David Thomson interviewed

Film critic and writer David Thomson talked to Robert Birnbaum of The Morning News about Hollywood, the Biographical Dictionary of Film, Nicole Kidman, and the perils of easy nostalgia:

There is a great danger in easy nostalgia and just laying claim to it because you were alive then. Sometimes it’s difficult not to do that. When you are writing about those things, I think you need to see that there is a generation that came alive at the time of say, Star Wars and it’s very natural and proper that young people think that the most important movies ever made were the movies they first saw. Every generation needs to think that and that’s proper. And that means that in time the older films will get a bit more distorted and a bit more forgotten. Going back to this whole question of whether these films were works of art or just works of entertainment – a lot of them were just works of entertainment. If they don’t survive, they don’t survive. There are lots of novels that were bestsellers in the 19th century that no one reads or has heard of anymore and it may be that a lot of the films I treasure will go that way. I think a few of them are going to last beyond it and that some of them still look as good as anything.