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O'Brien, Geoffrey The Phantom Empire ISBN 13: 9780393035490

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9780393035490: The Phantom Empire
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Examines the experience of watching a motion picture, discusses the social and psychological impact of films, and surveys major themes and genres

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From Kirkus Reviews:
Pop-culturist/spiritual autobiographer O'Brien (Dream Time, 1988; Hardboiled America, 1981) spins a brilliant, bullying monologue telling you Everything You Always Felt Was Happening Just Below The Surface Of The Movies. Like Michael Wood and David Thomson, O'Brien is convinced that he can generalize from his own experience of films (which seems heavier on German silents and Italian splatter flicks than on, say, Renoir's French films or anything since 1980) to a sense of ``The Movies.'' Substituting a challenging rhetorical ``you'' for the more customary ``we'' (``the films get their hooks into you by propping up memory, or perhaps more accurately by substituting for memory''), O'Brien presents cinema as contemporary religion, history, and epistemology rolled into one. In chapters on the relation between realism and dream in the art film, on the coercive function of the director, on the western and the horror film, on TV as the ultimate recycler and trivializer of visual magic, he comes up with one gorgeous aper‡u after the next. On movies as Scripture: ``Why settle for words when you could go see photographs of God?'' In Fritz Lang's geometric films, ``existence could be defined as what was demarcated by walls.'' Genres keep developing ``as if everybody set out to make exactly the same movie...and failed in revealing ways. The failed imitation then became someone else's original.'' But the shower of epigrams has a price: Instead of developing a sustained argument from chapter to chapter, or even from paragraph to paragraph, O'Brien keeps reinventing the reel with every indent. And his strenuous reverie borrows too much from Michael Wood's America in the Movies and Leo Braudy's The World in a Frame to justify what comes across as his relentless mannerism. Not the history or social anatomy of the movies the jacket copy promises, then--or even the systematic explanation of their enduring power--but a bracing trip through O'Brien's personal movie landscape, which just might turn out to be yours too. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Publishers Weekly:
Weaving observations on more than 600 mostly pre-1980 films into an incantatory second-person narrative, O'Brien ( Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties ) posits a world of shared spectatorship shaped by the silver screen. His assumption of collective cognition may not always convince, but his insights often hit home. He muses on the resonant power of titles, from the dangerous single word ( Notorious ) to "choreographic frivolity" ( Everybody Does It ). O'Brien suggests cinema taught generations how techno-industrial society--the police, the government, the Mafia--really worked. He muses on Fritz Lang's invention of the art of directing, and how the best directors practiced "the art of omission." He entertainingly assays the "ultra-refined tawdriness" of Hollywood's "cheap twin," the Italian movie machine. While O'Brien looks at several genres, including horror films, he largely ignores comedies. Also, he chooses not to ponder how the "movie century" will fare in the age of television. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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  • PublisherW W Norton & Co Inc
  • Publication date1993
  • ISBN 10 0393035492
  • ISBN 13 9780393035490
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages224
  • Rating

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