A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies

From cinema's most distinguished historian and critic comes a masterful assessment of the whole sweep of movie history 'The movies traded on the liberation of secret desires-drive that car as fast as you can; turn your humble abode into a palace; conquer all the mean spirits in the world; be as free and winsome as the Tramp yet as rich as Charlie ... Every lowlife can be a Corleone.' Every flicker of light has its shadow. In this masterful reassessment of the whole arc of movie history, David Thomson, film's wisest and most penetrating critic, shows us how cinema has entranced and transported us, but also profoundly changed us. From the earliest days of the first picture shows to the screens of today, Thomson glories in the great movies. Sharp, arresting readings of films from Metropolis to Rear Window, The Godfather to Anora can be found in these pages. Yet there is unease, too, at how cinema suckered us into a fantasy neverland that only looks like life. Hungry for spectacle and happy endings, submitting to voyeurism and villainy, we have let films change the way we experience reality; a habit of passivity that may have even betrayed our culture and our politics. As Thomson says, 'This is our history, and our show.' The result of a lifetime of immersion and reflection, this book is a reckoning and a testament from a writer who sees like no other.

About the Author :
David Thomson is the author of more than twenty books, including biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His writing and his books have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, Slate, and many more. He lives in San Francisco.

Review :
Thomson is unique in his field: intellectual, opinionated, informed and funny. So much film criticism is clichéd or unadventurous – he tackles it with a bullwhip, a magnifying glass and a sardonic grin… This book could be his Citizen Kane… This is a book with the learning of an encyclopaedia, the wisdom of a novel and the zingers of a screwball comedy David Thomson is the doyen of film historians, and for most of a century has, he tells us, seen two films a day pretty well every day. He knows a lot… Thoughtful, insightful and rather haunting… I enjoyed this book so much that I came close to missing the deadline for the review. I kept having to break off to see if a movie Thomson had wonderfully evoked was, as it ought to be, on the streaming services Deeply personal, persuasive and intelligently-argued… Lively, entertaining and unpredictable… Thomson is an excellent critic and his sharp, often witty writing brings to life many celebrated works I once took a book out of the library and was annoyed to find a previous reader has underlined every line in pencil. It seemed so indiscriminate. Reading David Thomson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light, I finally understood the urge. There are so many revelations, so many insights, that a highlighter pen would have given the whole book a radioactive glow A Sudden Flicker of Light hurtles around conceptual corners, pinballing between genres and eras inside a single chapter. The phrasing is arch and self-aware, full of sharp cuts but he’s also excellent on condensed, full-colour biographies … There will always be a level of hand-wringing around what we consume and its implications. Thomson at least has the good grace to make the conversation an entertainment in itself Thomson’s commentary on films is so filled with rich insights, connections and asides that it is easy to enter his imaginary world, in which film is as vivid and revealing as any reality… Lively and perceptive After a lifetime of helpless thraldom to beautiful people in the dark, Thomson has written a spirited jeremiad against the influence of the movies on us and on politics What animates A Sudden Flicker of Light is not the sheer love of film that he has so often expressed, but newly severe doubts, even moral nausea, about the effect cinema has had on us all over the past century in loosening our grasp on reality As an intellectual thought experiment and an exercise in radical self-scrutiny, the book is utterly compelling… Even as Thomson questions the passion that has defined his life, he reaffirms it – and infectiously so David Thomson, who knows more about cinema than anyone alive, is like a good Catholic: his doubts about the medium are as strong as his faith. Does cinema matter anymore? In the ubiquitous saturation of formulaic stories and familiar images, is real originality still possible? And would anyone notice? No-one is better qualified than Thomson to survey the history of cinema with wit and insight - and the bonus is a striking judgement on every page