The Big Screen: The Story of the MoviesRead about another book on the list.
By David Thomson
Deep focus has made British critic Thomson one of film's best historians. The Big Screen -- like Thomson's revered classic The Biographical Dictionary of Film and his deliciously surreal biography Nicole Kidman -- creates a panoramic view of the medium through a colossal number of smaller filmmaking fables, spanning a century plus, from "Muybridge to Facebook." An accomplished novelist in his own right, Thomson’s characterizations and dialogue are richly detailed, granting his research the luster of celluloid itself. Perhaps most intriguing is Thomson’s thesis that increased accessibility to film has heightened our need to disengage from it now and again: to appreciate the manual "real world" amid our smartphone era, if only to have source material from which to create future flicks.
See David Thomson's five best books about making movies and five top books about movies.
--Marshal Zeringue
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