Mark Cousins has created a meditative tribute to his hometown of Belfast in the “city symphony” tradition that stretches from Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera to Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City. It’s musing, free-associating and visually inventive, with wonderful images from cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Like all of Cousins’s documentary film-making and criticism, it refuses easy cynicism in favour of unashamedly heartfelt human sympathy. This is as refreshing, as ever, yet I wasn’t persuaded by his invention of a fictional wise old woman character who personifies Belfast. She is brutally upstaged by two real-life plain-speaking older women that Cousins interviews. I would have preferred to deal directly with the poetry of Cousins’s own authorial voice.
But there is much food for thought. He notes the fact that images of the Titanic, created at Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard, are everywhere in the city since the movie, creating a veritable tourist icon. Cousins indirectly and interestingly suggests that the catastrophe of its sinking in 1912 may have fed, or even caused, a existential crisis that underpinned the Troubles. The country outside Belfast is stunningly beautiful (you’d never guess it from the nightly TV news), and Cousins takes his camera up to lovely Cave Hill, where Dickens walked and gunmen executed people. A valuable piece of work.
