e-Book Suspects download

by David Thomson

ISBN: 0749396784
ISBN13: 978-0749396787
Language: English
Publisher: Minerva; New Ed edition (1997)
Pages: 288
Category: Movies
Subategory: Drollery

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ePub size: 1956 kb
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Rating: 4.5
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FREE shipping on qualifying offers. lt;P style MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime-these are a few of nearly 100 names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. He sketches in whole lives.

David Thomson is a prolific writer on film; his books include the controversial biography of Nicole Kidman, biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood, "Beneath Mulholland "and "The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood". He lives in San Francisco.

Almost all of David Thomson's writing is conceptual in one way or another, mixing suspected fact with outright fiction - his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" critiques the lives of motion picture performers as if their very existence was an artistic performance, and each of their film was a subplot along the way; "The Whole Equation" spins a history of Hollywood using, for primary.

David Thomson (born 18 February 1941) is a British film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books

David Thomson (born 18 February 1941) is a British film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books.

Read Suspects, by David Thomson online on Bookmate – Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime – these are a few of nearly a hundred names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he star. Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime – these are a few of nearly a hundred names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. He sketches in whole lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the screen. Then these characters start to meet each other outside the films as if they were real people with real needs and passions.

The Big Screen tells the enthralling story of the movies: their rise and spread, their remarkable influence over us, and the technology that made the screen-smaller now, but ever more ubiquitous-as important as the images it carries. The Big Screen is not another history of the movies. Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life.

Przeczytaj go w aplikacji Książki Google Play na komputerze albo na urządzeniu z Androidem lub iOS. Pobierz, by czytać offline. Czytając książkę Suspects, zaznaczaj tekst, dodawaj zakładki i rób notatki. The book is becoming a novel.

by. Thomson, David, 1941-. Books for People with Print Disabilities. Internet Archive Books. New York : Vintage Books. inlibrary; printdisabled; ; americana.

I'm not David Thomson, but many Suspects. Posts About I'm not David Thomson, but many Suspects.

David Thomson has put toghether what seems like a simple biographical dictionary of ficitonal film folk, But these bios are not straight and narrow affairs; they are the creation of a mysterious, secretive narrator, a hidden presence with a dark story to tell. Washington Post Book World.

Comments:

Lanadrta

This is a clever book, but it doesn't get much beyond clever. It's another of those postmodern novels ("novels of the Archive," says my son, who has studied recent critical theory) that ask a reader to remember and reinterpret a large collection of information from the past--in this case, the stories and characters of more than 50 movies. It implicitly invites the reader to assess whether the continuations of the characters' lives invented here are consistent and plausible. (Many, in my opinion, are not.) Then it asks you to to follow a complex set of lurid interactions among the extended characters. Of course, it has an unreliable narrator, who is himself a movie character. That's a lot of work for a reader, especially if, like me, you've seen only about half these movies and have half forgotten many of them. Personally, I don't think the added-on narrative is a good enough story to justify the difficulty in following it, and I don't think the extensions of the characters' lives are rich enough to quite justify the effort either. I think this book is for the real film buff, who has seen a lot of noirs, remembers them pretty well, and is amused by seeing a new take on familiar material.

MisterMax

This has got to be one of the hardest books to describe I've come across. You could fairly label it any (or all) of the following: meditation on film noir, meditation on the American psyche, film buff fanfic, partial encyclopedia of film characters, or experimental fiction. Thomson is an eminent film critic and biographer, and back in the early '80s, he was approached to put together a dictionary of film characters. As he thought about the project, the more problematic it seemed to him. So he reconceived it by focusing on the characters from a core of classic noir films and planning out how they might have interacted.

The book unfolds as brief biographies of almost 100 characters from around 40-50 films, mostly from the 1940s-1970s era. The characters are reimagined as they interect with the "real" world as well as the "reel" world of others in the book. So, for example, the characters Noah Cross (Chinatown) and Nora Desmond (Sunset Boulevard) are shown to have been lovers in the 1920s, while Ilsa (Casablanca) dies in the 1963 plane crash that killed U.N. General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld . Meanwhile, some characters are revealed to be relatives of others and so forth. As readers of Thompson's Biographical Dictionary of Film know, he is a gifted and incisive biographer, and his fictional work here is equally skilled. All of which makes for interesting (and sometimes amusing) metafare, but there's something deeper at work.

It's not at all clear who the first-person writer of these mini-bios is (it's clearly not Thomson), nor how he or she is related to them, or what the purpose of all the succession of bios is. However -- there is a big clue in the form of a map at the very beginning. That said, the clue didn't register with me, and about 1/3 of the way into the book, I was confused enough to start skipping around a bit. At the back, I found a family tree that unlocked the riddle and sent me back into the book, flipping back and forth to connect the dots (one of the book's juicier pleasures arrives once the reader works out the identity of Travis Bickle's (Taxi Driver) father.) As befits a book of such odd construction and narrative, one can interpret it many different ways -- as a statement on identity, a statement on American values, a statement on aging, a statement on the function of film, or even just an odd entertainment.

Whatever one's reaction, it's definitely worth checking out by those interested in experimental approaches to fiction, as well as those with a penchant for film noir. It would certainly be to the reader's advantage to be familiar with at least half the films referenced by the book, otherwise the character sketches are going to be hardest to contextualize in the mind. I was familair with about 3/4 of the characters in the book, and found the unfamiliarity with the other 1/4 to detract from the grip of the book.

Thordibandis

in my 20s, I was working at an art-house movie theater and considered myself a fairly knowledgeable film fan. I was mistaken. Reading this book helps me, as much as anything else, to realize that. Discovering the passionate, poetic work of David Thomson was a kin to discovering someone who speaks the same language that you do, but with the clarity and enunciation of one who truly cares. The language was films. And the speaker was film journalist, essayist, poet and novelist David Thomson.

I never agree with anything he writes completely – even in this, my favorite book of his, I have certain disagreements – but I respect and love the place that he is coming from.

Get this book. If you're open to it, it will change your movie-watching life.????

Nern

If you are an avid movie buff & have seen a wide variety of movies in the "noir" genre then you may get more out of this book than I did. As a collection of stand-alone mini-biographies of some of the characters in the aforementioned movies this book does a fine job of filling in their backgrounds very well. In some cases, the "whatever happened to?" aspect of these characters is expanded upon very nicely.
It is in the weaving of these vignettes that I feel the author has gone awry. Or maybe I, as the reader, did not have enough background to follow the authors intent. Admittedly, I have not seen over half of the movies listed in the book. Perhaps this added to my confusion, but is it not the writer's job to eventually explain all?
Of the movies I have seen, I noticed the author took some liberties to bend the story his way (which is called "poetic license")and that makes me curious about the others.
For instance, the state in which Bedford Falls exists is never mentioned in the film, "It's A Wonderful Life". Having seen this movie more times than I can count, I've always felt that Bedford Falls was in upstate New York. The characters who leave Bedford Falls all have connections to New York City; Sam Wainwright, Harry Bailey & Violet. Had Bedford Falls been located in Nebraska (as the author contends), wouldn't someone had an itch to go to Chicago?
And one character that was left out of the book; Mr. Potter is only mentioned briefly, but no background and no what-happened-to?
Enjoy the book for the clever mini-bios but don't try to find the plot... it's not there.

Just_paw

Eh!