The Books of My Life: Dziga Vertov (Hicks)

Dziga Vertov, the spinning gypsy, born David Abelevich Kaufman in Bielystock in the Russian Empire in 1896, was the son of Jewish librarians. During his lifetime Vertov was not, as many have noted, as celebrated as other Soviet filmmakers of his era such as Sergey Yestenstein or Vsevolod Pudovkin. Today, however, things have changed as they sometimes do and Vertov is as celebrated today as both Yesenstein and Pudovkin.

Vertov, as Jeremy Hicks makes clear in his excellent monograph Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: Tauris, 2007), was not only a maker of what came to be called unplayed, unacted, caught unawares, fly on the wall, actuality, documentary, or non-fiction films--Vertov was averse to calling them documentaries or non-fiction films--he was also, as Hick's subtitle makes clear, a film theorist. Finally, as Hicks notes, Vertov was the founder of an influential school of film makers, the Cine-Eyes, who wanted to film life unaware and who Vertov imagined would one day "publish" a daily cinematic newspaper, a kind of kino-pravda, for the masses. Between 1918 and 1947 Vertov, after 1919 editor, assistant director, and director, and also Vertov's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, and, after 1922, Vertov's cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman--Vertov called the three the Council of Three--made newsreel films, cine-eye films, cine-truth films, song films, and feature length caught unawares films including Forward, Soviet (1926). A Sixth Part of the World (1926), The Eleventh Hour (1928), Man With a (or the) Movie Camera (1929), the last film with Mikhail, Enthusiasm (1931), Three Songs About Lenin (1934), and Lullaby (1937).

Drawing on archival material, including an extensive analysis of Vertov's writings, the work of post-Thaw Soviet historians of journalism, and film, particularly documentary films, and Western analysts of Vertov, Hicks argues that the Council of Three's films must be understood against the backdrop of late Tsarist and early Soviet journalism. The Council of Three's caught unawares films, Hicks argues, melded the precise description and heroic themes of ocherk and the sharp juxtapositions, ironies, and critical aspects of the feuilleton. The Council of Three's films were thus, according to Hicks, attempts to simultaneously capture via the mechanical eye of the camera, life unaware, and, capture the lives of the heroic Soviet builders of communism, who were, with a little help from the surveiling gaze and paternalistic guidance of Soviet leaders, building the industrial and secular future of not only the Soviet Union but of humankind.

Vertov, as Hicks notes, was an apologist and a polemicist for a particular kind of what we now call documentary film. Instead of finding actuality in the filmic documentation of events, historical reconstructions or stagings of events--though sometimes Vertov did engage in staging and even used animation--in the use of professional actors and scripted scenes, or or the voice of god voice overs so common to documentaries then and now--Vertov even disliked intertitles and tried to keep them to a minimum--Vertov strove for truth in images, sounds, music like structures, and montage, in, in other words, argument arising out of the juxtaposition of images. This, as Hicks notes, eventually put Vertov at odds with the doctrine of socialist realism, which became dogma in the late 1920s in the USSR, given that the films Vertov made were rarely easily understood by the millions the high priests of socialist realism thought all art should be. This, in turn, made it difficult for Vertov, Svilova, and to a lesser extent, Kaufman, to make the films they wanted to make in the Stalin era USSR.

Some have seen a decline in the quality of the Vertov group's films after 1929 and The Man With a Movie Camera.  For many Vertov and Svilova sold their souls to the devil of socialist realism after 1929 and their films increasingly became a film by the numbers garden variety socialist realism.  Hicks, however, notes that elements from what some call the Council's avant garde (futurist and constructivist) era are present in Vertov's and Svilova's later documentaries and that theoretically, at the very least, Vertov pursued his dream of a pure documentary cinema that fit well with internationalist and nationalist Soviet Communist orthodoxy, making the marginalisation of Vertov and Svilova somewhat ironic, I suppose.

Though by the time of his death in 1954 Vertov was largely forgotten in the USSR and around the world, it would be, as Hicks notes, the experimental nature of the Vertov group's films, particularly Man With a Movie Camera, that would resurrect both the reputation and the works of Dziga Vertov particularly in the countercultural West. After the 1960s Vertov joined the ranks of Yesenstein--whose work and approach Vertov disdained--Pudovkin, Alexandr Dovzehnko, Abram Room, and others, as one of the great auteurs of Soviet cinema, a rank Vertov thought he deserved all along. Vertov now became celebrated by film makers such as the French auteur Jean Rouch, father of a reborn cinema vérité or direct cinema in the 1960s, an approach Rouch and others traced back to Vertov, and Jean-Luc Godard, who, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, formed Groupe Dziga Vertov in that failed revolutionary year of 1968. Vertov's reputation was also resurrected in the USSR during the periodic Thaws of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. In 1966, for instance, Soviet historian Sergey Drobashenko published an edited for the new Soviet orthodoxy collection of Vertov's diaries, articles, and projects that was published in Moscow. In this new somewhat thawed USSR Three Songs About Lenin came to be regarded as Vertov's and Svilova's masterpiece.

As Hick's book and other articles and books published in the West and in post-Soviet Russia point up, Vertov, Svilova, and Kaufman, are alive and well and living in the limited compass of intellectual, scholarly, and academic cultures, these days. Given the impact of Man With a Movie Camera on film theorists, and film students and cineastes of both the theoretical and practical film making variety, I very much expect the legacies of all three to live as long as media live. As Hicks notes, after all, Vertov can be seen as the father of database media theory and practise and surveillance media theory and practise, two major aspects and characteristics of the brave new digital media world, though the increasingly mainstream paternalistic practitioners of both throughout the core nation world, may not realise it.

The Books of My Life: Sergei Eisenstein (Bulgakowa)

Born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1898, Sergey Yesenstein, son of a Jewish father and a well off St. Petersberg mother, became, during his lifetime, one of the most famous and celebrated directors of the new technology and art of cinema. Over the course of his life Yesenstein would be feted by the Soviet film industry and state, German film culture, and even Hollywood, including Walt Disney, thanks to films like The Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1928), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1945) and the cinematic technique of montage. At the same time, Yesenstein would be attacked by the Soviet state for his avant garde "formalism", in both his films and in his many writings on culture, art, and film theory and practise, and criticised by others for his cinematic experimentation, something some found too far removed from the socialist realism mandated in Soviet art by the Soviet powers that be after the late 1920s. Yesenstein would also, like Orson Welles after him, find himself sometimes unable to finish many of the films he began and some of the writings he began, many on the cinema, for a variety of economic, political, and cultural reasons.

Oksana Bulgakowa's outstanding biography of Yesenstein, Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography (San Francisco: PotemkinPress, 1998, 2001) is everything an excellent biography should be. Bulgakowa does an excellent job of putting the life of Yesenstein into broader political, economic, and cultural contexts. She explores how Yesenstein was impacted by political decisions made by Soviet bureaucrats, by the economic conditions of his times, and by the cultural movements of his era which he came into contact and was influenced by, including Formalism, Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism, Mysticism, Occultism, Freudianism, psychological theory, linguistic theory and practise, and studies of comparative religion, all things that put Yesenstein sometimes at odds with the Soviet state and its leaders. Bulgakowa nicely explores the origins and making of Yesenstein's films. She nicely summarises, explains, and puts into context Yesenstein's many writings on culture, art, and cinema. I highly recommend Bulgakowa's book for anyone interested in modernity, the birth of cinema, film as an art, and Soviet history and culture. For those interested in Yesenstein, this is a must read.

I Will Take One Tie and One Baseball Cap Please: Musings on American Political Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century

What is remarkable to me about the 2020 presidential election is that despite the coronavirus pandemic and despite the protests about police brutality and racism in the United States set off by the murder of George Floyd and others, a sitting president, who has bungled the responses to both, still has a chance of being re-elected president of the United States. As I write Donald Trump, though he is behind his Democratic Party competitor Joe Biden nationally by eight to thirteen percentage points, is within three to four percentage points of Biden in Florida, within eight percentage points of Biden in Michigan, within three percentage points of Biden in Ohio, within three to eight percentage points of Biden in Pennsylvania, and is tied with or behind Biden by 3 percentage points in Wisconsin, the only states that really matter given the geographical realities of American political culture.

There are a number of reasons why Donald Trump is still competitive in the 2020 presidential race despite his manifest incompetence, greed, lack of sympathy, lack of empathy, and narcissism. First, his opponent Joe "Don't Hand Me No Neil Kinnock Lines and Keep Your Hands to Yourself" Biden is a mediocre candidate who is occasionally touched by foot in mouth disorder though to a much lesser extent than Trump, and who has, like Trump, though again to a lesser extent, engaged in ethically and morally questionable activities throughout his public political career. Second, and this is central to Trump's political (and economic) success, the Donald is a brand and the Donald is a celebrity.

Trump is a charismatic figure in Weberian terms, and an object of worship to the devotees of a relatively new religious movement or cult--I call it the Cult of the Orange One--a cult, by the way, that has consumption at its heart since late modern and postmodern celebrities are themselves consumer brands to be bought and sold, consumer brands that help feed global capital and help capitalism maintain its dominant position in the economies of the core countries and around the world. It is no accident that Brand Trump has been successful at marketing itself through sales of nouveau rich brow, middle brow, and low brow items such as baseball caps, t-shirts, whiskey glasses, pint glasses, flags, buttons, beverage coolers, straws, wine glasses, gift wrapping paper, Christmas ornaments, puzzles, wood train sets, cuff links, label pins, mugs, tumblers, dog collars, bandanas, posters, fine tip markers with the presidents signature on the side, playing cards, red plastic cups (shades of country singer Toby Keith's song "Red Solo Cup"), and colouring books to his devotees and fellow travellers at his website and at his rallies.

Trump's devotees literally worship him and for them he can do no wrong. He is their sacred symbol and he is the key symbol at the heart of Trumpism and its Cult of the Orange One. For Trump's devotees every word out of their totem's mouth is sacred and every word out of his mouth makes sense to them even though they often don't make sense to those who are not members of the cult or Trumpian fellow travellers. Brand Trump, like other fundamentalisms, is literalist, misogynist, and nationalist (this is where the Whiteness of the Cult of the Orange One reveals itself), nationalism, of course, is a meaning system which has been able to nationalise the universalist religion of Christianity and the universalist meaning system of socialism. It is, to digress a moment, worth remembering that the only comparable brand in the Democratic Party was and is not Joe Biden, but was and is Bernie Sanders, something Elizabeth Warren didn't recognise to the detriment of her presidential campaign. Biden is simply, for most, the anti-Trump or non-Trump. He is, in other words, a negative symbol and it is hard to build a brand on negation.

Brand Trump and its Cult of the Orange One has been able to feed into and feed off of, rather like a ravenous vampire, the culture war that has long divided America and which continues to divide the country. It is a culture war centred on identity and on the question of who is a "real American". For many on the increasingly radical right, including those in the Cult of the Orange One, the only "real Americans" are White, neoliberal capitalist, pro-life, right wing, and America first, Americans.

Where this culture war is going I do not know. It seems to be heating up once again thanks to the pandemic and to the murder of Blacks by America's militarised police forces which too often have a manichean us versus them meaning system at the heart of their culture. Personally, I think a divorce between the more nativist and the more cosmopolitan subcultures and countercultures of the United States is worth contemplating and considering before the right wing meaning systems with their notions of nationalistic purity do what other utopian movements throughout the twentieth century have done, attempt to purify the "race".

The Books of My Life: John Ford (Davis)

Historian Ronald Davis's John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995) offers readers yet another biography of Hollywood director John Ford though one grounded more in oral histories with those who both loved and hated the Ford they knew than in archival research. Peppered in with these oral histories is archival research Davis did particularly in the Ford papers at the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Davis takes a psychological approach to Ford and his 156 films and 54 Westerns arguing, if not novelly, that the director was a bundle of contradictions or paradoxes. Davis's Ford was an authoritarian tyrant--something several other film directors have been said to be--at the same time that he was a generous man. Davis's Ford was or wanted to be a macho man who celebrated the individualism of the American West and the rituals of the military in order, Davis argues, to hide his sensitive artistic side so as not to appear weak among the company of the macho men he cultivated and surrounded himself with. Davis's Ford was an Irish nationalist at the same time that he was an American nationalist of Irish heritage who had a sentimental nostalgia for both. Davis's Ford was a director who worked within the studio system, but who, at the same time, was able to make several of the more personal films that he wanted to make and which reflect, according to Davis, Ford's personal themes and display Ford's superb visual and compositional sense. Davis's Ford was a realist who loved history but at the same time reveled in ethnic stereotypes, particularly of the Irish and America's First Peoples, and manufactured myth making legends that fed into America's and American's nationalistic and mythical collective sense of self and nation. Davis's Ford was a man who appreciated and tried to emulate the loner heroes of the past while at the same time he celebrated the collective family and the collaborative civilisation that replaced the world of the loner heroes he made myths and legends of. Davis's Ford was an Irish Catholic who, at the same time, was a cultural Catholic who rarely attended weekly services. Davis's Ford was someone who was repressed sexually and who rarely kept the company of women who did not emulate the macho man persona he adored, while at the same time he celebrated women as Madonnas and Magdalenes. Davis's Ford was an intellectual and an anti-intellectual at the same time.

Like many books and articles grounded in oral histories Davis's book has an immediate and tangible quality that, to some extent, makes its subject come more alive. Davis's book does a decent job of putting Ford into his social contexts. Davis, for instance, argues that Ford's turn from the socially conscious socialist Democrat, Ford's phrase, who made The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941) became, as a result of World War II and the Cold War, more reactionary and conservative Republican in his politics like many of his peers. All this said Davis's book is more biographical and chatty, endlessly repeating the charge that Ford could be difficult and was often a tyrant during filming in order to, at least according to some who did oral histories on Ford, get better performances from his actors, than analytical and systematic in its approach to its subject.

The Pandemic Kiada

We did not really know a lot about the coronavirus when it begin. Many health professionals, medical historians and social scientists initially compared covid-19 to structurally similar viruses like SARS and MERS, for instance, and hoped that an understanding of SARS and MERS would provide us with a decent tentative understanding of the coronavirus. As the pandemic has gone on and scientists all around the world have studied the coronavirus intensely, our understanding of covid-19 has thankfully increased.

One of the things that scientists have been able to tentatively answer has been how long the coronavirus lives on things like plastic, steel, and on clothes, to chose just a few examples, all things many of us were concerned about when the pandemic hit. Soon publications, both online and traditional, both reputable and disreputable, both scientifically calm and sensationalistically maniacal, began providing answers to these questions. The best publications, of course, provided tentative answers to the questions of how long covid-19 lived on plastics, on steel, and on clothes because science, given that new data accumulates all the time on things like the coronavirus, requires a healthy degree of tentativeness along with a replication of scientific claims.

The Guardian and WebMD, for instance, throughout the course of the pandemic, have periodically published articles with tentative and ever expanding answers to some of these questions. A Guardian article dated 4 April 2020, for example, notes that the coronavirus lives on cardboard for twenty-four hours and steel and plastic for 72 hours. The WebMD website, in an article dated 11 June 2020, notes that evidence suggests that the virus lives for two to eight hours on aluminum, twenty-four hours on cardboard, and two to three days on stainless steel and plastic. As for how long the coronavirus lives on clothes, the WebMD website notes the paucity of knowledge on the subject but notes that the coronavirus probably survives on clothes less long than it does on steel and plastic.

So why do I dredge this information up? I do it because in classic Voinovichian fashion some of the places I have shopped during the pandemic have been inconsistent in regard to, for instance, taking returns during the pandemic. Hannaford and Price Chopper, for example, initially refused to take back emptied plastic bottles in their return drop offs. Given that the evidence suggests that the virus lasts for 72 hours on plastic all stores could have taken plastic bottle returns back and let these returned bottles set for 72 hours in the plastic bags that line plastic bottle return machines. Price Chopper and Hannaford didn't do this, one assumes, less for scientific reasons and more for practical reasons. Where are, one imagines they asked themselves, we going to store the returned plastic we take back? Walmart, I discovered today, after I tried to return a pair of pants I purchased that were too small, is still not taking clothes back though they are taking plastic bottles back. Scientifically, this is absurd since it is probable that covid-19 survives less long on clothes than it does on plastic. Again one can only assume that there is some reason other than science for Walmart not taking back clothes since Walmart could let clothes set in storage for 72 hours before putting them back on the shelves if they wanted to.

What makes all of this surreal is that the metal shelves of Price Chopper, Hannaford, and Walmart are stocked with plastic and fabrics, including clothes, of several types. All three likely have hundreds of people coming through their doors everyday wearing clothes whose wearers may have potentially come into contact with the coronavirus. All three have plastic bottles of seltzer sitting on the shelves that have come out of cardboard boxes and that have been stocked by human hands that have possibly come into contact with covid-19. All three have metal shelves that routinely get touched by humans who are possibly infected with coronavirus. Since, I highly doubt that each of these three stores are disinfecting each and every plastic bottle, each and every steel shelf, each and every item of clothing worn in or on the shelves, and each and every cardboard box that comes into the store and which has possibly been touched by the coronavirus, the absurd inconsistency in these practises should be obvious to anyone.

I will grant that those of us who don't farm and consume what we grow and don't make our own clothing need access to food and drink. We also, however, just as we need to purchase items that may have been infected with the coronavirus and which may still have active covid-19 on them, need to return items like seltzer bottles purchased and clothes purchased. That we can buy these items but still cannot return some of them--Price Chopper has recently reopened recycling machines-- shows once again how inconsistent, irrational, and unscientific humans and the institutions and organisations they have created are. Life is indeed absurd.

The Magical College and University Tour: Musings on the Abusurdity of Best Colleges and Universities Lists.

I have to admit, I get a kind of horror film like chuckle--funny yet scary--out of these best of lists whether they are the best films of all time, the best TV shows of the 1990s, the best sculptures since time immemorial, the US News and World Report rankings of American colleges and universities, or the CS list of the best universities in the world for 2021. The reason I do is because there are fundamental problems with these lists.

Let's start with reputation. Reputations are, at least in part, intersubjective and are impacted by broader practises associated with social and cultural capital. Reputations, in other words, are, at least in part, cultural and symbolic, and are often, if not generally, impacted by ideologies that are of questionable empirical status.

Second, there are different kinds of colleges and universities. There are, in the United States, for instance, teaching colleges (Siena), research colleges (Amherst), teaching universities (Fort Hays), and research universities (Indiana University, Bloomington, Ohio University). Each of these are somewhat different making comparisons between them, other than the conclusion that they are different, problematic.

I want to focus in the rest of this blog on research universities. When we do this it becomes crystal clear that there are, as a matter of empirical fact, important differences between research universities. There are, in the US, for instance, "elite" American universities like Indiana, Michigan Harvard, and Pittsburgh all members of the elite Association of American Universities. There are also, research universities that are not members of the AAU (Albany, Kent State, Nebraska, Syracuse) because they don't meet the criteria for membership. Comparing "elite" research universities with non-"elite" research universities is possible since they are both research universities, apples. Nevertheless, they are also different and are thus, to continue with the metaphor, rather like the difference between sweet apples and tart apples.

There are also important differences among these "elite" research universities as anyone with a grasp of history knows, a difference that is akin to the differences between sweet pink lady apples and sweet honey crisp apples. One of the differences in elite Association of American Universities universities, for instance, involves the issue of whether these "elite" research universities are all purpose universities with liberal arts, business, agricultural, and engineering schools, like Ohio State, Purdue, Penn State, Michigan State, and Iowa State, all land grant institutions of their respective states, or whether they are liberal arts universities.

America's land grant colleges began life as agricultural research colleges and universities thanks to the Land Grant College Act of 1862 and had the mission of engaging in extensive agricultural research and disseminating this research to farmers in the states in which they were located, states where agriculture was once dominant.

Some of the states where land grant colleges were founded,  however,  already had existing public universities. In the period after World War II many of these eventually grew into  "elite" research oriented liberal arts universities. These non-land grant research universities, such as Indiana University, Bloomington, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa, today are essentially large scale liberal arts universities with business colleges, schools of law, and sometimes medical colleges--Indiana's medical college is in Indianapolis, home to a growing non-"elite" research university, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, IUPUI, adding an important wrinkle to any empirical analysis. Thus to compare Indiana University, Bloomington, which is basically a massive liberal arts university, to Purdue University with its applied agricultural and engineering schools, research and applied research programmes that are research intensive, and with their expanding liberal arts programmes, is problematic and analytical controls must be put in place when comparing them. One must, in other words, compare like--liberal arts at Indiana--with like--liberal arts at Purdue. Any survey that doesn't do this is problematic for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Third, it is absurd to compare some American "elite" private colleges and universities with more selective admissions criteria, and who can be selective in their admissions, save when it comes to legacies and athletes, with state colleges and universities of the research or teaching variety, with less selective admissions criteria because their mission, at least in part, is to serve the residents of that state. Again this is like comparing various types of apples with each other.

Given all this, it is hard to think of these best of college and universities lists as anything other than historically anemic and theoretically week publicity. And that seems homologous with the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism we sadly live in these days, even in colleges and universities.

The Books of My Life: Metropolis

Film scholar Thomas Elsaesser explores the influences on, origins of, making of, the three versions of, interpretations of, including in later films, the  plot of, including a detailed summary or synopsis of, and the restoration of Fritz Lang's now famous 1927 film Metropolis in his BFI monograph Metropolis (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 2000). Along the way Elsaesser notes that Metropolis's budget was half of UFA's, the German film studio where Metropolis was made, budget for 1926, explores the contexts that impacted the interpretations of Metropolis from its premiere in 1927 to the 1990s, notes that film critics at the time of its three premieres were highly critical of the film, notes that there is no real ur-text of Metropolis, that UFA hoped Metropolis would do well in the United States--it didn't--as part of the distribution agreement they made with Paramount and MGM, and explodes Lang's self-serving myth that the idea for Metropolis came to him when he and UFA producer Erich Pommer arrived in New York City by ship in 1924 and were, according to Lang, mesmerised by Manhattan's skyline. And he does all this in the compass of 87 pages.

While some may quibble with Elsaesser's hybrid theoretical approach and certain of Elsaesser's theoretical emphases and others may want more meat in any analysis of Metropolis, Elsaesser's brief monograph is an excellent introduction to the history of Metropolis and Metropolis criticism. I should note that I read the 2000 edition of Elsaesser's monograph and that he added a new forward to the 2012 reprint in which he takes account of the 27 minutes of extra footage of Metropolis discovered in 2008 and the 2010 "restoration" that brought the film close to the length of its first premiere in Berlin in 1927. For some, of course, the most recent Metropolis represents as close to the ur-text of the film we are ever likely to get, a perspective Elsaesser doesn't agree with because he, as I mentioned earlier, does not concur that there is one final and authoritative version of Metropolis.

The Books of My Life: Movie Crazy

In chapter seven of her excellent Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity (New York: Palgrave, 2001) historian and now lawyer Stephanie Barbas explores the moral panic surrounding film fandom between the 1910s and the 1950s and its relation to the rise of the narrative film and the star system within the Hollywood studio system. Though many social scientists, politicians, and writers, like Nathanael West, saw film fans, and particularly female film fans, as dangerous infantile hysterics who were too intellectually challenged to be able to distinguish reality from the fictional "reality" on screen and thought that the "riots" that occurred at Rudolph Valenitino's funeral and the increasing numbers of film fan stalkers proved it, the reality of film fandom, as Barbas tries to argue in the earlier chapters of her book, was, different from the caricatured and stereotyped picture of fans social scientists, politicians, moral reformers, and even a Hollywood fearful of government regulation, painted. 

The vast majority of film fans, males and females, Barbas argues, were not the enthralled to the fictional worlds of the cinema its critics painted them as. Instead, Barbas argues, film fans, impacted as they were by a late modernity and early postmodernity of increasing consumer capitalism, increasing urbanity, the decline of naturalist and puritanical notions of sex, and increasingly tactile and "realistic" media like film, "realistic" media which made it difficult to distinguish reality from fiction and to distinguish the real lives of film stars from the propaganda of the Hollywood star making system and the film fan magazines that grew up around them, actually tried to discern the difference between reality and fantasy and actor and celebrity. Film fans, Barbas argues, particularly in the 1910s, were not the morons of their critics sensationalistic fantasies. Instead, Barbas argues, they were pushing back against the simulations of late modernity and early postmodernity. They tried to distinguish the Barnum like hokum of the Hollywood star making machinery from the reality they wanted to know about. They wanted to know whether the stars they came to admire, adore, and even emulate--some began to dress like, speak like, and purchase the consumer goods their favourite celebrities shilled for--were as they appeared to be on the big screen.

Hollywood and the flm fan magazines, claims Barbas, tried to answer the question of whether Hollywood stars and celebrities were like the characters they played on the screen. In general, they answered that question in the affirmative. Hollywood fans, however, were, as Barbas notes, quite aware of the fact that Hollywood was manipulating them for profit, but that didn't stop them from trying to distinguish fantasy from reality and they lobbied, via letters they wrote to film magazines, and formed film fan clubs to try to get at what the celebrities they saw on the big screen were really like.

Like so much historical research grounded in archival analysis Barbas's archival research adds colour, tangibility, and vitality to her argument. However, like a lot of research and writing grounded in archival research, one is left wondering, given that such research is generally not based on a random sample, how generalisable Barbas's data and the conclusions she draws about film fans from it is. One of Barbas's conclusions one might want to question for instance, is her argument that film fan practises were grounded in an attempt to uncover and ascertain how Hollywood was suckering them. Barbas makes the case that film fans tried to deconstruct and, in the process, understand the propagandistic manipulations of late modernity and postmodernity, propagandistic simulations that would also be used to obtain American support for World War I and to buy the products of the new consumer society. But film fans were, as Barbas notes, also, simultaneously, manipulated into emulating the fictions the new consumer industries and cultural industries were trying to "sell" them. The reality, if I can still use this word in the empirical sense, is that in late modernity and early postmodernity the utilitarian empiricism of industrial late modernity met the manipulations of the new media and produced individuals who were both empirically oriented while at the same time  interpellated or drawn into a fantasy world in which buying product was also buying into, often unconsciously, a certain "reality" or meaning system and certain identities that were consistent with the brave new world of consumer capitalism and culture, a conclusion Charles Eckert came to earlier in his seminal articles on Hollywood, Hollywood stars, and consumerism.