Director

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  Thom Anderson

  A Train Arrives at the Station (2016)California Sun (2015)The Tony Longo Trilogy (2014)Reconversão (2012) The Thoughts That Once We Had is a personal history of cinema, partly inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s The Movement-Image and The Time-Image (quotations from these books appear intermittently) and partly by my discovery of the classic Hollywood musical comedy, occasioned by a That’s Entertainment marathon on Turner Classic Movies the night of December 31, 2013-January 1, 2014. Perhaps little of these inspirations remain in the film, but it is certainly a personal history of cinema. Of course, many others are possible, and anyone’s history is as valid as mine.A working title was “Great Moments in the History of Cinema,” but the movie outgrew this title. It became more ambitious. It found a form that satisfied me.The title is not meant to imply that cinema is dead. On the contrary: all art today aspires to the condition of cinema. Instead, the title suggests that moving images and sounds are thoughts in themselves because motion pictures are not perceived, they are remembered.The Thoughts That Once We Had tells more than I know, although I learned a number of material facts about cinema and my relation to cinema while making it: few film-makers are capable of making what Deleuze calls an “affection-image,” an image that imprints the face as a pure affect; the melody of the gaze is also rare; the more grounded the camera, the better (what Joris Ivens taught); a shot from The Eleventh Year by Dziga Vertov anticipates Wavelength; reading aloud is the most cinematic of all actions; my interest in cinema is more carnal than I realized; what interests the camera is not a given, but something the camera discovers anew for every shot. Other thoughts will be given to other viewers.This may all sound a bit formidable, but I also intended to bring a touch of American vulgarity to the so-called “essay film.” The movie was not calculated to drive liberals crazy; it just turned out that way​