Moments That Made the Movies

Moments That Made the Movies

Lushly illustrated, compellingly written―David Thomson's choice of the key moments in movie history In his first fully illustrated work, David Thomson breaks new ground by focusing in on a series of moments―which his readers will also experience in beautifully reproduced imagery―from seventy-two films across a 100-year-plus span. An indispensable counterpart to both his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film (called “a miracle” by Sight and Sound ) and his lauded recent history, The Big Screen (“a pungently written, brilliant book” according to David Denby), Moments takes readers on an unprecedented visual tour, where the specifics of the imagery the reader is seeing are inextricably tied to the text. Thomson?s moments range from a set of Eadweard Muybridge?s pioneering photographs to sequences in films from the classic― Citizen Kane , Sunset Boulevard , The Red Shoes ―to the unexpected― The Piano Teacher , Burn After Reading . The excitement of Moments s? dynamic visuals will be matched only by the discussion it incites in film circles, as readers revisit their own list of memorable moments and then re-experience the films―both those included on Thomson's list and from their own life―as never before. Moments That Made the Movies will undoubtedly reaffirm Thomson's place as―according to John Banville―“the greatest living writer on the movies.” 200 images in color and black and white Our memories of movies tend to be dreamlike impressions. Often they involve “the look, the pace, the movement, the texture, the context,” a scene, or an image of a film. Film critic Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2003) presents us with his selection of idiosyncratic moments, chronologically arranged, that are guaranteed to pique our interest and prompt us to revisit films or add others to our movie queue. Thomson, sensitive to film’s innate eroticism, begins in 1887 with Eadweard Muybridge’s One Woman Standing, Another Sitting and Crossing Legs, less film than experiment, featuring the titular women in the nude, before moving on to more contemporary films, such as Sunrise, Pandora’s Box, and the famous lovemaking scene in Don’t Look Now. Moments with Jack Nicholson are featured five times, with four films by Hitchcock, three by Antonioni, and two starring Meg Ryan (really). Thomson is authoritative, yet personal, and includes anecdotes, little-known facts, juicy gossip, and a number of surprise selections (see Ryan, above), especially from the past 20 years. Accompanied by wonderfully evocative stills, this eminently browsable book is certain to delight film lovers. --Ben Segedin "A coffee-table book with a brain... Thomson is arguably the best American film critic since Pauline Kael, and almost everything he has to say in “Moments” is savvy and stimulating." ― The Washington Post " Moments That Made the Movies , is cinema history cloaked as a coffee-table showpiece. It comes at 70 individual films―usual suspects and irregulars alike― by way of a defining sequence. Whichever his approach, this most offbeat of cinephiles and spot-on of writers shows how the part represents the whole. The consistent delight of Moments , which samples both the thin crust ( When Harry Met Sally . . .) and the deep dish ( The Passenger ), is how Thomson makes the reader see how often the microcosm is both macro and cosmic." ― San Francisco Chronicle "A marvelous wordsmith with a keen eye, Thomson . . . somehow manages to illustrate his many moments in films both obscure . . . and legendary." ― The Boston Herald "The Brit transplant's long experience with writing accessible, entertaining, idiosyncratic, erudite and enlightening movie books led him to the most delightful one of all: Moments that Made the Movies . . . . This is a keeper." ― IndieWire.com "Explores iconic scenes in both classic and contemporary films that were not only enjoyable, but in some way groundbreaking." ― The Huffington Post " Moments That Made the Movies is full of assured declarations, chatty asides and free-associative essays. . . . both fun and not a little feverish. . . . Moment by moment, each statement is certainly worth considering, made as it is by a highly respected critic who is appreciated exactly for such a garrulous parade of this-not-that explications." ― New York Times Book Review "If your imagination is captured by freeze frames . . . movie history might be summed up in film historian David Thomson's Moments That Made the Movies. Films are often encapsulated by single scenes ― consider the boulder pursuing Indiana Jones or Joseph Cotten's endless wait at the end of The Third Man―and the ever-sharp Thomson picks several dozen to tell the story of cinema." ― CNN.com "The idea here is to focus on a series of moments in seventy-two films of particular significance and accompany them with wonderful stills representing those moments." ― The Nation "Accompanied by wonderfully evocative stills, this