A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson review – a brilliantly eccentric history of the movies

Film critic, historian and author of more than 40 books, David Thomson is back with another three-hour free jazz solo on the subject of the movies, though it’s a performance delivered with the magnificent elan of a 1940s big band leader. He’s as brilliant, eccentric, exasperating and absorbing as ever.

By “the movies”, incidentally, he means Hollywood, with a side order of established European and east Asian arthouse: he takes us from the cine-prehistory of photographer Eadweard Muybridge to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation with its sinister Ku Klux Klan hero-worship, Chaplin, Stroheim, Hitchcock, Capra, Renoir, Bogart, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch, Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon, Scorsese’s GoodFellas, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (“Is it drive or dream?”), Kirk Douglas and his alleged rape of Natalie Wood, Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Sean Baker’s Anora, Tracey Emin’s Why I Never Became a Dancer and much more. He subtitles his book a “revisionist” history.

Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.

He descants on the triumph of Stephen Graham’s Netflix drama Adolescence and uses it to suggest that the big-screen theatrical experience may indeed 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.” Well, I have looked closely and I do dispute it. All the same, Thomson’s contrarian, non-handwringing opinion on the subject is refreshing. Only he could have got away with that gleeful heresy, designed to wake us up to the commercial forces that brought big screens into being in the first place.

So it is revisionist. In a way. But the book’s body language is non-revisionist: it’s a straightforwardly rapturous, rhapsodic celebration of the extraordinary adventure of cinema in the 20th century and beyond with an old-fashioned feel. The author is a great believer in the importance of profits and grosses, in telling us how much money the key films made, as if that proves anything, though he’s also a great respecter of the importance of Sight and Sound magazine’s decennial Greatest Film of All Time poll.

The point is that Thomson, with that marvellous ambition that is all his own, always wants to recount the whole story, to start again with that task, to encompass the giant shape in its awe-inspiring entirety, the “whole equation”, to borrow F Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase which he brilliantly used as the title for a previous book. That is his revisionism: always to take on the whole thing. He rockets through his story while firing off into the slipstream provocative generalisations and opinions, gags and barbs.

He contrasts the darker moods of the American New Wave with the contemporary 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 says that the film industry’s pious and glib dedication to the shopworn 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.”

But weirdly, Thomson has a priestly tendency to intone the names of the accepted greats and to expect a kind of cinephile genuflexion in each case. Clive James did something like it in his TV documentary series Fame in the 20th Century: he would give an introductory upward-lift of acclaim to the first mention of each new famous name, as if bringing them on to a chatshow, and there is something of that in Thomson’s prose which 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 a classic proto-cinematic revelation: heroine Isabel Archer has married Gilbert Osmond and one day comes home to find their mutual friend Madame Merle and Osmond in an attitude of disconcerting intimacy and ease, he seated and she standing: “… the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light”. Thomson enthuses about that moment, whose vividness hints that James has mastered the arts of cinematographer, director and editor, and capriciously adds: “I want to bring this scene to life, with maybe Meryl Streep as Madame Merle, and who would you like as Osmond?” (It is a characteristically wilful and faintly baffling aside: Thomson appears here to disregard the excellent film version with John Malkovich as Osmond and Barbara Hershey as Madame Merle, directed by Jane Campion and starring Nicole Kidman, whose superfan biography Thomson has written. To be fair, Campion’s film doesn’t actually include that flickering moment.)

So how about now? Are the movies beginning to flicker in another sense, flicker out into darkness? Well, the gloomy-elegaic insistence on the end of cinema is a tiresome kind of cinephile affectation that’s been around for decades, usually from writers who are in fact mourning the passing of their own movie-filled youth and middle age. Thomson thankfully does not indulge it. But there are flickers of anxiety whose implications the author doesn’t explore at any length.

In the midst of discussing Sergei Eisenstein, whose longing to make films was shared by so many, 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?” That throwaway lands in our lap. In retreat? Seen it all? If he is serious, shouldn’t the author stop what he’s doing and pursue the point more rigorously?

Well, it could be that this book is not a conventional critical work at all, nothing so workaday; it is rather quasi-fictional, like an action painting made from melted celluloid in which Thomson is the creator-hero, splashing around on the canvas in his multicoloured liquid element. Or simply an epic novel: he alludes repeatedly to EL Doctorow’s 1975 book Ragtime, about immigration and the American dream in the first years of the 20th century, that mixes real figures with imaginary ones. Here, Thomson is both the narrator and underdog, meeting with legends in the crowded streets of Los Angeles or New York, feeling their pain, sensing their euphoria, foretelling their downfall or triumph. I very much hope that this is not his last book. I can’t imagine film criticism or films without him.

The Guardian wp:paragraph