‘A Sudden Flicker of Light’ Asks, Are Movies to Blame?

From Eadweard Muybridge’s equine chronophotography experiments of the 1870s to Donald Trump’s preternatural ability to frame himself perfectly with a raised fist and blood on his cheek in Butler, Pennsylvania, film historian David Thomson’s latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, crams roughly 150 years of moving images into one rapidly paced volume: This is what we saw, how we came to see it, and why it matters. It is a detailed, funny, and insightful speedrun through history that uses movies—mostly classics you’ve seen or at least heard of—as a touchpoint for issues of wider social importance, with a dash of critical opinion thrown in, too. The only real problem with the thing is fighting off the urge to watch clips of Marlene Dietrich, Marlon Brando, or Mikey Madison on YouTube immediately after he’s described them.

For the 85-year-old Thomson, the English author of the pivotal 1975 reference work A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema, now in its sixth edition, the movie screen is no mere rectangle. It is a window to an imagined reality, but also a mirror back to the audience, which is then molded (and even seduced) by what it sees. “A film does not really exist without us—and we never get a credit,” is just one clever witticism in his new book which is rife with them. Thomson’s writing style seems effortless, but is clearly born from a lot of rigorous work. His is a mind that’s been in dialogue with film and filmmaking for decades, and this summation—which has the subtitle A Revisionist History of Movies—reads like something he had to get off his chest.

For the 85-year-old Thomson, the English author of the pivotal 1975 reference work A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema, now in its sixth edition, the movie screen is no mere rectangle. It is a window to an imagined reality, but also a mirror back to the audience, which is then molded (and even seduced) by what it sees. “A film does not really exist without us—and we never get a credit,” is just one clever witticism in his new book which is rife with them. Thomson’s writing style seems effortless, but is clearly born from a lot of rigorous work. His is a mind that’s been in dialogue with film and filmmaking for decades, and this summation—which has the subtitle A Revisionist History of Movies—reads like something he had to get off his chest.

Vehicles fill a drive-in theater, circa the 1950s.Archive Photos/Getty Images

That streak of snark is indicative of the revisionism found in this revisionist history. Thomson is still besotted by cinema, and offers up memories of the movie palaces of his youth, but the book is countered with no shortage of weariness, if not even regret. A section reflecting on how Hitler, Goebbels, and weaponized movie (to borrow his turn of phrase) is a rewind of history that most film-literate people are familiar with. But depicting Trump as “our movie man” shouting “quiet, piggy” on camera to a journalist on Air Force One is the logical end point, Thomson feels, of a culture that celebrates Charles Foster Kane and Michael Corleone and Howard Beale and Dr. Mabuse. And that leaves one feeling a little sad for someone who has spent a lifetime in conversation with the great characters of film history. Though he doesn’t come out and say it, there is an undercurrent in A Sudden Flicker of Light that maybe we’d all have been better off if the Lumière brothers never met that train at La Ciotat Station.

This element of despair, however, is also a furnace for fiery writing. From page one, Thomson jumps directly into the ocean of motion pictures and bobs and weaves with a jazzman’s trust in his own solo. The riffing at times reads like a Lenny Bruce monologue, a cascade of small insights as one image hyperlinks to another to create more a sensation than an argument. As an example, in a chapter called “I’m With You,” devoted to great leading men whose talents conjure sympathy even while doing, at times, odious things, he describes the critical moment in The Godfather when Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone assassinates the police chief in the restaurant to the rumble of a heard-not-seen subway car, thus turning his back on his ethical past. “The decorated war veteran is a killer. The rightness of the stuff has been compromised,” Thomson writes.

As if surprised by his own writing, he then jumps to the movie The Right Stuff, not something commonly associated with The Godfather, and an examination of Sam Shepard’s turn as Chuck Yeager. Shepard’s performance reminds Thomson of Gary Cooper, so we don’t stay with Philip Kaufman’s midcentury space-age history for too long, and instead ruminate for a while on the star of The Fountainhead and Morocco.

A great deal (I’d even say most) of the book is exactly like this, bounding through movies like a click-happy Wikipedia user opening up window after window. Reading Thomson is a little like getting stuck next to a drunk at a bar—if that drunk were also the most learned and erudite film scholar ever to throw back a few.

The effect can be dizzying, and there are occasional frustrations. Though he never once mentions The Simpsons, there were times I felt like Milhouse Van Houten wondering when we’d get to the fireworks factory. Case in point, I adore the movie The Right Stuff and my eyes popped out of my head when I realized it was about to come under Thomson’s analytical gaze, but it really was just a vine swing to get from Pacino to Cooper. I elected not to be disappointed and instead chose happiness that the movie got mentioned at all.

The movies Thomson discusses more thoroughly are predominantly cinema studies war horses, like The Birth of a Nation and Battleship Potemkin, both watershed moments in film art with dubious legacies. On the former, Sudden Flicker does not underplay just how important D.W. Griffith’s viciously racist epic—allegedly saluted as “history written with lightning” by President Woodrow Wilson—was to the development of movies, both from an artistic and business point of view. Birth of a Nation was met with criticism at the time, but it also pretty much revived the Ku Klux Klan. But by analyzing these movies, plus Riefenstahl’s work, plus the sensual depiction of violence in The Godfather and Goodfellas, there’s a feeling that “movie” has been building to something rotten, and we’re all due for a comeuppance.

Salvatore Corsitto (from left) as Amerigo Bonasera, James Caan as Santino “Sonny” Corleone, and Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972).Moviepix/Getty Images

There are also unexpected shout-outs, like the recent WWII snoozer Nuremberg, as well as some notable absences. Other than representative movements like the French New Wave and Italian neorealism, there isn’t much discussion of international cinema save the aforementioned Grand Illusion. All of Asia is reduced to the classic art house directors Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. Latin American films are ignored, and there’s nothing about Black American filmmakers—not even Spike Lee. The only Black filmmaker given real consideration is the U.K.’s Steve McQueen, with a brief reference to Blitz, a good but little-seen movie.

Whether these choices make for revisionism, as per the book’s subtitle, is up for debate. One interpretation of this all is that, beginning with the “actuality” films of Thomas Edison and the Lumières and concluding with Trump soundbites you may have only seen on your phone, Thomson is drawing a line between the production methods and aesthetics of early cinema and today’s never-ending scroll of shareable “content.” This is a topic I’ve written about before and find deeply fascinating. But I disagree with the implication that everything in between—from The Wizard of Oz to Jaws to The Purple Rose of Cairo to Parasite—may have been a cursed stopover leading to our devastating media saturation. (Moreover, if you want to go that route, you need to discuss video games, which do not fall under Thomson’s purview of moving images.) Certainly, one can find Donald Trump reflected back in Citizen Kane’s endless hall of mirrors. That doesn’t mean we should stop watching.