Mcluhan's Wake dvd movie.|
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List Price: $24.98 Our Price: $21.99 You Save: $2.99 Features • Color • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : 23 January, 2007 DVD Release : 23 January, 2007 |
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Mcluhan's Wake description Taking Poe's "Descent Into the Maelstrom" as its central metaphor, this documentary about theoretician Marshall McCluhan covers basic biographical ground, but goes further to poetically illustrate McCluhan's concepts about relationships between humans and technology. Strained poeticism interferes with the focus on explanation, but fortunately there is enough footage of McCluhan speaking on talk shows and in the classroom to negate most damage done by cheesy segments of a sailor struggling through a hurricane, for example, or a suitcase floating through the ocean as if from a bad, early 1990s indie rock music video. Narrated by Laurie Anderson among others, McCluhan's Wake asserts that the philosopher's ideas have so infiltrated current mainstream ideas that we are nearly as unaware of his influence as we are oblivious to advertising's manipulative effects. Historically placing McCluhan as a Cambridge grad who by 1962 had become a kind of celebrity deemed "oracle of the electric age," McCluhan's Wake investigates his Laws of Media, or four questions McCluhan applied to any new media in order to reveal its future. The film's experimental segments reiterate McCluhan's fear that in his rebellion against media, he hypocritically exploited television media. Though lengthy digressions bog this film down, it is worth watching for its wealth of information on this thinker who felt that the only way to evade the technological maelstrom was to analyze it.--Trinie Dalton |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | "See Your Blind Spot" or "Hear the Music" |
| This hour-and-a-half video documentary is engaging and challenging. It's a good introduction into the outlines of Marshall McLuhan's life and thought.
Canadian-born McLuhan is most famous for either originating or at least popularizing two statememts: "the medium is the message," meaning that the means or medium of communication one uses to say something are just as important as what one is trying to say, and the "global village," meaning that electronic communication (telephone, radio, television, and now internet) is bringing everyone into communication with everyone else. The two main themes brought out by this documentary are: 1) from a paper McLuhan wrote in 1947 at age 36, fairly early in his career as a professor of English literature, about a poem from Edgar Allan Poe entitled the "Maelstrom" which describes a sailor caught in a giant whirlpool who eventually saves himself from drowning through detached observation of the vortex; modern electronic media have become the vortex from which McLuhan would like to show us how to rise above, and 2) a theme from the work in McLuhan's last decade of life in the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, called the "tetrad" of the "Laws of Media." The four questions or tetrad of questions that can be asked about any media or artifact of man is what does it enhance, what does it make obsolete, what does it retrieve, and what does it reverse or flip into? In the interactive section of the DVD "McLuhan's Wake," the viewer can practice looking for answers to these four questions; for example, the interactive portion shows that electricity enhances visible space, makes obsolete candles and the "mystery" of darkness, retrieves daylight activities, and reverses into a kind of "blindness" either when the illumination becomes all-encompassing or when there is a power-blackout. These two themes, the vortex of the maelstrom and the tetrads, appear again and again throughout the documentary. The DVD documentary starts with a hauntingly beautiful and stark animation sequence of the sailor surviving the vortex. The musical score for the documentary at times alternates between a kind of dreamy, watery world vs. a mechanical beat. The scenes of common urban life in Canada become the "Everyman" for which any viewer can envision himself in his own enviroment. Also throughout the documentary, though various ideas are illustrated with scenes of life in Canada again, we are shown the multi-racial, multi-ethnic side of Canada--- this draws the viewer into the global aspects and scope of McLuhan's ideas and observations. "McLuhan's Wake" DVD has many more extras than the typical DVD. The extras alone are worth the price of the DVD. There's a separate 12-minute film interview with McLuhan's widow. For those who want the "pure" McLuhan without having to go through the lens of the "McLuhan's Wake" documentary, the DVD has two half-hour audio lectures of McLuhan. And beyond that, there is a further 6 hours of audio recording of students, colleagues, as well as his son, all speaking about McLuhan. McLuhan was famous for uttering one aphorism or sound-bite after another. So to leave you with a sample from the documentary DVD "McLuhan's Wake," here are two examples heard there: regarding the "global village," McLuhan says that we "no longer have to be anywhere to do everything," and finally, we hear McLuhan say "Nothing is inevitable provided we are prepared to pay attention." |
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