Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Culture and the Moving Image Series) [Paperback]

J. Hoberman (Author)

Book Description

Series: Culture and the Moving Image Series | Publication Date: October 1991

For the past dozen years, J. Hoberman has been publishing witty, impassioned, vivid film criticism in the pages of New York's alternative weekly, The Village Voice. His first collection includes a variety of these (mostly) movie reviews, as well as a number of longer essays and film-festival reports, all written during the 1980s. For Hoberman, film criticism is a form of social commentary, and his articles reflect a decade when an actor was president, the Vietnam War was refought on the nation's movie screens, and soundbites determined elections.

The variety of Hoberman's interests and the intellectual depth of his critiques are remarkable. Writing from the perspective of Lower Manhattan, he places movies in the context of the other visual arts—painting, photography, comics, video, and TV—as well as that of postmodem theorists such as Leslie Fiedler and Jean Baudrillard. Demonstrating the widest range of any American film critic writing today, Hoberman is equally at home discussing the work of Steven Spielberg and Andrei Tarkovsky, films by cutting-edge artists Raul Ruiz and Yvonne Rainer, and historical figures as disparate as Charles Chaplin and Andy Warhol.

Vulgar Modernism offers an entertaining, trenchant, informed, and informative view of the past decade's popular culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is a collection of film critic Hoberman's writings on movies and culture, most of which appeared in The Village Voice . The essays are impassioned, erudite, blunt, and savvy. The question, which the omnibus encircles like a python, is how to best define the "visual Culture" of the 1980s. Given Hoberman's belief that art under Capital must be evaluated by the same criteria as all other cultural production, this question is both complicated and compelling. Hoberman's unacknowledged and decidedly conservative master is John Fell, whose Film and the Narrative Tradition ( LJ 4/15/75) coalesced the notion that Hollywood cinema was the logical culmination of late 19th-century culture (i.e. novels, comics, tabloids, modernist paintings). This is a necessary acquisition for any collection concerned with movies, culture (high or low), and images of our age.
- Robert Rayher, Sch. of the Art Inst. of Chicago
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Nobody since Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael has done more to deepen the way we think about films." --The Nation "This witty, erudite collection of reviews and longer essays is as much a commentary on the politics of the spectacle as it is a retrospective of the movies of the past dozen years." --Village Voice "One of the most intelligent an thought-provoking critics in the United States, though he doesn't always like my films." --Martin Sorsese "This is in the tradition of great American movie books--James Agee, Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael--in which an author's collected reviews have the emotional force of a recherche du temps perdu. Reliving the '80s with Hoberman, we can marvel at the weirdness and richness of world culture. Hoberman's writing offers impressive erudition, emotional intensity, and wiseguy wit. If Siegfried Kracauer and Patti Smith had bumped into each other on Second Avenue one night, maybe they could have produced a book like this." --Marshall Berman, author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr (October 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877228663
• ISBN-13: 978-0877228660
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,230,552 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

J. Hoberman is the senior film critic for the Village Voice, where he has worked for more than thirty years. He is the author of Bridge of Light, The Magic Hour, The Red Atlantis, Vulgar Modernism, and The Dream Life (The New Press) and the co-author, with Jonathan Rosenbaum, of Midnight Movies. He has written for Artforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, among other publications, and has taught cinema history at Cooper Union since 1990. He lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent survey of a great critic's work from the 1980s, October 20, 2009

By 

Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Culture and the Moving Image) (Hardcover)

Now that Jonathan Rosenbaum has retired from regular, weekly reviewing, I'd have to pick J. Hoberman as my easy favorite favorite film critic in the USA. He's been with "The Village Voice" for over 30 years, having done a review of ERASERHEAD as his very first piece; he started out as the third-string guy but has been the senior critic since 1988.

VULGAR MODERNISM was Hoberman's first collection, first published in 1991 and collecting a goodly-sized chunk of his writings for the "Voice" as well as a few pieces originaly written for "Film Comment" and other publications. Most of the pieces are 2-3 page (1000 words or so) single film reviews, but there are longer portrait-pieces on directors like Scorsese and Lynch, and also some writings on other arts, including an excellent piece on George Herriman's seminal early 20th century comic strip KRAZY KAT. Hoberman tends to cover the avant-garde and "outsider" American cinema a little more than his colleague and MIDNIGHT MOVIES collaborator Rosenbaum; witness the several articles on Andy Warhol and Jack Smith. And he's got a taste for what is often considered "bad" cinema - Ed Wood and Oscar Micheaux in particular. My favorite article in the whole book in fact is probably the piece on Micheaux, Wood, the French surrealists and the bad movie books of the Medveds. Hoberman has a tendency to a certain self-conscious hipness at times, a smugness I think, which can get tiresome, but the best pieces like the bad movies one profit from his erudition and his dismissal of some of the critical norms that even a Rosenbaum or Dave Kehr have accepted.

Like Rosenbaum and many of the other critics who cut their teeth in the alternative weekles, Hoberman has little patience for or interest in commercial, American "blockbuster" cinema; what few mentions of Spielberg and Lucas you'll find aren't terribly complimentary. So be warned, this is "elitist" New York criticism - at it's best. If that's your bag (it should be obvious now that it's mine, mostly), I certainly wouldn't hesitate to recommend this. The cheap paperback is apparently out of print, but you can easily get it used.