On Jean Renoir, “Orson Welles wrote a fond and discerning obituary for the Los Angeles Times that called him ‘the greatest of all directors.’ In truth, Renoir seemed a more balanced and warmer person than Welles, and a more mature or less vain storyteller.” I suspect the American Lang regarded himself as a failure and he made a lot of films that uphold that view.” In Germany, at least, he had held to desperate visual poetry as a director’s duty. “He was the first searing pessimist in a medium given over to crowd-pleasing and sentimentality. He gives us plenty to think about and plenty more to argue about.įritz Lang is passing into “the shadows” because the audience for his films - outside of academia and the occasional museum retrospective - is dying off. Television washes over it all like a tsunami that never recedes, its flow of streaming products written and directed by people whose names you’ll probably never know.īefore the interview, here are some excerpts from A Light in the Dark, evidence that Thomson’s writing rarely disappoints. Art houses have closed the audiences that once supported art cinema dies off.

Women, African-Americans, and others who were marginalized or excluded are replacing and overtaking them. Filmmakers who have stood the test of time - Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel - are receding from view. He guides us through the careers of a dozen of them and alludes to the work of many dozens more.Īnd he situates them and their work in history as well as in the present. Yet Thomson, author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, has watched directors being human long enough to have seen them eat and do a lot more, and it’s not always pleasant.

They’re human beings,” to which Bialystok responds, “Have you ever eaten with one?” That line was written by the film’s director, Mel Brooks.ĭavid Thomson is not quite echoing Max Bialystok in his new book, and he’s not Mel Brooks, whom he doesn’t mention in his elegant and caustic A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors. In The Producers, the accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) says to his conspirator boss Max Bialystok (Zero Mostel), “Actors aren’t animals. In his new book on film directors, critic David Thomson gives us plenty to think about and plenty more to argue about.

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