A SUDDEN FLICKER OF LIGHT

Thomson knows an awful lot about the movies. Here it is.

Thomson begins this book’s last chapter like so: “You may be saying, ‘Look, shifting from one shot to another, I don’t know where this book is going.’ You have a point, but I have no sympathy for either of us. It’s a book trying to keep up with every fresh screen I see.” He has seen numberless fresh screens in his long career as a film historian and critic, and the observations gathered here can leave the impression of a loosely chronology-driven, film-centric free-associative word spree—but what a spree it is. The book is a cascading selective history of cinema, with chapters considering, toward the top, the likes of the Lumière brothers and Erich von Stroheim, and, rounding out the proceedings, New Hollywood’s auteurs and unexpected industry player Netflix. The British-born Thomson, who makes his home in the United States and has authored a backbreakingly large number of books on film and its practitioners, traffics in nutrient-packed but unfussy sentences that can be deliciously coy and playfully elliptical. Director Blake Edwards is “so versatile as to seem unstable”; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) succeeded because of Jack Nicholson’s “shabby mercury.” Thomson is one for pronouncements about what he calls “movie”: “Movie is the industrialization of voyeurism”; “Writing urges you to see; movie leaves you no choice.” Beginner cinephiles: It’s probably best to sit this one out, as Thomson presumes a high level of film literacy in his readers. At one point, he begins to quote from Chinatown (1974) and then abandons the quote midway through, saying, “You know the rest of that line.” It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the reader might not.

More than a flicker of light: a flood of illumination.