Sudden Illumination by David Thomson review – the most amazing film history | Movie books

Film critic, historian and author of more than 40 books, David Thomson is back with another three-hour free jazz solo on the theme of movies, albeit a performance delivered with the striking elan of a 1940s big band leader. He is as smart, mysterious, annoying and charming as ever.

By “movies”, of course, he means Hollywood, with a home system established in Europe and East Asia: they take us to the history of the cinematographer. Edward Muybridge to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and his strong worship of the Ku Klux Klan, Chaplin, Stroheim, Hitchcock, Capra, Renoir, Bogart, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch, Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon GoodFshol’s David Scorsese’s Drives (“Is it drive or dream?”), Kirk Douglas and what he says he raped Natalie Wood, Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Sean Baker’s Anora, Tracey Emin’s Why I Never Became Dancer and more more. He writes in his books “revisionist” history.

Revisionists? Well, it takes us to a cold and hard meditation on the way movies (endless) annoy and cheapen, to force compliance with social norms. He also mentions King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, which starred James Murray, who was once removed from society and destined for fame but whose fate was to fall into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasizes the films’ surprising populist-democratic power and reach, their power combined with the fact that, unlike in the theater or concert hall, the actions of the film could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of him. As a theologian drawn by doubt to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if films will be without the means of literature to allow us to expand our minds, as opposed to forcing them to submit to the screen.

He criticizes the success of Stephen Graham’s drama Netflix Youth and uses it to show that big theaters can really come out, because “the picture in our house is bright and bright. Well, I have looked closely and I disagree. Even so, Thomson’s controversial, unscripted opinion on the matter is refreshing. Only he could have left with that interesting heresy, designed to wake us up to the commercial forces that brought the big shows to exist in the first place.

So it is a revisionist. In other words. But the physical form of the book is no mere rehash: it’s a straight-forward, heartwarming celebration of the incredible journey of 20th-century cinema and beyond with a classic feel. The author is a big believer in the importance of profit and big money, telling us the money that important films have made, as if that proves everything, although he has a lot of respect for the importance of the middle ages of Sight and Sound. Best Movie Ever research.

The truth is that Thomson, with that wonderful desire that is his, always wants to tell the whole story, to start again with the work, including its mysterious form, “the whole equation”, to borrow the words of F Scott Fitzgerald that he used skillfully as the title of the previous book. That’s his reformation: always taking the whole thing. He jumps into his story while shooting in plenty of wit and thought, gags and barbs.

He contrasts the darkness of the American New Wave with the positivity of today’s Steven Spielberg, who he says, “is the most determined person in the history of cinema, a guy who came to the art of trying hard or doubting and he expressed it without limits”. He added that the film industry’s dedication to the commercialized concept of “love” has created an evolutionary problem: “The species has reached a point where LOVE can feel like HOLLYWOOD above Los Angeles.”

But oddly enough, Thomson has a priestly habit of naming celebrities and expecting a kind of cinephile genuflexion at every turn. Clive James did something like this in his TV documentary Fame in the 20th Century: he gave a shout-out to the first mention of every famous name, as if bringing them to a chatshow, and there is something in Thomson’s writing that can inspire, amuse and bewilder at the same time.

He takes his title for a short time in Henry James’s 1881 book The Portrait of a Lady, in which he sees the highest revelation of the cinema: the heroine Isabel Archer is married to Gilbert Osmond and one day she comes home to find her best friend, Madame Merle and Osmond with a disturbing sense of relationship and relaxation, she sat down and stood up suddenly, “… of light”. Thomson is interested in this moment, whose appearance shows that James has mastered the skills of a cinematographer, director and editor, and adds: “I want to bring this scene to life, maybe Meryl Streep as Madame Merle, and who would you like as Osmond?” (It’s a deliberate and ironic aside: Thomson appears here to ignore the excellent film with John Malkovich as Osmond and Barbara Hershey as Madame Merle, directed by Jane Campion and Nicole Kidman, whose most successful biography Thomson wrote.

What about now? Are movies starting to fade away in some way, flying in the dark? Well, the persistence of sadness at the end of a movie is a boring type of movie that has been around for years, often from writers who are mourning their movie-filled youth and middle age. Thomson thankfully does not tolerate it. But there are paradoxes of concern that the author does not explore at length.

In the midst of discussing Sergei Eisenstein, whose desire to make films was shared by many people, Thomson said: “The passion lasted until … well, the end of the century? The waste is getting into our laps. You’re coming back? You’ve seen it all? If he’s serious, shouldn’t the writer stop what he’s doing and follow the principle more strongly?”

Well, it may be that this book is not an ordinary work against at all, there is nothing so that workaday; it is an illusion, like a painting made from molten celluloid in which Thomson is the creator-hero, flooding the canvas in its fluid, multi-colored contents. Or a classic book: he repeatedly references EL Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime, about immigration and the American dream in the early 20th century, which mixes real and fictional figures. Here, Thomson is descriptive and understated, meeting legends on the crowded streets of Los Angeles or New York, feeling their pain, feeling their joy, predicting their downfall or success. I hope this is not his last book. I can’t imagine criticism of films or films without him.