Dear Orson Welles & Other Essays – the collected writings of filmmaker Mark Cousins (The Eyes of Orson Welles, The Story of Film) – will be published in August.
The Irish Pages Press will host a book launch, “Dear Orson Welles: Mark Cousins’ World Of Cinema,” at the Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast on August 2. Tickets for the screening of a highlight reel of film clips selected by Cousins and a Q&A will be available at queensfilmtheatre.com during July.
The Belfast-based publisher offered the following synopsis of Cousins’ upcoming book:
From recollections of his childhood in Belfast to practical filmmaking advice for new directors, to the complexities of representing trauma on screen, this is a book that will captivate readers interested in both contemporary film and the history of cinema.
Cousins’ essays are in conversation with iconic artistic figures, particularly Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian poet, filmmaker, writer and intellectual; and Orson Welles, an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. He is also in dialogue with D.H. Lawrence; film-directors Stanley Donen, and Agnès Varda, Paul Schrader and Quentin Tarantino; actors Amy Adams, Channing Tatum, Nicole Kidman and Dennis Hopper; and last but not least, himself.
The book will also feature an Introduction by Fintan O’Toole, a polemicist, literary editor, journalist and drama critic for The Irish Times, and the author of the best-selling memoir We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958.
Cousins was born in 1965, raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and has lived in Scotland since the early 1980s. He has written, directed and/or produced more than 50 documentaries and films, many of them broadcast widely on the BBC and Channel 4.
His 24 feature-length films, as well as 30 short films, and 40 hours of television – including The Story of Film: An Odyssey, What is This Film Called Love?, Life May Be, A Story of Children and Film, Atomic, Stockholm My Love, I Am Belfast and The Eyes of Orson Welles – have premiered in Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and Venice film festivals and have won the Prix Italia, a Peabody, the Persistence of Vision Award in San Francisco, the Maverick Award in Dublin, the Stanley Kubrick Award, and the European Film Award for Innovative Storytelling as well as many other prizes. Cousins has filmed in Iraq, Sarajevo during the siege, Iran, Mexico, across Asia and in America and Europe.
In 2018, Cousins, working with Beatrice Welles, put together the first-ever major exhibition of late director’s artwork at Summerhall in Edinburgh. Orson Welles, who briefly studied at the Art Institute of Chicago as a youth, traveled and painted throughout the Irish countryside at the age of 16 in 1931. After his stage success at the Gate Theatre Dublin, Welles embarked on a career as an actor and director, first in theater and later in radio and motion pictures.
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