MOMENTS THAT MADE THE MOVIES

David Thomson is the film critics' critic, regularly hailed as one of the greats, and this stunning book expands the reach of his classic Dictionary of Film. Being a visual medium, film creates meaning through countless wordless moments, illustrated here in a series of stills from 74 different films, from 1887 with Edward Muybridge's groundbreaking sequence featuring two nude women to Robert Redford's All Is Lost of 2013. Some film moments are made by the dialogue, but "I'll have what she's having" (When Harry Met Sally, 1989) and "Round up the usual suspects" (Casablanca, 1942) would make no sense without the visual context. When Dietrich starred in Morocco (1930), wearing top hat and tails for her cabaret act and kissing a female audience member, she established a rich tradition of sexual ambiguity that extended far beyond her own transgressive roles, although according to Thomson, "Dietrich was never really a great actress". One shocking key moment in film history happened off-set, when Hattie McDaniel, the first black woman to win an Oscar, was relegated to a table in a corner at the awards ceremony for Gone With the Wind in 1939. Among great film endings, The Third Man (1949) stands out as Anna does the long walk down the tree-lined avenue and finally strides straight past Holly without a glance. At the end of John Wayne's The Searchers (1956), Ethan returns Debbie to her family and then turns back to the desert, perhaps having gone through too much to be domesticated again. Some performances are simply mesmerising, and although Moira Shearer was cast in the central role in The Red Shoes because she was an accomplished ballerina, it was her acting that raised the film to greatness. The shower scene in Psycho (1960) took a week to film and is full of visual traps for the viewer, while Blow-up, 1966, is about a photographer who looks at his stills and thinks he may have seen a murder. The illusory uncertainty of the image is in question, and Klute (1971) is yet another film about voyeurism and surveillance. The Shining, Blue Velvet, Burn After Reading all capture moments of shifting perceptions. 320pp, softback, colour and black and white photos on every double spread.
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