Whether you are obsessed with film and its theoretical and historical aspects, or simply enjoy overhearing a brilliant conversation between two intensely analytical people, boy, have we got a treat for you: Greil Marcus interviewing David Thomson about everything from surrealistic film and modern entertainment consumption habits, to nihilism and the “internalized videogame called sensation.”
We’ll give you a taste, but there is no one quote we could slice from the delicious meat of this interview that would do absolute justice to the range of ideas discussed:
David Thomson: Then there’s a notion that [a film is] all about one of a series of personal but also infinite and almost abstract things. It’s about memory, it’s about time, it’s about place, it’s about the face, it’s about violence, cruelty, romance, sex, all of those things. And that you can see those as fish, if you like, that are swimming in the river, shoals of fish, and it’s very interesting just to look at film history in terms of that. And then there comes along gradually this notion that what seemed for all intents and purposes to be a cinematic medium, in fact became something that people felt they did not have to look at with concentration. They could turn it on and they could then do something else.
