Thomson begins this book\u2019s last chapter like so: \u201cYou may be saying, \u2018Look, shifting from one shot to another, I don\u2019t know where this book is going.\u2019 You have a point, but I have no sympathy for either of us. It\u2019s a book trying to keep up with every fresh screen I see.\u201d He has seen numberless fresh screens in his long career as a film historian and critic, and the observations gathered here can leave the impression of a loosely chronology-driven, film-centric free-associative word spree\u2014but what a spree it is. The book is a cascading selective history of cinema, with chapters considering, toward the top, the likes of the Lumi\u00e8re brothers and Erich von Stroheim, and, rounding out the proceedings, New Hollywood\u2019s auteurs and unexpected industry player Netflix. The British-born Thomson, who makes his home in the United States and has authored a backbreakingly large number of books on film and its practitioners, traffics in nutrient-packed but unfussy sentences that can be deliciously coy and playfully elliptical. Director Blake Edwards is \u201cso versatile as to seem unstable\u201d; One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest (1975) succeeded because of Jack Nicholson\u2019s \u201cshabby mercury.\u201d Thomson is one for pronouncements about what he calls \u201cmovie\u201d: \u201cMovie is the industrialization of voyeurism\u201d; \u201cWriting urges you to see; movie leaves you no choice.\u201d Beginner cinephiles: It\u2019s probably best to sit this one out, as Thomson presumes a high level of film literacy in his readers. At one point, he begins to quote from Chinatown (1974) and then abandons the quote midway through, saying, \u201cYou know the rest of that line.\u201d It doesn\u2019t seem to occur to him that the reader might not. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thomson begins this book\u2019s last chapter like so: \u201cYou may be saying, \u2018Look, shifting from one shot to another, I don\u2019t know where this book is going.\u2019 You have a point, but I have no sympathy for either of us. It\u2019s a book trying to keep up with every fresh screen I see.\u201d He has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6790,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6789"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}