In this new scene-by-scene break-down of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, contemporary culture critic John David Ebert frames the work in reference to an archaeology of the film's images. At the same time, Ebert connects this ancient history with"postmodern" contemporary critical theory, drawing upon Lacan, Derrida, Gadamer, and Cornelius Castoriadis, unpacking and analyzing Francis Ford Coppola's classic, one of the most famous and wildly inventive works in cinema history. In 23 chapters, Ebert interprets the longer Apocalypse Now Redux version, delving deep into the film's complex layers of...

In this new book by cultural critic John David Ebert, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film masterpiece "The Shining" is analyzed in a scene-by-scene breakdown. Drawing upon such theoreticians as Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Ebert sees the film as the attempts of a human singularity, a boy with psychic powers, to rupture the Eternal Returns of the temporal sinkhole represented by the Overlook Hotel, a place full of dead memories which recur over and over again (as the hotel's name suggests). Ebert tells the tale of the achievement of the boy Danny Torrance in breaking the...

In this new scene-by-scene breakdown of Videodrome, John David Ebert illuminates David Cronenberg's 1983 classic film utilizing ideas drawn from the fields of critical theory, comparative mythology and media studies. Borrowing concepts from such thinkers as Marshall McLuhan, Vilem Flusser and Jean Baudrillard. Ebert sees Videodrome as the tale of a man who becomes swallowed up inside of a televisual reality--as we all were by the 1980s--and lives in a world in which, as Baudrillard put it, the simulacra precede, and come to replace, the originals. The real is slowly displaced by the surreal,...

In this new collection of essays cultural critic John David Ebert traces the history of what Jacques Derrida termed "Transcendental Signifieds" as they have evolved from the archetypes of ancient myth through the philosophical Ideas of German Idealist philosophy and on down to their disintegration into the floating signifiers of today's consumer society. From myth to philosophy to science, these ultimate signifieds have undergone many transformations: beginning as the Sumerian gods, Ebert carefully traces the impacts of science and technology upon these Ideas as they changed over the...