A Seasoned Hollywood Chronicler Questions His Cinematic Life

David Thomson’s new book, “A Sudden Flicker of Light,” is the testament of a man who has been blinded by despair and fallen out of love. Not since Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741 has there been a jeremiad of such eloquence. An exaggeration, perhaps, but don’t kid yourself: There’s hellfire and damnation underscoring Mr. Thomson’s bitterness.Long considered among the most perceptive of contemporary film critics, Mr. Thomson is the author of numerous books, the most indispensable of which are likely “A Biographical Dictionary of Film” (1975), now in its sixth edition, and “Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films” (2008). “Film,” he has written, “has offered adventure, hope, fantasy, and escape for those of us encased in poverty, limitation, and quiet desperation.” Things change. The movies, he writes in “A Sudden Flicker of Light,” are “a parasite on reality.” They have “turned us into watchers, half aware that we cannot have what we see.” He goes on: “There is something in cinema that co-opts the illicit and leaves us feeling impotent.” The escapism Mr. Thomson previously extolled has since become a prison that is “serene, effortless and even dead.”He doesn’t stop there: It is a “lazy assumption that cinema is an art instead of a mass medium, or a place where individual and critical thinking may be given up for excitement and explosions.” Mr. Thomson is rounded enough as a thinker to know that art and mass media need not be mutually exclusive. During the run of “A Sudden Flicker of Light” he advocates on behalf of figures like D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles and Hitler’s personal auteur, Leni Riefenstahl. “There are,” he reminds us, “so many brilliant ways of seeing.” ‘A Sudden Flicker of Light,’ by David Thomson. Simon & Schuster “A Sudden Flicker of Light,” the title comes from “The Portrait of Lady” by Henry James, encompasses more than 300-some pages would seem possible. Mr. Thomson is a mellifluous stylist, a writer whose conjectures, digressions and caprices somehow manage to hew to a linear narrative. Beginning with the advent of photography, he traces how a raft of oddballs, inventors and businessmen would go about making images move, how they went about marketing them, and how their creations impacted social conventions, intellectual currents, and an international body politic.Mr. Thomson condenses incisive observations into silky ribbons of prose. On Welles, he writes that “every subsequent director walks a little hunched yet burning and indignant in his shadow.” Alfred Hitchcock “believed in life less than he did in presentation.” The aesthetic myopia of Martin Scorsese is neatly underscored: “‘Goodfellas’ exists in an emotional exhilaration where all the terrible energy comes from a lifetime of going to the movies.”Terrible energy, indeed. Mr. Thomson is suffering his own strain of myopia. “A Sudden Flicker of Light” is a miserabilist purview of the movies. Do you want revisionism? Here’s revisionism: A history of the motion picture that ends in a chapter titled, “Quiet, Piggy.” President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Thomson claims, is the ultimate indicator of cinema’s toxicity, of a “bitter understanding that the medium was indifferent to discrimination and prospects of a pantheon.”A person can have qualms about the personality and policies of the 47th President of the United States of America without claiming him as the harbinger to the end of days or, at least, moving picture shows. Conservative, Mr. Thomson is not; reactionary, he is. A disagreeable present and an onrushing future have unmoored Mr. Thomson’s belief in the autonomy, let alone the viability, of art. He has joined an exclusive club of doubters that include Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Stalin, Jesse Helms, and the Taliban. Mr. Thomson is, in so many words, at the end of his rope: “Does anyone care which film is best, or why films matter?” Supplant the word “films” with the artform of your choice in this question and marvel at how readily a critic can festoon his own intellectual disgruntlement onto the world around him. The author would doom us to a life of shopworn nihilism. Thanks a lot, Dave.“A Sudden Flicker of Light” sheds little light on the movies but lays bare its author’s shortcomings to jaw-dropping effect.

A Seasoned Hollywood Chronicler Questions His Cinematic Life

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