Comedy, Book Two: Cinematic Revolutions
Ebook
Comedy is a philosophical poem in the form of waking dream, inspired by Dante and William Blake. In book two, Cinematic Revolutions, the narrator, having passed through a cinema screen at the end of book one, arrives in the middle of a World War I field of dying men. An indescribable human figure appears who warns that these cinematic images are not real but projections of the cinematic mind with its power of empathy. Assuming different shapes and identities, this generic being becomes the narrator's guide. Through a series of dialogues and encounters, cinema and the visual culture it generates are identified with a cultural revolution--the nonviolent revolution--that surpasses the violent revolutions of the twentieth century. This view is articulated through encounters with Russian revolutionary Trotsky, twelve modernist writers and the philosopher Wittgenstein, Hitchcock, three dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mao), a cinematic Jesus Christ, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Interspersed among these encounters are cinematic visions from directors like Eisenstein, Chaplin, and others. From Paris to Memphis, passing through Pasolini's black and white desert in Gospel according to Saint Matthew, descending into the dark underworld of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, rising into a Hollywood heaven of the forties, and standing on top of the Empire State Building with King Kong, cinematic images channel revolutionary desires and the necessity of nonviolence.
“Comedy, Book Two is a tour de force. I read his first
volume in this three-part series and was blown away by its
intellectual scope and power. I was skeptical that anyone could
build on that success and go even further with the next book.
Patrick McGee did it again, and I’m now a champion of these two
vehicles for engaging with the most important, slippery issues of
our time.”
—Robert Con Davis-Undiano, University of Oklahoma
- Title: Comedy, Book Two: Cinematic Revolutions
- Author: Patrick McGee
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666741735, 9781666741711, 9781666741728, 1666741736, 166674171X, 1666741728
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666741735
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-12-22T06:49:47Z
Patrick McGee is emeritus professor from Louisiana State
University, where he taught modern literature, film, and critical
theory. He is the author of ten previous books, including
Archival Resurrections, book one of Comedy, and
Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination: Spinoza, Blake,
Hugo, Joyce. He currently lives in Seattle.