FILM: Have you seen? By David Thompson, Allen lane, 1007pp, 22
ONCE IN A WHILE, an iconic figure - maybe a writer, a painter or a film-director - will unveil a creation of such staggering wretchedness that it threatens to undermine all the work that has gone before.
Flick through Have You Seen?, an appreciation of 1,000 movies by David Thomson, the most singular of film critics, and you will encounter some titles which, following later atrocities by their directors, now seem a tad suspect.
The passion for Americana in Wim Wenders's lovely Kings of the Road is harder to enjoy when you've sat through the pathetic, deranged cowboy nostalgia of Don't Come Knocking or Land of Plenty. The electric, organised chaos of Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Parte offers forbidding pointers towards the inert, disorganised chaos of the director's more recent illustrated diatribes.
Now, consider Thomson himself. Rarely has a writer of such note attracted the degree of opprobrium stirred up by his appalling 2006 biography of Nicole Kidman. So squalid were Thomson's celebrations of the Australian's bottom that one critic - admittedly the notoriously waspish Lynn Barber - concluded the volume was the work of "a madman".
Since that book was published, it has become hard to read Thomson's magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film without feeling ever so slightly nauseous (particularly when flicking past the entry that lies between Abbas Kiarostami and Krzysztof Kieslowski).
Thomson has responded to his dip in standing by going back to basics. Sure enough, Have You Seen?, which contains characteristically eccentric assessments of copper-bottomed classics, obscure cult pleasures and interesting disasters, proves to be an absolute delight. After the horrors of the Kidman fiasco, the Thomson enthusiast can look forward to a thick slab of mischievously written provocations and diversions.
One does, it must be said, detect a degree of bandwagon jumping on the publisher's part. Four years ago, Steven Jay Schneider edited a book entitled 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. That volume was so successful it inspired the publication of similarly themed tomes on books, paintings, golf holes, natural beauties and (it can only be a matter of time) public lavatories. Despite its gruesome title, Schneider's volume turned out to be a respectable piece of work featuring contributions from such distinguished critics as Kim Newman and Jonathan Rosenbaum. But, hampered by an unfortunate taste for democracy, 1001 Movies lacked the idiosyncratic approach to style and content that Thomson brings to Have You Seen?
Alphabetically, it runs from Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Zabriskie Point. Chronologically, we begin with L'Arroseur Arrosé, a Lumière Brothers short from 1895, and end with Paul Thomas Anderson's recent There Will be Blood. Along the way, Thomson's familiar passions for Jacques Rivette and Kenji Mizoguchi juggle for space with his distaste for the likes of Titanic ("The acting doesn't really exist") and The Sound of Music ("A picture I loathe but which - unquestionably - has to be in the book").
To say that Thomson's tastes are characteristic of his generation is not to offer criticism. Everybody must be born sometime and those serious film writers who were raised in the 1940s - Thomson is now 67 - have, perhaps, the most interesting stories to tell. They are old enough to have enjoyed the golden age of Hollywood first time round, but, also, young enough to have properly savoured the renaissance in European cinema that ran from the discovery of Ingmar Bergman in the 1950s to the high years of the French New Wave in the early 1960s. "It was to see the earlier work of Ingmar Bergman that I joined the National Film Theatre in London in 1957," Thomson tells us in the entry for The Seventh Seal.
Children might balk at the exclusion of Pan's Labyrinth, Reservoir Dogs and Requiem for a Dream from Thomson's 1,000. But the author's heart-tugging verbal prostrations before such rarer pleasures as Mizoguchi's Ugestsu Monogatari or Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating should make up for any supposed omissions.
Thomson's inclinations, suspicions and prejudices have, of course, been exercised in four editions of the Biographical Dictionary. But Have You Seen? finds the author softening somewhat and admitting a few once-derided masters back into his personal pantheon.
The Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky, treated with a degree of suspicion in the Dictionary, is rightly celebrated in the entries on Stalker and Andrei Rublev. Nicolas Roeg's great Don't Look Now, previously damned with the faintest of praise, is now seen as "beautiful, grave and forbidding".
These alterations seem to reflect authentic changes of mind, but, from time to time, one suspects that Thomson has genuinely forgotten what he used to think. In the Dictionary, while discussing Sergio Leone, the Italian director of baroque westerns, Thomson writes: "I think Leone really despised the Western". But, in an entry on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the new book contains the following perplexing sentence: "But Leone was not superior to the Western: he adored it". When one considers another, more prosaic mistake concerning Rocky - Burt Young played the fighter's brother-in-law, not, as the book claims, his brother - one begins to wonder if Have You Seen? was done in a rush.
Then again, it would be unwise to rule out the possibility that the Leone contradiction is a sophisticated meta-joke on Thomson's part.
The author's irrepressibly playful approach to criticism runs through this essential volume and helps elevate its status to that of literature. Still, you may want to steer away from the entries on Moulin Rouge, To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut. I'm sure you get my drift.
Donald Clarke writes about film for The Irish Times
