29 July 2026

Is David Thomson still watching?

After a lifetime of critiquing film, Thomson seems instead haunted by “white spaces”

Previous histories of cinema by David Thomson have titles that tell us they are operating on the grand scale: The Whole Equation (2004), The Big Screen (2012). The latest work from the flamboyantly provocative and erudite British critic promises something smaller: A Sudden Flicker of Light. These words might suggest that cinema has been only a passing glimmer, an anomalous flare-up in the dark, but the phrase is taken from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, where it describes an abrupt moment of insight as the heroine, Isabel Archer, espies a significant silence between two other characters.

Throughout his new book, Thomson finds such meaningful flickers all too rare in cinema. He is haunted by the “white spaces” of contemplative pause that he sees in literature – in James, Woolf, Fitzgerald – and that cinema, he argues, tends to suppress, bombarding us with image, hobbling our ability to imagine: “Writing urges you to see; movie leaves you no choice.”

This is a singularly bleak view of film from someone who has devoted his life to studying the art form. The phenomenally productive Thomson consolidated his formidable reputation with his 1975 Biographical Dictionary of Cinema and has since published numerous histories, studies and biographies (notably the magnificently idiosyncratic Rosebud, on Orson Welles) as well as novels (Suspects, Silver Light) which recast characters from film noir and the western respectively in complex new narrative frameworks.

Thomson’s discursive style recalls Welles himself, as seen at the start of his unreliable documentary F for Fake, dressed in a magician’s cape and warning us not to trust what we see. You can picture Thomson’s own cape swirling as he winkingly nudges the reader (“Are you still watching?”) and spins his teasing digressive threads.

But in A Sudden Flicker the magus that most comes to mind is Prospero. At 85, Thomson, after a lifetime immersed in the arcana of the moving image, comes across as profoundly disenchanted with screen magic and all it has given us, or stolen from us. By his final chapter, Thomson – having demystified a history of glittering shadows as tawdry illusions, ruinous to mind and soul – altogether leaves us with the impression that our revels now are ended.

There is also a Caliban haunting the book; unsurprisingly, it is Donald Trump (Thomson has long been resident in the US): “At last a president spoke to us in the flat certainty that we had decided to be stupid.” However, the final chapter, entitled “Quiet, Piggy”, depicts Trump not as cause but symptom, resulting from the moving image’s progressive erosion of discernment.

The book’s subtitle is “A Revisionist History of the Movies”. In practice, this largely means popular movies, particularly Hollywood, although key 20th-century cinemas get their look in too: Weimar, the Soviet innovators, Italian neo-realism, the French New Wave. A brief section on the Japanese masters is one of the few to look beyond Euro-American parameters.

As for “revisionist”, the book is rich in bracingly polemical takes: an argument for Paul Schrader’s best films over the attention-grabbing recent works of Martin Scorsese; a regretful admission that one can have quite enough of Alfred Hitchcock’s “mere mastery”. There are brilliant, skewed insights: how could we have missed the family relationship between Luis Buñuel and the Hollywood screwball tradition, or failed to see that Fred Astaire was “the most religious person on screen in the 1930s, when being swell… was a state of grace”?

Then there are the briskly perplexing tangents, Thomson’s equivalents of the cinematic shock cut, veering from the Netflix series Adolescence to the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, and from Reese Witherspoon’s estimated net worth as business mogul ($440m) to the paper parcel of dollars that Lee Marvin chases in John Boorman’s Point Blank. The result is exhilarating, as if Thomson, after all these years in California, had tuned critical discourse to the careering rhythms of the theme park ride. This impression of thinking aloud is itself a rebellion against the state of paralysed fixation that cinema, he argues, forces on us, making it difficult for us to reflect or argue back.

Much of the book covers the same ground as other Thomson studies: here again are the old gods (Méliès, Griffith, Von Stroheim) and monuments (Metropolis, Gone with the Wind, Psycho). And here are many of the same arguments, reworked, remixed. But if Hollywood reserves the constant right to reboot and remonetise its long-established intellectual properties, we shouldn’t begrudge Thomson the same privilege; he does it more inventively and mischievously than the studios.

Some opinions and omissions may well rankle with younger moviegoers in tune with the new cinephile culture demarcated by platforms, Letterboxd, the festival circuit and Mubi tote bags. Most awkward in this respect is the chapter on the screen’s chronically fraught relationship with women. It includes discussions of work by Barbara Loden, Jane Campion, Chantal Akerman and Tracey Emin. But shoehorning in a ragtag list of women directors (Liv Ullmann, Ida Lupino, Claire Denis, Emerald Fennell…) further ghettoises them. And surely Agnès Varda, whose auteur status has belatedly rocketed, properly deserved full honours in Thomson’s section on the French New Wave?

Thomson’s lamentation sometimes takes a confessional turn. He admits to his lifelong complicity in the male gaze; discussing tough-guy leading men such as Robert Mitchum, he confides that at times their influence encouraged him to adopt “an adolescent attitude that hurt people around me”. He discusses gangster movies such as The Godfather and Goodfellas: vivid, accomplished works that mesmerise, and that make thoughtful critics like Thomson want to write about them; but that also, he feels, promote a kind of fascism.

There’s a glimmer of perversity when he discusses the films that at once horrify and fascinate him. Musing on Al Pacino’s little-known The Local Stigmatic, he couldn’t be clearer in his assessment – “A malice comes off the film, a foul stink” – and yet he has watched it several times. Thomson is a determined gazer into the abyss; little wonder that in his final chapter he ends up describing himself as sleepless, “exhausted by fear”, his nights spent dreaming up fantasy assassinations.

As in previous works, Thomson argues that cinema, supposedly the modern – and modernist – art form par excellence, was essentially primitive from the start, the work of Georges Méliès “monotonous and childish” in comparison to the contemporary emergence of cubism, The Birth of a Nation a malign clunker when placed beside The Golden Bowl. Here, he doubles down, stressing the coercive power of the moving image. Cinema, he says, insists that we pay total attention (“There is nothing to see but the screen”), with television going one better, contributing to a ruinous culture of inattention.

You emerge from the book wondering whether Thomson has simply seen too much of a certain cinema. Plenty of films this century alone have been dedicated above all to that elusive “white space”, but are more likely to be made in Austria, the Philippines or Catalonia rather than California. The great paradox is that Thomson writes with such dynamic mastery about the downsides. He called The Big Screen “a love letter to a lost love”; here he goes further, like a disappointed lover who can’t stop listing his former beloved’s flaws. The publicist’s blurb for this magnificent but melancholic book calls it “a powerful capstone” to Thomson’s career. Rather, given its repetitions of earlier work, it’s tempting to call it a victory lap – or whatever kind of lap you run at full tilt in the face of catastrophe.

A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies
David Thomson
Allen Lane, 368pp, £25

[Further reading: How good is Colson Whitehead?]