What Is This Film Called Love? (2012)

• 65%
• 2012
• Documentary
• Mark Cousins

What Is This Film Called Love? is a passionate, poetic documentary about the nature of happiness. Filmed in Mexico over three days for just £10, it begins as a film about the soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, and then, using his ideas, opens up to look at memory, landscape and the pleasures of walking. It is a personal film and aims to be very cinematic, using three visual dream sequences and the music of PJ Harvey, Simon Fisher Turner, J Espen Jorgensen and Bernard Hermann. The film draws from a range of filmmakers and writers (principally Chris Marker, but also Virginia Woolf, Frank O'Hara and others) but aims to touch on themes that are relevant to a wide range of people, like where joy comes from, the emotions involved with travel and homecoming and the nature of solitude.