num_pages: 608
description: 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 as important as the images it carries.But 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. The celebrated film authority David Thomson takes us around the globe through time and across many media to tell the complex gripping paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways we were initially enchanted by movies as imitations of lifethe stories the stars the lookand how we allowed them to show us how to live. At the same time movies offering a seductive escape from everyday reality and its responsibilities have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless and anxiety-ridden citizens trying to pursue happiness and dodge terror by sitting quietly in a dark room.Does the big screen take us out into the world or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this grand adventure of a book vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screensthe age that more than ever we are living in.
language: English
title: The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux