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 apercu 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. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly original
book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the
image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on
human culture and consciousness.
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