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A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors - Hardcover

Thomson, David

 
9780593318157: A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593318153 ISBN 13: 9780593318157
Verlag: Knopf, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film--an essential work on the preeminent, indispensable movie directors and the ways in which their work has forged, and continues to forge, the landscape of modern film.

Directors operate behind the scenes, managing actors, establishing a cohesive creative vision, at times literally guiding our eyes with the eye of the camera. But we are often so dazzled by the visions on-screen that it is easy to forget the individual who is off-screen orchestrating the entire production--to say nothing of their having marshaled a script, a studio, and other people's money. David Thomson, in his usual brilliantly insightful way, shines a light on the visionary directors who have shaped modern cinema and, through their work, studies the very nature of film direction. With his customary candor about his own delights and disappointments, Thomson analyzes both landmark works and forgotten films from classic directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as contemporary powerhouses such as Jane Campion, Spike Lee, and Quentin Tarantino. He shrewdly interrogates their professional legacies and influence in the industry, while simultaneously assessing the critical impact of an artist's personal life on his or her work. He explores the male directors' dominance of the past, and describes how diversity can change the landscape. Judicious, vivid, and witty, A Light in the Dark is yet another required Thomson text for every movie lover's shelf.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID THOMSON is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Biographical Dictionary of Film, biographies of Orson Welles and David O. Selznick, and the pioneering novel Suspects, which was peopled with characters from film.

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1

Waiting for the Monolith

We sat in the dark for nearly a century; we were traveling together. We hoped we were going to have fun, a good scare, or just be occupied. We were strangers there, but fellow pilgrims, and the cinema was a palace for our wondering.

But it was like a prison, too. Wasn’t there a sinister air, a feeling that someone must be in charge—­working the machinery, dimming the lights, taking our money? Yet there was no one in sight except for people selling tickets and wistful usherettes. Instead, there was this feeling of being alone in the dark place, exposed to the searchlight of the projector, and the suddenness (quicker than saying “cut”) with which a nice family picnic might be invaded by a tiger, a tidal wave . . . or even a black monolith.

Do you remember that moment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001? There we are in a semi-­desert (in Utah perhaps, or Namibia), at “the dawn of man,” where ragged apes battle for futile power. Then all of a sudden a monolith is there, before our eyes (made by Brancusi or HomePlastics, Inc.), dominating the scene and proving that something is in charge. That’s ominous (the apes chatter in fear), but it’s a relief, too (they gather beneath the black intrusion, waiting for the feature), because the world is more frightening for apes if no one is running the show. That could mean there’s no show. And as educated apes gave up on God, so we were left open to uncertainty.

The suddenness of the monolith is a sublime intervention, as if fate or advertising had told those apes that Las Vegas was just over the magic-­hour horizon, with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis opening at the Sands tonight. Or as if that fluttering kite of shadow in the western sky might be an asteroid approaching, like the one we believe hit the Yucatán 66 million years ago.

The monolith was a religious experience and such awe does call a god into being. But who could be that god? It might be the light, the money, or the haunting apprehension in being part of a movie crowd. But then directors said, It’s me. I’ll be God! The arrival of that thin black screen (really, that’s what it is), was Kubrick’s way of saying, C’est moi, Stanley. Just see what comes next! And we were left having to decide whether this was arrogance, pretension, or the wonderful wizard of cinema.

Directors shouted “Action!” and “Cut!” Those bold words were meant to signal they were in control, and that shaky confidence has worked from D. W. Griffith and Alfred Hitchcock to Ingmar Bergman and Martin Scorsese. This is a book about that assumption of authority and our hope that it promotes cinema into a great entertainment for the world, or even an art. It’s the history of a job and the arc of magic. Without those optimistic explanations, “cinema” might be just a machine that teaches people they are deluded, alone and insignificant. So direction was what the word suggests, a determination about not being lost, a filling of the void.

At first, there was no such thing as a theory. There wasn’t even directing. There was a camera and the light. Just photography, a sensationalism: having lovely faces to look at when there was no one actually there.

Imagine you are nineteen in 1890. You have a camera and you are so intent on taking pictures that other people believe you are obsessed. (Film directors are expected to be obsessed—­it goes with their not noticing so much of real life.) At the end of the day in your room, in London or Chicago or Calcutta, you are studying the picture of your girlfriend, present and absent at the same time.

Cut there, because my 1890 assumption is awkward now. I’m making the male gaze our origin legend. My editor suggests adding “or boyfriend” to be “more inclusive.” I’m happy to do that, but it leads back to historical matters. In the early days of the picture business, it was invariably a man wanting to photograph a woman, and the sad record of our fine art has to face how often that was a path to seduction, exploitation, and the control lurking in the phrase “directed by.” By now, women are a little more likely to hold the camera and direct a film, but seldom do they gaze at men the way my 1890 guy was fixed on his girlfriend. Doesn’t “gaze” have a note of rapture? Our photographer felt that she was there for him, and in 1890 that was still an orthodoxy. It follows that the romantic pressure in movies—­their thrust, their hope for meaning—­was different for men and women. We are determined to repair that imbalance, but watch carefully: it is possible that “cinema” might vanish in the reformation. Suppose the cult of directors could be ending, swept aside by CGI, streaming, and correctness in a medium that often edged into the illicit.

You’re going to have to follow that line. We’re going to have to live by it.

The young man has a snapshot; he took time and trouble over it; and now he has the image even if the romance has ended. He made the picture the year before, on an excursion to the countryside. He asked the girl to stand just so, under that sycamore, but in a soft light—­and would she take her hat off and let her hair be free? Then he saw the sun had clouded over just a touch; it put her face in a more pensive light. So then, as she was thinking, or so it seemed, he took the picture (that word is important, for theft can be authority). The snap was a record of the light, of her, and of our new power over the momentary. But looking at the picture put us on the edge of once upon a time. Perhaps the young man would tell a story about this woman and where she went, an odyssey, and how he followed her for years and thousands of miles, and rescued her from being lost. (At 16 snaps a second, you might have a ninety-­minute story . . . with 86,400 snaps. This was the industrialization of the split second, fifty years or so before man, or Man, split the atom.)

He began to be moved by the way this slip of photographic paper could overcome time and mortality and might grip strangers. “Action!” he ordered; it sounded so positive. Perhaps he was directing this girl and real life, just because he had chosen them. Didn’t he want her? But perhaps the medium—­its isolation and its worship of something seen—­was directing both of them. He had never had so intense a relationship with a stranger. He realized that properly once she left him. But don’t rule out the possibility that she thinks he dropped her once he had the photograph to be in love with. There is an intimacy in photographs that may challenge human closeness.

“Action!” was like an open sesame. It started with this young man or a few other geniuses, but in ten years the world was hooked on the word, its energy, and that black monolith of desire.

How quickly this new medium began to fuel our longing for stories, dreams, and self-­deception. I am talking about a total culture, and this quaint imagined anecdote from 1890 fits just as well with how we are using selfies and smartphone images in 2020. Who is directing your smartphone? Is it you, or your friends, or is it the corporations that preside over such media and call them social, as opposed to merely revenue-­generating? Or is it the transaction of seeing and being seen that is in charge?

Come to that, is anything “in charge”? And is it frightening when that question has no sure answer? Is that what alarmed the girlfriend, so she left him? Did she get the idea that he was more moved by the photo than by her?

If you were a kid...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593318153
ISBN 13 
9780593318157
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

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Trebbin
Brandenburg
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Deutschland