The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century [Paperback]

Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 1995

The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly original book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on human culture and consciousness.

In his intense and mysterious evocation of (seemingly) every kind of movie ever made, Geoffrey O'Brien erases the distinction between spectator and commentator and virtually reinvents film writing in our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

O'Brien examines the cultural and psychological effects of movie-watching over the past 100 years, analyzing a variety of genres within the medium.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

One of the most eccentrically engaging books to come out all year. . . . The Phantom Empire is an elegy for reality, the screenplay of a celluloid culture. (Voice Literary Supplement )

Ingenious and idiosyncratic . . . a work that somehow manages to be both a prose poem about the pleasures and distractions of movie-watching and an extremely compact history of the cinema. (Louis Menand - The New Yorker )

O'Brien's stroboscopic images of a mind that the movies have made and remade, deformed and reformed, straitened and enlarged, are dazzling. They fuse into an aptly pyrotechnical celebration of film's first century. (Stanley Kauffmann - New Republic )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393312968
• ISBN-13: 978-0393312966
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #248,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's a cinemascope blockbuster in a book!, August 29, 2000

By 

Jim Allen "The Big Idea Coach" (Odenton, Md USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century (Paperback)

As a movie lover, I was intrigued with the theme of this book -- how movies have shaped our culture, our thinking -- and was prepared for a heavy, textbook-like reading. As I read, though, I was overwhelmed with O'Briens style, his sterling craftsmanship in describing the feelings and emotions of the movies. I would literally stop after every few lines and shake my head in amazement. As a writer, I am jealous of his skill. As a reader, I am eager to read it again.

Steve Martin said (in L.A. STORY) that "a kiss may not be the truth, but it's what we wish was the truth." I do not know if O'Brien's book is THE truth about movies in the modern mind but, oh, how I hope that it is.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional, April 26, 2000

By 

George Grella "Urbane citizen" (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century (Paperback)

Don't be alarmed, just go to the movies. O'Brien, in this unforgettable, beautifully written book, has come up with an idea and a work so original and startling that it is difficult to describe. Essentially, he sees how movies [and he's seen hundreds of all kinds] have helped create the pyschology of the century. In one chapter, for example, he uses the melodramatic chestnut "The Four Feathers" to show how the movies displayed the customs and manners of a class and society different than ourselves, and thus taught us how to live in certain ways. And that's just scratching the surface of a book that seems to have a new and astonishing idea on every page. Neal Gabler published on this topic recently, but to a much inferior extent. Skip that and buy this. You will never, ever go to the movies the same way again.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of the greatest living writer of English prose, January 12, 2005

By 

Gooch McCracken (c/o your haunted slab of Velveeta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century (Paperback)

Gob's pic on the book-jacket is the grimmest cautionary tale since Truman Capote shook his booty at Studio 54. Let this be a warning to you all. This is what happens when you spend half your life gawking at Barbara Steele & Silvana Mangano: you turn bald and myopic and you have no-one to blame but yourself. My favorite line: "What did they need a script for if they had enough bad mood to poison the atmosphere for a whole planet?"

Every sentence in this book is a masterpiece. Although there's no need to worry about any Serioso High-Art Heavyosity. Gob eschewed any in-depth discussion of Godard & Bergman & Welles & Antonioni in favor of delineating the Cinecitta aesthetic: "As the sword-and-sandal cycle ran its course they grabbed whatever raw material came to hand, Tacitus and Captain Marvel, Sophocles and the Bible and Mandrake the Magician, Tiresias and the Sibyl, vampires and virgins and an endless horde of raucous men-at-arms. The contents of an old cupboard full of irreplaceable artifacts were being briefly held up to the light--for the delectation of uncomprehending inheritors momentarily amused by gold leaf or a bit of fine carving--before being discarded. All periods of history collapsed into one, enabling Hercules and Ulysses to wash up on the Gaza coast and encounter Samson. It was the final garage sale of Thrace and Carthage and Byzantium."

I read a recent profile of Godard. His unfilmed latter-day scripts are (yes, you guessed it) scripts about film directors. Movies about movies. Gob covers that too: "The ultimate film festival would then have to consist of ghost movies: the low-budget risorgimento period piece that Edward G. Robinson almost finished shooting in TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN, Fritz Lang's ODYSSEY, the Crucifixion movie that Orson Welles was directing in Pasolini's LA RICOTTA, and the movie that (in Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT) the alcoholic actor played by Terence Stamp had flown to Cinecitta to star in: the first Catholic western, 'something between Dreyer and Pasolini with a touch of John Ford, of course'."

Gob even risks the charge of psychological projection when he waxes metaphysical: "A profound underlying boredom was the emotional basis of westerns. They were basically about killing time. They were what there was to do in town, in America, year after year."

My only hope is that Pauline Kael is savoring this book in Schlock Heaven.