A Light in the Dark
A History of Movie Directors
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Film critic Thomson (The Big Screen) returns in this scattershot meditation on some of the movie business's most famous directors. In 14 essays, the author covers such directors as the "artful careerist" Fritz Lang, "intellectually brilliant" Jean-Luc Godard, and "rebel" Nicholas Ray. The book opens with a promise to show how "those intruders, the directors" became "heroes and masters" whose influence may be waning in the era of computer-generated imagery. But what ensues is less a history than a series of essays that each nominally focuses on one or more directors before devolving into unconvincing metaphors and tangents (such as a section wondering if Jane Campion is left-handed). There are insights to be found, about both directing and cinema in general: Godard, Thomson states, "was uncannily aware of (and angry about) the way romance was a commercial-cultural construct of reality being imposed upon us," and Thomson's analysis of Quentin Tarantino—"an advocate for an ideology that has had woeful consequences"—is refreshing and original. While film snobs may enjoy Thomson's roving insights on whether "the cult of directors could be ending," those looking for a comprehensive history of directorial masters will be left wanting.
