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A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies: "And there it was in a nutshell: the rapture of seeing a thing and the horror of seeing it at the same time..."
In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with the incomparable film critic and historian David Thomson about his revelatory new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. We trace his earliest experiences of cinema—from the terror and beauty of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V to watching Brief Encounter through his mother’s emotional response—and consider why films can both enchant and unsettle us. Our conversation moves through Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Hollywood’s treatment of women, film noir, documentary’s complicated relationship to truth, the creative force of émigré…
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