with our friends out there streaming land well uh good day everyone
uh i'm crosby kemper i'm the director of the institute of museum and library
services of the federal government federal support for libraries and
museums and this is the second in a series of
conversations on the arts and humanities in libraries and museums about the
shared heritage the shared ideals and the shared
experiences that we all have or perhaps could have
today i'm honored and pleased to have my friend david thompson
america's well maybe the world's best film critic
uh with us uh he's written the whole equation
audio visual supports here uh uh the uh the big screen uh these are the
i think the two best books about hollywood and the world
movie uh experience and and history the whole story of the movies
uh as well as he's written a a a group of recent books
uh about terror sex murder uh and the other reasons that we go to
the movies yeah there we go uh so i think we'll
we'll talk about hollywood's legacy and what is worth
preserving and promoting what's really good what's worth watching
and especially what's worth watching again
so first the existential question for you david
uh the pandemic technology the virtual thing that we're
all doing streaming etc well the film industry the movie
theater the theatrical release the big screen survive
i don't know i was talking only the other day
with a friend who is a fairly important distributor of films in this
country and we agreed we don't know the answer
uh i think a lot of people
feel are really profound urge to get out into a theater
uh a live theater maybe even more than a movie theater but
while we've had a great time in our living room watching
shows that we've binged over and i think that's been a huge
experience um we want to get back to what we think
we had and
that i think is basically sitting with a crowd of strangers
laughing or being frightened by the same emotion coming off the screen a big
screen and that is what i think we still
think of as the experience of cinema movie going whatever you call it one has
to say factually that that experience has been
in decline for quite a long time before covet um you go to a theater or
if you went to a theater just two years ago
in the afternoon uh you were in pretty small company
and a lot of those theaters did not even play in the afternoons they had resigned
themselves just playing in the evening so
we have to face the fact that commercially many movie theaters were in
bad shape before covert came along and obviously
it's been a terrible experience for them after covert
you talk about the experience and and the experience of the movie theater with
a crowd is different than anything anything else i can i can remember uh
going to opening night of jaws uh in a
neighborhood theater in hampden connecticut i walked a long way from
downtown new haven to get there and i remember the very first time the
shark seems to appear everyone in the theater 200 people took
their breath in and since we all did it at the same time
we all then laughed and it was an incredible uh unifying
experience uh that that i that i had that that
night and i missed that i think everybody of a
certain age does miss it and and
the real question is is that kind of experience going to come back
as a whole thing and lost or have we moved on
in terms of how we define the experience of watching films
and i'm not sure of the answer i do think
that watching streamed shows has had an extraordinary effect on
us because you have all the advantages
of a domestic setting you actually have for many people
watching at home you have a screen quality
a brightness of image a detail that is more than you would get in a movie
theater and i think people are very impressed by
that emotionally and also
the way it works economically you feel you're just turning your television
set on you're renting a film for maybe
three or four dollars and you remember that if you took
your friend your wife whatever your husband
to a movie you're probably getting into the region of a
forty dollar bill if you include car parking and babysitting maybe
um it to watch the stuff at home seems cheaper i'm not sure that it is
but it seems cheaper the other thing is i think we've all
fallen in love with binging when we get a show we
really love so my wife and i right so what are you watching now yeah
well i mean we're we're watching a show called
the investigation at the moment which is a danish show
but i was thinking about babylon berlin uh when we first found that
we just went on and on into the early hours of the morning
which is way beyond our bedtime um watching maybe five episodes a night and
i don't think that's unusual i think people
change their habit of viewing and that old-fashioned serial right
sensation what's going to happen next um binge watching of long-form television
series has catered to that and some of them not all of them by any
means but some of those shows are really so good that they challenge the
quality of what we've been seeing in a movie
theater this is the scandinavian the
scandinavian detective series such as the investigation there are a
whole bunch of them that that seem remarkably high uh quality and
i'm also going back to some of the bbc series for many people
i think they had never seen a danish or a swedish
show because you know there aren't that many that play in america nowadays
and all of a sudden you're getting hours of it
and um it's very intriguing and you learn a lot about these scandinavian
societies so all i'm saying is that a change has
occurred and while i'm certain that once we feel
safe there will be a rush back to movie theaters
i'm not certain how long it will last and in part that's because
i don't know if the movie industry knows how to make
films that will rival the quality of the best long-form tv
series because you know they're more grown up than a
lot of movies they're dealing with character and
social reality in ways that movies are scared of
dealing with now so i think the the industry to the
extent that it still exists is facing huge challenges
and questions and i just don't know how it's going to turn
out so i'm i'm interested in in in that because it does seem to me
that there was a golden age about five to ten years ago
of uh television uh production uh that included the wire and breaking
bad and uh mad men uh et cetera
um it was really extraordinary and i've sort of been waiting for that to happen
again there have been some interesting things and particularly some
interesting shorter versions of that uh that have that have come out uh but but
we i i haven't seen and it's one reason i've
been watching the scandinavian shows uh in the british shows i haven't i
haven't seen hollywood turn out uh you know they're back to
producing some of the uh the weekly shows which are not
terrible and and we've been watching some of them too
uh but nothing at the quality of you know the five to ten
years ago at least my view i share your view and i think
it's a reflection of a loss of confidence
in hollywood i don't think hollywood really quite believes it exists in the
old way any longer and you know in my childhood
i went to the movies twice a week i didn't even know what the movie was
i just went because i loved the the relationship between the fantasy the
huge screen the packed theater it it was
from for me and i think for many people it was the most important communal
experience i had going to a soccer match would
rival it but there is an intensity from being in the dark that is greater
than the open air and i remember feeling the sheer
excitement of watching a funny film and everybody laughing and there was a
kind of joy in that you know what i mean and it applies to
dramas and adventure films too and i i thank my lucky stars that i
grew up and sort of came of age in that climate
and when i think about my kids and grandkids
um i don't think the cinema the movies means the same to them
and i remember being intensely moved by stories in movies
mutual tears by them and when i talked to my grandchildren
they're very blase about being moved they they they no longer believe
that they go to the movies to believe in an intense dramatic situation they've
got a rather detached camp-like attitude to it because they
they believe the movies are fake and i'm not saying they're wrong i think
they are but i think once upon a time
we you and i near enough the same sort of age range
we trusted the movies we trusted those stories
and being immersed in them i think that has rather passed and and it's it's a
reflection of huge questions like why people feel
they're alive and what they're doing what are we good what are we aiming for
i i wanted to be happy when i was a kid
and i believed that there were evident ways that i could get to be happy
and part of a productive society i'm afraid
people of my grandchildren's age don't have that conviction
and trust anymore now we're talking here about
enormous issues and the cinema is a very small
part of it but i think it's been affected deeply by the larger thing i'm
talking about well like i completely agree with you i
think the trust in institutions is an example of that yeah and it's
one reason that i'm glad we we started on this subject because i think
there are very few trusted institutions libraries are are
are one trusted institution and museums to some some extents
as as well but but we've lost trust in institutions and and i
think you're right trust in hollywood trust in
in in the movies and and also a sense of we have a sense of oppression i say we i
think this is socially uh uh broadly
uh true though i think there are lots of pockets where it isn't true
that we we we feel we've gone from feeling life was an adventure
many of us to feeling life is an oppression uh which is a sad commentary
on our on on our world and and the movies have
followed along with that we as recently as only only maybe a decade
or two ago two decades ago probably indiana jones was uh our most popular
character and probably all of of the fictional
world uh great sense of adventure i know you
you and i might dispute a little bit about the quality of spielberg's view of
the of the world but uh but the indiana
jones movies were fun and yeah and they were a sense of
adventure and it's hard to find anything that has a sense of adventure
anymore in uh yeah in movies
well i was going to say that stories the people who write stories
and the actors no longer feel they can be heroes in the same sort of
way and you know indiana jones made some fun
of himself but you trusted that guy's ability
his nerve his courage and and there was something admirable
about him and harrison ford is one of those actors that i think
universally people said i like harrison ford he's a
good guy i sort of trust him whether they could
or should have done that is another matter but they did in the
way that people had once trusted john wayne there aren't actors like that
anymore and that reflects the what we're talking about the the loss of
faith in the whole process of fantasy storytelling that movies
introduced and and and maybe in character i mean of
course some of it is we we we have the revelations about
everybody's private life including those great actors of the past
whether it's carrie grant or gary cooper john wayne john wayne didn't
go fight in world war ii though of course jimmy stewart did
um so maybe we could watch jimmy stewart movies anyway
i don't know you know and you wonder why somebody like george clooney
you you talk a little bit about clooney and uh in in
in your books uh in more recent books you know he seems to have the charm and
the grace of a cary grant absolutely absolutely
and he's made one or two movies that have that
achieved that level it seems to me but only one or two and then
and then you know it's hard to even remember some of
some of the uh of the movies bad choices but no no i mean it's very
tough to be george clooney or a george clooney-like
figure today um a year and a half ago whatever it was
two years ago uh when i saw once upon a time in
hollywood a film over which i have mixed feelings
there is a moment in that film where brad pitt
goes up on a roof in a beverly hills home
to repair the tv antenna i think and he takes off his shirt because it's
a beautiful day and he's going to be working
and all of a sudden i felt and i felt other people in the audience
of the same feeling oh oh wow that is one guy
you know i think bradford at the time was over 50
and he looked a lot younger and he's an example i think of someone
who has managed to get up on screen
and say i'm gonna be your hero without irony without shame about it
without feeling camp and pulled it off but it's a hard thing to do it's equally
hard for a young woman or a woman to come on
screen and to look at us without knowing where
they're the way you look at the audience in a
film and say you know i have one sexy broad
because one sexy broad has become an extremely problematic category
and it's very hard for actresses to do that
straight because they don't want to encourage the archetype of one
sexy broad because it represents a past now there we're touching upon
a cultural hangover that really is dogging the movies they no
longer know i think how to treat relationships
between men and women and the assurance that it
had for decades about that he's good-looking she's good-looking of
course they're going to come together it's not believed in anymore it's not
just that divorce broke down the sense of
what that man and woman will do together it's
that romantic confidence has gone
and it it's a it's a it's another way of saying
that it's fatuous to say make america great again because
america is a wonderful place i chose to come here
but a nation does not need to be great it needs to be decent
and it needs to survive and the movies i think bread in us
a feeling of supremacy of prowess and accomplishment and
attached to that was the feeling that men around the world and if
men ran the world then they must take responsibility for making a
god-awful mess of it and we no longer buy into those archetypes and we're not
sure what we're going to work our way through to
and there's a lot of anxiety about it i think
and the funny thing is that although hollywood thrived in the era of
depression and war it didn't have
anxiety anxiety you went to the movies in the first
years of the second world war and you know the world was in enormous
peril and somehow what you were seeing made
you feel good about it you know i mean some of the great
preston searches films like the lady eve howard hawks is his girlfriend were made
during the war they ignored the war but by doing that they sort of said to
us you can ignore the war it's going to be
all right we're going to come through i don't think we are sure we're going to
come through now so and and you've just picked two of our
mutual favorite movies that the the lady eve and his
girl friday and and i i i wonder why
those movies ha among other things they they have
very strong women uh in the movies i mean
barbara stanwick as the lady eve sedgwick etc
uh and uh and catherine hepburn uh i'm sorry
uh and his girl friday rosalind russell and then there are some other
similar movies at the similar time the philadelphia story with catherine
catherine hepburn um the the those comedies of remarriage which you've
you've uh you've written written about uh in
in which men and women are very anxious about each other
you know jimmy stewart in in the philadelphia story
is very anxious um the the whole relationship of the triangular
relationship uh in his girl friday uh between cary
grant the editor the he'll leave the reporter
and ralph bellamy who comes on is that the poor
poor end of that triangle uh triangle um there's an immense amount of anxiety
hildy of course has a lot of anxiety because
she knows exactly what walter her ex-husband is up to
uh and uh uh and why can't we why can't we deal with
our anxiety that way and knowing knowing that
the world is a slippery place knowing that there's anxiety out there
and just being strong enough to take it and and
to give it back to take it and give it back which is what those movies are
about well i i think some of it has to do with
the way in which men and women to take just two
branches of the sexual tree men and women
now feel a lot of collective unease and regret and envy
and hostility about how they might be together we're not
confident of what's going to happen to us
in a quote relationship uh we feel that relationships are much less
stable than they seemed to be in the hollywood
that loved happy endings and we're working it out and you know
uh there are an increasing number of ways
of working it out and they have they have liberated our
society in a lot of ways i mean for instance i
think same-sex marriage is a very liberating
force and i think it's quote a good thing but
i know that it is one of the things that most animates and provokes
the kind of people who broke into the capital
on january the 6th just to generalize that group of people
and these tensions in our society they have to do not just with how much
money you have and whether you have a gun
or not they have to do with what your attitude
dissects to living together to happiness what those ideas are and
we're much more confused now in the long term of history it may
well be that in a hundred years or so a great historian begins a book by saying
at last in the second decade of the new century
the 21st century america at last discovered
the need to feel uneasy and had to have less confidence in
itself and from that moment onwards the quality
of the country began to improve and the cult of
greatness gave way to the generality
of decency i would hope that a book like that will appear and that it will
reflect a real enlightenment we're at that point
we have to go one way or the other i think we have to become more liberal
or much less liberal and it's quite evident
in the in our society how easily we could go either direction we should
certainly become more liberal in the sense of
of uh civil society of having a civil society
civility being a core to to a civil society and we've
kind of run out of that and i think that that you know the the worst example is
certainly the insurrection at the capitol but their their their
example their examples all over including on on the other other side um
i i do i do hope you you would agree that
the the possibility of greatness the possibility
of uh of of heroism it seems to me take for instance the
civil rights uh movement uh that that it took heroism
uh to it maybe it may take heroism for us to get back to making good movies i
don't know but uh it took some heroism to get to where
we are today and it may take some heroism of
one kind or or another for for us to to bring people
together around certain common ideals um being civil is
a start though i i agree in that sense liberalism the
traditional liberalism is absolutely uh necessary and wanting
today i mean i think to be heroic is a wonderful
aspiration because it it implies that you oppose yourself
to some force that disagrees with you and you are prepared
to out argue it to demonstrate other ways and i think that's admirable
i have to say and i think this is where i'm still
european and english i don't really know what national
greatness is and i
certainly don't trust it when it is a self-conscious
ambition in a society i mean we may look back
on the time of the romans and say that was a great civilization
it's based on it was founded partly on slavery and
many things we don't approve of but they did great things in the world
but i'd much rather we told them through history that they had
done great things than that they said at the time
we're doing great things because the only examples i know of
people saying that in the present moment are essentially fascist operations
that's very frightening i think when i think about my my sense is that's a
that's an overstatement unless you take some very small groups the you know the
the the oath breakers or the the the boogie boys um
it does seem to me that that there is a heroism that we
that we do need that's reflected in in some figures in our history
and uh and and and some movies about them so
take take lincoln for instance and take not only spielberg's
lincoln with daniel day lewis but but uh ford's
uh young mr lincoln yeah um which are both
i think very good very good movies not ford's absolute best
uh and maybe close to spielberg's best with with lincoln
um and and and and they're about they're about people who protected uh
what is good let's let's forget greatness for a moment because of
its connotations nationalism versus patriotism for instance
but protected what was good uh in in this country and what was good in this
country at the beginning of the country and in the civil war where you know 300
000 white people were willing to die to end
slavery uh and you know it's more complicated than
that i recognize but defending that which lincoln did
um and and expressing our our care for that
as spielberg and daniel day lewis did seems to me something that is worth uh
uh celebrating about the movie business and about about who
we are well i know i agree with you and i mean i i
like both those films very much however um
isn't there a way that we need to say draw a breath we fought the civil war
and if you like right and justice won the civil war
we marched across the bridge with john lewis we we we suffered
through civil rights with people being assassinated and we got civil
rights which is an extraordinary benevolent wise piece of legislation
but we are still a deeply racist society
in other words there is still i think in most white people a discomfort
with people of color and that has got to be dealt with and i don't think
it's the responsibility of the movies to deal with it
i think we have been dealing with it for a long time and movies have been dealing
with it too i mean you know a lot of us
individually and hollywood and you know sort of sad
sappy liberalism ways like you know guesses coming to dinner
um uh but you know much more heroically if you
will you look at look at the oscars this year
um we you know i think i think we we are
coming to terms with it and i think i think attitudes have changed
dramatically and you know it is true throughout history
that people have always been afraid of uh and oppressive of things
that are different than and people are different than they
are and we're doing i think we're doing okay
david compares to the chinese where they've
got 10 million uyghurs in what are functionally kind you know
they've recreated the gulag or the concentration camps
uh in in china and you know vladimir putin who
you know if you raise your voice uh against him at dinner you've
you know you find yourself dead the next day um etc
etc we could go around the world i think stewart we're actually doing
okay in that regard we're not perfect that's for sure
that's for sure and we need to do more for sure but
just saying we're racist strikes me as as as uh being
a little heavy well perhaps it is we're less racist than we were yes i
think so but i think it is still there and
i had a conversation a few weeks ago with spike lee
who is an absolutely engaging and wonderfully
smart guy and um you know a great career
i think it's not unfair to say that spike lee believes
the world now is as racist as the one into which he was born in the 1950s
i don't think it's enough anymore for people like you and me
to say we're working hard at it and we're doing okay because if you look
at what has happened in the last few years
just the last few years in this country in matters of race it doesn't look okay
to me it really doesn't and i think
that it's easily conceivable that within the next few years the
extreme right wing would come back into power with a
vengeance and this country might then be
almost compelled to re-fight the civil war
maybe you think that's well i guess with you too
possibly more on on that subject and so again i mean i would i would take if
you look look uh at the oscars look at the racial
protests so we had the racial protests and
what was the nation's reaction to the racial protests put aside the
the violence that occasionally accompanied them
the racial protests i i think were an inflection point
i think i think the majority of people in the in the country thought
that understood what was going on in the racial protests
you know you can argue about black lives matter this way or that but that the
racial protests themselves against the the police killings and other aspects of
racism in the country would seem to me to to be a a a very important moment in
our history and then if you look around at what's going
on in in terms of the movements towards racial
racial justice i think they're they're pretty strong in the country
now you've got the insurrectionists and you you know you've got
donald trump occasionally retweeting white supremacist stuff
and and whatnot and that but i think that's an outlying
thing uh i don't think that's a there's a wave of
of that going on except you know [Music]
the the trump tweeters um which which is you know which is a problem
absolutely is a problem needs to we we all need to reject that but but i
i i see i see a wave going the other way look i'm a racial point of view i hope
you're right and i'm encouraged by a lot of things
that are happening too but why is it
that people of color are finding it much harder to get a vaccine
and why is it that they are dying in unusually high proportions from
covid how has that happened if we've been working at this
and doing well and it's pretty well okay you see i love the country and please
don't misinterpret what i'm saying i love the
country but i think the country is on the cusp
and i think the battle simply to be decent seems to me to be more important
the aim of being great i come from a country
pretty good country fairly good record in a lot of respects
it's a stupid country in other respects but
even when the second world war was concluded
and it would be possible for britain to say well we won
as opposed to losing uh i don't think anyone i knew felt it was
necessary for the country to be great
i don't know what great means ultimately in that sense i think being alive
is more than great you do you know what i'm meaning yeah well i
i absolutely know what what you mean and i i'll say
two things one i i completely agree with you that i think being live is great and
i think one of the great things about the movies
historically has been uh we go through
various individual movies if you wanted to it is
it frequently is about the joy of living yes
about the joy of of of participating in in certain things and i was going to go
into a riff about the difference between 1939 between victor fleming doing gone
with the wind and victor fleming doing the wizard of oz
and why the wizard of oz will be a joy for everyone forever and gone with the
wind now has to be interpreted uh to be on tv for good reason the
reasons we've just been talking about um yeah but but but
but i want to there's a word you used and you use it
in your books and it's profoundly important word and i think
it's the word allegiance and to have allegiance to anything we
have to believe in it in some way now you know you and i
probably don't disagree much about the problems of nationalism national you
know those of us who are old enough who or
who saw enough world war ii movies or world war one movies or
have read enough history know that nationalism can be a huge problem and
nationalism has existed for a very long time and and
it's pretty much existed in one form or another
uh ethnocentrism however however you want to put it
almost everywhere in in in history it has existed
and much worse forms than anything we see in the united states today
but it's but it's problematic for sure but we have to find
some kind of allegiance and it's why patriotism is important
and it's why having good figures figures figures that that we care about
you know the great man theory of history may may absolutely be wrong and and
fallacious and particularly if taken over by nationalists as in german
history it was for instance but if if if we can have people like
george washington or abraham lincoln of martin luther king
who represent our country and the greatness of our country
allegiance to that allegiance to what they represent seems to me
something that's unifying in a good way for the country
uh and and can take us a long way and if we look at
if we look at if we look at patriot if we confuse nationalism and patriotism
and on the right we've done that in a bad way my
my people have done that in a bad way in the last 20 years
but if on the left we can we confuse patriotism with nationalism and we
reject any form of allegiance to the country
particularly our country which has done so much good in the history of the world
i think we've got a problem there
i agree with everything you've said and i i think that those
ideals are so important i would say
the two main things that people have allegiance to today
are one technology and two survival
and i think that a lot of people believe in their heart of hearts that
the problems we face and they go all the way from say racism
and poverty to what is going to happen
through our climate i think a lot of people actually believe
it's hopeless and i think they have settled
on making their time their remaining time
as good as it can be as comfortable as it can be
and i find it fascinating how that urge to be
comfortable is enormously accelerated and assisted
by technology and i think there are many many things
in our lives where we have actually voluntarily abandoned
qualities of human contact because the technology seems like the more rational
and economic way of conducting our life in other words to really put it in a
nutshell a huge nutshell there is a battle underway already
between moral intelligence by which i mean the ability to hold
complicated ideas in your head in an effort to make the lives of as
many people as possible better and artificial intelligence
which is the logic and the rationale of technology
and which could could smother moral intelligence
and you know we're talking huge lofty stuff here and
somehow we got away from the movies right yeah we got we've gotten away from
the movies let me let me ask you this question to
get back to the movies but to take your point
you you've just made um i i do think technology separates it's one reason i
think the community programs that libraries and museums do
are so important they bring people together
and in the pandemic we haven't been able to do that but
there's a movie that you and i both love and and
in which a decision is made uh that basically is it's a decision about
comfort in one way but it's a decision about
what i would call communal values that that i think we're talking about
meet me in st louis i'm thinking of the musical and
and and you're very eloquent on this in a couple of a couple of your your books
um about the decision that father makes uh to uh to not take the leap in his
career and go to new york corporate headquarters um and to stay
with the great family now of course you know any family in america would love to
live in the house uh they live in uh louis it's not
exactly it's not exactly abandoning comfort that's for sure
it's a sweet life they have there yeah right yeah exactly but but it's a it's a
very sentimental movie and of the kind that it's very hard to
make today and it's basically about family values which everybody claims to
be in favor of and nobody really uh supports these days left right or
center um and i i i do think that the the
notion of community is so is so deeply important
and for a long time people on the right were all about being togethers
and berkians and and uh and celebrating the the community
uh and and and social justice warriors on on the left have claimed to be all
about that and where i see community happening is
in places like public libraries and and at the local level where people come
together to do things and to have fun uh have fun or do some good and and and
it's it's one reason i i wanted to do this program with you is
i thought you know if if we could recreate in libraries and
sometimes in museums i know museums that are doing doing this the
old film society idea you know when you and i were were young
and going to five movies a day there were lots of places to see older
movies and classic movies and the kind of movies that
like meet me in st louis that are about values that are different than some of
the values that are being celebrated movies today
um and i wonder if we couldn't we couldn't inspire ourselves uh
in libraries and museums with some some great movies of
some older movies and some new movies and interpreting some some
challenging movies i mean i think that libraries museums
schools are one of the greatest most encouraging
welcoming aspects of this country and many other developed countries and
i i as a kid owed a lot to libraries and and still do and
i love them but here's a point in the in the realm of movies
we are at a point now very close to it where anyone
who's got uh access to the platforms that are
available and i'm not minimizing what that costs but
still most of the country has that access and that gives them the ability
virtually and i mean virtually in the old sense to
dial up any movie they want to see
um most of the films you and i have been talking about
or could be talking about it in the program at the moment
we could we could go home and dial them up
and that technology is extraordinary and wonderful and you
and i remember an age where if you hadn't seen a film
you might have to wait years to find it in a movie theater because there was no
access to films in this kind of form
um in a way that technology has already surpassed
the library that has shelves of shelves of dvds it's wonderful that they
do because you could go to the library and
you can find a precious rare film as a dvd
however when you get home can you play it because the dvd
player and the ability to service and repair
a dvd player that is fading away and more and more we depend on people
like netflix and amazon to have the films we want to see
and they're corporations they run by business logic and what that
means is you can't be sure that they will always
have the films you want so that
if i want to see the shop around the corner
a classic for the moment i can see it now but it's
possible that in 10 years time netflix will tell you or a version of
netflix will tell you oh we discontinued the shop around the
corner because there wasn't sufficient demand
for it because most young people haven't heard
of it don't know who else lubitch was and find
it rather strange to see two people
spending an hour and a half talking across purposes
as to whether they're in love or not because that's not the way people today
really talk and behave now the technology is
changing the way we think about ourselves
and i think that's generally alarming i suspect you do too
yeah i do that's why i'm suggesting all alternatives
yes no absolutely and and you know i i want you to be
back in libraries and i want to be and i want to millions of people to be in
those libraries using them and of course there are more
imaginative ways of using them than any of us have yet thought of and you are
a forerunner and a very important figure in pioneering the whole sense of
how can we make libraries relevant and active and important
and i've seen your library in kansas city i know
the kind of things you did and i now know that you're
sort of taking responsibility for the libraries of america
and that's a great thing no one we couldn't hire a better person for that
job than you but the technology is
insatiable and people love technology and they simply do not
know how to stop it for instance go back 200
years or more the photograph comes into being and the
photograph is so beguiling and so seductive
and so entertaining that everybody wants it
and if anyone stands up and says you know
be very careful the photograph introduces
a concept new to us the lifelike and once you have the life like you run
the risk of life meaning less
and they look at you and they say you mean you want to abandon photography
which is absurd but that's only a reflection
of how far technology never gets put to the vote
we never vote on technology uh it just happens it occurs we work with our feet
we adopt it we adopt it we find it we find it useful
uh or entertaining um you know so light i think is you know i
i want i want to end we wouldn't go to questions in one minute but
i'm glad you brought up light because i think it's one of the great subjects in
your books across all of your books is the subject of light the
california light the light and monument valley the light that
wells and and greg tolin get uh in citizen kane uh and uh and and the
magnificent ambersons and i i told you we were preparing for
this i watched more or less simultaneously the
magnificent ambersons and the earrings of madame de
uh uh max offil's movie and there is things glow
in these movies they glow in these movies and there's they're always in
both both of their movies the movies and max
ovals and movies of of orson welles there's always a
source of light somewhere in the scene that's not directly
on or from the actors or or the the sun shining or the ambient light
shining on on the actors and your eye is always
drawn to it and drawn to other things that are glowing on the
on on the screen it's a really remark and and
you have a comparison at one point you you use los meninas
the velasquez painting and i was looking at las meninas
and and looking at the backgrounds looking at that at
scenes uh in in magnificent emerson's and the earrings of madame did
and i was thinking you know this is really what the painting is about
and what both of these filmmakers are are telling us
is there's always light somewhere that we're we're drawn to
and it's always it's always somewhere behind us or around us
uh or we're using it from some source we don't fully understand vermeer
i i also see this in vermeer um and and and
the trick of the light if you will uh and you're very good on on
on on this subject and it's it's something the movies can do for us
and that great art can do for us great great painters like velasquez or vermeer
can do for us that we find very hard to do for
ourselves which is to see the big picture to see a big screen
in which there are many sources of light and
and and energy they're also incredible motion in both those
those films um so before we go to questions
i want to comment on that well i'm looking at you in a room in your
house no no no i'm being i'm being serious
there is a beautiful white light behind you i i'm not suggesting
that you calculated this and contrived it
but oh maybe you did but when i look at the image
of you
your shelf of books going off in a diagonal
a door in the background i'm not quite sure of the shape of the room behind you
but there is a bright light just over your
left shoulder you may not know it's there but it is
and it makes it gives me a
sense of how you live that i find really touching i'm not
sentimentalizing you i find touching and precious and i think
that it's something as you say the movies can do it can put
people in a place and it can light them natural light or
artificial light in a way that says oh i think that's a
nice guy and okay okay
i want to get a question from our audience before you you go into a
rapture on on on this and your interior design
yeah we're friends we're just good friends um uh
elizabeth have we got a a question or two from the audience
we have a wide variety of really great and thoughtful questions so i'm hoping
people can stick on the line a little bit longer so
we can get to a few of these there's a question from val she's
writing from the talbot museum of art in roanoke
virginia and she says that they'll soon be
presenting the ruth e carter afrofuturism and costume design
exhibition which features this academy
award-winning costume designers creations for movies like black panther
selma roots amistad among others so she's asking if uh crosby or david
have any insights as to how costuming black actors has
changed over the years oh boy well that is a fascinating
question um well i mean
you have to allow that for a long time
uh you did not find black people in american films who were
other than very poor now
i'm not saying that that wasn't fairly true to life
but i think the constant presentation of black women as housemaids and
similar kind of servants i think it reinforced the idea that that's what
black women should be and uh therefore they were generally not
always but generally poorly dressed and you know the
world famous scene of mammy in going with the wind lacing up
scarlett's corset and scarlet is from a completely
different price level and and uh the maid maybe
is helping her and that seems to be the natural and persistent
way in which a black woman and a white woman
should interact um i'm sure that the exhibition you're
going to mount in virginia is going to show
very very different situations and that's all to the good
but it would not be bad maybe to show the costumes of a few
earlier versions of black people in films perhaps you're aiming to do that
anyway but because the contrast is very very
important i think i i just say what one thing about it if
if you watch a tv show as i have it's one of my
favorite shows the good fight uh in which you've got it
essentially um a black uh law firm
and the the costuming in that is is pretty fabulous
uh you know uh uh act various audra mcdonald etc wearing petro
i i know this because i'm married to a fashionista
uh by the way not because i know anything about fashion
uh but uh you know it is pretty spectacular
and i i think uh one of the things that has happened in popular culture
uh is that african-american sense of style which has always been pretty great
it's just been suppressed or over there somewhere
has now blossomed and it's in the art world i think we
we we know this museums are doing a lot with that i think
uh today it's a spectacular addition that was always there but was ignored or
wasn't recognized by by the majority culture and now is and
and and so i just want to say you know uh
god bless america that that's happened
great elizabeth another one yes indeed i i'll uh i'll give you two at once here
um first a comment from wendy who says that
her online film club has been really popular at the library
um using canopy and she'd love some suggestions
and then second one from erica says that pop culture used to exist in a
specific time but now that things are streaming and
everything is available right now outside of the context in
which it was made how do we watch things and acknowledge
the difference in society and values and are we creating new ability reducing
the ability to create new or current pop culture
that's a tough question i think it's a huge question
simply i don't know the answer i think that
i think that one of the one of the very important things in
home watching is and here's a technology that
has changed the world it's the remote
so that you're watching tv and you don't like what you're watching
so you start thumbing the remote to get to something
else and as you do that you become like a
sort of automatic editing machine of your own tv
and it's enormously interesting to do it because you
suddenly get a sense of the multiple versions of the world
and you know you cut from an ad to a religious program
and if you just go back and forth between the two
they are preaching in not dissimilar ways
but recommending very different things and i think that using the remote
for an hour a day is an enormously educational thing and i would urge
people to do it more we have hundreds of channels
we can look at take advantage of that great range
it's all very all well and good to concentrate on one channel
obviously that's the essential way of watching but
the variety that is out there and getting at it can be very
instructive about the nature of the world we're living in
so i'd i'd say everything i agree with with what what david just said i would
say if you're watching something streaming
if you're like if you're getting it getting on your phone or your
ipad or or on your tv or however you're getting it
um you're also able to go and take a look at other things on the internet and
i would suggest you know i don't always suggest this but
with films i probably would wikipedia uh it will give you some
context uh for uh for a film not for everything
i i you know i watched intolerance on over
the last few days because i thought i might be talking about it with david
uh with the dw griffith film that he made after birth of a nation
um i i watched it on my iphone actually which was an experience it's like
like i read wordsworth's the prelude on my iphone
phone at one point and i i decided that was not the perfect experience for
reading wordsworth um and it's not the perfect
experience for watching intolerance for sure
um but it would would have been very helpful for me to have gone
which in fact i did to uh some books such as david's books
to to look at the context of of intolerance which among other things
is two years after birth of a nation which is a purely racist movie i mean it
is a celebration of the ku klux klan and intolerance of course is a purely
liberal movie about being against intolerance um and you
have to understand what dw griffith's very complex
background and and mental state which is partly a state of the of the nation at
the time and partly a state of his background
um uh to to really understand what's going on in in that movie and
and and also that he might in some some small way being tried trying to make
amends for for for one of the one of the worst movies ever made from a
racial point of view it's a brilliant movie from a technological point of view
uh it's called the birth of the art of film uh by
by some critics and historians but it's a purely racist movie
which probably probably caused some of the racial
uh animosity that led to things like the growth
of lynchings in the immediate aftermath of the film okay
um so i uh i'll since we're getting close to our time um i'll just
note an interesting follow-up comments by ronald who says that he
orders films for his library and in the past couple of years he's
noticed a decline in dvd circulation in our upscale
communities and an increase in other communities um
and they've found that very very informative interesting yeah
and i will just uh close us out thank you
um for those of you who have stayed on a couple extra minutes i will
um not end on a light note and pose one last question for you this is a
a question from gladstone who says for a number of reasons
maybe growing divisions in our culture writ large
it seems like we're really focused on demystifying the world
so why if that's the case is they're not an equal creative response
during this pandemic like other seemingly dystopian periods such as
dog day afternoon apocalypse now or taxi driver how do you think the pandemic
is is affecting filmmaking um i don't think it has
yet and i think that that is probably because so many
filmmakers like anyone else are in a kind of state of shock
where getting through surviving is very important but i do think
just talking to creative people you find more and more people are
discovering aspects of human and social nature
during a lockdown that they didn't expect
and that is really intriguing and i think that the kind of
new loneliness that covet has
forced upon us i think that is going to be getting
into all the arts and many other aspects of life pretty soon
and and it would not surprise me that in the next few years
there is a kind of flowering of new maybe dangerous but very challenging
interesting ideas in the arts just as there has to
be in society i think
we probably have to reappraise a whole sense of what we want from
police in reality but a part of that i think we have to
develop a new way of treating police characters in the movies
because the stereotype of cops in movies has had a lot to do with the
more regrettable circumstances in which cops
find themselves in reality today so the two things are very connected but
i do think that that we could be in for a very rich
five or six years or so and i'm full of hope
and i'd i'd just say uh that i i think one reason we're not seeing so much
direct response is that we're still it's david said probably processing it
at some level but also dealing with it you know there was a huge uh increase in
the first few months of the pandemic of people watching uh pandemic related
movies you know the dustin hoffman movie uh et cetera and everybody
i admit it i did it too um and i was reading the books about i was going back
you know to to the last man by mary shelley and and
uh diary of a play gear uh journal of the
play gear etc um i've stopped doing that now i'm you
know now i'm watching uh all creatures great and small uh because
i want to get away from the the disaster um i think you'll
you'll probably see some some some really interesting and epic
work before uh before too long about what what's
happened and i think one thing that has happened in the pandemic and
and david alluded to this um and we might have a little bit of a
disagreement about how it happens and how we how we deal
with it but the social justice effects of the
pandemic or injustice effects of the pandemic
reveal something about the way we structure our our society
and i think you'll you'll see commentary on that from the world with the arts and
humanities and i think you'll see government uh uh and institutions like
libraries and museums try to deal with that
well thank you so much we do and and uh special thanks to to you
crosby for hosting such a riveting discussion
and uh thank you very much david for joining us it was a
really engaging i want to thank everyone who helped put this together
bubble crosby who is an old friend and and um
we often disagree and disagreement is a very very
important aspect of conversation and i want to say
one one last thing which is it may be that
the movies in more ways than one have gotten small
but our film critic
[Laughter]
you can find this on imls.gov afterwards take care