The Death of the Auteur

For a long time, the best big book to buy for any budding cinephile has been a doorstop work with a reference-library title: The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (“new” because it’s been updated repeatedly since its original publication in 1975), by the critic and essayist and biographer David Thomson. The substance of the current edition’s roughly 1,400 entries varies wildly: from biographical sketches and brief observations to confessions of authorial obsession. But the book’s core purpose is less to educate the ignorant reader on Marlene Dietrich or Jimmy Stewart than to reveal the glory of the movies through the passions of a single idiosyncratic mind.

Thomson is an octogenarian now, and, like many movie writers, he senses that the art form he has loved so well has entered a diminished age. His new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, has some of the same eccentric intensity as the biographical dictionary, with the chronological scaffolding an excuse to obsess over a specific movie or performance in language that’s often powerful and sometimes a bit silly (Thomson’s wrestling matches with his metaphors are the opposite of AI-generated prose).

About the Author

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a former National Review contributing editor.

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For a long time, the best big book to buy for any budding cinephile has been a doorstop work with a reference-library title: The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (“new” because it’s been updated repeatedly since its original publication in 1975), by the critic and essayist and biographer David Thomson. The substance of the current edition’s roughly 1,400 entries varies wildly: from biographical sketches and brief observations to confessions of authorial obsession. But the book’s core purpose is less to educate the ignorant reader on Marlene Dietrich or Jimmy Stewart than to reveal the glory of the movies through the passions of a single idiosyncratic mind.

Thomson is an octogenarian now, and, like many movie writers, he senses that the art form he has loved so well has entered a diminished age. His new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, has some of the same eccentric intensity as the biographical dictionary, with the chronological scaffolding an excuse to obsess over a specific movie or performance in language that’s often powerful and sometimes a bit silly (Thomson’s wrestling matches with his metaphors are the opposite of AI-generated prose).