In the pages of a new book that moves with the restless energy of memory itself, David Thomson traces more than a century of cinema from the golden age of Hollywood through to the harder times of the present. On 20 July the Guardian chose A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies as its book of the day, praising the work as a brilliantly eccentric history that refuses the tidy categories so often imposed on the medium.
Published by Simon & Schuster on 7 July, the volume arrives at a moment when the traditions of theatrical storytelling face constant pressure from newer habits of consumption. Thomson, a film critic and historian who has written more than 40 books, focuses his attention on Hollywood while also considering established European and east Asian arthouse traditions. His account draws together figures as varied as Eadweard Muybridge, Fritz Lang with Metropolis, D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation, Chaplin, Stroheim, Hitchcock, Capra, Renoir, Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and the Monroe Stahr imagined by F Scott Fitzgerald in The Last Tycoon. Later passages touch on Scorsese's GoodFellas, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Kirk Douglas, Barbara Loden's Wanda, Sean Baker's Anora, Tracey Emin's Why I Never Became a Dancer, King Vidor's The Crowd and the work of Sergei Eisenstein.
A title drawn from literature
The book's title itself comes from a fleeting moment in Henry James's 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, an echo that suggests both illumination and its sudden withdrawal. Thomson subtitles his study a revisionist history. In it he examines the movies' recurring tendency to coarsen culture even as he celebrates their populist and democratic power. The Guardian review by Peter Bradshaw presents the book as a rapturous yet contrarian account, comparing Thomson's style to free jazz and likening the whole to an epic novel akin to E L Doctorow's Ragtime.
What sets this work apart is its insistence on the importance of box office profits and grosses, a practical measure too often overlooked in more academic treatments. Thomson also references the Sight and Sound magazine decennial greatest film poll, using such data points to ground his reflections in the actual life of the art form rather than abstract theory. In doing so he offers a form of cultural criticism that values craft, inheritance and the stubborn realities of audience response over passing ideological fashions.
Such an approach feels quietly necessary. At a time when much commentary on the arts seeks to overlay contemporary preoccupations on older works, Thomson's method returns attention to the medium's own achievements and limitations. Cinema, in his telling, emerges as a flawed yet irreplaceable carrier of stories that have shaped how we see ourselves and our shared past. By resisting the urge to moralise from a distance, he allows the films and their makers to speak on their own terms.
Thomson emphasises the importance of box office profits and grosses and references the Sight and Sound magazine decennial greatest film poll.
Readers familiar with his earlier writings will recognise the same clear-eyed affection for the medium's democratic energies. The book does not pretend that every development has been an advance. Instead it weighs cinema's coarsening effects alongside its capacity to enchant, to document, and to reveal. In an era of streaming abundance and theatrical uncertainty, this measured perspective offers a reminder that the finest film criticism has always been rooted in long acquaintance with the art, not in the latest trend.