In this interview made with the occasion of her presence in Romania, the renowned American film historian Kristin Thompson talks about her famous books, written together with David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction and Film Art: An Introduction, about the worldwide phenomenon of the rediscovery of classic films, in restored versions, which are increasingly accessible, about the state of cinephilia and film criticism, but also about the New Romanian Cinema.

Kristin Thompson was in Bucharest following the publication of the Romanian translation of her seminal work Film History: An Introduction (written with David Bordwell and revised with the help of Jeff Smith). On Thursday, October 24th, she was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from UNATC, the most prominent Romanian Film School. On Saturday, October 25th, she held a masterclass at UNATC, moderated by film critics and professors Andrei Gorzo and Andrei Rus.

Kristin Thompson also chose two films for a Carte Blanche section during Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest festival: The Long Day Closes (1992), by Terence Davies, and Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), by Ernst Lubitsch. Finally, on October 27th, she met with readers at the Carturesti & Friends Bookstore.

According to the presentation made by UNATC, throughout her prestigious career, Kristin Thompson has dedicated extensive studies both to directors from the classic period of world cinema, such as Ernst Lubitsch, and to contemporary ones, such as Christopher Nolan or Peter Jackson. She wrote or co-wrote with her husband, the late film historian David Bordwell, with whom she lived in Madison, Wisconsin, several books on American cinema, signing together two of the most popular and influential syntheses of world film in recent decades: Film History: An Introduction and Film Art: An Introduction. 

She has also contributed texts and commentary to the booklets of dozens of DVDs and Blu-rays released by the world’s leading distribution companies and, together with David Bordwell and Jeff Smith, hosted a series entitled Observations on Film Art for the streaming service Criterion Channel. On davidbordwell.net she has published hundreds of essays on the most varied topics.

One of the reasons you are here in Bucharest is the release of the Romanian version of this famous book, Film History: An Introduction. When you wrote it and published it more than 30 years ago, did you expect the success this book had? 

Well, I hoped for it. Our first book, Film Art: An Introduction, was actually much more successful. Film history is not taught as often in American universities as basic aesthetics of film. So it hasn’t been as successful, but it has been certainly translated in many countries, and I’m delighted that there’s now this Romanian translation. So in a way that’s a big success, I think. But yeah, I was hoping to make money. I don’t teach, so I’m a professional writer. That’s why I undertook this rather foolish endeavor. It was a very difficult project. 

But how do you explain the success of these two books for so many years? 

Well, for Film Art it was fairly simple because there was only one other book in existence and it wasn’t very good. It took a little while but gradually Film Art became the book that people wanted to use. It was also more expensive than some of the other books that were written later, so we do have competition, but I think it retained its reputation as the book to teach. We’re required to revise it by the publisher and now eventually it will be in a 14th edition soon. Film History is, as I say, less successful just in terms of sales. I’m sure it’s very well respected. Also, it was a good time to publish the textbook. The 1990s and the early 2000s were the height of textbooks because e-books have not yet come in and so people were buying actual physical copies. And then eventually McGraw Hill, our publisher, wanted e-books. Now I think still more print books are sold than e-books, but it’s changing, it’s gradually moving over to digital, and we just keep revising that book as well.

What were the main challenges in writing this book, given the huge task that you undertook?

I think there were two. First of all we had to go to the archives. We spent a lot of time in Brussels because they have one of the largest film archives in the world. They cooperate with us and for many of the films that we illustrate in the book we took frames from their prints. They have a fabulous collection. So films that we had never seen from various countries were available there, and we spent quite a bit of time there. We traveled a lot. We went to other archives, including the British Film Institute, or the Library of Congress, University of California, Los Angeles Archive, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Archive. There was a lot of research to do, and this was before DVDs, of course. So that was an obstacle. 

The other obstacle was trying to write all this in a compact way. At the time we were writing the book, more and more smaller countries were making films. Of course it happened in Romania a little later, but there were countries turning out films that had never done so before, or the films were only shown locally. So we found that film history had grown as a topic. It was very difficult to just sit down and write a paragraph about Fritz Lang. It was just ridiculous. The book as a whole is long, but any coverage of a single topic is somewhat short. And that was hard to write for people like us. I wrote a whole book on Ivan the Terrible, so I was used to having all the space I needed. 

People are aware of festivals, they’re aware of older films. They know what restoration means and so they’re willing to travel the way people who love opera are willing to travel someplace else to see what they love.

How do you see the state of cinephilia today? How did it change compared to when you wrote this book?

I think one big change has been the growth of film festivals. When we started there were very few, but now there’s been an explosion. Any little town can have its own film festival. I think that promotes cinephilia among people who might not get a chance to see art films, foreign films and so forth. And of course streaming has helped, although I have no idea whether people are watching Antonioni on streaming or just watching Back to the Future or something like that. That’s been a tremendous change – having DVDs and Blu-rays and various other forms of home media. So it’s just access. I mean when I started out the number of classic films that were available in any format was pretty limited and it’s grown extremely large.

Is there any big difference between the situation in the United States and in other parts of the world, maybe in Europe? 

Well, I have friends in Australia who see more films than I do. They run a film festival and they see I don’t know how many films a week. So, yeah, there’s cinephilia all over the world, but, well, I don’t know, maybe there are some countries where streaming is not really available widely. But attendance at film festivals as well has grown. When I started going to Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, in 2008 I think, it was a small festival. And by the end, it was just almost impossible to deal with. When David and I went to the festival, we would usually have lunch with friends between films. But the last year we were there, in 2019, we had to get up in the morning, buy sandwiches, get to the theater, get in line, watch a film, go out, eat the sandwiches in the courtyard of the Cineteca, and go back and get in line, because there was no other way to make sure you could see the film you want.

So I think it’s a symptom of the fact that people are aware of festivals, they’re aware of older films. They know what restoration means and so they’re willing to travel the way people who love opera are willing to travel someplace else to see what they love.

You also mentioned in the interviews Pordenone Silent Film Festival, where you also used to go a lot. This type of festivals grew a lot, but we can also see that big festivals like Cannes, Venice, Berlinale have these sections of classic films in restored versions, and they are also growing. How do you see this evolution? 

I think it’s partly the archives. When we started, people were not restoring films the way they are now. When we watched D.W. Griffith, we were watching these little 16mm prints from very bad sources, and so we really didn’t know Griffith that well. But then the archival boom happened, really starting in the ’70s. Then you get these beautiful prints, and people can realize that old films are not these horrible, unsophisticated things that they thought. They just assumed that in silent films people ran around very quickly, there were scratches. So once you get really beautiful prints and people become aware of them… I mean the archivists want to show these films at festivals, so they encourage it. And they become festival guests when they introduce their films. So it’s a collaboration between people who are restoring films and people who are showing them at these festivals and sort of giving them publicity. It’s been a major part of the spread of appreciation for old films. 

Are you nostalgic about watching films on film? 

Well, I will watch films on film when I get a chance, which sometimes happens. Some of the directors, of course, insist on having some 35mm prints made, only a few. But if you’re in the right place, at a film festival. I remember seeing László Nemes’ Sunset. I think it was 2018, in Venice, in the Sala Grande. It was this huge screen, beautiful sound system, 35mm, brand new print too. It was just overwhelming. I’m not sure DCP would be quite as impressive.

I do like to take the chance to see things like that. I get that chance often in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin. We have a projection room that can do DCP, 35mm, 16mm, DVD, whatever, and we often see 35mm films there, but it’s unusual. It’s certainly not what happens in most schools, where they’re showing on disc. 

How do you see this digital revolution of the last 20 years? As we spoke earlier, in a way it helped the archives a lot to make available these classic films. So this had a positive effect, right? 

Certainly the way they can do the restorations, removing scratches and that kind of thing is very, very impressive. And you sometimes wonder – did this film ever look quite this good? I mean, I remember seeing 35mm films in theaters when I was a kid. I lived in a fairly small town, so they were late runs. They were not brand new prints, but I was used to seeing scratches and occasional jumps. So, if you don’t care that much about the grain and all the aspects of 35 mm, a really good digital restoration it’s amazing. I think (digital revolution) it’s been great for restoration, certainly. And having access to digital copies on disc has been tremendous for us getting frames. We always insist on using frames when we analyze a film or discuss it historically. And it’s just so easy now with DVDs and Blu-rays. 

Why was it so important for you to use frames when analyzing films? 

The only alternative really was the production stills that were taken on the set during the shooting. They were meant for publicity purposes. They were to show off the stars. But if you’re analyzing a scene, well, if you want a frame from every shot, there aren’t any publicity stills that do that. So you had to make frames that looked like what was on the screen when people were watching movies. I think we were the first to do that in textbooks because we started so early in Film Art. We just insist on it. How else can you really analyze a film? You can’t imagine somebody analyzing a classic painting without having color and the entire thing shown in the illustration. So we treat films more or less the way art historians would treat paintings or sculpture. We try to respect the original. 

Each year you make this alternative list of best films from exactly a century ago. Do you think that people today are still open to watching these very old films? We spoke about the interest of the festivals, the interest of the audience of these festivals, but do you think that regular audiences are still interested in watching these old films? 

I think students who are not majors, who are not studying film as their main topic, are not. They tell their teachers that they don’t like black and white films, they hate reading subtitles. So foreign films, old films are completely out of their range of interest, but I think there are probably always a few students in a class who get it. They understand why we’re watching old movies in black and white, or why we’re watching movies with subtitles. So it’s still a specialized taste, I think. But there are more and more situations where people are exposed, especially children, to, say, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. We have a big theater in Madison where a couple of times a year they run silent films and they have the old organ still in the theater so they have music to go with it, good projection and they love it. So if kids are exposed to that early and they get to see the right films that entertain them.. I think it’s always going to be a minority taste but still there are a lot of people who have that taste and it’s growing. It’s also partly streaming, where so many old films are available.

So you think streaming helped in a way to develop this cinephilia or at least to make these old films available to a broader audience? 

Yeah, I mean, in the United States, well North America in general, you probably know about the Criterion Channel. So the number of films that people would put on top 10 of all time lists that they show is absolutely amazing. Almost all of Kurosawa, Renoir, Bresson, Ozu, etc., the classics. And they have a following. I think they have over 200,000 subscribers, so that’s not bad. And people still buy their discs as well. They’re still making DVDs and Blu-rays. Maybe not for long, it may not last, but they’re a big influence on people who are real cinephilia people. 

Everybody thinks they’re a reviewer and they’re all doing this online and they have these little groups that follow them and that kind of thing. It’s pretty grim.

How do you see the state of film criticism today? I know it’s a big question, I know it’s a big debate. It started many years ago and it’s still going. 

Unfortunately film criticism is going on to places like Facebook. I mean, I don’t belong to many social media services, but I am on Facebook. And there are all these people who post these little reviews very quickly. They’re not experts. They don’t know much about film history. I read them and I think this is not worth reading. And even the professional critics, I feel, are strangely unaware of unconventional films. They’ll go into a film expecting something that they’re used to, and then they see something that is challenging – which in my opinion is a great film – and they make no effort to try to figure out what the film is doing. They just think this is obscure, this is hard to understand, it’s weird. 

So a surprising number of people who are getting paid a lot of money to write for professional journals like Variety or Hollywood Reporter are turning out reviews that really are uncomprehending of the film. You’re probably familiar with our blog: I find myself occasionally explaining films to the audience. I did that with Sunset and with Alex Garland’s Men which baffled people. 

I wish film criticism was more like it was in the ’50s, because I wonder if a Fellini film or something like Last Year at Marienbad or Hiroshima mon amour would be acceptable today. Would these same critics be saying, this is obscure, this is weird? It took some tolerance on the part of critics back in the late ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, when the art cinema was at its height. It took some willingness to be challenged and to think that being challenged was maybe a good thing, it might indicate something original and exciting. 

I’m afraid by the fact that everybody thinks they’re a reviewer and they’re all doing this online and they have these little groups that follow them and that kind of thing. It’s pretty grim. I think there are still some very good critics like Michael Phillips who writes for the Chicago Tribune, Glenn Kenney who sometimes writes for New York Times. There are some very good critics but they’re very much in the minority. 

Part of this debate is also the discussion about the gap that for many people is growing between the academic style of writing about films and the popular style of writing for mainstream media. How do you see this gap? Is this a problem? 

I think it’s a terrible problem. I read, try to read things, and I have no idea what these people are saying. They’re using terminology that, well, it keeps changing because they want to be fashionable, and so they have to change the terminology and come up with some new theory. But they say very little, and what little they say, you can’t follow. David and I both tried to write more accessible prose. I certainly would not want to put someone off by using a lot of academic terminology. I mean, I use some terminology that’s academic, but not that much. And I must say, writing the blog has changed our style. It’s become more casual, more accessible, I think. But it’s still academic, you know, we have footnotes and we’re still writing about subjects that are relatively new. We’re trying to come up with new knowledge, not just sort of casual but difficult kinds of pieces that appear. I’ve known people who’ve gotten out of the field because they were having to teach in this extremely dense and theoretical way, which is just not the way to reach more than a few people who understand it.

How often do you go to the cinema? Do you like to go to the cinema a lot to watch new films?

I try to. When David was ill, I was taking care of him, so there was a long stretch where I was not able to go to the theaters. We depended on streaming. But I try to go. I just saw The Wild Robot a couple weeks ago, which is a very good film, by the way. We also have a series with film that’s shown at our university department. I mentioned that we could play all these different formats. So they show three films a week, open to the public for free. And I go to that quite a bit because they show new films, old films, just a completely open schedule to different tastes and it’s very good projections.

How important is it for a film historian to be connected to these new releases?

I certainly try. David and I went to Venice for three years and that was great. Of course we were seeing brand new films. I remember seeing the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs which never came out on any discs, it’s not on Blu-ray, it’s not on DVD, it never went into theaters. It’s just on Netflix. And it was a fabulous presentation. We loved the film. 

Madison is not a place where most foreign films or independent films would show. So our Cinemateque is really filling in for that. We don’t even have an art house cinema in Madison anymore. So it’s rather difficult. We either go to festivals, or we watch things on streaming. Or occasionally there will be a film shown, especially when the Oscar nominations come out. Our local multiplex shows all the films. But unless that happens, unless they get nominated, they’re not going to show those films. 

We are in Romania, you are here also for a festival which is called Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, which was initiated and is organized by Cristian Mungiu,  one of the most important filmmakers from this generation that appeared and changed the face of Romanian cinema after 2000. Do you remember when you saw these famous Romanian films from about 15 years ago? What do you think about them and about this new generation?

I have to say I was not that aware of those films, because David was the one who wrote the section on Romanian cinema, and in general he wrote most of the second volume in the Romanian translation. So he knew those films better than I did at the time. I did see some at festivals. I saw Beyond the Hills and Graduation and The Whistlers and Sieranevada and things like that, but that was a bit later. I was starting in about 2012. And then when I knew I was coming here, I got as many DVDs and Blu-rays and watched things on streaming, so I tried to catch up. And I like them very much, I think it’s a very interesting movement.

In the book, David had a box and there’s a section on Romanian cinema, he called it Romania, a newer wave. So it’s kind of a late wave in comparison to, say, the Czech movement. And it’s, I guess, still going on. I think the most recent film I’ve seen, apart from The Whistlers, was R.M.N., which, again, I liked very much. David saw it late in his life. I’m still catching up. 

Photo: UNATC

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.