An epic of reel lives

A biographical dictionary calls for a biographical review, especially from somebody who bears the author's name. Even that distinguishing "p" has failed throughout my sporadic career as a film journalist and professional cinephile to prevent occasional confusion between us. When in my teens I became a serious film addict, an obvious requirement was a solid reference book. Leslie Halliwell's guides, undeserved bestsellers, never appealed: the mealy-mouthed judgements - 1930s or 1940s Hollywood good, anything else bad - were of little value. Ephraim Katz's conscientiously compiled dictionary had yet to appear, and the television film guides were only an aid to quick identification. I believe I bought the first edition of David Thomson's book - then entitled A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema - in ignorance that its text would be so remarkably personal. But then, as for many people in the 1970s, my preferred non-academic film reading was the collected film criticism of Pauline Kael. Her reviews were partisan, provocative, even sexually charged; love them or hate them, they were full of a shameless passion for over-sized images projected in a darkened room. Thomson's love letters to the medium were in the same class.

Each entry announced an essay that would be "personal, opinionated and obsessive" (his own definition), freely giving his response to how a director, producer or actor had left his or her mark on the 20th-century art form. His judgements, though, were tempered with a distinctively European sensibility. Thomson was born in London, educated at Dulwich College, and his bibliography included a study of Laurence Sterne. His flair for the memorable phrase, the surprising conceit, the astonishing association, bear witness to such a background. Certain sentences have long stayed with me. On Jean-Luc Godard: "He is the first director, the first great director, who does not seem to be a human being. It was the discovery that he loved (Anna) Karina more in moving images than in life that may have broken their marriage." This was and still is - the kind of writing on cinema that explains just why sitting in the dark for two hours can be more than simply identifying with fictional characters or puzzling over a plot.

Receiving the new edition of this book felt something like a personal reunion. Back in 1975, cinema still seemed to promise so much. As Thomson notes in his new introduction, "those were great years" - class acts like The Godfather and Chinatown from Hollywood, the intense new vision of the New German Cinema, the breaking of taboos with WR Mysteries of the Organism and Last Tango In Paris. In 1980, another edition slipped out, suggesting all was still healthy. Fifteen years have passed since then and much has changed. "Cinema" has become "Film", a guarded recognition that so much celluloid is no longer there for us, as Godard once observed, to look up to on a big screen, but rather to look down at on a diminutive television monitor. Even Thomson notes that "movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a fish passing us in the water". The author of this "biographical" dictionary has also gone through a seachange, as he is now fully resident in the United States, perhaps even a citizen of Hollywood himself. This permanent distance from his homeland may explain some controversial judgements: can the films of David Hare really be worth greater praise than those of Martin Scorsese? Perhaps our grass really is greener than we thought. Or perhaps not.

Above all, by relocating to San Francisco, Thomson has surrendered himself to a film distribution system even less generous than our own. In this "American" edition, there is no shortage of smart observations on contemporary Hollywood figures. But is his sketchy appreciation of the international cinema scene good enough? Can the career of Krzysztof Kieslowski really be appreciated without a viewing of the entire Dekalog? By contrast, keen US citizens have apparently been well served by retrospectives of British TV, judging by the fulsome and detailed entries on Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke. But Thomson's assessment of African cinema (just one entry, for Ousmane Sembene) is woefully inadequate, as is his omission of several acclaimed directors from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Thomson also courts danger by his decision now to include a few cinematographers and even one composer (a lucky Bernard Herrmann) in his pantheon of cinema artists - why not editors and production designers, let alone a few more script-writers? In opening up his book to other areas, the exclusions appear much crueller.

For Thomson, time has only confirmed the greatness of so many former loves, with a generous coda added to the entry on Howard Hawks, among others. But it has also found many of the promising talents praised in the first edition wanting. Nagisa Oshima, in 1975, looked "like one of those relatively young men . . . who could be proved in the next ten years as major figures in cinema history". Cut to 1995: "Oshima must be regarded now as a major example of fatal hesitation or misdirection." Even Thomson's infamous statement that "I take (Jacques Rivette's Celine And Julie Go Boating) to be the most important film made since Citizen Kane" is now transformed into "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane". Among the new entries (more than 200 apparently), few suggest the author has made great discoveries or detected significant advances; only Blue Velvet and The Piano seem to have stirred him in the way the great masters once did.

Time has also introduced some unfortunate errors. The two finest contemporary Chinese directors, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, have been alphabetised under their first names, Kaige and Yimou, rather than under their surnames. Terence Malick was born in 1945, not 1950, and Barry Levinson 1942, not 1932. This last mistake leads Thomson into the unfortunate assertion that "Levinson now is 60, and we are still waiting to see if he has a knockout film in him". Give the boy a break, I say.

But those complaints aside, the book remains hard to resist. Thomson's delivers a scathing two-line dismissal of Richard Donner and cheerily admits that he has not yet viewed any film directed by the recently revered (and dead) Japanese director Mikio Naruse, adding "there is nothing like knowing that one has still to see a body of great work". The charm of that gesture just absolves him from the accusation of pure laziness. It also suggests that the author may yet be inspired to write another edition of his remarkable work.

David Thompson is a producer for BBC Television and co-editor of Scorsese on Scorsese and Jean Renoir: Letters (see page 30).