The entire history of cinema in one shot

Paul Lay: Welcome to The EI Podcast. I’m Paul Lay, senior editor at Engelsberg Ideas. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by the distinguished film critic David Thomson, who’s joining us from his home in San Francisco.

David is the author of more than 40 books, including a number of authoritative reference works, of which my particular favourite is, I would say, the epigrammatic masterpiece Have You Seen…? He’s been described by Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The Atlantic, as ‘probably the greatest living film critic and historian’, and I, for one, wouldn’t disagree.

His latest book is A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies. You’ve spent almost all of your now long life, I think it’s fair to say, writing about cinema and absorbing cinema. You’ve probably seen more films than just about anyone living. So it comes as a bit of a surprise in this revisionist history that you’ve come to a rather striking conclusion.

You seem to be suggesting, if I’ve got this right, that the medium is voyeuristic, that it’s somewhat passive, that it has contributed to the coarsening of our wider political culture. And this is evident especially, I believe, in your argument in the US. You write, ‘The movies suckered us into a fantasy Neverland.’

So is your book A Sudden Flicker of Light an indictment of cinema? Or could it be interpreted as an unusually severe, almost a reprimand, as an expression of your love for it?

David Thomson: I want to make it clear that I still love the movies and what they can do. Only a few days ago I saw The Invite, and I thought it was one of the loveliest films I had seen for a long time. I just rejoiced in it, and in the way four odd, interesting people were brought to life in a story – not quite a story, more a situation – that said so much about marriage, companionship, sex, and just people being together.

And it was exactly the kind of thing that I have always relished in films. It sort of harks back, in a way, to some of the romantic and screwball comedies of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and I felt a huge surge of enthusiasm for the medium. So, I want to make it clear that going to the movies is still as big a passion for me as reading, watching soccer, things like that – things that mean a lot to me.

And the fact that this is not simply a book that celebrates the medium and glories in it and says, ‘What a wonderful, wonderful thing this has been,’ is really just a mark of my feeling that if you’re going to stay alive and be alive – and, I’m at an age I didn’t really anticipate getting to, and an age at which life has many awkwardnesses and problems – I think you have to keep thinking and you have to keep asking yourself: What am I doing? What does it mean to me? And what is it all about?

And I, for a long time, have had feelings of unease over the movies along the lines you outlined: that it indulges fantasy, it helps build up the American dream, which I think is one of the most disastrous concepts this country has suffered – and the world, because what America suffers gets shared with the world in a horrible way.

There are a lot of things about this medium, the way it induces passivity and acceptance in the audience because they can’t intervene in the film. So they’re sitting in the dark, watching the bright light. There’s a sort of weird perversion of a religious situation in it, and I’m always suspicious of the religious effect. Someone reminded me that the first book I wrote, which was in 1967, called Movie Man, which is not a very good book and really was meant as a sort of celebration of cinema. But still, this friend told me it’s got the seeds of the doubts that I have tried to express in this book.

So, at this age, having given my life as a writer largely to film – I have written about other things – I have a lot of anxieties about it that are tied up with the anxiety in general about where the world and the culture is going. If we’re about to fall off into the abyss, don’t let’s say we weren’t warned or we didn’t have a notion of where we were going. Things are not going well. And the famous American dream often feels more like a nightmare.

And the most glowing, golden example of the nightmare may pass. We cross our fingers about that. But he has wrought or revealed changes, fault lines in the culture that will last after he’s gone and are going to have to be dealt with in some way. So, I can’t see that a man of my age, with grandchildren and in the position of thinking about the future and where we’re going, can do anything other than keep looking at what you had taken for granted.

And I would say that many film buffs simply watch the films over and over again, but don’t keep asking themselves awkward questions about them. And this book is an attempt to ask the awkward questions and just to make people think. So that’s a long answer to your question.

Paul Lay: Yes, but it does make it also a love letter of a kind as well, even if it is also a reprimand. You just mentioned your first book was released in 1967. That was an important period for American cinema, I think it’s fair to say.

David Thomson: For world cinema. Among all the exciting things that happened in the 1960s, it was a time when young people who would have thought a few years earlier that they had no chance of making films or thinking about them seriously – they broke out. And the French New Wave was the original iteration of this, and they started making films of a kind that really the world hadn’t seen before.

And in concert with that, colleges and universities suddenly thought, we ought to teach film, because it’s been going on close to 70 years at that time. And so many people have been formed by it and shaped by it, and we’ve taken it for granted. We haven’t recognised it as something worth thinking about.

So, in England, certainly, in America, colleges started teaching what’s called film studies, or what’s now called media. And as with all academic processes, there’s been a lot of nonsense in it, but it reflects the fact that people were anxious to start thinking about something that they had really regarded as fun entertainment, a chance to relax.

And I think part of what I do is to say, well, it’s okay if you really want to relax. A hot bath might be as good and easier and quicker. Isn’t something happening at the movies where you really have to think?

So there again, that’s what leads me to it. But the 1960s were a great time. And I went to film school in 1960, and it looked as if the film business was something that was shut off to young people with different ideas. And in fact, in the ‘60s, that was proved a mistake. And all over the world, waves followed the New Wave. And it was a very exciting time.

Paul Lay: On this idea of a new generation coming through in the 1960s, there seems to be a tension about cinema. A new generation, and you will have seen it as a child, where you have these huge numbers going to the cinema. You talk about cinemas that have 200 seats and they’re full. Sometimes you can’t get into them. There are queues outside cinemas.

And then you have this, I think it probably comes, as you say, from France, where it ceases to be a mass media in the same sense. It’s more specialised, we might say. There is something about the art house, the separate kinds of cinema.

Talk to us about the tension between those two things. I’m always struck, for example, by the use of the word ‘movie’. There’s something quite childish about it. And people talk about cinema, they talk about film, they talk about movies. And those three different descriptions seem to represent different genres of the same medium.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct. And certainly around 1960, there was genuine debate over what to call this thing. And you’ve used all three of the terms.

‘Cinema’ was the sort of standard, classic term. ‘Film’ was a rather more generalised thing. But ‘movie’, definitely to English ears, I think had an American connotation. It seemed a slicker, more sensationalist, sexier version.And I think it was a way of saying there was a kind of excitement in cinema that ‘cinema’, as a word, didn’t quite cover.

Early in the ‘60s in London, there was a very, very different new kind of film magazine called Movie, and it lasted for a while, but it made a very big impact when it arrived.

And I think a lot of people at Sight and Sound, which of course is still there, were jostled and a little alarmed by a magazine called Movie. But that was a serious attempt, with a lot of very good writing in it, to say it’s all very well to revere silent German film, Soviet film, the great French cinema – all worthy of it. But don’t overlook entertainment films from America, because there have been a lot of fantastic things going on there.

And I was a part of that in the sense that I believed in the term ‘movie’. But you’re right, there is a tension, and I think it’s in the process of changing or enlarging itself again. I feel a little shy of saying this in the moment of The Odyssey, which I think is a monstrous silliness, but it seems to be a moment where the big American movie, with sword fighting and beautiful women and all that kind of stuff, is back.

And there are people in the business who say, ‘Oh, look. Look at the money that film is making, and we’re going to have big theatrical films again.’

I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think that actually we’re facing a future of smaller films and smaller places where they are seen, smaller even to the point that you might watch a movie on your iPhone or, looking just a little further ahead, maybe you even have a chip implanted in your head and the movie plays there.

Now that’s science fiction until it happens. And I think there’s a lot of chance that something like that will happen. And at that point, it will be easier to see that the age of mass audiences altogether has gone. And although a lot of people may see a movie, they’re watching it in solitary situations. They’re alone when they’re watching it, or they’re with maybe one or two other people.

And that’s going to change, and has changed already, the nature of films. And I don’t know what they’re going to be called. Someone is going to come up soon with a word, a new word that catches. And we’re in a culture so attentive to advertising that advertising words catch on.

And I don’t know what the word’s going to be. You could ask your viewers to offer suggestions. It’s going to happen. And I think that if we as a culture last – which obviously is not guaranteed – we’re going to be watching what I will still call movies in very different ways and situations. And movies will be smaller, they’ll be cheaper, they’ll be more difficult, they’ll be more awkward, and they’ll be sort of where the novel is now.

Nobody any longer thinks that this is a mass reading culture. And novels, even successful novels, probably sell only a few thousand copies. Really small audiences. I think films are going to be like that, too.

Speaker 1: So do you think, in that case, that we’ll look back historically at a golden moment in cinema, or golden moments?

Thinking back to what you said about the 1960s, in which it became smaller in some way, but then it developed with people such as Scorsese and Coppola in particular into vast canvases, of which, I suppose, The Godfather was a kind of apogee. You don’t see us ever regrouping and then expanding again?

David Thomson: I don’t know. I doubt it.

I think we’re very lucky, and I feel enormously lucky that I was alive and most active in the times, in the age that I would say comes from the arrival of sound. I think sound really completed the idea of what a film could be from then until, well, certainly in the mid-70s.

I think that is a great age. And, I feel very lucky to have been young enough to have some part in it, writing about it at that time. And, yeah, I think you can call it a golden age. That again is an advertising term. It’s much more complicated than that, because the American film business was tearing itself apart.

And what I call, or admit is, the golden age ends, I think, in many ways with the moment where Jaws and Star Wars, particularly, sort of reintroduce the idea of a huge audience in America. Just before then, from, say, Bonnie and Clyde through to Chinatown or Taxi Driver, they’d been making difficult films. And when I say difficult, I mean films that don’t determine themselves on a happy ending and don’t tell you, ‘Oh, everything’s going to be okay.’

Films that began to say living in America is not really okay. It’s an extremely troubled, tormented culture. And maybe there’s big trouble ahead. And, as it happened, I don’t think the medium was able to handle that difficulty. There were people that almost said to themselves, ‘We’ve got to get back to that mass audience, and we’re going to do that. We’ve got to cheer them up and make them feel good.’

The whole notion that films are to make you feel good is very suspect, I think. And I love that time, late ‘60s, early ‘70s, when so many films were prepared to be unsettling and less than what the advertising industry is trying to tell us.

Paul Lay: And yet some of those films – we’ve mentioned The Godfather, although unsettling as they were, and of course its great follow-up, The Godfather Part II – were commercial successes. The Godfather was an enormous commercial success and laden with awards as well.

David Thomson: That was a sign that there was a large audience prepared to look at something difficult and challenging. And I think we’re probably getting back to that age now. I think a lot of the smaller films are very complicated in what they’re saying and demanding, and they require not so much an educated audience, but an audience that is prepared to grapple with the ideas in films.

Paul Lay: Let me look back not that long ago, when you wanted to see a film you had to go to a repertory cinema. If you wanted to see, say, a Scorsese triple bill or a Tarkovsky triple bill or a Bresson triple bill, you had to spend that afternoon, that evening, in the cinema. It was a very focused experience. Now you can watch that on television. There seems to be a qualitative difference in the experience of cinema. I wonder what you thought about that.

David Thomson: Well, the first thing to say is that there was a period before repertory theatres when you actually couldn’t see an old film. I probably, from the age of about 11 or 12, had started reading the few books that there were on film, and I’d learned from those that there was this film, Citizen Kane, that was pretty interesting, to say the least.

But you couldn’t see it because cinemas only played new films. And then, all of a sudden, in, I think, 1955, the Classic in Tooting – which I hope still exists, I don’t know if it does, I hope it does – announced that they were going to play Citizen Kane.

It was the only cinema in the part of South London where I lived that ever dared to show foreign films or old films. And I assume that everybody was just waiting, just waiting for Citizen Kane to come back. And there would be lines. I was the only person there.

You’re absolutely right that we then went into the age of repertory cinema. And of course, now we’re into a time of streaming, and it’s a rich time in the sense that you can dial up not every film that was ever made, but a lot of them.

I have the fear that the commercial pressures in streaming may make it harder and harder, as time goes by, to see some of the old films you would want to see. And I think they will certainly start charging more for them in streaming because, on the face of it, you can see anything for three or four dollars over here, which is a lot cheaper than any ticket you would have to pay going to a theatre.

So those circumstances keep shifting, and they will continue to do so.

I know some film buffs, people of my sort of age, who have accumulated over the years a library of DVDs or discs or tapes or some form, which, so long as they can keep their player up to date, they can play and see. But those great collections now begin to be archaic. They take up a lot of space in the house, and you realise that you don’t actually consult them very much.

But, I’m sitting in a room, you can’t see it, but it’s packed with books. And it’s an absurd number of books, in the sense that I don’t read many of them for years, but I am comforted that they are here because I have a book-culture mind. But I don’t know what will happen when I die, because I don’t know that my children would say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to keep Dad’s books.’ And that’s happening with collections of tapes. And the storage of films is going to change, and streaming is the new basis for the storage of films. But don’t trust the business interests to keep the streaming capacity going. They could suddenly think, ‘Oh, let’s get over that stage.’

Paul Lay: And one of those things is that expansion over space and time of our access to cinema. cinema of the past, cinema that’s of geographical breadth. But do you think that the cinema, movies, remains a fundamentally American art form, or is a fundamentally American art form? You mentioned Citizen Kane, and I always think of that and The Godfather as perhaps the representative, the archetypal American film. Would that be a fair assessment?

David Thomson: I think that certainly, for a long time, relatively, the cinema, the movies, was an American form, in that the shape of films as narratives, the idea of film stardom, the elevation of magical personalities, the way they looked, the way they were sold, that was a very American thing.

And I think historically it’s easier now to see it as, in addition, one of the key spearheads in American imperialism. And it’s part of a spirit in which most people in the world genuinely believed America had worked out the idea for a relatively democratic society in which people were relatively well off, and in which the sort of foreign policy of the country was generally benign and constructive.

It had helped largely win the Second World War. It got through the Cold War. It felt as if there was an answer to what human purpose and destiny could be. I think that is falling apart before our eyes. And I think that, as an empire, America is entering into a period of great decline. It will only become more clear that the most significant and interesting films are going to be made outside America. America doesn’t know how to make the American films anymore.

When I said earlier that The Invite pleased me so much, it was partly because Olivia Wilde, the director, and the people on the film sort of had rekindled the idea of what an American comedy could be. And I loved it.

But I do not think that that is a general process. I think that the great genres of American cinema are much, much harder to do these days. So, I think that the movie will fade away, just as I think America is in the process of fading away.

Paul Lay: You didn’t mention him by name, but you implied him: Donald Trump. He’s in his second presidency now, and you talk of him as the natural product of a society that has fallen in love with the image. He’s a man who’s never away from the camera, it seems, who exists really only because of the camera. But what do you mean by that, having fallen in love with the image?

David Thomson: Well, I think, although he might not be interested in trying to articulate it, I think that Donald Trump wants to be in a movie. I think he loves being on camera. And when he’s not on camera, he spends a great deal of his time watching things the camera has done. He watches a mass of television.

And, once upon a time, until quite recently, we would take it for granted that our president would spend every waking hour, or most of his waking hours, reading background information, reports on situations that would help him work his way towards some sort of decision and action. In those situations, I don’t think Donald Trump does that. He’s actually boasted about not doing it.

He clearly spends most of his life on camera or watching the products of a camera. And I think that, in his deepest being, he believes he’s in a sort of melodrama, which you could call power, because really, power is what motivates him more than love or any of those things. And, yeah, he’s a figment. And what’s remarkable is that in just really 10 years, he has changed the way we think about his office, how it functions.

This used to be a country in which there were several departments or areas of government, and the Supreme Court and Congress are almost phantoms now. They have very little real leverage and agency in the world. And we are watching, day by day, in horror, a kind of horror film in which power exists almost alone, from any guardrails or constraints.

And it will be so hard to get back from that. Some people think, ‘Oh, well, come the next election, get the Democrats back in. It’s going to be okay.’ I wish that I could believe that. I think that getting back to where we were is as hard as it always is. Reliving the past is not easy and not that productive.

Paul Lay: I wonder if that is the difference between a kind of creative and destructive tension. Because when we refer to the 1960s and 1970s as this golden age, or a golden age of American cinema, if you like, there’s an awful lot of crisis and tension in American society at that point.

But you seem to be suggesting that those who were involved in this were creative in some way, that resulted in some kind of artistic thrust, that there was cinematic expression to that tension.

Whereas now, you haven’t been explicit about your thoughts on The Odyssey, for example, but I don’t believe they’re entirely positive. Is that because it seems to be much less creative in its tension, much less constructive, or just smothered in some way?

David Thomson: I think The Odyssey is a very bad film, to be clear. Well, I would have to say that because, for all his interest in and command of spectacle, I don’t think Nolan is very good at telling coherent stories or even knowing what they’re about.

And I would challenge the millions who are obviously going to see The Odyssey to really come out of the film and say, ‘Well, this is what happened,’ let alone what it’s about. I think it’s the most extraordinary mess, and it amounts to a huge confidence trick and a superb promotional job, that that film, which I do think is a mess, has been turned into a film that everybody believes they need to see.

And, the amount of coverage that has been in the media about it, way beyond the film reviews, but so many papers have to conjure up some story that seems to justify putting ‘Odyssey’ in the title of the piece.

Amazing con job. And so now I think it’s I think it’s a bad film from an essentially uninteresting director. And it’s not a tribute to where we are at the moment. Does that make it clear?

Paul Lay: I think so. I think it makes your judgment clear, certainly. This sounds like a kind of endgame of that kind of cinema, in a way. We’ve seen so many Marvel films. Some argue that this decline begins with Star Wars, that there’s something that happens after Apocalypse Now, particularly after Heaven’s Gate, and then you have a different kind of cinema that comes through, although, of course, Coppola and Lucas were very close.

But you talk about the rest of the world. Where in the rest of the world is this new sort of cinema, or the best cinema, coming from? And who are the directors you look to as arbiters, as heralds of this new age?

David Thomson: Well, it’s happening all over. And obviously we’ve been aware since the 1950s, I suppose, that Asia in general is an extraordinary producer of interesting films.

There’s a lot going on in Europe. There’s a lot going on in Britain. Britain, when I was a young man, was justifiably, I think, regarded as a bit of a wasteland as far as making movies was concerned. And Britain had its New Wave in the 1960s, and it’s still got it. And, there’s an amazing amount of good stuff coming out of Britain, I think.

So it’s all over. And it’s not that there aren’t fascinating films to see. There are. And I’ve tried to list and attend to some of them in the book. It’s a wild and fascinating time in film in general.

It’s extraordinary that so many really good women directors are working now. It’s great that there are more films by people from different races than there used to be, and that, if you’re interested, you can search out so many of these films.

Paul Lay: I was thinking, as you’ve got older, I was talking to someone recently about music who said that in, say, the first 30 or 40 years of life, they listened to everything with a voraciousness. And then the other half of life was taking an editing machine to it all and paring this canon down to what was really essential and what they listened to again and again. So it became more focused, more concentrated. Has that been your experience as a film critic? Do you have a core of films that you go to again and again and think, ‘That’s the measure. That’s the gold standard?’

David Thomson: By the time I was, let’s say, 50 or something like that, I had worked out that there were films I really loved, and I have gone back to them quite regularly.

And I would say, just to pick out two areas, I’m a huge fan of American romantic screwball comedies. Films like My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve, Midnight – films of that era, mid-30s to mid-40s. So, broadly speaking, I love those films.

Paul Lay: What is it you love about them?

David Thomson: Well, I think a very big part of them is that they believe in two things that are not universally believed in by films. They believe in talk. They believe in language, and they believe in women, and they believe in women who talk. And I have found in life that the most attractive women, the most interesting, are the ones that talk.

Whereas we are in a culture – and you and I are of an age where we were raised into a culture – where women were not expected to talk in the way that men were. That’s an absurdity and a cultural disaster. And I love films that refuse that.

Paul Lay: That’s definitely not The Godfather, then.

David Thomson: No. The Godfather has one of the great dismissive shots about women, where the face of Kay, Diane Keaton, is literally sort of closed out of the frame because a door closes on her, as if to say, there are important things in life that women don’t get.

So get out of the room, my dear, go up to the bedroom and wait for me there, kind of thing. An appalling attitude. And I’m sort of framing it with some humour, but there’s a darkly comic side to it too, and I hate it. So I love films like that. I love the career of Jean Renoir, who still seems to me to be one of the great, great humane filmmakers.

And there are many other things that I would say are my favourites, but those are films that I go back to time and again, and just sheer, sheer pleasure.

I run certain Fred Astaire films not for the story, because the story in Fred Astaire films is as flimsy as it could be. I go back for some of the routines, some of the numbers, because Fred Astaire with Ginger or with some of his other partners dancing are just beauties of such wonder that you can watch them almost every day and feel a little better. It’s like taking a glass of cool lemonade on a hot day.

Paul Lay: But there is a profundity there, though, as well. I always think of Swing Time and the scene with ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, which is magical.

David Thomson: Totally, totally. And those are films that draw upon some of the great, great songs too, and I love songs, and they’re a big part of why I find those films so great.

Also, they’re black and white, and I’m really an antique in the sense that I love black and white. I think it’s one of the great things we’ve invented. And obviously the world as a whole now believes film has to be in colour. And there we are. But black and white is just beautiful for its own sake, I think.

Paul Lay: And do you think that also reflects that it was the medium in which so many of those great films were made? How much is it black and white, or how much is it just that many great films were made in black and white?

David Thomson: Oh, I think it is the fact of black and white. Obviously, there’s much more to it than that. But, once upon a time, nobody conceived that there could be a book of 200 pages, let’s say, telling a story about certain people. It happened, and it’s been a source of wonder for most of us at some time or other in our life.

And technologically, we come upon inventions. I believe, for instance, that getting films to talk was crucial in making the medium grow up. And, there are some people who revere silent films. I like a lot of silent films, but I think the medium was limited and restricted before sound came in.

Paul Lay: Well, thank you, David. Your latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies, is out now. It is typically insightful, contentious at points as well, I think it’s fair to say. But all your books are worth reading. So thank you very, very much for sharing your wisdom and your long experience of cinema. It’s been a pleasure.

David Thomson: I thank you for being such a good person to talk with.