A thousand points of flickering light: David Thomson's Have You Seen...? is another colossal homage to that corrupting labyrinth of cinema

There is a threshold that divides the perfectly sound criticism of movies from another literary pursuit, foolishly ambitious, irredeemably obsessive, inevitably laced with something like memoir, a writing that makes pleas for its existence completely apart from the work, if not the whole labyrinthine medium, it addresses. I understand, you may or may not want to take on what’s delivered from the far side of that threshold, though I’ve always found that it’s precisely where things start to get genuinely interesting. There’ve been several writers who’ve blazed a trail through this thorny terrain, but I have a special admiration for the British-born David Thomson, whose one-man encyclopedia, The Biographical Dictionary of Film, remains a mind-boggling text, among the most compulsively perused books I own, full of aphoristic flights, brilliant observations, towering bullshit and enraging dismissals, not to mention ordinary old movie lust. (Enter Nicole Kidman.)

Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films (Knopf, $45) is a sort of companion to The Biographical Dictionary, another sprawling tome of filmic considerations that scale the medium’s century-plus trajectory—not Thomson’s thousand best, mind you, but perhaps his thousand most worth discussing? Honestly, my impression is that he’s not completely sure what these selections collectively constitute, but the number itself seems important: “going for a thousand is a gesture toward history… like wondering whether Beowulf can talk to Lolita.” It should be stressed that Have You Seen…? is not a compendium of previous published reviews, or even, most impressively, previously aired opinions, but a wholly realized project all its own. Every title here, from Paris, Texas (“I’m not sure that many films are as moving and as incoherent”) to Persona (“We are in performance: it is a religious condition”), from 2001 (“a lavish travesty”) to Stalker (“I am in awe of the power—yet I have an itch to see Bob Hope playing the Stalker”), and every artist, from Mickey Rourke (“a poet, if someone could lay down the length of his lines”) to Ingmar Bergman (“the saint of lives that may think they are settled”), from Catherine Denueve (“she seemed dipped in liquid cocaine”) to James Spader (“a cul-de-sac of oddity”), is newly surveyed.

Thomson once wrote that there’s no effect more special than an actor changing his or her mind, and for those familiar with Thomson’s arguments, there’s pleasure to found in seeing how the writer, too, changes his mind. As evident in the irreverent compliment to Stalker above, it appears Thomson’s finally come around in a big way to Andrei Tarkovsky, who has no less than four films in the thousand, and he’s learned to love the morbid lyricism that underlies the films of Val Lewton, once derided for his “B-movie philosophy.” Thomson still has an annoying habit of pooh-poohing Akira Kurosawa however, largely because he wasn’t Kenji Mizoguchi—sometimes you wonder how much Japanese cinema Thomson’s actually seen. There are other filmmakers whose work Thomson seems to have appraised only recently and is still catching up with—how else to explain the inclusion of both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises but nothing else from David Cronenberg? At one point Thomson congratulates Poltergeist for giving us “TV as the threshold for the other world” but, bafflingly, makes no mention of Videodrome.

Weirder still, we get Thomson’s praise for To Die For and Happy Together, the former the book’s sole selection from Gus Van Sant, the latter it’s only Wong Kar-Wai. At least Van Sant and Wong get mentions—there isn’t a single film from Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Shohei Imamura or Jim Jarmusch entered in this book that nevertheless makes room for Mary Reilly, the original Thomas Crown Affair and Yentl. And it kind of disgusts me that we get an entry on the recent, widely celebrated rediscovery of Army of Shadows, a product of the French cinematic establishment, while no whisper of the equally celebrated rediscovery of Killer of Sheep, a product of South Central Los Angeles that hauntingly reveals the Third World alive and well in prosperous America.

Flamboyant subjectivity, incompleteness and even contrarianism is, of course, part of the point of Have You Seen…?, which is always, stridently, personal in approach, a look at movies, and perhaps even more so the experience of movies, through the prism of a single articulate obsessive. Thomson knows that opinion and analysis both need to be fluid and flexed to stay alive. He’s taken it upon himself, sometimes, mind you, to absurd and unpersuasive degrees (see his review of My Darling Clementine), to hold every classic up to the highest standard, deliberately sniffing out flaws in masterpieces, while he pounds his fists on a few occasions to make cases for the overlooked and under-loved. And when Thomson returns to work he’s examined previously and thoroughly, he often delivers his finest prose of all, breathtaking, penetrating the very heart of something, wrestling with reflections on the real life outside the frame, making you want to rush out and re-see the film in question. On The Mother and the Whore: “It is long because people will talk themselves into silence over sex and love, and the uncertain hope that they can be kept separate… they catch youth at that tyrannical moment when it can believe it will never have to yield.”

Something that really irks some readers—or, at least, many fellow critics—is Thomson’s perpetual mistrust of cinema as a genuine art. He does indeed have a niggling knee-jerk toward high and low artistic designations that can corrupt otherwise sound arguments, but I actually consider this aspect of the work on the whole enjoyable, intriguing and revealing, especially when you catch onto the fact that it’s the cinema’s very slipperiness that so obviously seduces Thomson, who uses Have You Seen…? to constantly weave film history, business and biography into his one-page reviews, a way of accounting for exactly that multi-tired phenomenon that gave its title to Thomson’s history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation. “I came to a fork in the path and followed movies rather than Henry James,” he confesses near the book’s end—though, I suppose, such a reference book has no end—and we know exactly what he’s getting at, a choice to simply adore and revere literature, music and painting while aiming his critical faculties at a force more unruly, more corrupted, more ghostly, more exploited, more mysterious, more collaborative, seemingly infinite and in all it accumulates from the world and spits back into it. If that last part sounds a little too abstract and sweeping, well, spend a few hours with Have You Seen…? and you might just get swept up in the whirlwind yourself, a state of being in which the immensity of movies surrounds you and becomes at once slight, fractured, and dangerously endless in meaning.