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.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Castaways is the thrilling new adventure featuring Marvel's swashbuckling heroes Rocket Raccoon, Groot, Drax the Destroyer, Gamora, and the ever-charming Star-Lord himself, Peter Quill. After a series of missions—some successful, others less so, and most nearly getting everyone killed—the Guardians of the Galaxy are at a breaking point when they crash-land on a strange planet. With no way to repair their ship, the frustrated Guardians go their separate ways, quickly discovering that the planet's inhabitants have never progressed past a medieval stage of development. Quill finds himself a favored member of a powerful duke's court (as well as a favorite of the duke's daughter), and life seems just fine under the circumstances . . . until the duchy comes under attack. When Quill reckons that their foe may be what's keeping the planet's civilization from advancing, he realizes that defeating it—with the Guardians' help—may be their only hope for getting off of that world. . . If he can find his friends in time.
In the tradition of The Devil in the White City comes a spell-binding tale of madness and murder in a nineteenth century American dynasty On June 3, 1873, a portly, fashionably dressed, middle-aged man calls the Sturtevant House and asks to see the tenant on the second floor. The bellman goes up and presents the visitor's card to the guest in room 267, returns promptly, and escorts the visitor upstairs. Before the bellman even reaches the lobby, four shots are fired in rapid succession. Eighteen-year-old Frank Walworth descends the staircase and approaches the hotel clerk. He calmly inquires the location of the nearest police precinct and adds, "I have killed my father in my room, and I am going to surrender myself to the police." So begins the fall of the Walworths, a Saratoga family that rose to prominence as part of the splendor of New York's aristocracy. In a single generation that appearance of stability and firm moral direction would be altered beyond recognition, replaced by the greed, corruption, and madness that had been festering in the family for decades.
Celebrate America's zaniest and most subversive magazine in 26 essays and comix from all-star contributors, including Roz Chast, Jonathan Lethem, and Grady Hendrix. Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . . MAD. A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever to be sold on America’s newsstands, anticipating the spirit of underground comix and ’zines and influencing humor writing in movies, television, and the internet to this day. Edited by David Mikics, The MAD Files celebrates the magazine’s impact and the legacy of the Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. 26 essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny account of MAD’s significance, ranging from the cultural to the aesthetic to the personal. Art Spiegelman reflects on how he “couldn’t learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents—but I learned all about it from MAD” Roz Chast remembers how the magazine was “love at first sight. . . . It was one of my first inklings that there were other people out there who found the world as ridiculous as I did.” David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD’s hilarious movie spoofs Liel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine’s humor and Rachel Shteir amplifies the often unsung contributions of MAD’s women artists. Several essays are admiring profiles of the individual creators that made MAD what it was: Mort Drucker, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Antonio Prohias, and Will Elder. For longtime fans and new readers alike, The MAD Files is an indispensable guide to America’s greatest satire magazine.
A new translation of one of Balzac’s finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess—a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover. A story of impossible and unsatisfied desire, Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley opens with a scene of desire unleashed. Félix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, is at a ball, when his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress: before he knows what he is doing, he throws himself upon her, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him away. He leaves the party in shame. The woman at the party is Henriette de Mortsauf, married to a much older count. Time passes, and Félix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins whose premise is that Félix will worship Henriette without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits on her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He develops a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Félix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Meanwhile Henriette is on her deathbed. She writes him, “Do you remember your kisses? They have dominated my life and furrowed my soul. . . . They are my death!” The Lily in the Valley is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love—or is it? Peter Bush’s new translation brings out the psychological dynamics of one of Balzac’s masterpieces.
"We watch what is moving fast from a platform that is also moving fast," writes Geoffrey O'Brien in the beginning of Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows. This collection—gathering the best of a decade's worth of writing on film by one of our most bracing and imaginative critics—ranges freely over the past, present, and future of the movies, from the primal visual poetry of the silent era to the dizzying permutations of the merging digital age. Here are 38 searching essays on contemporary blockbusters like Spider–Man and Minority Report; recent innovative triumphs like The Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild; and the intricacies of genre mythmaking from Chinese martial arts films to the horror classics of Val Lewton. O'Brien probes the visionary art of classic filmmakers—von Sternberg, Fod, Cocteau, Kurosawa, Godard—and the implications of such diverse recent work as Farenheit 9/11, The Passion of Christ, and The Sopranos. Each of these pieces is alert to the always–surprising intersections between screen life and real life, and the way that film from the beginning has shaped our sense of memory and history.
Cinematic Flashes challenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame. In an agile demonstration of "cinephiliac" historiography, Rashna Wadia Richards extracts intriguing film fragments from their seemingly ordinary narratives in order to explore what these unexpected moments reveal about the studio era. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's preference for studying cultural fragments rather than composing grand narratives, this unorthodox history of the films of the studio system reveals how classical Hollywood emerges as a disjointed network of accidents, excesses, and coincidences.
This book discusses the impact of visuals on the study of history by examining visual culture and the future of print, providing an analysis of photography, film, television, and computer culture. The author shows how the visualization of history can become a driving social and cultural force for change.
Invoking key concepts from the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, The Dark Interval examines a subtle but distinct iconography of passivity, stillness and profound self-affection that recurs across noir films of every era. In doing so, it identifies the emergence of a specific cinematic figure – the 'intervallic' noir protagonist exposed to the redemptive force of his or her own passion. Significantly, the book contextualises the iconography of film noir in relation to prior art-historical visual traditions, in particular earlier representations of melancholia and the saturnine, locating noir against a much broader canvas than has been the norm. Examining central noir films of the classic and modern era (The Killers, The Man Who Wasn't There) as well as films at the peripheries of noir (from Jacques Tourneur's Cat People to Wong Kar Wai's 2046), the book locates a series of iconographic gestures, performance traditions and affective tonalities at once specific to noir and yet resonant with a deeper cultural and philosophical heritage. It is a meditation that uniquely grapples with the look and the feel of noir, and which dares to detect a unique quality of 'beatitude' that runs through a certain strain of noir films. In doing so, it illuminates why film noir remains one of the most provocative and affecting visual milieus of our time.
