. When we look at these two Bergmans, we see our own aging in them, or we see time. |
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11:17:38 |
Mark’s future self gazes out of a window, while he lies under a bed sheet. |
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11:17:44 |
An old shark slowly turns in the water |
They think some sharks might be over 400 years old. Could it have started looking before Martin Luther said that the visual world was idolatrous? before Catherine the Great tried to turn St Petersburg into a palace. And how do we know the age of such sharks? When they died, scientists cut out the lenses of their eyes, and measured the amount of Carbon14 in them. The memories, discoveries, fears and shocks of looking. |
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11:18:28 |
Clip from Citizen Kane CAPTION: Citizen Kane Orson Welles RKO Radio Pictures Mercury Productions |
Here’s a shock. A grand office for a small guy in his massive chair. The camera slowly tracks in, as if drawn to a story, a memory, a visual memory. LELAND: "I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry. And as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in. And on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol." I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all. But I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.” |
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11:19:20 |
The man on the chimney stack. |
Has a month gone past without me thinking of this guy? Maybe. But not a year. I never saw his face. I never saw what he saw. What a story we’ve had. We’ve wondered how others saw. We’ve reached through time. |
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11:19:48 |
The shots of Mark in the water and the jelly fish intertwine, followed by the shot of the stag |
I’ve imagined myself as a jelly fish, a stag. We’ve expanded beyond ourselves. |
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11:20:08 |
A crashing waterfall viewed from above |
And when you expand, what’s the limit? When a bird sees this, they see what? An oyster shell? A falls? |
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11:20:38 |
Gently rippling water, reflecting an inverted rocky landscape, with a solitary tree on the horizon. Just visible near the water’s surface are swaying fronds of seaweed. |
A year ago, I was in Stonehaven in Scotland. I took out my camera and filmed this. I thought of my looking life. The tree reminded me of the Iranian films of Abbas Kiarostami. I wanted to plunge in and float naked like the seaweed, like a jellyfish, but I’m too old for that. I thought of something Virginia Woolf wrote: The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down the stream...resting, pausing...the brain sleeps as it looks.” I thought of all the buried visual treasure in my head. I knew it’s time for me to sleep soon. But I felt....what’s the word? Joy. Total joy at being able to see the slalom of the seaweed. The wind came up. There was more tremble, undulation, power. And I realised that... Ray Charles was wrong. He said that he feels sorry for those of us who have to put up with seeing some of the things in modern life. But we don’t put up with what we see. I don’t put up. It isn’t a burden. It’s the opposite of burden. What’s the word? I can’t think of the word. But I can picture it. |
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11:24:28 |
The camera lifts and turns to reveal a narrow craggy inlet, with rocks coated in sea lichen. |
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11:24:36 |
Closing credits CAPTION: Directed, filmed and written by Mark Cousins. Producers, Mary Bell and Adam Dawtrey. Executive producers, Mark Thomas, Catherine Benkaim and Barbara Timmer. Editor, Timo Langer. |
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11:24:55 |
Climbing a tarmac path lined with spindly bushes towards a row of tenement flats CAPTION: Composer, Donna McKevitt. Sound designer, Ania Przygoda. Sound editor, Maiken Hansen. Additional camera, Diego Almazan de Pablo. Based on the book ‘The Story of Looking’. |
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11:25:25 |
List of archive credits. |
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11:25:35 |
Continues slowly along the path then descends a set of wooden stairs towards the road. The light is grey and the surrounding trees are bare CAPTION: Business Affairs, Katherine Otway. Legal, Sara Vandore-Mackay. Reviewed and Cleared - Niamh Hargan, SmithDehn LLP. Insurance, Media Insurance Brokers and WK Insurance. Audio description and closed captions, Elena Zini, Screen Language, 2021.
For Screen Scotland: Executive Director, Isabel Davis. Head of unscripted, Dani Carlaw. Legal Manager, Mark Wilson. Legal Services, Neil Gillard, Wiggin LLP.
List of thanks. |
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11:26:40 |
Arrives at the roadside as traffic rushes past. Across the road on the river are a number of moored passenger boats. Looks left.
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11:26:55 |
Copyright card |
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