An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War - Hardcover

J. Hoberman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595580050 ISBN 13: 9781595580054

Publisher: THE NEW PRESS, 2011

Synopsis

An Army of Phantoms- a major new work of film history and cultural criticism from J. Hoberman, one of the foremost film critics writing todayładdresses the dynamic synergy of American politics and American popular culture during the Cold War's first decade.

Heralded by a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the years between 1946 and 1956 brought an explosion of affluence and anxiety. Along with U.S. dominance over Europe and a new war in Asia came the birth of the civil rights movement and the first stirrings of a new youth culture. The period saw the movie industry purged of its political left at the same time as the ideological action hero John Wayne reached the peak of his career.

Analyzing Hollywood's cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, along with media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, and drawing on FBI files and studio records, Hoberman has orchestrated a colorful, sometimes surreal pageant wherein Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe.

Essential reading for film and history buffs, An Army of Phantoms expands on the analysis of the 1960's found in Hoberman's critically acclaimed The Dream Life and offers a lively and astute history of film that is also, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, about the film of history.

About this title

Review:

Utterly compulsive reading There’s something majestic about the reach of Hoberman’s ambitions An Army of Phantoms may prove to be the definitive text on its subject.”
—Film Comment

An energetic and adventurous book scholarly, even encyclopedic, yet written occasionally in a style akin to the Hush-Hush columns of L.A. Confidential.”
—London Review of Books

A welcome acknowledgment of how complicated the story of one particular period really is.”
—National Review

An epic: an alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.”
—Cineaste

An important, overflowing and often compelling study of movie history Smartly conceived, and its richness defies capture in a book review.”
—Ha’aretz

About the Author:

One of the most highly respected film critics working today, J. Hoberman is the senior film critic for theVillage Voice. His thirtieth anniversary at the Voice was celebrated with a film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and he received the Mel Novikoff Award at the 2008 San Francisco Film Festival. Hoberman is the author ofBridge of Light; The Magic Hour; The Red Atlantis; Vulgar Modernism, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism;On Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures; and The Dream Life (The New Press), among other books; he is the co-author, with Jonathan Rosenbaum, ofMidnight Movies. He has written for Artforum, Bookforum, theLondon Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, theNew York Times, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and has taught cinema history at Cooper Union since 1990. He lives in New York.

J. Hoberman Is the senior film critic for the Village Voice, where he has worked for more than thirty years. He has written for Art-forum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and has taught cinema history at Cooper Union since 1990.

About this edition

• Publisher: THE NEW PRESS
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1595580050
• ISBN 13: 9781595580054
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432