‘As I was writing this book and trying to discover what it was about .…’ With his very first words, David Thomson pulls out the carpet from under himself, drapes it over his head, and runs towards the nearest wall. For what he’s admitting in this opening sentence is that, when he began work on this 578-page history of cinema, he had no idea what he was going to say. And man you have to be good to pull that off.
We live in an age of relativism, in which (arguably) assertions are often spliced with (this is only my opinion) apologetic parentheses. Yet books of this kind ought to be an exception. What we want is the Olympian overview or panoramic shot. They are pledged by Thomson’s subtitle, ‘The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us’, and implied by his publisher’s blurb, which stakes his claim to being ‘the greatest living writer on film’.
The author himself seems to promise some accumulative heft when, four times in his prologue, he refers to a particular ambiguity of movies: the way they can inspire us to more vivid ways of living, or alternatively offer mere escapism. This, he declares, is the schizophrenic theme The Big Screen will explore. But it isn’t. It barely touches on it.
Instead, what we get is a decent, dogged tour of movie-making from its origins to something like the present day. We’re reminded, for example, of Eadweard Muybridge, who in 1877 came up with a way to photograph a galloping horse several times a second. We’re ushered through the silent era; assailed by the advent of talkies and Hollywood’s golden age; the nouvelle vague washes over us, surfed by Truffaut and Godard; then the so-called silver age of the Seventies, laced with the blood of mafiosi.
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