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Summary
Summary
The Big Screen tells the enthralling story of the movies: their rise and spread, their remarkable influence over us, and the technology that made the screen--smaller now, but ever more ubiquitous--as important as the images it carries.
The Big Screen is not another history of the movies. Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life. At first, film was a waking dream, the gift of appearance delivered for a nickel to huddled masses sitting in the dark. But soon, and abruptly, movies began transforming our societies and our perceptions of the world. The celebrated film authority David Thomson takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media--moving from Eadweard Muybridge to Steve Jobs, from Sunrise to I Love Lucy , from John Wayne to George Clooney, from television commercials to streaming video--to tell the complex, gripping, paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways we were initially enchanted by movies as imitations of life--the stories, the stars, the look--and how we allowed them to show us how to live. At the same time, movies, offering a seductive escape from everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless and anxiety-ridden citizens trying to pursue happiness and dodge terror by sitting quietly in a dark room.
Does the big screen take us out into the world, or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this grand adventure of a book. Books about the movies are often aimed at film buffs, but this passionate and provocative feat of storytelling is vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens--the age that, more than ever, we are living in.
Author Notes
David Thomson , renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film , now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood . Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films . Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies to the latest cable-TV and video game offerings, this fascinating history of movies and their spinoffs celebrates and indicts the flickering image that beguiles. Film critic and historian Thomson (The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood) concentrates on American movies, but takes excursions to other national cinemas and stops in occasionally on I Love Lucy and other gems of the small screen. His is a loose-limbed, conversational narrative, moving fitfully through time, dawdling over directors and films that interest him, shamelessly ogling every starlet that strikes his fancy, spouting provocative opinions-thumbs up to Adam Sandler, thumbs down to Lars von Trier and his "insufferable" Dogme-tisms-at every turn, ruminating throughout on the ravishing, corrupting essence of light playing across empty screens. Crackling with ideas and vivid impressionisms (get a load of Lauren Bacall, "holding up a doorway in case it faints")-Thomson's stylish prose, simultaneously erudite and entertaining, captivates as it informs-and if things get overlooked in his idiosyncratic treatment (where's John Wayne?) one notices mainly because one is dying to hear what he thinks about them. Buffs and casual fans alike will enjoy this extra-large serving of popcorn for thought. Photos. (Oct. 16) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Veteran essayist Thomson's thoughtful new book is not just the story of traditional cinema; the screen of the title refers not only to the silver screen of the movies, but also to television and beyond. Early on, he draws a fascinating parallel between the viewing experience of Edison's nickelodeon, a single person watching a short film loop through a viewfinder, to the way we now watch YouTube-length clips on our computer screens, whether tablet- or smartphone-size. But does the vacuum of watching alone merely stimulate our proclivity for fantasy and illusion? How has 100 years of watching movies affected our ability to handle realities outside the screen? Every page is studded with provocative questions meant to goad readers into rethinking common assumptions. For much of the book, he co-opts the approach of his earlier tome, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2010), sketching thumbnail portraits of dozens of historical figures: Eadward Muybridge, John Ford, Ingrid Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Lucille Ball, George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, and others. The way he strings these cameos together thematically rather than chronologically will prove maddening to anyone wanting a straightforward history. But if the most important quality of a book about the movies is that it triggers a craving to reexamine the movies themselves, then Thomson's book is a spectacular success.--Christopher, Rob Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Seen in fast forward, the career of David Thomson - the avid, idiosyncratic movie critic - looks more like a klatch session than a formal lesson in the history of film. Where many writers' work suggests a dutiful progression, Thomson chases his subjects with free-associative license: Nicole Kidman to Alfred Hitchcock (with a hefty reference work in between), the big picture to the picayune. And where a lot of critics aim for impartial assessment, he has unapologetically privileged his private passions. Today, Thomson is best known for his "New Biographical Dictionary of Film," but his strength is less taxonomy than transition, the almost cinematic way his mind cuts among its intellectual frames. That montage, at its best, gives his working life a thrilling unpredictability; sometimes, his books deliver greater pleasures than the multiplex itself. "The Big Screen," Thomson's new history, is in some sense the summa of this unusual career. Folding in ideas and research from his previous studies, the book traces a path through more than a century of movie history, starting with Eadweard Muybridge (the eccentric Gilded Age photographer) and ending, more or less, with Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" (the enfant chéri of this past year's Oscars). Thomson considers not just the changes to filmmaking in that time but the shifts in creative imagination that propelled such changes; at one point, he explains that he is striving "to uncover the secret nature of film and the way it aids our dreaming." It's a testament to his success in this slippery endeavor that his book works both as an engaging primer on film history and as a map for more numinous shifts in the path of popular art. Where many people see an industry now in decline, Thomson offers a nuanced portrait of a creative business always reaching toward, or away from, the mirage of its own public image. For Thomson, that mirage, and the story, starts with the light. The annals of writing on early cinema are rich in technique and history, but Thomson concentrates on its visceral effects: the play of sunlight and landscape against the celluloid, the strange trace of the world captured on screen. He rhapsodizes about the soft, rich "movie light" of Los Angeles; the "general and generous" French light nurturing Gallic cinema; even the light that spills across Hitler's limp palm in "Triumph of the Will." He wants, it seems, to free the canon from its dusty display case - to show how much real and sensual experience has been caught in the lens. That approach is the starting point of Thomson's theory about how movies changed, but it also restores something frequently repressed in film writing of this sweep and scale: the critic's own subjective eye. For readers, this creates a vivid journey. Bouncing from country to country, decade to decade, Thomson's account is broadly conventional: the names we expect all appear, from Welles to Bacall to Antonioni, and the films he marks as classics could form the foundation of any survey course. Yet the details of his narrative glimmer with offbeat insight. "Brief Encounter" (1945), David Lean's quiet romance, is best understood as noir, Thomson argues - but much American hard-boiled fiction isn't. Sergei Eisenstein's camera, in close-up, trails his actors "like a nose with cocaine" (an image so weird, and so apt, it's fair to say that only Thomson could conceive it), while in modern porn, "the shooting style and its relevance to the action is invariably more fluent and interesting than one finds in today's average feature film." The decay of the "average feature film" is such a common refrain it's worth noting how Thomson's version veers from the standard complaint. He does not think that moviemakers have simply stopped trying. He suggests, most startlingly, that the seeds of today's anodyne blockbusters took root in the heyday of postwar film. Pronouncing Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece, "Sunset Blvd.," "the start of a new adulthood," he explains how shrinking audiences led to a crisis of cinematic confidence. (The pictures did, in fact, get small.) In Thomson's eyes, the French New Wave, and especially Godard's work, was one propitious outgrowth of this change: because the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd rose to prominence as critics, their filmmaking employed a vocabulary tinged with allusion and anxious self-awareness. ("The critic in Godard was battling the storyteller," Thomson writes.) By the time the young filmmakers of the late '60s and 70s arrived - Bertolucci, Coppola, Scorsese - moviemaking had become the province of artists schooled in "film studies "-style appreciation. Today, that explosion of brazen, selfconscious filmmaking is often hailed as movies' "silver age." In Thomson's view, though, it was the bright flash that shriveled the filaments. The wild success of self-made, academically trained directors cleared a new proving ground for film-makers. Meanwhile, a fresh generation rose behind the camera - one with little intellectual or creative experience except moviemaking and little standard of success but ticket sales. "The Big Screen" casts George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as paladins of this new, more box-office-minded age, conquering a broad swath of moviemaking territory even as they sealed its boundaries. Thomson is generally dismissive of Lucas, whose recent work he likens to "fast food" and whose multibillion-dollar empire he thinks propelled movies to wan consumerism. But his attitude toward Spielberg is more vexed. He says he's "shaken" by Spielberg's ability to move among disparate projects, treating movies as "dazzling games" to be played rather than reports on specific experience - the hallmark, he thinks, of today's blockbuster culture. "Spielberg ... has always wanted to be a comprehensive American success," Thomson writes, "and never seemed to notice how that commodity might turn suspect." THE story of the movies, then, is a tale of transformation from a technology operating as a canvas to a canvas that's become technology. The early revelation of the cinema was how much of the world it could absorb - how much of the moment, and of the creators' experiences, could be caught between the camera's whirring gears. Today, movies aren't so much caught as assembled to serve a specific function in the marketplace. (Thomson sees animation's renaissance, as with Pixar, as one expression of this tendency.) It's a grim observation, but Thomson's thinking is too game to grow querulous. Around one bend, we get the eyebrowraising but persuasive idea that Desi Arnaz was a crucial architect of modern television. (He insisted that "I Love Lucy" be shot on film rather than perishable kinescope, making syndication possible, and pioneered the now ubiquitous concept of filming in front of an audience.) Around another, we're told that the end of "The Truman Show" ranks among "the most expressive moments in the history of film." Even when Thomson seems off the mark, as in his now fashionable insistence on psychologizing Hitchcock's creativity - a curious allegation to level at a director who worked his magic mostly as a coolheaded technician - he's writing in a mode of passion rather than polemic. Playfulness, too. Conceding "something dazzling but shallow about the whole medium" of film, Thomson balks at the idea that the pictures should aspire to change history. Movies, he allows, may be nearing the end of their vanguard run; the Internet is now the temple of wonder that the movie house once was. But why should that impede our pleasure? "Last night my son and I watched one of the 'Jackass' movies," he reports in a charming aside. He found it oddly captivating. There isn't nearly enough "last night" in film criticism, or enough fresh wonder. Thomson's great achievement is to show how a century of creative aspiration took flight from our humblest thrills. Shades of noir: Celia Johnson in David Lean's 1945 romance "Brief Encounter". Bouncing from country to country, from decade to decade, from Welles to Bacall to Antonioni. Nathan Heller is a film and TV critic for Vogue.
Choice Review
This book wants the reader to know that this is not a history but a story of the movies. Signs of research and inquiry are minimal. The jacket copy warns of what is to come: "not another history" but a "wide-ranging narrative" that is self-consciously not meant to be a scholarly work of the sort emanating from a university press. But it is not a purely personal walk-through either. It is history filtered through a lively mind, marked by its time, and willing to wonder what the experience of movie-going has meant, not only in the age of the theatrical screen but also in an age when screens have grown so small as to fit into a shirt pocket. Throughout, Thomson expects much of his reader. He titles one chapter "Films Were Started," implying that the reader must be acquainted with the wartime documentary Fires Were Started (1943). Readers will find dozens of their favorite characters are missing, indeed whole eras--there is no Melvin Van Peebles, no blaxploitation era. But of course there had to be limits. Readers are left with a story they will appreciate for both the fun of reading and the puzzle of what got in or did not. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers. T. Cripps emeritus, Morgan State University
Kirkus Review
Thomson (The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, 2009, etc.) brings his encyclopedic knowledge of film and idiosyncratic, allusive style to bear on this ambitious consideration of the history of motion pictures and their effect on the audience. The author goes beyond mere survey and analysis to question what movies mean to us and how they have shaped our perceptions and beliefs. Thomson chronicles the development of movies from Eadweard Muybridge's 19th-century photographic experiments to the phenomenon of Internet pornography. Along the way, he explicates the excitement and politically fraught evolution of Soviet cinema, the provocations of the European New Wave, the allure of film noir and the world-shaking product of Hollywood, but the author makes no attempt to give a comprehensive or strictly linear history of the medium. Thomson is more interested in making striking connections, looking deeply at particular films, such as Brief Encounter (a surprising subject for such intense scrutiny and indicative of Thomson's iconoclastic bent) or the TV landmark I Love Lucy, to pursue the central question of his history: What does life in front of screens do to us? Thomson's approach is lyrical and questing rather than academic; the book is accessible to anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject, written in a distinctive voice, learned and authoritative without pedantic dryness and touched with wonder and trepidation at the primal power of the image. Readers familiar with the author's Biographical Dictionary of Film will be happy to note that Thomson's beguiling knack for capturing the essences of our movie icons in poetic or provocative asides has not diminished, and the scholarship on display is first-rate. However, the heart of this unique overview is the author's ambivalence about the power we grant those shadows on the wall. A profound and richly satisfying reckoning with the movies and what they mean.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Film guru Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film) presents a freewheeling historical and sociopolitical treatment of film that deals with screens big and small worldwide. Thomson discusses the global influence of film images (from Biograph Studios to the Zapruder film to Johnny Carson); subject matter (from film noir to politics to porn); significant films, directors, and genres; how sexual relationships have shaped the film community; academia's resistance to film studies; and his own speculations about the future of the movies. Thomson blends fact with incisively witty commentary. The high quality of this sophisticated, worldly-wise overview of the industry, art, and influence of film outweighs its rough organization, awkward (or nonexistent) reintroduction of subjects, and generally kaleidoscopic (and thus disorienting) format. VERDICT This is an essential title for readers who know and love film and for those who wish to know more; it functions both as a great reference and a great read. Chronology and linearity be gone, this thing sparkles.-Ann Fey, Rockland Community Coll., SUNY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Let There Be Light | p. 3 |
Part I The Shining Light and the Huddled Masses | p. 13 |
A Cheap Form of Amusement | p. 15 |
The Era of Sunrise | p. 33 |
The Cinema of Winter | p. 51 |
M | p. 66 |
State Film-Film State | p. 73 |
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Bolshevik in the West | p. 90 |
1930s Hollywood | p. 106 |
France | p. 125 |
Renoir | p. 142 |
American | p. 156 |
Ambersons | p. 167 |
Howard Hawks: The "Slim" Years | p. 171 |
Films Were Started | p. 178 |
Brief Encounter | p. 191 |
War | p. 197 |
Italian Cinema | p. 209 |
Ingrid Sees a Movie | p. 223 |
Sing a Noir Song | p. 229 |
Part II Sunset and Change | p. 241 |
Part III Film Studies | p. 347 |
Part IV Dread and Desire | p. 421 |
Dread and Desire | p. 423 |
To Own the Summer | p. 438 |
Brave New Northern California World | p. 449 |
What Is a Director? | p. 461 |
Silence or Sinatra? | p. 473 |
The Numbers and the Numbness | p. 491 |
Epilogue: I Wake Up Screening | p. 503 |
Notes | p. 529 |
Acknowledgments | p. 553 |
Index | p. 555 |