{"id":35395,"date":"2026-07-11T21:41:56","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T01:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/a-sudden-flicker-of-light-asks-are-movies-to-blame\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T21:41:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T01:41:56","slug":"a-sudden-flicker-of-light-asks-are-movies-to-blame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/a-sudden-flicker-of-light-asks-are-movies-to-blame\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A Sudden Flicker of Light\u2019 Asks, Are Movies to Blame?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s equine chronophotography experiments of the 1870s to Donald Trump\u2019s preternatural ability to frame himself perfectly with a raised fist and blood on his cheek in Butler, Pennsylvania, film historian David Thomson\u2019s latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light<\/em>, crams roughly 150 years of moving images into one rapidly paced volume: This is what we saw, how we came to see it, and why it matters. It is a detailed, funny, and insightful speedrun through history that uses movies\u2014mostly classics you\u2019ve seen or at least heard of\u2014as a touchpoint for issues of wider social importance, with a dash of critical opinion thrown in, too. The only real problem with the thing is fighting off the urge to watch clips of Marlene Dietrich, Marlon Brando, or Mikey Madison on YouTube immediately after he\u2019s described them.<\/p>\n

For the 85-year-old Thomson, the English author of the pivotal 1975 reference work A Biographical Dictionary of <\/em>Cinema<\/em>, now in its sixth edition, the movie screen is no mere rectangle. It is a window to an imagined reality, but also a mirror back to the audience, which is then molded (and even seduced) by what it sees. \u201cA film does not really exist without us<\/em>\u2014and we never get a credit,\u201d is just one clever witticism in his new book which is rife with them. Thomson\u2019s writing style seems effortless, but is clearly born from a lot of rigorous work. His is a mind that\u2019s been in dialogue with film and filmmaking for decades, and this summation\u2014which has the subtitle A Revisionist History of Movies<\/em>\u2014reads like something he had to get off his chest.<\/p>\n

From Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s equine chronophotography experiments of the 1870s to Donald Trump\u2019s preternatural ability to frame himself perfectly with a raised fist and blood on his cheek in Butler, Pennsylvania, film historian David Thomson\u2019s latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light<\/em>, crams roughly 150 years of moving images into one rapidly paced volume: This is what we saw, how we came to see it, and why it matters. It is a detailed, funny, and insightful speedrun through history that uses movies\u2014mostly classics you\u2019ve seen or at least heard of\u2014as a touchpoint for issues of wider social importance, with a dash of critical opinion thrown in, too. The only real problem with the thing is fighting off the urge to watch clips of Marlene Dietrich, Marlon Brando, or Mikey Madison on YouTube immediately after he\u2019s described them.<\/p>\n

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A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies<\/em><\/strong>,<\/a> David Thomson, Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $30, July 2026<\/p>\n

For the 85-year-old Thomson, the English author of the pivotal 1975 reference work A Biographical Dictionary of <\/em>Cinema<\/em>, now in its sixth edition, the movie screen is no mere rectangle. It is a window to an imagined reality, but also a mirror back to the audience, which is then molded (and even seduced) by what it sees. \u201cA film does not really exist without us<\/em>\u2014and we never get a credit,\u201d is just one clever witticism in his new book which is rife with them. Thomson\u2019s writing style seems effortless, but is clearly born from a lot of rigorous work. His is a mind that\u2019s been in dialogue with film and filmmaking for decades, and this summation\u2014which has the subtitle A Revisionist History of Movies<\/em>\u2014reads like something he had to get off his chest.<\/p>\n

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\n Vehicles fill a drive-in theater, 1950s<\/p>\n

Vehicles fill a drive-in theater, circa the 1950s.Archive Photos\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n

As in his previous works, like 2015\u2019s How to Watch a Movie<\/em>, Thomson deploys the term \u201cmovie\u201d to represent the phenomenon of cinema in total. \u201cMovie\u201d sometimes means the tactile world of filmmaking, the craft of capturing action with the right kind of lens, and getting actors to use their physicality to express a story. Or it can mean the economic system born from Hollywood\u2019s Wild West of American newcomers like Marcus Loew and Louis B. Mayer who\u2014well, let\u2019s just say they enjoyed creating an industry free of regulatory constraints. It also means the dream life that Hollywood created: the magical mind space shared between the audience, the moguls, the artists, and also the hacks. (The career trajectory of Karl Freund, one of the most celebrated cinematographers of German expressionism, who later created the \u201cflat lighting\u201d technique copied for decades by numerous forgotten U.S. sitcoms after he created it for I Love Lucy<\/em>, is summed up rather cattily with the remark, \u201cCamera people will do anything. They are so like their machine.\u201d)<\/p>\n

That streak of snark is indicative of the revisionism found in this revisionist history. Thomson is still besotted by cinema, and offers up memories of the movie palaces of his youth, but the book is countered with no shortage of weariness, if not even regret. A section reflecting on how Hitler, Goebbels, and weaponized movie (to borrow his turn of phrase) is a rewind of history that most film-literate people are familiar with. But depicting Trump as \u201cour movie man\u201d shouting \u201cquiet, piggy\u201d on camera to a journalist on Air Force One is the logical end point, Thomson feels, of a culture that celebrates Charles Foster Kane and Michael Corleone and Howard Beale and Dr. Mabuse. And that leaves one feeling a little sad for someone who has spent a lifetime in conversation with the great characters of film history. Though he doesn\u2019t come out and say it, there is an undercurrent in A Sudden Flicker of Light <\/em>that maybe we\u2019d all have been better off if the Lumi\u00e8re brothers never met that train at La Ciotat Station.<\/p>\n

This element of despair, however, is also a furnace for fiery writing. From page one, Thomson jumps directly into the ocean of motion pictures and bobs and weaves with a jazzman\u2019s trust in his own solo. The riffing at times reads like a Lenny Bruce monologue, a cascade of small insights as one image hyperlinks to another to create more a sensation than an argument. As an example, in a chapter called \u201cI\u2019m With You,\u201d devoted to great leading men whose talents conjure sympathy even while doing, at times, odious things, he describes the critical moment in The Godfather<\/em> when Al Pacino\u2019s Michael Corleone assassinates the police chief in the restaurant to the rumble of a heard-not-seen subway car, thus turning his back on his ethical past. \u201cThe decorated war veteran is a killer. The rightness of the stuff has been compromised,\u201d Thomson writes.<\/p>\n

As if surprised by his own writing, he then jumps to the movie The Right Stuff<\/em>, not something commonly associated with The Godfather<\/em>, and an examination of Sam Shepard\u2019s turn as Chuck Yeager. Shepard\u2019s performance reminds Thomson of Gary Cooper, so we don\u2019t stay with Philip Kaufman\u2019s midcentury space-age history for too long, and instead ruminate for a while on the star of The Fountainhead <\/em>and Morocco<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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