When The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man first appeared in 1956, the movies and the moviegoing experience were generally not regarded as worthy of serious scholarly consideration. Yet, French critic and social theorist Edgar Morin perceived in the cinema a complex phenomenon capable of illuminating fundamental truths about thought, imagination, and human nature - which allowed him to connect the mythic universe of gods and spirits present within the most primitive societies to the hyperreality emanating from the images projected on the screen. Now making its English-language debut, this...

Worshipped as heroes, treated as gods, movie stars are more than objects of admiration. A star's influence touches on every aspect of ordinary life, dictating taste in fashion, lifestyle, and desire. Edgar Morin's remarkable investigation into the cultural and social significance of the star system traces its evolution from the earliest days of the cinema - when stars like Chaplin, Garbo, and Valentino lived at a distance from their fans, far beyond all mortals, to the postwar era in which stars like Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe became familiar and familial, less unapproachable but more...

Edgar Morin, one of France s leading intellectual figures and known as a path-breaking and innovative sociologist and researcher of popular culture, recounts the story of his experiences in the cauldron of change that was 1960s California, including his encounters with some of the leading minds of that time. The book combines Morin s accounts of his experiences with his own search for answers to fundamental questions about the human condition. For a few months, the author had a profound feeling of being drawn into the heart of the great questions, played out personal and societal level. The...