Over the last few years, despair has permeated the film industry. Paramount is going to buy Warner Bros. Mass layoffs are rampant. AI is the worst, and it’s everywhere. Mid-budget movies and romantic comedies are becoming endangered species. Arthouse films are struggling at theaters because their intended audience has gotten used to watching movies at home. The sky is falling. When confronted with this harsh reality, film lovers usually seek out something comforting to calm their anxieties, maybe rewatching a favorite movie or enjoying Criterion’s cheerful Closet Videos series. But although I also find solace in such pick-me-ups, nothing in recent memory has restored my devotion to cinema as much as David Thomson’s new book A Sudden Flicker Of Light, which is ironic considering its discouraged tone.
If anything, the volume’s subtitle, A Revisionist History Of Movies, undersells the longtime critic and historian’s deep misgivings about an art form he’s spent his life adoring. But having turned 85 in February, the author of the encyclopedic, argument-starting New Biographical Dictionary Of Film finds his fondness for film increasingly replaced by regret and suspicion. The result is a poignant rejection of the optimism most of us cling to whenever cinema’s cultural importance is threatened. And yet, A Sudden Flicker Of Light‘s cold-water assessment of cinema’s failures and limitations is bracing—and a reminder that an underappreciated part of loving movies is sometimes being glum about their future. If we didn’t care so passionately, our devotion wouldn’t occasionally hurt so damn much.
Some readers, though, don’t want anybody dampening their film fandom. In his Atlantic review titled “Movies Are Good, Actually,” Michael O’Donnell essentially tells Thomson to lighten up. “The dour feeling that this book produces is the exact opposite of the invigorating excitement that [Martin] Scorsese conveys when discussing movie magic,” complains O’Donnell. “The distance between an artist such as Scorsese and a critic such as Thomson is as expansive as an open horizon compared with a dark room.” O’Donnell declares that “movies matter as an art form because the best ones graze our souls … Movies aren’t bad for us. Some days I think they keep my heart from slowing to a stop. It will take a great deal more than this sour book to convince me otherwise.”
But that blind Pollyannaish positivity misses the big picture—and Thomson’s point. Of course many great, life-affirming films have been made; Thomson doesn’t disagree. In A Sudden Flicker Of Light, he chronicles cinema’s century-plus history, adopting a stream-of-conscious approach that is often poetic. He is taken to calling the movies “movie,” almost as if they’re a euphoric state or incurable condition. (When discussing actors’ skillfulness at embodying different types of characters, Thomson observes, “That instability of identity is a primary lesson in movie.”) The man is besotted by the art form, but his admiration is mixed with musings that feel like the confessions of a haunted protagonist narrating his own novel. This starts with the first page, in which he wonders about society’s increased bombardment with images: “[T]he culture is left in mounting dismay over what is real, or what matters. For we can now fabricate the imagery—we have bypassed light and nature—so that we no longer trust it or our response. Are we smart enough to handle such things? Or is our smartness just a rumor from out of the past?”
Accuse Thomson of being grandiose, but there’s no denying the potency of his buyer’s remorse for an art form that, for the entirety of his existence, has been at the forefront of our collective consciousness. Now, near the end of his life, he’s debating what movies really did for him, and us, after all these years. But contrary to what O’Donnell thinks, this debate is neither dour nor sour—it’s galvanizing. Because movies are currently so embattled, its champions have adopted the guise of cheerleaders, loudly insisting that the medium is still resonant, that movie theaters remain magical, that cinema’s heyday is not long gone. That’s a reassuring way to think, but it is not the only way, and A Sudden Flicker Of Light slaps us across the face with a different viewpoint. The book is the devil on every movie lover’s shoulder, the one who whispers that we’ve wasted our lives watching and thinking about movies. Thomson’s perspective isn’t necessarily more true because it’s more despondent, but it is vital because we hear it far less often.
