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

 Yet Bunuel's rating on the movie stock exchange is slipping.  No matter that so many of us seem always hurrying after a meal that does not materialize.  Despite the settled marriages in which the partners are somehow looking offscreen.  Still, his seasons or fetes are less often now.  Perhaps his insights are too unsettling for a community content with dreams and white lies.  I fear his status is passing out of reach -- and there are other directors for whom that shade has arrived:  Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, Mizoguchi, and even Jean Renoir.

-- David Thomson. A History of Movie Directors (Knopf, 2021)

David Thomson, who wrote the indispensible The Biographical Dictionary of Film, here meanders a bit in a stream of consciousness about a number of different directors, from Fritz Lang to Quentin Tarantino, and his rambling thoughts about their roles in film history and whether they will be remembered or not.  As he says, "Who directed Ozark?" one might think this would lead to a discussion about the current auteurs of streaming TV shows, but it doesn't (there are a number of choices and reasons, from showrunners such Ronald D. Moore of the intelligent time travel series Outlander to writers such as David E. Kelley of Mr. Mercedes).  Whatever one's opinion of Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock may be Thomson has his own interesting and intelligent comments and analyses.  Certain things I agree with him about (the ultimate blandness of Spielberg and Tarantino) and others I completely disagree (Fritz Lang's American films never lived up to the quality of his German ones), but he always acknowledges the social factors at work.

In any case, Thomson's book has encouraged me to seek out again quite a number of movies (especially those of Stephen Frears, whose Philomena in 2013 I particulary liked) as well as books, with his recommendations of books on Renoir and Mizoguchi, though he shares my disappointment that the torrent of good books on film has been reduced to a trickle, though there a number of good ones in French that have not yet been translated.  He is also encouraging in his efforts to rethink and rewatch what one may have already formed an opinion about.