A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson
David Thomson is the most challenging, perhaps the most eminent living film critic-historian. With the provocative A Sudden Flicker of Light, Thomson turns critical of the medium itself. He’s disappointed with the general direction of movies, as many of us are, but his disappointment has led to disenchantment with the whole idea of showing stories on screen. “This medium has begun to diminish our nature,” he writes. Our nature as humans.
His conclusions won’t entirely surprise careful readers of his essential Biographical Dictionary of Film or the three dozen other books he’s authored. Several years ago he mentioned that screen, an implement that now follows us everywhere, has more than one definition. A screen can also be a filter or barrier that obscures our vision. Lifelike is not the same as life. Realism is not reality. Beware not only of what you’re watching but of how you’re watching and why.
Thomson doesn’t state his thesis in the intro and proceed from there to offer supporting evidence. A Sudden Flicker of Light reads like stream of consciousness as it zigs and zags across motion picture history. Thomson starts with Haskell Wexler (The Thomas Crown Affair), a Hollywood pro from the ‘60s and ‘70s, then on to Milos Forman (Amadeus) and Citizen Kane … before reaching Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1887 photographic studies in motion pointed the way to movies. And then Thomson imagines an 1896 screening at a New York music hall. A small orchestra accompanies the silent shorts, “along with shouts and cries from the audience” as celluloid fragments flicker on screen—a boxing match, a dancing couple, the waves rushing toward the shore.
“This is miraculous and transporting” for an 1896 audience, he writes—a break from the tedious monotony of life in an industrialized society. Nowadays images have taken over our lives. We act as if we are in a movie, and many of us, thanks to Instagram and YouTube, have starring roles in tiny screenplays of our own making.
Is this a good thing? Has our identification with the faces and scenarios on screen, even a century ago in the shared experience of a movie theater, ever been better than a mixed blessing? “The picture show,” Thomson writes, “was hinged on a desire to be more than reality allowed.”
Birth of a Nation?
Thomson considers D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a box office hit that helped popularize the grammar of filmmaking through edits and close ups and sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan by valorizing the terrorists’ post-Civil War campaign against Reconstruction and free Black folks. Describing Griffith’s depiction of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, Thomson acknowledges that “the film tells us that Lincoln’s loss was a tragedy,” yet “it can’t take its eyes off the elan of Booth. This was an early signal of how much the medium flatters killers, or people doing taboo things.”
He cites Virginia Woolf’s concern that movies present stories that seem real, but we’re involved only as spectators experiencing a simulation of reality without responsibility. “So villainy—even evil—might begin to be attractive, or something the crowd would pay to see,” he writes. One wonders, though: villains existed since literature long before pictures moved, there were always villains. Did no reader root for Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories? Or Shylock?
Perhaps the difference, Thomson suggests, is that reading “requires serious time.” Are movies too easy? “What film does not grasp is the largeness of imagination” literature can provide. Watching screens, “we are no more than helpless outsiders to what is happening.”
Thomson’s sardonic wit sneaks into the prose. On Luis Buñuel-Salvador Dali’s still shocking short, Un Chien Andalou (1929), he quips, “It’s not the worst date movie ever made, and at that length it leaves the evening open.” Or on something more contemporary: “Once upon a time … we had to get up off the sofa and turn the damn switch from channel to channel … and as the lassitude of the sofa set in, we were given a simple instrument, the remote, that let us stay on the sofa.” The result? “A repetitive tremor came into our lives, a prodding accuracy, the culture of having a finger on the button” leading to “the calm of remoteness that is another kind of loneliness or futility.”
Throughout A Sudden Flicker of Light, Thompson expresses his love—or at least admiration—for many specific films while worrying that the medium’s message is not inherently beneficial. Should everyone limit their screentime? Refocus on reading or music and the face-to-face physical world instead of the pornography of virtual “experience”? “In sex and violence alike, we have discovered the dead end in which the lifelike may diminish our energy in life,” he writes. And what about those motion-picture second-stringers who rose to hold the highest office in our land?
A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies is published by Simon & Schuster.
