Articles Available Online

David Thomson — the author of dozens of books, including an account of Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic and the 1966 World Cup Final, a treatise on acting, histories of Nevada and Hollywood, a memoir of his London boyhood, a mythopoeic fantasy about Warren Beatty, a piece of very high-end fan fiction entitled Suspects, studies of Psycho and the Alien movies, and biographies of figures as varied as Laurence Sterne and Nicole Kidman — is best-known and best-loved for a compendium of critical essays that poses as a reference book When the magazine Sight and Sound organised a poll of the greatest books about film, Geoff Dyer chose all five editions of the book known in its latest — sixth — edition as The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, which he called ‘one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time’ There were numerous similar testimonies Thomson topped the poll   Over the years, the Biographical Dictionary has been criticised for its omissions The epigraph to a recent edition runs, ‘But where’s Bela Tarr and Barbara Lamarr and…’, with the credit ‘from life, from readers of this book’ It’s also an allusion—typically wry and cheerful—to the book’s harshest detractors In a fiercely argued essay called ‘Chronicle of a Backsliding Cinephile, or the Two Daves’, responding to Thomson’s message of doom about cinema’s artistic health, the critic Adrian Martin ascribed Thomson’s pessimism to ignorance: no wonder he thinks that cinema is dead, that – in his notorious phrase – there are ‘so few masters left now’, when he is ‘a million miles away from taking its life-pulse’ (Many people were irritated, perhaps understandably, by an entry on Wes Anderson, after he had made three films, which read, in its entirety: ‘Watch this space What does that mean? That he might be something one day’)   A defence from beyond cinephilia maintains that there is only one ‘Dave’ but that he changes over time For Geoff Dyer, the book is not a report on the state of the art, or even a work of criticism; it is ‘a vicarious and incremental autobiography’ Viewed in that light, Dyer explains,