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.”