The Phantom Empire (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Geoffrey O’Brien
- First Published: 1993
- Type of Work: Film criticism
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction
- Subjects: Communication, Social life, Imagination, Popular culture, Films, movies, or motion pictures, Mass media, Filmmaking or filmmakers, Technology
It is difficult to determine exactly what kind of book Geoffrey O’Brien’s The Phantom Empire is, in part because he adopts many different critical approaches and styles of writing to do justice to the many paradoxes at the heart of the experience of film. Film is intensely personal but also shared, communal, public. Films free the imagination yet also bind it to predetermined patterns. Films capture and also dissolve history, in part by making the “past” always “present” and in part by rendering it trivial, if not meaningless. Finally, film in one sense completes the...
[The entire page is 2042 words long]
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