David Thomson

I am reading Desert Eyes. It is great.

All things said, he does have some good ideas every now and then, he's just a piss-poor writer.

I hate the Biographical Dictionary, but solely on the basis of the fact that it's WAY too shallow on foreign films.

it's good on foreign films from before 1975 (original publication). sicne then his interest seems to have waned; and in fact most 'new' entries in the 4th edition are in fact lists from imdb (danny boyle, kirsten dunst, edward norton, fer example -- ooh, dream film there).

I've never found any of his writing anything less than incomprehensible.

For a 'reference' work, the Dictionary's leanings and opinions fetch up and make remarks on themselves.

'He is frequently wrong but &c.'

I wish the world had more like David Thompson. Maybe in the next one.

It's needling at these points where David Thomson's writing flares up perhaps.

His major strength is an ability to pinpoint the sort of quality of someone's work (he is particularly good with actors) that an audience has noticed but not consciously recognised. You find yourself realising that you agree with him, but have never before known it....the sign of a great critic.

"Rosebud" is a very unusual biography, appropriate for its subject. The films are like players in the mythical narrative of Welles that Thomson spins... marvellous book.
"New Biographical Dictionary of Film" is I am convinced the most essential tome about film I have ever read; perhaps in the way he flaunts the Dictionary aspect, with all its pinned-down definition. He gets to the essence, as David Nolan touches on, of the appeal and genius of certain actors and directors... James Cagney and Cary Grant are the two that come to mind. Not afraid to be controversial... he really takes to task some hallowed names...
He is not afraid of doing rather appropriately odd things like making the W.C. Fields entry a letter penned by Charles Dickens!
His love for what is good in film comes through beautifully; and you feel you can trust him to have a wider context than just film... I love his analogies in the book of film people to literature, c.f. Faulkner, Sterne...

In a sublimely roundabout way, he tells the story of film with that book (admittedly more of an American/British perspective, but he's good on World Cinema where he writes about it). Much better and more personal, thrilling and opinionated a document than any hefty 'historical' tome on the History of Film.

opening to a random paragraph on a random page (206):

"For myself, I don't think Capra is an artist so much as someone desperate to do contrary things: to be noble, but to please people; to do the right thing; and to be famous. In a way, the most inriguing thing in his work is the very question he faced: What is a film director? Can he be all these things? Can he stand up to the alleged tyrannies of Harry Cohn? The thing that Capra's films are most hysterically afraid of, the regular compromise in democratic process, is actually the very thing that made the partnership with Cohn function so successfully. Capra was a fine popular storyteller who needed to be told to behave himself if his natural mischief was to show. He needed the system he hated to be at his best."

and there are around 13k more paragraphs just like that.

But ultimately, he's one of the few writers who entirely discards cliches and wordplay, and forces himself to rethink every subject anew. He's very creative about cutting to the heart of the matter. And even when he's wrong, which is often, he provokes me to think more excitedly about whatever he's looking at. Lastly, he thinks in terms of careers, and looks at careers and lives as, in their way, works of art, along with the invididual films. This is something new, to me at least...

There have been few to write as well about Coppola, Johnny Carson, and Kubrick, and all of these are in his book Overexposures.

http://www.independent.co.uk/search/search.jsp?keywords=David+Thomson

http://citypages.com/databank/26/1282/article13454.asp

Let me observe he agrees with me that The Terminal is "a very interesting and affecting picture--with its use of the airport as a great metaphor...in a lot of ways it was trying to address the sort of changed state of being that we find ourselves in."

I wonder what is he after writing about today.

Any thoughts on his new book?

There's an entertainingly pompous chat between Thomson and Greil Marcus about it in a recent Sight and Sound, but yes, it does seem rather more of the same - Thomson seems to want to hammer home the point that films are basically BAD for us in terms of their cultural impact, collective sense of history etc and that, as an aesthetic medium, it is pretty much over and done with.

It sometimes surprises me that Thomson isn't more self-aware about the tragi-comedy of being the man who has fallen out of love with film but who has to, for professional (monetary) reasons, still spend all his time thinking and writing about them.

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107218/not-dead-just-dying

^ In this article he hammers on the death drive of cinema, or at least how it plays in cinema appreciation (save the cinema from the cinephiles), which gives his whole 'the films are dying' (not dead) a spin.

Probably won't read the book...but if I did pick it up someday I'll inevitably learn something.

There was an exchange between David and Jacqueline Rose in the lrb over an article on Marilyn: my impression was that JR needed a crash course in film history from DT; likewise DT on feminism/psychoanalysis from JR.

That might have made for a worthwhile collaboration.

I doubt there are many bigger fans of DT than me but the new book is a bit of a chore. Not terribly different to the Whole Equation, but with some brief, familiar surveys of German, French, Japanese etc cinema, some bits on tv. The pitch of "Muybridge to Facebook" isn't really followed through on - the epilogue on the present and future of screens feels befuddled. At one point I might have said DT was the great British prose stylist, in any genre, of the last 30 years, but reading this found myself thinking, a la Hansen on some centreback warhorse, "his legs have gone". Having spoken to him, a few years ago, I think he is extremely aware of the irony of falling out of love with movie while being professionally obliged to continue writing about it. I sometimes think his best book is 4-2 and there's a nice passage in the new book about watching Juan Mata make his debut for CFC. Would enjoy a book by DT on sport or jazz or San Francisco; as with so many things, I think it's the lack of imagination of commissioning editors, rather than the writer, that prevents them happening.

At one point I might have said DT was the great British prose stylist, in any genre, of the last 30 years, but reading this found myself thinking, a la Hansen on some centreback warhorse, "his legs have gone".

This is v. v otm - just last night I looked up his entry on Antonioni in the Biographical Dictionary, and was reminded again why I fell in love with his style in the first place. And then I turned to one of the newer entries - the one on Kiarostami (in the edition with Lauren Bacall on the cover) - and it was as flat as a pancake, trite, unegaged, just awful. Aside from DT's own disintegration as a writer, I wonder if, with his elevated reuptation, he's also being edited far less carefully these days.

In the Sight and Sound interview Thomson hints at some personal unhappiness, which is sad.

Saying all this, I would still like to read that LRB exchange - I don't know Jacqueline Rose's work that well, but have immense respect for her ever since I read Janet Malcolm's book on Sylvia Plath, where Rose comes across as a very impressive interview subject.

kinda love him despite everything, but there can't be many other often-great writers who flirt with total gibberish as frequently as DT (the long capra bit quoted upthread is a sterling example).

DT: It’s very interesting that you should say that, because you’ve touched upon something that I think is very important to The Big Screen and to what we do. Television is so much better than the movies now. Homeland is a major work.

From here and posted by Clemenza elsewhere

I was like 'not you too'

Ward - article on Marilyn and exchanges here