David Thomson – författare

“A marvelous bombshell of a book, by one of our most formidably knowledgeable and insightful writers on film, it is filled with surprises and witty asides.Though Thomson is quick to pounce on the hypocrisies and historical omissions of some of these war movies, there is nothing compromised about his own daredevil judgments.We are in the hands of a master critic/essayist.”—Phillip Lopate

From one of the greatest living writers on film, a magisterial look at a century of battle depicted on screen, and a meditation on the twisted relationship between war and the movies.

InThe Fatal Alliance the acclaimed film critic David Thomson offers us one of his most provocative books yet—a rich,arresting, and troubling study of that most beloved genre: the war movie. It is not a standard history or survey of war films, although Thomson turns his typically piercing eye to many favorites—fromAll Quiet on the Western FronttoThe Bridge on the River KwaitoSaving Private Ryan.ButThe Fatal Alliancedoes much more, exploringhow war and cinema in the twentiethcentury became inextricably linked. Movies had only begun to exist by the beginning of World War I, yet in less than a century, had transformed civilian experience of war—and history itself—for millions around the globe. This reality is the moral conundrum at the heart of Thomson’s book. War movies bring both prestige and are so often box office blockbusters; but is there something problematic at how much moviegoers enjoy depictions of violence on a grand scale, such asApocalypse Now, Black Hawk Down, or evenStar Wars? And what does this truth say about us, our culture, and our changing sense of warfare and the past?

In little more than a century of cinema - Birth of a Nation was one hundred years old in 2015 - our sense of what a film director is, or should be, has shifted in fascinating ways. A director was once a functionary; then an important but not decisive part of an industrial process; then accepted as the person who was and should be in charge, because he was an artist and a hero. But the world has changed. In a nutshell, the change takes the form of a question: Who directed The Sopranos or Homeland? Hardly anyone knows, because we don''t tend to read TV credits and the director has returned to a more subservient and anonymous role. Directors now try to be efficient, the deliverers of profitable films, and are often involved as producers, like Steven Spielberg.David Thomson''s brilliant A Light in the Dark personalises each chapter through an individual: Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Jane Campion, Stephen Frears and Quentin Tarantino. Through these characters (and other directors not mentioned here), David Thomson relates an imaginative new history of a medium that has changed the world.