David Thomson has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Sleeping with Strangers.
Sleeping with Strangers
Summary
In this wholly original work of film criticism, David Thomson, celebrated author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, probes the many ways in which sexuality has shaped the movies - and the ways in which the movies have shaped sexuality. Exploring the tangled notions of masculinity, femininity, beauty, and sex that characterize our cinematic imagination - and drawing on examples that range from advertising to pornography, Bonnie and Clyde to Call Me by Your Name - Thomson illuminates how film as art, entertainment, and business has historically been a polite cover for a kind of erotic séance. In so doing, he casts the art and the artists we love in a new light, and reveals how film can both expose the fault lines in conventional masculinity and point the way past it, toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person with desires.
©2019 David Thomson (P)2019 Random House Audio
A Light in the Dark
Summary
From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film - an essential work on the preeminent, indispensable movie directors and the ways in which their work has forged, and continues to forge, the landscape of modern film. Directors operate behind the scenes managing actors, establishing a cohesive creative vision, at times literally guiding our eyes with the eye of the camera. But we are often so dazzled by the visions onscreen that it is easy to forget the individual who is off-screen orchestrating the entire production - to say nothing of their having marshaled a script, a studio, and other people's money. David Thomson, in his usual brilliantly insightful way, shines a light on the visionary directors who have shaped modern cinema and, through their work, studies the very nature of film direction. With his customary candor about his own delights and disappointments, Thomson analyzes both landmark works and forgotten films from classic directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as contemporary powerhouses such as Jane Campion, Spike Lee, and Quentin Tarantino. He shrewdly interrogates their professional legacies and influence in the industry, while simultaneously assessing the critical impact of an artist's personal life on his or her work. He explores the male directors' dominance of the past and describes how diversity can change the landscape. Judicious, vivid, and witty, A Light in the Dark is yet another required Thomson text for every movie lover's audiobook shelf.
©2021 David Thomson (P)2021 Random House Audio
Warner Bros
Summary
Behind the scenes at the legendary Warner Brothers film studio, where four immigrant brothers transformed themselves into the moguls and masters of American fantasy Warner Bros charts the rise of an unpromising film studio from its shaky beginnings in the early 20th century through its ascent to the pinnacle of Hollywood influence and popularity. The Warner Brothers - Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack - arrived in America as unschooled Jewish immigrants, yet they founded a studio that became the smartest, toughest, and most radical in all of Hollywood. David Thomson provides fascinating and original interpretations of Warner Brothers pictures from the pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer through black-and-white musicals, gangster movies, and such dramatic romances as Casablanca, East of Eden, and Bonnie and Clyde. He recounts the storied exploits of the studio's larger-than-life stars, among them Al Jolson, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Doris Day, and Bugs Bunny. The Warner brothers' cultural impact was so profound, Thomson writes, that their studio became "one of the enterprises that helped us see there might be an American dream out there".
©2017 David Thomson (P)2018 Audible, Inc.