Mark Cousins’ epic Story of Film reinforced his credentials as a fine, intuitive advocate for cinema. But his efforts to straddle the gap between interpreter and creator remain fitful. His otherwise enlivening A Story of Children and Film, from (2013) was bogged down by awkwardly indulgent digicam sections with his family. Other would-be lateral jeux d’esprits fall flat in this BBC Storyville cine-essay touring small UK cinemas to mark the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. The early montage of mushrooming cells and sprouting seeds is a bit pat: life over death, man! Soundtracked by Mogwai’s doomy lull, the archival collage that follows – Hiroshima, cold-war paranoia, CND marches, Chernobyl, nuclear medicine and much else – contains lots of Google fodder. Steadfastly unanalytic, it can’t function as straight documentary, but Cousins’ laborious pasteup doesn’t let individual voices mingle in the kind of subjective history Julien Temple is good at, nor does it have the seductive poise of Adam Curtis’s hyper-Wagnerian surveys. Isolated parts hit home, like the awesome geometry of fission explosions set to stark Japanese percussion, but not enough bonds with the poetic valency Cousins seeks.
