Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle - Softcover

O'Brien, Geoffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619021609 ISBN 13: 9781619021600

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2013

Synopsis

One of our best cultural critics here collects sixteen years' worth of essays on film and popular culture. Topics range from the invention of cinema to contemporary F-X aesthetics, from Shakespeare on film to Seinfeld, and we include essays on 30's screwball comedies, Hong Kong Martial Arts movies, to the roots of spy movies and the televising of Clinton's grand jury testimony.

O'Brien emphasizes the unpredictable interactions between film as a medium apt for expressing the most private dreams and film as the mass literature of the modern world. Several of the pieces are profiles of individual actors or directors—Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Ed Wood, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Dana Andrews, The Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby—whose careers are probed to look for the point where obsession meets public myth-making.

About this title

About the Author:

Geoffrey O'Brien is the editor in chief of the Library of America and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His latest books are Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth (September 2012). He is a widely published poet, critic, editor, and cultural historian and has been honored with a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1619021609
• ISBN 13: 9781619021600
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256