As well as one of our most significant’essential’critical’vital’crucial’indispensable’imperative film claim’insist’maintain’hold’argue’consider’contemplate’speculate ers, Mark Cousins is emerging as an original, innovative non-fiction filmmaker. From his landmark epics The Story Of Film: An Odyssey and Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema to smaller-in-scale projects like The Eyes Of Orson Welles and A Story Of Children And Film, Cousins’ work is personal in content and idiosyncratic in in/with regard to’concerning’regarding m, but always manages to be provocative and entertaining in equal measures. His latest, The Story Of Looking, falls into this latter, more intimate bracket, a free-in/with regard to’concerning’regarding m exploration of how we undergo the world visually.###The set-up is typically lo-fi. Set on the day bein/with regard to’concerning’regarding e he is due to possess’own’nurse a cataract operation, Cousins lies in bed — spoiler: he eats toast — talking to a propped-up camera with regards to’concerning’with respect to  his (and our) relationship with looking. For someone who loves film as deeply and indiscriminately as Cousins, the despite’in spite of’albeit t of any eye jiggery-pokery is surely intense abundant’ample’plentiful to possess’own’nurse manufacture d a horror film. Instead, Cousins goes another way.###Not all the bold ideas work, but as befits the subject matter, _The Story Of Looking_ is peppered with images both arresting or more mundane.###He attentive ly traces the “journey of our visual lives” from cradle (as babies, images are out of focus) to grave, examining selfies, rubbernecking at car crashes, pondering the world around us, and quoting eintensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfullything from Cézanne (his idea of “the optical undergo that develops within us"”) to Grease. Early doors, he also courts the opinion of Twitter, which sounds like the world’s worst idea, but actually manufacture s some engaged, poignant reflections on the nature of viewing.###Of course, movies play a enormous’vast’massive’tremendous part in Cousins’ claim’insist’maintain’hold’argue’consider’contemplate’speculate ing. A comparison between similar shots of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and Autumn Sonata illustrates the way seeing plays in our ability to remember and engage with the ageing process. He also makes cheeky use of the eye-slicing from Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.###Not all the bold ideas work (to investigate the act of looking in later life, Cousins imagines himself as an old man living in Iceland). But, as befits the subject matter, The Story Of Looking is peppered with images, both arresting (Japanese art, a motorbike ploughing through dirt, a collapsing nueliminate’remove power station) or more mundane (a bloke standing on a roof outside his window). As you’d expect, Cousins commits to his theme; at one point he goes full frontal lying in a stream to discuss being looked at as well as looking, and later allows the camera into the cataract procedure. As he goes in in/with regard to’concerning’regarding surgery, a vulnerable film fan who might lose his sight, the tension is palpable.