David Thomson - A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors

A light in the dark! It sounds such fun and so encouraging. Isnt that the promise of enlightenment rescuing us from obscurity and the condition we learned to call noir? The plan lets us feel directors are visionaries and pathfinders. Wont there be treasure in the light?

Consider the title carefully. Is it entirely cheerful or positive? Or does it feel the enclosing pressure of darknessthe state of mind Milton called darkness visible in Paradise Lost? Isnt that a message in noir? Is the light enlightening or a way of holding off our fear of the dark?

One thing seems clear: these people who lit up the dark might be storytellers, prophets, supreme entertainers, or heroesyet they were also calculating magicians, manipulators, fakes, and dictators in the making. Such heroes might need very careful watching. They could turn out as Fritz Langs character Dr. Mabuse, as Hitlers dream for Herr Langor Charles Foster Kane, a lord of misrule.

So suppose you want to take a photograph. It may involve your dog or some human beloved; it could be the light on the water or the mountains a few miles away. In all cases, this enterprise requires a subject, you, and a camera. You may have read instructions for the camera; your beloved has perhaps been shy, or the opposite of shy. So you have decisions to make about the picturing, so small or delicate you hardly notice them. The apparent naturalness of life is invaded by the grid of choices and decisions.

But getting on for two hundred years into the history of photography, you dont expect some cocksure Other to intervene and tell you, No, not like that. Do this instead. Its your show, so you do not want to be directed.

This book is a critical history of how the big enterprise of movie yielded to those intruders, the directors. They were unknown once; then they became heroes and masters. And now it is possible to see that they might even fade away, because the process and the cameras have minds (or a mindlessness) of their own that cannot be denied.

In the first part of this book I have chosen exemplary figures because, one way or the other, they pulled off the intrusive trick by charm, dominance, vision, luckand other peoples money. These are big figures by most standards, auteurs. But that means I have omitted others who would have seemed essential onceCecil B. DeMille, Sergei Eisenstein, even Charlie Chaplin. They are referred to, but not in the depth I have allowed Fritz Lang, Luis Buuel, Jean Renoir, and so on. My personal judgments could be left looking silly in history. Opinion cant be afraid of that.

I have chosen classic directors as understood from an era when I was in film school (1960, more or less, when that kind of education began). That status has lasted, even if classic now needs a pinch of salt or a Turner brand image. Even in 1960, some reckoned Hitchcock was just an entertainer, instead of an insanely calm obsessive. The directors in this book represent their decades, and the attempt to work wherever fate blew themor directed them.

Still, I have had to omit valuable othersBoris Barnet, F. W. Murnau, Jean Cocteau, Mitchell Leisen. Film Studies can tell you it has such figures taken care of. But if youve ever encountered a 2015 film student who didnt know who Gary Cooper was then its easy to wonder if those in the know have lived properly with Jean Vigo, Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, or Dziga Vertov. You can look those guys up, we say; or make a note to do so some other day.

Once upon a time, we did not know the names of directors. Then they became essential. And now? Try this: Who directed Ozark?