Thomson's Rapturous Celebration of Cinema
Film critic and historian David Thomson, author of over 40 books, delivers another three-hour free jazz solo on cinema in A Sudden Flicker of Light, performed with the magnificent elan of a 1940s big band leader. He remains as brilliant, eccentric, exasperating, and absorbing as ever.
Thomson focuses primarily on Hollywood, with a side order of established European and East Asian arthouse. He takes readers from the cine-prehistory of photographer Eadweard Muybridge to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation with its sinister Ku Klux Klan hero-worship, and works by Chaplin, Stroheim, Hitchcock, Capra, Renoir, and Bogart. He covers Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch, Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon, Scorsese's GoodFellas, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Kirk Douglas and his alleged rape of Natalie Wood, Barbara Loden's Wanda, Sean Baker's Anora, and Tracey Emin's Why I Never Became a Dancer.
Revisionist or Rhapsodic?
Thomson subtitles his book a "revisionist" history. He offers wintry ponderings on the movies' tendency to coarsen and cheapen, enforcing cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor's 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra who descended into alcoholism and homelessness. Thomson emphasizes the amazing populist-democratic power of films, noting that unlike theater or concert halls, a film's action cannot be stopped by the crowd. He wonders if movies will always lack literature's way of enlarging our imaginations, as opposed to forcing submission to the screen.
He descants on the triumph of Stephen Graham's Netflix drama Adolescence, suggesting that the big-screen theatrical experience may be on the way out because "the image on our home screens is brighter and more transporting. If you are inclined to dispute that, look very closely." Thomson's contrarian opinion is refreshing, designed to wake readers to the commercial forces that brought big screens into being.
Thomson's Unique Approach
The book's body language is non-revisionist: it is a straightforwardly rapturous, rhapsodic celebration of cinema's adventure in the 20th century and beyond. Thomson is a great believer in the importance of profits and grosses, telling how much money key films made, and he respects Sight and Sound magazine's decennial Greatest Film of All Time poll.
Thomson always wants to recount the whole story, encompass the giant shape in its entirety—the "whole equation," borrowing F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase. He rockets through his story while firing off provocative generalizations, opinions, gags, and barbs. He contrasts the darker moods of the American New Wave with the sunlit positivity of Steven Spielberg, who, he says, is "the most decisive figure in the history of film, a guy who came upon an art experimenting with difficulty or doubt and talked it in off the ledge." He claims the film industry's dedication to the concept of "love" has brought it to an evolutionary crisis: "The species is at a point where LOVE can start to feel as hollow as HOLLYWOOD above Los Angeles."
Priestly Tendencies and Flickering Light
Thomson has a priestly tendency to intone the names of accepted greats, expecting cinephile genuflection. Clive James did something similar in his TV documentary series Fame in the 20th Century, giving an introductory upward-lift of acclaim to each famous name. Thomson's prose can stimulate, amuse, and bewilder all at once.
He takes his title from a moment in Henry James's 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, which he regards as a classic proto-cinematic revelation: heroine Isabel Archer finds her husband Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle in an attitude of disconcerting intimacy—"the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light." Thomson enthuses that James mastered the arts of cinematographer, director, and editor, capriciously adding: "I want to bring this scene to life, with maybe Meryl Streep as Madame Merle, and who would you like as Osmond?" This disregards Jane Campion's film version with John Malkovich and Barbara Hershey, though Campion's film doesn't include that flickering moment.
Are the Movies Flickering Out?
Thomson thankfully does not indulge the gloomy-elegiac insistence on the end of cinema, a tiresome cinephile affectation. But there are flickers of anxiety. Discussing Sergei Eisenstein, Thomson remarks: "That longing lasted until … well, the end of the century? But I think it's in retreat now. Do we feel we've seen it all?" This throwaway lands in our lap, but Thomson does not pursue the point rigorously.
The book may not be a conventional critical work but quasi-fictional, like an action painting made from melted celluloid with Thomson as creator-hero. He alludes repeatedly to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, which mixes real figures with imaginary ones. Here, Thomson is both narrator and underdog, meeting legends in Los Angeles or New York, feeling their pain, sensing their euphoria, foretelling their downfall or triumph.
A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies by David Thomson is published by Allen Lane (£25).
