Sunday 29th September at 7pm (UK time)
Join us to mark the publication of two outstanding books by two remarkable talents.
Mark Cousins is an English-born, Northern Irish film director and writer who will be joining us
to talk about his new collection of writings on cinema: Dear Orson Welles (and other essays).
In this wide-ranging, stylish and iconoclastic book, Cousins reflects on his prolific career in filmmaking, meditating on the actors, directors, films, writers and philosophers that have influenced him, as well as on other adventures in filmland and on creativity in general.
Mark is a prolific documentarian, among his best-known works is the 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey.
He presented the BBC cult film series Moviedrome from June 1997 to July 2000, introducing 66 films for the show, including the little-seen Nicolas Roeg film Eureka.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Cousins interviewed directors, producers, and actors including Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Tom Hanks, Sean Connery, Brian De Palma, Steve Martin, Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Moreau, Terence Stamp, Jack Lemmon, Janet Leigh and Rod Steiger.
In 2009, Cousins and Tilda Swinton co-founded the "8/2 Foundation". Together they also created a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck which was physically pulled through the Scottish Highlands. The travelling independent film festival was featured prominently in a documentary called Cinema is Everywhere. The festival was repeated in 2011.
He is the co-artistic director of Cinema China, The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, and A Pilgrimage, with Tilda Swinton. Together with Antonia Bird, Robert Carlyle, and Irvine Welsh, Cousins is a director of the production company 4Way Pictures. Between 2001 and 2011, he wrote for Prospect, and now writes for Sight & Sound and Filmkrant.
He was appointed honorary professor of the University of Glasgow in 2013, as well as being awarded honorary doctorates at both the University of Edinburgh in 2007 and University of Stirling in 2014.
Order Dear Orson Welles (and other essays) from the publisher here:
https://irishpages.org/product/dear-orson-welles-other-essays/?v=79cba1185463
NB Courtesy of the publishers a discount code will be available on the night!
Rónán Hession needs no introduction as a leading light in the Carthorse Orchestra Players, who perform an annual live pantomime to raise funds for good causes.
Audiences will never forget his haunting Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, his unsettling Humpty Dumpty in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, his salty Mr Smee in Peter Pan and his enigmatic Signor Paravicini in The Mousebook. Rónán is a master of disguise as you can see, a Lon Chaney for the internet age:
You will, like me, be surprised to learn that he has an unexpected side hustle... as a writer!
He's published no fewer than two novels: Leonard and Hungry Paul (which is the 'Jacob Marley,' so to speak, of his writing career), and Panenka (which is the 'Humpty-Dumpty,' as it were, of his writing career), both of them attracting no small success in the world of books reading.
And now he's written a third. It's called Ghost Mountain (the 'Mr Smee' if you will, of his writing career), and books reading folk who know about this kind of thing assure me that it's not half bad.
Whatever will he do next?
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The Dublin launch of Ghost Mountain at Hodges Figgis with (from left) actor Barry McGovern, RH, DC, Guillermo Stitch and Bluemoose Books head honcho Kevin Duffy. |
At Manchester Waterstone's with Kevin Boniface.
DC and Rónán at the London launch in the Bloomsbury Chapel.
Ghost Mountain and Rónán's other novels can be ordered direct from Bluemoose Books here: https://bluemoosebooks.com/books/ghost-mountain
