Filmmakers Always Make Films About Themselves
A brief exchange with Mark Cousins at the EFM, and why I think he's half right.
By Matan Tal
At the Berlinale this February, Mark Cousins premiered the first four episodes of The Story of Documentary — a new multi-part essay film series that does for documentary what his earlier The Story of Film did for cinema history. After a panel discussion at the European Film Market, I went to speak with him briefly. I wanted to challenge something he had said on stage.
His position was clear and sincerely held: documentary filmmaking, and filmmaking in general, is not about making a film about yourself. It is about curiosity directed outward — toward something external that you want to share with others. The filmmaker serves the subject. The subject is always outside.
I introduced myself as a maker of essay films and pushed back. Because in essay film — and I would argue in all filmmaking, whether the filmmaker admits it or not — the filmmaker is inherently present. Not as an intrusion, but as the very condition of seeing. You can only perceive reality through your own prism. You destroy and rebuild the world every time you look at it. The idea that a filmmaker can somehow step outside themselves to access something purely external seems to me not just philosophically questionable, but practically impossible.
"You might feel attracted to something external because it is a mirror to your own self. That is why you make a film about it."
Cousins acknowledged the point — yes, there is always a point of view, always a filmmaker's lens. But his emphasis remained on the outside. The filmmaker goes outward to examine something. The subject exists beyond the self. I respect that position. It is a true position. But I think it is only half the story.
My argument is this: filmmakers are always making films about themselves, even when they pretend otherwise. The pretense of objectivity, the claim of serving the subject — these are real commitments made in good faith, and they shape the work. But underneath them, what draws a filmmaker to a particular subject is rarely the subject itself in some pure, external sense. It is recognition. It is the subject functioning as a mirror. You are attracted to it because something in it reflects something in you, and the film becomes the form through which you work that out.
Terence, the Roman playwright, said it best: nothing that is human is alien to me. That is my philosophy too. Even the most inward, self-enclosed life — think of the protagonist in Chekhov's story The Bet, who voluntarily imprisons himself for fifteen years — even that life reaches outward through its very withdrawal. There is no perspective so private that it cannot speak to the world. Which is why the opposite is also true: there is no subject so external that a filmmaker doesn't bring their entire interior life to it.
I had a version of this argument years earlier, at film school. A professor insisted there was one correct way to direct any given scene — a single true interpretation that the director had to discover. I found this idea not just wrong but impoverishing. Every human being sees reality differently. Every reading of a scene is shaped by the person reading it. There may be a true way to direct it for a specific person at a specific moment, but that truth is personal, not universal. The idea of a universal correct interpretation says more about the professor's wish to control than about how cinema actually works.
Cousins and I are not far apart, really. We agree that the filmmaker's perspective is always present. We disagree about where the center of gravity lies. He says: start outside, bring yourself to it. I say: start inside, use the outside to express it. The external world, in my view, is the material — the excuse, even. The real subject is always the filmmaker encountering it.
He is a curious, sensitive and intelligent man, and I have no doubt our paths will cross again. Next time, maybe we get the full hour.
