Customer Reviews

Mcluhan's Wake

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This hour-and-a-half video documentary is engaging and challenging. It's a good introduction into the outlines of Marshall McLuhan's life and thought.

Canadian-born McLuhan is most famous for either originating or at least popularizing two statememts: "the medium is the message," meaning that the means or medium of communication one uses to say something are just as important as what one is trying to say, and the "global village," meaning that electronic communication (telephone, radio, television, and now internet) is bringing everyone into communication with everyone else.

The two main themes brought out by this documentary are:

1) from a paper McLuhan wrote in 1947 at age 36, fairly early in his career as a professor of English literature, about a poem from Edgar Allan Poe entitled the "Maelstrom" which describes a sailor caught in a giant whirlpool who eventually saves himself from drowning through detached observation of the vortex; modern electronic media have become the vortex from which McLuhan would like to show us how to rise above,

and 2) a theme from the work in McLuhan's last decade of life in the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, called the "tetrad" of the "Laws of Media." The four questions or tetrad of questions that can be asked about any media or artifact of man is what does it enhance, what does it make obsolete, what does it retrieve, and what does it reverse or flip into? In the interactive section of the DVD "McLuhan's Wake," the viewer can practice looking for answers to these four questions; for example, the interactive portion shows that electricity enhances visible space, makes obsolete candles and the "mystery" of darkness, retrieves daylight activities, and reverses into a kind of "blindness" either when the illumination becomes all-encompassing or when there is a power-blackout.

These two themes, the vortex of the maelstrom and the tetrads, appear again and again throughout the documentary.

The DVD documentary starts with a hauntingly beautiful and stark animation sequence of the sailor surviving the vortex.

The musical score for the documentary at times alternates between a kind of dreamy, watery world vs. a mechanical beat.

The scenes of common urban life in Canada become the "Everyman" for which any viewer can envision himself in his own enviroment. Also throughout the documentary, though various ideas are illustrated with scenes of life in Canada again, we are shown the multi-racial, multi-ethnic side of Canada--- this draws the viewer into the global aspects and scope of McLuhan's ideas and observations.

"McLuhan's Wake" DVD has many more extras than the typical DVD. The extras alone are worth the price of the DVD. There's a separate 12-minute film interview with McLuhan's widow. For those who want the "pure" McLuhan without having to go through the lens of the "McLuhan's Wake" documentary, the DVD has two half-hour audio lectures of McLuhan. And beyond that, there is a further 6 hours of audio recording of students, colleagues, as well as his son, all speaking about McLuhan.

McLuhan was famous for uttering one aphorism or sound-bite after another. So to leave you with a sample from the documentary DVD "McLuhan's Wake," here are two examples heard there: regarding the "global village," McLuhan says that we "no longer have to be anywhere to do everything," and finally, we hear McLuhan say "Nothing is inevitable provided we are prepared to pay attention."

I came across this documentary when I was looking for material on McLuhan for the course I teach on new media. When it's good, it's very very good. The heart of the documentary is an explanation of McLuhan's career and theoretical explorations, the best one-stop presentation I've found. There are some lengthy passages elsewhere that are tangential to the film's subject matter. But for people who are seriously interested in the evolution of the media, this is an important work. And the biographical background on McLuhan is absolutely fascinating.

'McLuhan's Wake' is the new DVD release of a 2002 film by Canadian documentary director Kevin McMahon. It doesn't have a straightforward linear narrative, but has three main themes that cycle round each other: firstly, McLuhan's use of Poe's 'Descent Into The Maelstrom' as a metaphor for our current situation in relation to the "vortex" of technological change; secondly, McLuhan's 'Laws of Media'; and thirdly, a biographical strand reconstructed in the main from stills and TV clips. Laurie Anderson provides the main narration, with added commentary from the usual suspects: Eric McLuhan, Corrine McLuhan, Neil Postman, Phillip Marchand, Frank Zingrone, et al.

I've watched it twice now and I'd have to say it's flawed. For me, there are two main problems with it: one, the visual images don't always tie in with the ideas that they're supposed to be expressing. A lot of the footage is quite generic and could be about almost anything given the context, although I suspect much of this may be down to financial limitations (it being an independent production). Two, the sound track is mixed quite badly. The interviews are really the backbone of the film and they've often chosen to fade them in and out, which means you lose the end of sentences. Frustrating! Also, the mix leaves something to be desired. The voices don't always sit at the same level and the music is generally too loud.

Having said all that, it's great to have. There are loads of extras: a couple of hours of footage from the original interviews, hours and hours of audio (including two lengthy examples of McLuhan himself talking), and "hundreds of pages" of documents that include the Director's notes, McLuhan biog, shooting script, and--joy of joys--a study guide. There's a full set of subtitles, the navigation is well organized, and it's Region 0 encoded. Not bad for under twenty dollars!

So there we have it. It's not really a critical evaluation of McLuhan's work, but a serious and ambitious attempt to get McLuhan's complex ideas over to a non-specialist audience. If you've never read any of his books and want to know why Wired magazine named a middle-aged conservative and Catholic the "patron saint of the Internet", this is a good a place to start. It would also make an ideal introduction and resource for an undergraduate course teaching McLuhan.

"McLuhan's Wake" is four separate offerings, not one. Sponsored originally by the Film Board of Canada, the film is a project that is educational and illuminating, and this DVD offers not merely the feature film at 97 minutes, but also features on the tetrologies of "Understanding Media" and, most impressively, printable documents, including the shooting script.

Marshall McLuhan is the most important, pivotal, and still rewarding philosopher of communication, technology, and social organization that we have. While scholars enjoyed, for a time, coupling his theories with Walter Ong, S.J., or looking at the autonomous individual through his lens, McLuhan's insights do not end at this. His philosophy is a versatile set of observations and questions, albeit dyspeptic ones, that crack open the meaning of invention itself and what it is to use. However, his work is quite, quite dense, and McLuhan's writing can be impenetrable. This DVD does the best job I have ever encountered of explaining the man's thought even as it offers a biography.

"McLuhan's Wake" is a wake, in that it is a celebration, a reawakening of the dead man's philosophy, and an elegy, and this DVD must be seen.

thanks for the quickness.Allow myself to drop only 4 stars because the doc is not really what i expected.The first half is extremely boring.

If you are completely unfamiliar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, then this might be a good place to start. However, this film is so elementary in tone--sometimes to the point of assuming that the viewer is moronically incapable of grasping big ideas--that it often comes across as insulting to one's intelligence. The narrator, for instance, often speaks very slowly, as though she were addressing the mentally handicapped. This might be all right for a video about sign language or learning the alphabet for three-year olds, but it is decidedly the wrong approach for this subject matter.

Indeed, the director has made quite a few mistakes here, one of which is to weave into the narrative a series of spectacularly bad graphics regarding Poe's "Descent Into the Maelstrom" as an attempt at a leitmotif for understanding McLuhan's work. However, the viewer often finds himself cringing, or scowling,whenever this graphic appears onscreen. Another mistake, and this is a big one, was not to allow McLuhan to explain himself more often in the picture. He is stripped down to the occasional soundbite, and often his voice on the soundtrack will articulate a single sentence which those who are familiar with McLuhan's work know would be greatly illuminated by hearing the sentence embedded within a larger context of elocution. But McLuhan, though he is often onscreen--his frequent appearances on television are shown in quick clips--is never there for long enough to articulate more than a sentence or two, and this does him a great disservice, since McLuhan was the kind of thinker whose ideas are best illuminated by listening to him for long stretches at a time. Consequently, the viewer never really does get a feel for his personality, since one rarely sees him interacting with interviewers for very long. Yet another problem is that there is too little discussion of his ideas. An attempt is made to boil down his thinking into his media tetrads, which he actually only formulated toward the end of his life and which, brilliant though they may be, are not representative of McLuhan's overarching thought about media. There is, for instance, no discussion of the notions of media hot and cool, or cultural implosion, or how artists create counterenvironments to make invisible environments visible.

In short, the film is an ironic confirmation of Neil Postman's critique about the incompatibility of ideas with electronic media, for once ideas are accelerated to lightspeed, they are automatically transformed into infotainment. In celluloid or on televsion, ideas are hi-jacked by images and jazzy graphics which are constantly thrust upon the viewer to engage his attention. As a result, ideas wither and atrophy, while slick, glossy images proliferate, and the viewer is misled into believing that learning is all about being entertained.

The medium truly IS the message.

SEE ALSO MY YOUTUBE VIDEO "MARSHALL MCLUHAN CULTURE WITHOUT LITERACY DISCUSSION BY JOHN DAVID EBERT"

--John David Ebert
author, "The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake" (McFarland Books, 2011)

As other reviewers have commented, McLuhan had several key theories that laid important groundwork for later ages. This video doesn't really do any of them justice. After watching it I couldn't help feeling irritated by the man's ideas and attitude, and I wondered how much of that was because he doesn't get to have center stage. It's odd that such heady material would be given such elementary treatment (and the recurrence of the alphabet song on a little plink-plink piano does not add intellectual weight). Lots of silent tracking shots of cookies being made in a factory, people reading in libraries, boats tossing about on waves, etc. do not elucidate McLuhan's theories; I'm sure it's all very symbolic, but it's neither less time-consuming nor more enlightening than simply reading McLuhan's works.

As for the extras, supposedly worth the price of the video alone: I can't agree, nor can I imagine anyone who would. Two audio interviews (overlaid with screen-saver images floating endlessly at the viewer/listener) are nowhere near the most interesting material on McLuhan, and one in particular consists of 10 solid minutes of McLuhan warming up the crowd with corny jokes. Some formatting mishap has resulted in both interviews/speeches being given the same title on the DVD menu. And frankly, these extra simply don't represent McLuhan at his best: he comes off sounding like just another crusty old guy complaining about how civilization's going to hell and making at least one puzzling comment about how the Chinese did not have literacy. (?) It would really have helped to have some modern theorists to explain and provide context for McLuhan's views.