Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons Book

What do Star Wars and Lord of the Rings tell us of our mythic past and our attitude to modern technology? John David Ebert?s Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons - Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society examines how movies since the late 1960s have developed a "myth of the machine" for our contemporary society. Modern technology, Ebert argues, has created a new environment which raises problems that our modern myths, in celluloid form, attempt to resolve by presenting a number of possible scenarios ranging from "demolition" of the machine, as in The Lord of the Rings, to "symbiosis," as in the Star Wars films. Ebert examines films such as Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Videodrome, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and A.I. for answers to the question how modern man can retain his humanity while living in a society which is increasingly dominated by the technology he has created. From the author's introduction As one who takes delight in the study of culture, I see today?s new myths coming to us in the form of celluloid. Joseph Campbell, by contrast, coming out of the Modernist generation, saw the new myths of his time emerging in the literary apotheosis of the novel under the pens of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and in the art of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. Film, in those days, was still a minor art, considered not one of the highbrow arts at all, but a diversion for the masses. Oswald Spengler compared it with the Roman mime shows of the days of the Empire and Campbell thought so little of it that, with the advent of the talkies ? which he and his colleague at Sarah Lawrence, the art and film critic Rudolf Arnheim, dismissed as a decline into realism ? he completely avoided the medium until the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Later, when George Lucas invited him to see his Star Wars trilogy ? which, after all, had been based on The Hero with a Thousand Faces ? he remarked, "I thought real art had died with Joyce and Picasso, but I guess I was wrong." . It is my contention in this book that film, with the aid of myth, is expanding and developing the great themes of the Western canon, and that it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s, when filmmakers began to make conscious use of myth, that this process began. And by "conscious use of myth," I mean, for example, that filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and George Miller drew inspiration for their narratives from Joseph Campbell?s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, while Francis Ford Coppola structured the climax of Apocalypse Now upon the model of Frazer?s myth of the slain bull god-king in The Golden Bough. From these four examples of the deliberate use of myth, five of the most successful films of all time were created ? 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Road Warrior ? which then spawned hordes of secondary imitators whose work did not bear the direct influence of mythic scholarship, but were mythologically inspired nonetheless by way of their being affiliated to these five films. To this secondary group belongs such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Altered States, The Last Wave, Dune, Jacob?s Ladder (inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead), the Star Trek movies and others.Read More