The Big Screen
David Thomson's 'The Big Screen' tells the story of the rise and decline of an art form that once played a central role in human life.
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In "Brief Encounter," written by Noël Coward and directed by David Lean (who would eventually move on from this and other tiny, precise, intimate films to sprawling, imprecise epics like "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago"), Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey meet in a train station, fall in love, and spend the rest of the film successfully but reluctantly suppressing the urge to leave or cheat on the spouses to which they are faithfully but unhappily wed. The film is both touching and exquisitely tense; Thomson writes that at times "it seems nothing less than a film about hysteria and the dysfunction between a stiff upper lip and a mind turning to jelly." Lean and Coward invite us to contemplate our position as observers of the characters' emotional affair by turning them into watchers, affording Thomson the opportunity for a bit of entertaining riffing:
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So what do Alec and Laura do on their Thursday afternoons in Milford? They take a genteel lunch together and then go to "the pictures." Their cinema seems crowded. They rock with laughter at Donald Duck. She is bored by a "noisy musical." And they watch "Flames of Passion" – a silly Hollywood product (no details supplied) – before they walk out. What they need to see is "Un Chien Andalou" (or "Blue Velvet"), but such programs could not come to "Milford."… Celia Johnson's large eyes are naked to our scrutiny, but that's as far as that word could go – all of which leaves our imagining more intense.
The insertion of a reference to "Blue Velvet," David Lynch's lurid and perverse 1985 masterpiece, into a discussion of David Lean's polite-on-the-surface 1945 chamber piece, is a way of reminding us that the movies have always (well, since "Sunrise," at any rate) attempted to pierce the skin of propriety and to seek out the secret heart that beats with a more frightening, primal, and human rhythm underneath. ("Blue Velvet," too, takes place in a society – in this case, small-town USA – that is, on the surface, squeaky clean to the point of banality.) It's also characteristic of Thomson's writing style: there is a lot of skipping around in time, and also in conceptual space. The reader thinks Thomson has ignored Georges Méliès -- we get to Fred Astaire, more than 100 pages into the book and seemingly several decades too late, with barely a mention of him -- but then, just as we are prepared to fire off a stormy protest letter on Méliès's behalf, we get to a chapter called "France" that skips back several decades to start the story of the movies all over at very nearly the beginning. A paragraph near the beginning of his discussion of Jean Renoir provides a good representative sampling of a writer who will confine himself neither to a single historical era nor to a single framework of ideas:
Jean Renoir was born in Montmartre in 1894, the son of Pierre Auguste Renoir, so he was looking at [his father's] pictures in the late 1890s without quite realizing he had posed for them. His father had noticed him, seen the opportunity of a picture, and taken it – he had snapped it. This was before the boy could read. And in the 1890s, photography began to be a mass practice. Now it affects all of us, nearly all the time. Parents snap their children with cell phones and hold the bright pixels up to the infant's gaze, like a mobile to play with. "There you are!' they say, before the babies possess these words. There we are. It begins to become a basic form of identity, the level at which existence registers. We are our image. Our reality has been split, and that may be as significant as the more famous bifurcation of the atom.
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