Screening History [Hardcover]

Gore Vidal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1992

Vidal intertwines fond recollections of films savored in the movie palaces of his Washington, D.C., boyhood with strands of autobiography and trenchant observations about American politics. Never before has the renowned author revealed so much about his own life or written with such immediacy about the forces shaping America. 26 halftones.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vidal's loose theme in this short, witty volume is that American movies manipulate us: on a personal level by inventing fictions that replace our own experience, on a political one by shaping our national self-image. Part memoir, part film commentary, his digressive narrative (based on a lecture series) reveals that his major formative influences included Boris Karloff in The Mummy , Errol Flynn in The Prince and the Pauper and Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lin coln. He derides U.S. presidential elections as "fast-moving fictions . . . empty of content." For George Bush, he laments, "it is always 1939, the year of The Wizard of Oz . . . ." Illustrated with film clips and family photographs, Vidal's reminiscences include candid vignettes of his entrepreneurial father, who was Franklin Roosevelt's director of air commerce, and his hard-drinking mother, a thrice-married flapper. His scattershot broadside ranges from a vitriolic profile of FDR to an analysis of TV coverage of the Persian Gulf war.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This volume is part of the same series as Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings ( LJ 2/15/84) and contains author Vidal's reminiscences of his childhood and early manhood. Interestingly, Vidal uses the movies of his youth as the key to an examination of his past. Young Gore's first confrontation with the reality of death occurred in his viewing of a poignant scene from The Prince and the Pauper (1937). He is aware that films and other images from the media can be used to manipulate or define an event for its audience, and he realizes that the image often becomes the reality of that event. Vidal has a facile turn of phrase and a markedly pessimistic view of the fuure of American democracy. There is more philosophical rumination here than straight biography, but this reviewer was intrigued by the character of his grandfather, a blind senator from Oklahoma. This book is literate, thoughtful, wry, slightly cynical, and very highly recommended.
- Marianne Cawley, Kingwood Branch Lib., Tex.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (September 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674795865
• ISBN-13: 978-0674795860
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,417,064 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Vidal's most pleasant books - a joy to read, October 23, 2000

By 

P. Bartl - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Screening History (Paperback)

Gore Vidal's recent non-fiction writings have been disappointing, but this book is a gem. It is an early attempt at autobiography, years before "Palimpsest" and in some ways deeper. Vidal's early years in the thirties coincided with Hollywood's golden age, and in "Screening History" he reflects on the movies which most influenced him, particularly those versions of British and American history, such as "The Prince and the Pauper", "Fire over England" and "Young Mr. Lincoln". Vidal shares his reminiscences not only on the movies themselves but also on their historical context in the pre-WWII US of the thirties, but in far more serene and thoughtful way than in later writings, where he sounds increasingly bitter. His musings on the possible influence of 1939 movies on then President Bush are apparently not to be taken too seriously and are far more agreeable than his later simplistic comments on presidents in "The American Presidency". Altogether this is not the best, but arguably the most pleasant of Vidal's books.

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Just who is influenced by American movies?, December 9, 2010

By 

Theodore A. Rushton (PHOENIX, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Screening History (Paperback)

Vidal complains about the influence of British filmmakers shaping American attitudes which led to U.S. involvement in World War I and II. He cites the 1937 'Fire Over England' as a "... sort of gallant-little-England picture." The film's introduction explains how "In 1587, Spain, powerful in the old world, master in the new, its king, Philip, rules by force and fear."

This, Vidal says, reminds viewers of Hitler and Mussolini. The introduction continues, "But Spanish tyranny is challenged by the free men of a little island, England."

Okay. Very noble. Brave warriors of a little island strike at the heart of their enemy's sea power, destroying the fleet to assure freedom for all. Thus, Vidal says, Americans were lured into a war against Hitler and Mussolini.

It raises an issue Vidal doesn't address: Was this film shown in Japan?

Isn't the basic theme of almost all American movies the struggle and triumph of underdogs against powerful forces? European films dwell on underdogs being crushed by tyrants and impersonal bureaucracies in a heartless state. American films are just the opposite. In U.S. films, the underdog almost always wins.

If anything, typical American films assert, " ... even if you are weak, without resources and vastly outnumbered -- you can strike a powerful blow against the enemy ..." American films are the "romance novels" of the theatre -- always a happy ending, always a triumph of the virtuous.

In contrast, consider Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will' about the 1934 Nuremberg rally by the Nazi party; the whole emphasis, starting with the opening scenes of Hitler descending through the clouds in a Junkers 52 passenger plane, is the power of the Nazi movement in crushing all doubt, dissent and opposition.

This German film is about the triumph of dominant power; it has nothing of the "little person" standing up against all the forces of fate. It is the opposite of the films Vidal and Bush watched, whether British-inspired or home-grown Hollywood dreams. The American film hero, as in most American literature, is always a flawed individual facing tremendous odds who manages to persevere and eventually triumph.

The great vitality of America is writers who question and challenge such depictions of dreamscapes.