David Thomson > Quotes

“Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. It's like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind.”
― David Thomson, Bette Davis

“Agee wrote “like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it — out with it, as if it were a girl; drinking with it; driving in the night with it.”
― David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated

“The only real danger is flinching, seeming to notice your own nakedness. If you don’t flinch, you’re merely nude, which is a classically recognized form of beauty.”
― David Thomson, Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts

“Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town”
― David Thomson, In Camden Town

“Why is it dark in cinemas? So that the compulsive force of our involvement may be hidden.”
― David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated

“dragging their antique field guns,”
― David Thomson, The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film – An Arresting Meditation on the Moral Conundrum of Depicting Battle on Screen

“But film sometimes flinches at the expertise of actresses, and the sympathetic viewer may come to realize that there was a mute honesty in Novak: she did not conceal the fact that she had been drawn into a world capable of exploiting her. Filming seemed an ordeal for her; it was as if the camera hurt her. But while many hostile to the movies rose in defense of the devastation of Marilyn Monroe—whether or not she was a sentient victim—Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears haphazard and oblivious. Novak is the epitome of every small-town waitress or beauty contest winner who thought of being in the movies. Despite a thorough attempt by Columbia to glamorize her, she never lost the desperate attentiveness of someone out of her depth but refusing to give in. Her performances improve with time so that ordinary films come to center on her; even Vertigo, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, owes some of its power to Novak’s harrowing suspension between tranquility and anxiety.”
― David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated

“What greater contrast of chiaroscuro is there than that between burning screen and darkened audience? Take any photograph of an intent audience, and it is an image from Fuseli: of pale faces staring out of the night. What medium is so dependent on sensation, with the screen so much larger than life and the constant threat that in a fraction of a second the image we are watching can change unimaginably? And what are the abiding themes of cinema but glamour, sexuality, fear, horror, danger, violence, suspense, averted disaster, true love, self-sacrifice, happy endings, and the wholesale realization of those hopes and anxieties that we are too shy to talk about in the daylight? Why is it dark in cinemas? So that the compulsive force of our involvement may be hidden.”
― David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated

“Why was Simpson called "OJ" except in some kind of branding or headlinese that said, "Look, this guy is sweet, wholseome, and nourishing (and 'Orenthal' is just too fancy)? You can have him for breakfast." (And "Sweetness" and "Sweet" are nicknames often given to black men.) Is "OJ" that far away from Jell-O? Wasn't that extended advertising campaign a way of saying you can trust our pudding because Bill Cosby likes it—sweet, wholesome, and pretty?”
― David Thomson, Television: A Biography

“The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.”
― David Thomson, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies

“One might as well, in considering how to watch a movie, recognize the extent to which public life in America has itself become an untidy, unrated motion picture that has a captive but disenchanted audience.”
― David Thomson, How to Watch a Movie

“Film has offered adventure, hope, fantasy, and escape for those of us encased in poverty, limitation, and quiet desperation.”
― David Thomson, How to Watch a Movie

“I suspect that a greater and more insidious influence [than violence in movies] may lie in what they tell us about being in love, and how to conduct ourselves while in that condition.”
― David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood

“The mirror can be a character or a conscience in movies.”
― David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire