See It Big! Spielberg Summer

Steven Spielberg is the ultimate “See It Big” director. He was five years old when his father took him to see his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. “My father said, ‘It’s going to be bigger than you but that’s all right. The people in it are going to be up on a screen and they can’t get out at you.’ But there they were up on the screen and they were getting out at me. I guess ever since then I’ve wanted to involve the audience as much as I can, so that they no longer think they’re sitting in an audience.” This feeling that a movie should be larger than life, visceral and kinetic in its impact, and able to transport an audience defines Spielberg’s approach to filmmaking, whether he is making us experience wonderment or fear, and whether he is making a sheerly entertaining thriller or an absorbing historical drama. Spielberg has now been making films for more than 45 years, and has been Hollywood’s dominant creative force ever since his blockbuster hit Jaws devoured the summer of 1975. On the occasion of this series, the Museum of the Moving Image and Reverse Shot will publish their second book: Steven Spielberg: Nostalgia and the Light.