Geoffrey O’Brien: THE PHANTOM EMPIRE

The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century
Geoffrey O’Brien
W.W. Norton; 1995

This is a completely original book, that, within just over 200 pages manages to synthesize the history of cinema, our society’s dependence on the image, the interglobal universality of movie conventions, and world history being known only through the distillation of Hollywood. O’Brien writes in paragraph-long sentences, and the entire book seems like one long reel of thought, philosophy, titles, genres, names, faces, imagery. He writes as though this book is film: a rapid succession of images breathlessly pass through the Steenbeck viewscreen of your mind.

It is a shame that this is currently out of print (although you may be lucky to find a copy online or in the plethora of publisher’s clearance stores across the nation) because it could be a modern classic. I cannot think of another piece of cinema writing that accomplishes so much in so few pages. At once it gathers various cinema movements throughout the world, and explains how each has affected how we see, and how what we see affects us.

In the post-McLuhan age with the bombardment of media that quite often has no message, much has been written about the overload of visual information, but O’Brien’s thesis is that this is by no means a new revelation. In the 20th century, film has recreated history, preserved people and events from other ages, and has narrowed our knowledge of everything. I love the analogy he uses of seeing a home-movie of grandma in the garden, and watching this at a time when she has passed away, and the garden is currently covered in snow. Cinema makes the past become the present, and all that we have come to learn of the past is through cinema. (For instance, future relatives will only get to know whatever facet of grandma’s personality is demonstrated within that small clip of film.)

The chapter entitled “Garden of Allah” demonstrates how images have taken over our lives, not least in how strangers share a mutual recognition of them. “A Short History of Fun” breezes through the history of cinema’s first 100 years, and then kind of retells it from a different perspective with “Orpheus and His Brothers”, illustrating how foreign-language cinema brought the “seriousness” into film, where realistic black-and-white pervaded over escapist colour, where it was harder to remember the phrase, “it’s only a movie”.

This blends into the chapter “Ghost Opera”, telling of when cinema was not yet “art, but filmed records, such as as the Lumiere Programme. “Author of the Visible” details the emergence of a “creator”, aka- the director. Suddenly, craft was born.

“The Souk of Knowledge…” illustrates cinema’s documentation of the world, where foreign spaces become familiar to the viewer (for this theory, he uses the western genre). Then symbolically, all the world is a stage, as other parts of the globe replicate Hollywood, in “The Italian System”, where Cinecetta rivals Tinseltown, where Cabiria predates Birth of a Nation, where the Italian film industry becomes a carbon copy of Hollywood forms.

From that depiction of exploitation, we segue into “A Ticket to Hell”, in which horror films depict the darkest side of human nature, and then “The Magic Carpet” tells of humans’ ineffectual response to the image, because the world is distilled into one big sound bite. Finally, we end on the cinema not yet untapped, the true 3D movie of them all- the subconscious. “Dream Sequence” examines our unconscious states’ ability to evoke internal imagery even more perfect than cinema, and our saturated memories playing like little movies.

The analyses of each chapter are to hopefully illustrate how each piece blends together, like in a film. This short piece cannot do justice, however, to the arresting, neck-snapping way in which O’Brien’s text blurs past you. A flood of bite-sized imagery, snippets of time, sound bites of logic, dance in and out of your field of perception that one needs to review their contents again- like in a film. 

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Originally appeared in Volume #1, Issue #1.