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The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, by David Thomson
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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.
- Sales Rank: #645048 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2012-10-16
- Released on: 2012-10-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.35" h x 1.83" w x 6.43" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 608 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
*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. --Rob Christopher
From Bookforum
This is Thomson at his best: holding his jewels, singly, to the light and finding unglimpsed facets. If you haven’t seen, say, Boudu Saved from Drowning or A Man Escaped or Hiroshima mon amour or Sunrise or Metropolis, The Big Screen will make you want to. And even if you’ve seen them, you may want to go back, because a movie is no longer quite the same once it’s been viewed through Thomson’s exacting lens. It is, in fact, this fine analytical grain, coupled with Thomson's penchant for eccentric judgments and rhetorical excess, that make him so ill suited to the historical-survey format of The Big Screen. The obligations of chronology force him into bizarre conjunctions, yoking noir to the musical and Max Ophuls to Robert Bresson. —Louis Bayard
Review
“David Thomson is, I think, the best writer on film in our time. If ‘Have You Seen . . . ?' was his most succinct and entertaining book, The Big Screen is a large and vivacious map of ‘the screen': beginning with Muybridge and tracing careers ranging from Korda to Renoir to Hawkes to Mizoguchi, to David Lynch and Tarantino, then swerving over to television shows such as I Love Lucy and The Sopranos. Thomson has found and created a marvelous plot for the history of film, with insights and revelations on every page--as well as a few MacGuffins. He is our most argumentative and trustworthy historian of the screen.” ―Michael Ondaatje, author of The Cat's Table
“David Thomson has composed a grand aesthetic, spiritual, and moral account of cinema history assembled around the movies and artists that have meant the most to him. As Thomson reconstructs film history, movies bring us close to reality and deliver us into ecstatic dreams. A pungently written, brilliant book.” ―David Denby, author of Snark and film critic at The New Yorker
“A great critic cuts both ways--he nudges you into reconsidering the films you love, as well as the ones you dislike. David Thomson's sensual prose has always amplified the imagination of a great critic. In broad outline, The Big Screen is a history of the movies, a wide-ranging task that usually carries with it a certain amount of connect-the-dots tedium. But Thomson's emphases are typically fresh and often ecstatic, even when he's disparaging a film you love. Nobody does it better.” ―Scott Eyman, author of Empire of Dreams and Lion of Hollywood
Most helpful customer reviews
49 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent book. But warning re the Kindle edition.
By Mark Phillips
The book is excellent. Thomson's style makes it an easy read. His wealth of knowledge and insightful subjective responses are fun to read even when I disagree with him.
If you love films, as I do, then experiencing Thomson's knowledgeable passion is a great experience.
But I urge you to think twice about the Kindle edition.
For a book that is so rich in reference to so many films, I need an index so I can quickly access Thomson's comments on individual films.
There is no index in the Kindle edition!
There is a comment that it can't be indexed to the hard cover edition. That's understandable and normative.
But it is also normative to have an index that references the pages in the Kindle edition.
Absent an index, I returned my Kindle copy and chose to deal with the physical weight of the hard cover edition.
Of course if you don't care about having an index the Kindle is fine.
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
You and the Screen
By Constructed Resignation
This is a true history of film. Right from the book's first chapter I am hit by the little vignette of Eadweard Muybridge, a man who died in 1904. He was the brains behind those first pictures that proved a horse was off the ground when trotting. At these fledgling stages of films science and fiction are separate. That the same man killed his wife's lover adds extra spice. That he had previously suffered a head injury, like your loving reviewer, put my enjoyment of reading this vast, fascinating text into overdrive. And it has not stopped.
The author writes this history by giving the main players real character. Whether that is the ego of Louis B Mayer or the non-Jewishness of Cecil B. DeMille or the 18 year old Gladys Smith who gave up the theatre in 1911 to get into 'moving pictures.' The stories are woven into a narrative that always includes you. Its about you and the screen. That is what made Mary Pickford.
Fascinating to understand how the role of director was initially 'a stooge's job' became the central figure and now is once again peripheral in the making of film. As Mr Thompson rightly asks: do you know who directed which episode of The Sopranos?
The gift season is nearly upon us once again. This is a book for reading, not just for owning or to refer to or to look at. Like The Second World War I devoured recently this is real history. Captivating in a prose style akin to a novel replete with long sentences and the occasional jump-cut. It is not glued together reportage of quotes and stories. The narrative thread is the screen. From the silent to the one in your pocket. Highly recommended. For you.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Swan Song?
By Bruce Moody
It cannot be that David Thomson will ever write a book this compendious again. He is the author of other huge tomes, and every one of them is valuable, readable, and a song of his desire and love for movie.
For he calls the entire genre "movie," and he is right in that, as he is in so much else. The main thing he is right about is that the screen is no longer limited to the ones found in picture palaces. For even there the screens have gotten smaller. As they have in the parlors and pockets of millions of people, watching whatever they watch on gadgets. Watching not just movies, but always watching screens. And this is what he means by The Big Screen. Screens have gotten bigger as they have gotten smaller. Screens have proliferated. The big ones have given birth to the little ones, and they to littler ones still. Screens are pandemic.
Thomson has the world history of film at his fingertips. Movie has been and remains his lifelong love. This accounts for more than a career. It is a response to a gift. Not just the gift of perspicacity -- a good teacher, which he is, may have perspicacity -- but the gift of the violin of his prose, which provokes that sweetness of mind that enables one to look at movie as lovingly and as ruthlessly as he.
The size of the book should not put anyone off. It should lure them, as a big garden lures. For Thomson is not a scrunched up scholar. His prose is not pasty. He does not have a tub to thump. He is certainly not a theoretician -- heaven forbid -- indeed, he has nothing theoretical to say at all -- or a statistician -- his style is open and lyrical. He is not an intellectual, thank goodness. His response is always personal. His thought is felt. His conversation with us is his experience, not his ratiocination. You can enter in. You can talk back.
I have read many of his books, and I own all I can afford. I understand he is to write a book on Bette Davis; I suppose I will read that too, although I wonder what still could be said about her. But then I wondered what he could have left to say when I was given this book. Yet I found he has a lot to say. I do observe, however, that he writes better about what he appreciates most, which is not comedy or musicals (for where is Betty Grable in all this?), but about film drama, for that's what he is drawn to, and that is what, I imagine, his art-snobbery about film dictates as serious and therefore can be written seriously about. Or perhaps it is just that he is English and does not really grock so vast a sense of humor as American films offer.
But he has plenty of humor of his own. The Big Screen is penetrating and fun. It is delicious to read. It gives one pause. It draws one to films one has never seen. It causes one to consider what one has never considered. Good for him.
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