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Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
The definitive story of the medium that defines our times
"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 as important as the images it
carries.
But "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. The celebrated film authority David Thomson
takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media 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,
vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens--the age
that, more than ever, we are living in.
From one of the greatest living writers on film, a magisterial look
at a century of battle depicted on screen, and a meditation on the
twisted relationship between war and the movies. “Thomson’s own
genius is his ability to remain one of the leading authorities on
cinematic history, without shying away from the controversial.
Cinephiles seeking provocative arguments will appreciate his
work.â€â€”Library Journal In The Fatal Alliance the
acclaimed film critic David Thomson offers us one of his most
provocative books yet—a rich, arresting, and troubling
study of that most beloved genre: the war movie. It is not a
standard history or survey of war films, although Thomson turns his
typically piercing eye to many favorites—from All Quiet on
the Western Front to The Bridge on the River
Kwai to Saving Private Ryan. But The Fatal
Alliance does much more, exploring how war and cinema
in the twentieth century became inextricably linked. Movies
had only begun to exist by the beginning of World War I, yet in
less than a century, had transformed civilian experience of
war—and history itself—for millions around the globe. This
reality is the moral conundrum at the heart of Thomson’s book.
War movies bring both prestige and are so often box office
blockbusters; but is there something problematic at how much
moviegoers enjoy depictions of violence on a grand scale, such
as Apocalypse Now, Black Hawk Down, or even Star Wars?
And what does this truth say about us, our culture, and our
changing sense of warfare and the past?Â
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &
Francis, an informa company.
A leading film critic on the evolving world of streaming media and
its impact on society  The city at night under lockdown, a
time of plague and anxiety. It is an exciting new age of
television, the light that flutters in every cell in the city. But
no one seems to be asking: What is the endless stream doing to us?
 In Remotely, the most innovative writer on film and screens
asks what happened to us as we sought consolation under lockdown by
becoming a society of bingeing creatures. From Candid Camera and I
Love Lucy to Ozark, Succession, and Chernobyl, David Thomson and
his wife, Lucy Gray, wander through shows old and new, trying to
pin down the nature and justification for what we call
“entertainment.†Funny, mysterious, and warm, at last here is a
book that grasps the extent to which television is not just a
collection of particular shows—hits and misses—but a weather
system in which we are lost pilgrims searching for answers.
In the first fully illustrated work of his illustrious career,
David Thomson re-examines a series of moments - which readers will
experience in beautifully reproduced imagery - from seventy-two
carefully selected films across a hundred-year time span. Hailed by
John Banville as 'the greatest living writer on the movies', David
Thomson takes readers on an unprecedented visual journey. His
moments range from a set of Eadward Muybridge's pioneering
photographs to sequences in films from the classic - Citizen Kane ,
Sunset Boulevard and The Red Shoes - to the unexpected - The Piano
Teacher , Burn After Reading - immersing the reader via a
groundbreaking marriage of imagery and the author's accompanying
narrative. David Thomson's evocative, unflinching prose and
profound understanding of what makes film and art form identify him
as one of the great film writers of our time, making it likely that
Moments that Made the Movies will be widely viewed as an important
classic on the subject of international cinema.
Published in 1984: This is a working text and guide to the context
of treatises which have so far not played their full part in the
study of the late Middle Ages.
Published in 1984: This is a working text and guide to the context
of treatises which have so far not played their full part in the
study of the late Middle Ages.
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It
as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of
contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and
haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in
Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert,
but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more
than three decades after its original publication a profoundly
disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a
society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of
its prose.
The Big Sleep: Marlowe and Vivian practising kissing; General
Sternwood shivering in a hothouse full of orchids; a screenplay,
co-written by Faulkner, famously mysterious and difficult to solve.
Released in 1946, Howard Hawks' adaptation of Raymond Chandler
reunited Bogart and Bacall and gave them two of their most famous
roles. The mercurial but ever-manipulative Hawks dredged humour and
happiness out of film noir. 'Give him a story about more murders
than anyone can keep up with, or explain,' David Thomson writes in
his compelling study of the film, 'and somehow he made a paradise.'
When it was first shown to a military audience The Big Sleep was
coldly received. So, as Thomson reveals, Hawks shot extra scenes,
'fun' scenes, to replace one in which the film's murders had been
explained, and in so doing left the plot unresolved. Thomson argues
that, if this was accidental, it also signalled a change in the
nature of Hollywood cinema: 'The Big Sleep inaugurates a
post-modern, camp, satirical view of movies being about other
movies that extends to the New Wave and Pulp Fiction.'
First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &
Francis, an informa company.
A deep-and darkly comic-dive into the nature of disasters, and the
ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world "In this
brilliant book, David Thomson tells the story of how we came to
make disaster and catastrophe our best friends-how we let terror
cocoon and take over our imaginations to avoid seeing the things
that really frighten us. Riveting and totally original."-Adam
Curtis, BBC filmmaker and political journalist "Erudite. . . .
Engaging. . . . A cri de coeur about art's struggle to keep up with
reality."-Kirkus Reviews Audiences swell with the scale of
disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own
demise. In this searching treatment, noted film historian David
Thomson examines iconic disasters, both real and fictional,
exposing the slippage between what occurs and what we observe. With
reportage, film commentary, speculation, and a liberating sense of
humor, Thomson shows how digital culture commodifies disaster and
sates our desire to witness chaos while suffering none of its
aftereffects. Ranging from Laurel and Hardy and Battleship Potemkin
to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and from the epic San Andreas to the
intimate Don't Look Now, Thomson pulls back the curtain to reveal
why we love watching disaster unfold-but only if it happens to
others.
From one of the most admired critics of our time, brilliant
insights into the act of watching movies and an enlightening
discussion about how to derive more from any film experience. Since
first publishing his landmark Biographical Dictionary of Film in
1975 (now in its sixth edition), David Thomson has been one of the
most trusted authorities on all things cinema. Now, he offers his
most inventive exploration of the medium yet: guiding us through
each element of the viewing experience, considering the
significance of everything from what we see and hear on screen -
actors, shots, cuts, dialogue, music - to the specifics of how,
where, and with whom we do the viewing. With customary candour and
wit, Thomson delivers keen analyses of a range of films from
classics such as Psycho and Citizen Kane to contemporary fare such
as 12 Years a Slave and All Is Lost, revealing how to more deeply
appreciate both the artistry and manipulation of film, and how
watching movies approaches something like watching life itself.
Discerning, funny and utterly unique, How to Watch a Movie is a
welcome twist on the classic proverb: Give a movie fan a film,
she'll be entertained for an hour or two; teach a movie fan to
watch, her experience will be enriched forever.
"Tomasevic's images sear themselves into your consciousness. I have
never seen such powerful imagery that not only captures the horror
of war itself but also its heartrending impact on innocent
civilians, on our sense of our own humanity. But they do much more
than that. They have an iconic quality as if created with a
painter's eye for detail, composition and contrast." - John Green,
Morning Star "This powerful, terrible book conveys a Dantesque
vision of our humanity. Admiration for Goran Tomasevic, a wonderful
Caravaggio of photography!" - Francis Kochert, Academie nationale
de Metz Goran Tomas evic is a living legend. Not only has he
survived for 30 years in crisis zones, but he has mastered the
supreme art of photography, interpreting the world in a humanistic
way, following in the footsteps of Robert Capa and James Nachtwey.
This powerful, terrifying book conveys a Dantesque vision of our
humanity. Current circumstances lead us to believe that this
madness will go on and on. Goran is just 13 years old when his
father gives him his first camera - an ancient FED 5V. And with it,
his life begins to become a constant adventure, described in the
444 pages of this book. The quality of his reportage and the power
of his images enabled him to join the Reuters agency in 1996 and,
over the next 20 years, to become one of the most awarded
photographers in the world. His oeuvre can be called a photographic
synthesis of the arts, an eminent contribution to the great path of
photo reportage and an indispensable history of the last 30 years.
Goran Tomasevic's credo: "If you want to present the facts
authentically, you have to be where they are. That's the
challenge." Text in English, German, and French.
A renowned movie critic on film's treatment of one of mankind's
darkest behaviors: murder How many acts of murder have each of us
followed on a screen? What does that say about us? Do we remain
law-abiding citizens who wouldn't hurt a fly? Film historian David
Thomson, known for wit and subversiveness, leads us into this very
delicate subject. While unpacking classics such as Seven,Kind
Hearts and Coronets,Strangers on a Train,The Conformist,The
Godfather, and The Shining, he offers a disconcerting sense of how
the form of movies makes us accomplices in this sinister narrative
process. By turns seductive and astringent, very serious and
suddenly hilarious, Murder and the Movies admits us into what
Thomson calls "a warped triangle": the creator working out a
compelling death; the killer doing his and her best; and the
entranced reader and spectator trying to cling to life and a proper
sense of decency.
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82 (Hardcover)
David Thomson
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R3,131
R2,523
Discovery Miles 25 230
Save R608 (19%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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All 82 photographs included in this two-volume set date from the
Second World War; none were taken by professional photographers. In
the back of each volume the images are exhibited at their actual
size, showing front and back. In the front sections, the images are
enlarged. This edit provides a guidebook to the stratified emotions
of warfare.
Peter Weir: Interviews is the first volume of interviews to be
published on the esteemed Australian director. Although Weir (b.
1944) has acquired a reputation of being guarded about his life and
work, these interviews by archivists, journalists, historians, and
colleagues reveal him to be a most amiable and forthcoming subject.
He talks about "the precious desperation of the art, the madness,
the willingness to experiment" in all his films; the adaptation
process from novel to film, when he tells a scriptwriter, "I'm
going to eat your script; it's going to be part of my blood!"; and
his self-assessment as "merely a jester, with cap and bells, going
from court to court. " He is encouraged, even provoked to tell his
own story, from his childhood in a Sydney suburb in the 1950s, to
his apprenticeship in the Australian television industry in the
1960s, his preparations to shoot his first features in the early
1970s, his international celebrity in Australia and Hollywood. An
extensive new interview details his current plans for a new film.
Interviews discuss Weir's diverse and impressive range of work-his
earlier films Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and
The Year of Living Dangerously, as well as Academy Award-nominated
Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, and
Master and Commander. This book confirms that the trajectory of
Weir's life and work parallels and embodies Australia's own quest
to define and express a historical and cultural identity.
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Connecticut
David Thomson
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R312
R254
Discovery Miles 2 540
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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The third novel in David Thomson's series inspired by movie genres
- an enchanting yet haunting celebration of screwball romantic
comedies. In 1985, with the acclaimed Suspects, and then in 1990
with the exhilarating Silver Light, David Thomson delivered
unprecedented fictions in which the characters were figures from
film noir and the Western. Now a trilogy is completed with
Connecticut. Why Connecticut? Because that lovely, liberal state
has been set aside as the resting place for every disturbed person
in the nation! At first, this seems like an opportunity for meeting
up with the merry ghosts of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Carole
Lombard, William Powell and Margaret Sullavan. We get glimpses of
Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey and The Lady Eve. But then the
wild comedy darkens as we realize that Connecticut itself is on the
edge of a demented and cruel war that challenges all its inmates to
keep seeing the comic side of mishap and madness. The trilogy is
revealed not just as a set of dazzling stories. But a commentary on
how far we have all been steered towards delightful but dangerous
fantasies by the movies. Aren't we all screwball now? Is
Connecticut safe to visit?
With the same style and insight he brought to his previous studies
of American cinema, acclaimed critic David Thomson masterfully
evokes the history of America's love affair with the movies and the
tangled history of Hollywood in "The Whole Equation."
Thomson takes us from D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and the first
movies of mass appeal to Louis B. Mayer, who understood what movies
meant to America-and reaped the profits. From Capra to Kidman and
Hitchcock to Nicholson, Thomson examines the passion, vanity,
calculation and gossip of Hollywood and the films it has given us.
This one-volume history is a brilliant and illuminating overview of
"the wonder in the dark"-and the staggering impact Hollywood and
its films has had on American culture.
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Suspects (Paperback)
David Thomson
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R413
R339
Discovery Miles 3 390
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Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime - these are a
few of nearly a hundred names that inhabit the mind of the narrator
as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most
famous characters in the history of film noir. He sketches in whole
lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the screen. Then
these characters start to meet each other outside the films as if
they were real people with real needs and passions. The book is
becoming a novel. The names and faces are familiar to us - Jake
Gittes from Chinatown, Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker from Laura,
Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca - but is it true that Noah Cross and
Norma Desmond were lovers in the twenties, that she and Joe Gillis
had a son who grew up to be Julian Kay in American Gigolo? For the
narrator is not merely the author. Married to the sister of Laura
Hunt, he has a mission to carry out, a lost family link to find, a
thread to pull so that nearly all these disparate characters come
together to form a kind of society. Suspects is the most inspired
of commentaries on film noir and the forms of Hollywood
story-telling. It is in its way a biographical dictionary, but it
is also a dazzlingly original work of fiction, so full of America,
of an old man's dread of loss and failure, and of a simultaneous
love and rage for these movies that you may find its impossible
world as real and as touching as any you have ever inhabited.
Ultimately an examination on how movies affect the way we think and
how film not only shapes our perceptions and our memories but in
some ways comes to stand in for them, Suspects can be read as an
unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self
through the medium of narratives, or simply as a fascinating take
on movie fandom. Either way, it's fabulous.
From 1865 to 1950, the multi-faceted world of the American West,
its rich, colorful characters, and its many faces - historical,
mythic, and cinematic - are captured in the story of a reclusive,
elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic
books. Two characters dominate the novel's foreground: a Georgia
O'Keeffe-like figure, photographer Susan Garth, shrewd,
cantankerous, reclusive, and still self-reliant at 80, and her
longtime friend Bark Blaylock, a western writer/filmmaker who may
be Wyatt Earp's son. A subplot involves James Averill, a wealthy
Easterner who sees his philandering as a frontiersman's quest for
knowledge. As the time frame shuttles between 1950 and the late
1800s, we meet Susan's father, a gentlemanly cattle rancher who
reads Thomas Hardy, and serves as a springboard to the Old West of
Bat Masterson, Geronimo and Billy the Kid. The cast includes Willa
Cather, Montgomery Clift, Charles Ives, Judge Roy Bean and numerous
characters smuggled in from such movies as The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Silver Light artfully
juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of
the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul.
In little more than a century of cinema - Birth of a Nation was one
hundred years old in 2015 - our sense of what a film director is,
or should be, has shifted in fascinating ways. A director was once
a functionary; then an important but not decisive part of an
industrial process; then accepted as the person who was and should
be in charge, because he was an artist and a hero. But the world
has changed. In a nutshell, the change takes the form of a
question: Who directed The Sopranos or Homeland? Hardly anyone
knows, because we don't tend to read TV credits and the director
has returned to a more subservient and anonymous role. Directors
now try to be efficient, the deliverers of profitable films, and
are often involved as producers, like Steven Spielberg. David
Thomson's brilliant A Light in the Dark personalises each chapter
through an individual: Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard,
Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Jane
Campion, Stephen Frears and Quentin Tarantino. Through these
characters (and other directors not mentioned here), David Thomson
relates an imaginative new history of a medium that has changed the
world.
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