FILM critic, historian and author of over 40 books, David Thomson is back with another three-hour free jazz solo on the subject of the films, though this is a performance delivered with the ecstatic enthusiasm of a big band leader from the 1940s. He is as brilliant, eccentric, thrilling and attention-grabbing as ever.
Incidentally, by “films” he means Hollywood, with side orders of established European and East Asian arthouses: he takes us from the cine-prehistory of photographer Edward Muybridge to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the sinister Ku Klux Klan hero-worship of DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Chaplin, Stroheim, Hitchcock, Capra, Renoir, Bogart, The Seven-Years. Leads to Marilyn Monroe. Itch, Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon, Scorsese’s Goodfellas, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (“Is it a drive or a dream?”), Kirk Douglas and his alleged rape of Natalie Wood, Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Sean Baker’s Anora, Tracey Emin’s Why I Never Became a Dancer and many more. He subtitled his book a “revisionist” history.
Revisionist? Well, it certainly leads us to a chilling and sad reflection on the (perennial) tendency of films to impose cultural mob-rule on the harsh and cheap. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, which starred James Murray, a former extra who was plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory, but whose terrible destiny—turning him into alcoholism and homelessness—back into the mob. He emphasizes the amazing populist-democratic power and reach of films, their power lying in the fact that, unlike a theater or a concert hall, the action of a film cannot be stopped or influenced by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian who is dragged to the foot of the cross by doubt, Thomson wonders whether films will always lack the way literature does in a way that allows us to stretch our imaginations, rather than force us to surrender to the screen.
He latches onto the triumph of Stephen Graham’s Netflix drama Adolescence and uses it to suggest that the big screen theatrical experience may actually be taking over, because “the image is brighter and more impressive on our home screens. If you’re willing to dispute this, look very closely.” Well, I’ve taken a closer look and I dispute this. Still, Thomson’s contradictory, uncritical take on the subject is refreshing. Only that could survive the gleeful heresy that was designed to wake us up to the commercial forces that brought about the big screen in the first place.
So this is revisionist. From one side. But the body language of the book is non-revisionist: it’s a straightforward celebration of the extraordinary adventures of cinema of the 20th century and beyond, with a warm, old-fashioned feel. The author is a great believer in the importance of profits and earnings, telling us how much money major films made as if this proves anything, although he also has great respect for the importance of Sight & Sound magazine’s decade. greatest movie of all time Voting.
The point is that Thomson, with that wonderful ambition that is his own, always wants to retell the whole story, to begin that work again, to include the immense shape in its astonishing completeness, “the whole equation”, to borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase which he brilliantly used as the title of an earlier book. This is their revisionism: always taking the whole thing upon themselves. He rockets through his story with provocative generalizations and a barrage of ideas, jokes and sarcasm.
He compares the darker mood of the American New Wave to the contemporary sunny positivity of Steven Spielberg, who he says is “the most incisive figure in the history of film, a man who approached an art form with difficulty or doubt and talked it out.” He says that the film industry’s sacred and glittering dedication to the shopworn concept of “love” has brought it into an evolutionary crisis: “The species is at a point where love can begin to feel as hollow as Hollywood over Los Angeles.”
But strangely, Thomson has a priestly tendency to recite the names of acknowledged greats and expect a kind of cinephile genuflexion in each case. Clive James did something similar in his TV documentary series Fame in the 20th Century: he would give an introductory flourish of praise for the first mention of each new famous name, as if bringing them into a chat show, and there is something about Thomson’s prose that can excite, amuse and confuse all at once.
After newsletter promotion
They take their title from a moment in Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, which they consider a classic proto-cinematic revelation: the heroine Isabel Archer has married Gilbert Osmond and comes home one day to find their mutual friend Madame Merle and Osmond in a mood of disturbing intimacy and spontaneity, he seated and she standing: “…that thing created an image, which Lasted only for a moment, like a sudden flicker of light”. Thomson is excited about the moment, the liveliness of which indicates that James has mastered the arts of cinematographer, director, and editor, and says modestly: “I’d like to bring this scene to life, maybe with Meryl Streep as Madame Merle, and who would you like as Osmond?” (This one is particularly willful and a little baffling: Thomson appears here to be ignoring the excellent film version with John Malkovich as Osmond and Barbara Hershey as Madame Merle, directed by Jane Campion and starring Nicole Kidman, whose superfan biography Thomson has written. To be fair, Campion’s film doesn’t actually include that shimmering moment.)
So how will it be now? Are films beginning to twinkle in another sense, twinkling in the dark? Well, the sad-mournful insistence on the end of cinema is a tired kind of cinephile influence that has been around for decades, usually by writers who are actually mourning the demise of their own film-filled youth and middle age. Thankfully Thomson was not involved. But there are also glimpses of concern whose implications the author does not explore at any length.
In the midst of a discussion of Sergei Eisenstein, whose longing to make films was shared by many, Thomson comments: “That longing … well, lasted until the turn of the century? But I think it’s retreating now. Do we think we’ve seen it all?” That abandoned land comes into our lap. In retreat? seen it all? If he’s serious, shouldn’t the author stop what he’s doing and pursue the issue more vigorously?
Well, it may be that this book is not a conventional critical work at all, it is nothing like that; It is rather semi-imaginary, like an action painting made of molten celluloid in which Thomson is the creator-protagonist, squirting his multicolored liquid substance onto the canvas. Or simply an epic novel: He repeatedly mentions Ragtime, EL Doctorow’s 1975 book about immigration and the American dream in the first years of the 20th century, which mixes real data with fictional figures. Here, Thomson is both narrator and underdog, meeting veterans on the crowded streets of Los Angeles or New York, feeling their pain, sensing their enthusiasm, predicting their fall or triumph. I sincerely hope that this is not his last book. I can’t imagine film criticism or films without him.
