Cinema, According to Mark Jenkin

The latest episode of Cinema Body/Cinema Mind is an extended conversation with a filmmaker who is known for his unique aesthetic sensibility and who is also deeply attuned to the cinematic experience.

Welcome friends. Thanks once again for engaging with Cinema Body/Cinema Mind.

It’s difficult to know where to start in encapsulating this next episode. Heading to one of my favourite cinematic haunts, the Garden Cinema, felt like the ideal place to meet up with Mark Jenkin: A small, tucked-away venue in which the culture, the space, the programming, the vibe all contribute to a holistic sense of the cinematic experience.

I first met Mark Jenkin when I started working at Falmouth University. He was a resident filmmaker there, supervising students in direction while also keeping alive the craft of celluloid filmmaking - both in shooting and in processing.

He’s a persona who I immediately thought carries a certain energy. It’s not just that he possesses a deep passion and knowledge for cinema - many have those credentials - but something rarer: an uncommon empathy with the interrelation between form and experience.

Indeed watching his work one could describe him as a formalist filmmaker, but not in an austere, high-modernist, or didactic sense. Rather, his formalism feels lived-in and tactile - born from an intuitive engagement with process, texture, and rhythm, where each aesthetic choice seems to emerge from the grain of the film itself, rather than being imposed from above.

I remember discussing with him the Japanese notion of mono no aware, the idea that there is a gentle, melancholic beauty in impermanence. It’s often associated with the great auteur Yasujirō Ozu. It’s not hard to see how Mark would be drawn to such a philosophy: shooting on 16mm film with his trusty Bolex like an artistic sidearm, searching imprint the light of moments. His devotion to the fragile materiality of celluloid is perhaps the foundation of his whole sensibility.

One thing I’ve noticed in talking to Mark about film is that he always tends to situate the conditions of watching—as though he needs to make you aware of how he physically came to be in that moment of viewing: how he was feeling, where he was, who he was with. I wanted to understand whether this was a conscious evocation of his cinematic “beingness”.

Also, like myself, he’s a connoisseur of cinemas, loving to immerse himself in the aesthetic spaces around the screening rooms. (Indeed, in the conversation he jumps straight into a reverie about the Garden’s toilets—which, to be fair, are very good.)

Mark is the ideal person to unpack the idea that cinema is not merely a venue for spectatorship as transaction or distraction, it is an ecosystem of time, space, and ritual.

Mark Jenkin with yours truely

It’s obvious to place Mark Jenkin in the lineage of iconoclastic British regional auteurs—Bill Douglas, Terence Davies, Derek Jarman, Andrew Kötting—but he ultimately resists easy categorisation. If Douglas was Proustian in his formal rigour, Davies symphonic in his melancholia, Jarman alchemical in his queer-political poetics, and Kötting anarchic in his mytho-folk wanderings, then Jenkin feels closer to the devotional and the ritualistic.

His films aren’t simply regional, they’re consecrated to place. Shot on hand-cranked cameras, cut by hand, scored by the director himself, his cinema is less a medium of representation than an act of offering. It’s not just about telling stories rooted in Cornwall, it’s about making cinema with Cornwall: its textures, weather, dialects, ghosts. Jenkin doesn’t merely chronicle Cornishness; he communes with it.

Bait (2019) was a film no one quite saw coming, yet it seemed to gather different meanings for different people in different contexts.

With its grainy monochrome stock and post-synced dialogue, it became a breakout hit at Berlinale precisely because it stood apart from the surrounding digital slickness. Handmade, yes, but never self-consciously artisanal, performatively retro, or mired in luddite nostalgia.

The film emerged in the midst of Brexit, and this existentially portentous tale of a Cornish fisherman confronting the slow death of an industry seemed, in miniature, to evoke many of the deeper questions of place, capital, identity, and belonging that sat at the heart of Britain’s political malaise.

The critical and commercial success of such an uncompromisingly idiosyncratic work, rendered with a handcrafted sensibility, placed Jenkin as a new auteur, informed by an transcendent sense of cinematic lore.

Mark’s follow-up, Enys Men, is an even more ethereal, psychological fable—starring his partner, Mary Woodvine, as a lone woman documenting the growth of plant life on a remote island. When I first saw it, the film seemed to evoke the hallucinatory, end-times atmosphere of those early months of lockdown, while simultaneously engaging in an eerie, silent dialogue with British folk horror traditions. It felt both utterly contemporary and somehow buried in time.

So it was a genuine pleasure to speak to Mark just as he’d completed a full year of post-production on his new film, Rose of Nevada. A larger production by most measures, yet Mark was at pains to stress that his process remains unchanged. Despite the constructed set that housed the fishing boat central to the narrative, the expanded crew, and lead actors like George MacKay and Callum Turner, Jenkin retained resolute control over every element - camera operation, editing, sound design, and the score. It’s going to be interesting how Mark specific vision and authorial continuity are rendered at a bigger scale.

First look image from Rose of Nevada

But the subject I most wanted to explore with him was, of course, the cinematic experience itself.

In conversation, Mark moves fluently between metaphysical reflections and tactile recollections: of real cinemas, real projectors, real crowds. He recalls with reverence a childhood screening of Oliver Twist in a Cornish village hall, where the 16mm projector sat beside him, close enough to feel its presence. He admits he spent as much time watching the mechanism as the film.

Another memory: The Jungle Book, not remembered for its animation but for the physical sensation of sitting in the smoking section next to his friend’s dad. It’s always fascinating to listen to a true cineastes foundational moments.

He speaks with considered passion about why watching films in the cinema matters more than ever in a world glutted by streaming. But this isn’t sentimentality. It’s a deeper, more philosophical belief in what makes cinema cinematic: the screen, the space, the audience, yes-but also the environment, the architecture, the culture of presence. To be there, with others, watching. An ecology of meaning that’s collective and embodied.

We talked about the films he’s programmed at local screenings - with my other podcast The Cinematologists he’s shown The Doors, Big Wednesday - and the peculiar anxiety that comes with curating for a live audience. The weight of responsibility. The fear that people might walk out. The hope that something resonates. That’s a feeling I know intimately, having programmed many screenings myself over the years. The tension of choosing something personal and sharing it publicly never really goes away.

What struck me most in our exchange was Mark’s insistence that it’s not just about the size of the screen or the quality of the sound - though those matter too - but the collective breath of the room. The fact that he cried at the end of The Doors not because the film surprised him, but because, for the first time, he wasn’t watching it alone. “I realised,” he said, “I’d never seen it with anyone else.”

Newlyn Film House

Jenkin’s belief in the communal experience is not just conceptual—it’s active, grounded, heartfelt. His ongoing support for the Newlyn Filmhouse, the independent venue built improbably on the site of a former fish merchant’s, is one example. After it opened in 2016, he recalls repeatedly driving past it just to check it was still there.

“It’s a cinema 400 metres from where I work. I can just walk down the hill.” He talks about its survival through COVID as though recounting a miracle. And in some ways, it was. “A cinema is like running a hotel,” he says, with full awareness of how unsustainable it must look on a spreadsheet. “But it’s still there.”

There’s a sort of cosmic irony that a filmmaker so rooted in physicality and locality has been embraced by the global festival circuit. The Berlin premiere of Bait, held in the cavernous Filmhaus, changed his life. He talks about this in detail, still with an aura of amazement.

I was lucky enough to be there myself. Looking back, it felt quite profound to witness an actual sliding doors moment - when a friend, whose work you respect, arrives on the stage where it belongs. It actually reaffirmed a sense of hope.

If he felt it again, it was in Cannes with Enys Men, after three years of pandemic-imposed stasis. These moments aren’t remembered for glamour or prestige, but for something deeper: a sense of communion, an affirmation that cinema - not content, not media - is still capable of gathering bodies, breath, and attention. Of reanimating the cinema as experience.

I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction and Film Overview

03:04 Collaboration and Relationships in Filmmaking

05:48 Creative Control and Filmmaking Process

09:13 The Cinematic Experience and Audience Engagement

11:55 The Importance of Environment in Film Viewing

15:10 Reflections on Cinematic Evolution

17:59 Personal Experiences and Audience Dynamics

20:50 The Impact of Audience on Film Reception

24:11 The First Cinema Experience and Nostalgia

27:01 The Early Cinematic Experience

29:19 Cinemas and Video Shops: A Cultural Connection

31:47 Rites of Passage: Cinema as a Social Hub

34:14 Reviving Local Cinemas: The Newlin Experience

38:30 The Role of Cinema in Community Life

41:39 Post-Pandemic Cinema: A Mixed Bag

44:00 Berlin Premiere: A Life-Changing Moment

51:12 Navigating the Pandemic

---

Thanks to the Garden Cinema for allowing me to shoot this episode there.

Camera and Production: Rio Campanella

---

Thanks for supporting Cinema Body/Cinema Mind. If you liked what you have read/seen I’d really appreciate if you can restack/share to your networks. This is a gesture of human curatorial practice which works better than any algorithm recommendation.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please consider doing so by hitting the button below. Become part of the network of curious, fascinating people!!

A paid subscription is £3.50 per month and you will get access to the full articles and podcasts I produce. There is a lot of work that goes into the writing and podcasting, so becoming a paying subscriber really help support the continuation of the work.

I’ll also send you and physical postcard, wherever you may reside, how can one resist:

If you don’t want to subscribe but could see your way offering a small tip the labour of producing the work, hit the button below.

For paid subscribers below is part 2 of my conversation with Mark. We go in many more subjects including filmmaker Q&As, the current streaming v theatrical debates, plight of the cinema business and, of course, Mark answer 10 question on cinematic identity.