The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties

Description

J. Hoberman, senior film critic for "The Village Voice", argues that in 1960s cinema, the distinction between political figures and glamorous movie stars disintegrated. Here, he reinterprets key Hollywood movies ("Dr Strangelove", "Bonnie and Clyde", "The Wild Bunch" and "Shampoo", among others) to find the latent politics of 60s cinema and to offer a history of the era's political culture. With often comic meditations on the decade's movies, as well as its personae - with Che Guevara, JFK and Ronald Reagan considered alongside John Wayne, Jane Fonda and Dirty Harry - Hoberman describes how our mass-mediated politics entered the realm of the fantastic, converting feared radicals into media heroes and vice-versa.

J. Hoberman is the author, co-author, or editor of a dozen books, including the trilogy The Dream Life, An Army of Phantoms, and the forthcoming Found Illusions (all from The New Press) and Film After Film. He has written for Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books; contributes the "On Video" column for the New York Times; has taught cinema history at Cooper Union since 1990; and was, for over thirty years, a film critic for the Village Voice. He lives in New York.

"One of the most vital cultural histories I've ever read. Hoberman's deceptively easygoing yet deliriously compacted prose threads history through movie lore through McLuhanesque media criticism. . . . An extraordinary publishing evenT." David Edelstein, Slate "So invigorating that I had to ration myself to a chapter a week." John Patterson, The Guardian "Nobody in America writes as well about culture and film as J. Hoberman." Peter Biskind "Packs a salient and unique wallop." Publishers Weekly