
Comedy, Book Two
Cinematic Revolutions
Patrick McGee(Author)
Resource Publications (CA) (Publisher)
Published on 21. June 2022
Book
Hardback
186 pages
978-1-6667-4172-8 (ISBN)
Description
Comedy is a philosophical poem in the form of waking dream, inspired by Dante and William Blake. In book two, Cinematic Revolutions, the narrator, having passed through a cinema screen at the end of book one, arrives in the middle of a World War I field of dying men. An indescribable human figure appears who warns that these cinematic images are not real but projections of the cinematic mind with its power of empathy. Assuming different shapes and identities, this generic being becomes the narrator's guide. Through a series of dialogues and encounters, cinema and the visual culture it generates are identified with a cultural revolution--the nonviolent revolution--that surpasses the violent revolutions of the twentieth century. This view is articulated through encounters with Russian revolutionary Trotsky, twelve modernist writers and the philosopher Wittgenstein, Hitchcock, three dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mao), a cinematic Jesus Christ, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Interspersed among these encounters are cinematic visions from directors like Eisenstein, Chaplin, and others. From Paris to Memphis, passing through Pasolini's black and white desert in Gospel according to Saint Matthew, descending into the dark underworld of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, rising into a Hollywood heaven of the forties, and standing on top of the Empire State Building with King Kong, cinematic images channel revolutionary desires and the necessity of nonviolence.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
422 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-6667-4172-8 (9781666741728)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
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E-Book
06/2022
Wipf and Stock Publishers
€18.49
Available for download
Person
Patrick McGee is emeritus professor from Louisiana State University, where he taught modern literature, film, and critical theory. He is the author of ten previous books, including Archival Resurrections, book one of Comedy, and Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination: Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce. He currently lives in Seattle.