David Thomson's A Sudden Flicker of Light attempts another history of "the movies," which the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw describes as brilliant, eccentric, rapturous and exasperating, but its admitted stage is published criticism, not a census of cinema or a measured forecast of its future. [1]

The paper's July 19 account of renewed attention to Homer's translators argued that a canon reaches readers through often-hidden mediation, and Thomson's canon raises the parallel question of who makes movie history visible and who remains outside the beam.

Bradshaw says Thomson largely means Hollywood, supplemented by established European and east Asian art cinema; the book celebrates the medium's popular reach, prizes profits and grosses, and suggests brighter home screens may be displacing theatrical experience, although Bradshaw disputes that last conclusion even while admiring the provocation. [1]

Neither critic supplies an admissions series, revenue ledger or demographic audit, and a forceful canon can reveal one mind's connections while leaving regions, industries, workers and audiences peripheral, but naming that boundary is not a counted finding about every omission.

The book's anxiety therefore remains an argument rather than cinema's death notice, with sales, readership and market outcomes beyond this review; Thomson rewrites the history with characteristic sweep, but the edges of his map still deserve their own historians, and a wider history would need counted geography, labor, production, exhibition and reception, not merely a longer procession of famous titles.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London