the poster art is a nice blend of american and foreign and nicely captures the evolution of the medium, but the accompanying text is seriously worthless, consisting of synopses for each film written in the worst middle-school syntax and replete with glaring typographical errors. it would have been nice to read some informative blurbs about the poster art itself, and about how hitchcock, a master or self-publicity, advertised his pictures more broadly. the cover shot on the book is from the buzz-generating psycho campaign, yet the text accompanying the psycho posters mentions nothing of the policy of excluding tardy movie-goers from the picture so as to maximize the experience. the interested reader may find a broader collection of images online, although without the crisp clarity of the photographs in this book. three stars primarily because of the disappointing text.

I enjoyed looking at this book - I got it from the library. It's got many posters and lobby cards from Hitchcock's works, all in colour. And it's not just the same ones you see everywhere. This has posters from other countries too. Some of them are really WEIRD. Especially the Polish ones. But interesting. I think you should give this book a try if you like Hitchcock.

You have to have this book it tells so much about alfred hitchcocks movies ...

An interesting book, that provides a new perspective on our western idea of "progress" and how this myth is constructed and maintained around the world

Mark Poster walks the reader through sections of the history of 20th century French philosophy, delving a bit into other times and nations as well, in order to tell a story about what he terms "existential marxism". The sections on the influence of Hegel, as mediated by Kojeve and Hyppolite, are fairly good, though Vincent Descombes _Modern French Philosophy_ is better. Considering the importance that the early Marx has in Poster's narrative, Poster's handling of Marx and his French reception is a little quick, and doesn't offer as much as it should to readers unfamiliar with the _1844 Manuscripts_. Poster's discussion of existentialism is a little better, though the almost complete lack of attention to the philosophy Kierkegaard and Heidegger was a little puzzling. Poster's treatment of Merleau-Ponty is quite interesting, as is the relatively in depth section on Henri Lefebvre. Though it may not have been his intention, Poster demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre prefigure a lot of ideas in parlance among 'postmodern' theorists, like the focus on ambiguity and open-endedness in M-P's case, and an analysis on the loss of signification and the alienation of every day life in Lefebvre's writing. Given Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre's anticipation of and contributions to much of what are now considered 'postmodern' ideas, it's a shame the two are not more widely read. Hopefully Poster's sympathetic treatment will go a little ways to rectifying this.

My biggest complaint about the book is that an inordinately large portion of is spent on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. While the sections on Sartre's ambivalent and conflict-ridden relationship with the French Communist Party and CP intellectuals is interesting, it doesn't advance the book's goal of establishing 'existential marxism' as a viable and important historical development. Granted, Sartre is important, particularly to Poster's chosen focus on 'existential marxism', but some of the Sartre could have been trimmed in favor of more attention to other figures. Also, given the prominence of Sartre, it would have been nice to have had an exposition on Simone De Beauvoir, who is relegated completely to a supporting role, providing biographical and corraborative quotes to Poster's Sartre without being presented as an important and original figure in her own right. Conspicuously lacking from this book is the Situationist International, a particularly glaring oversight given the importance which the events of May 1968 play in Poster's story. The Situationists were very important to the May revolution, and yet they receive only a one line mention in Poster's exposition on Lefebvre. Perhaps the Situationists absence was deliberate, as focusing on the SI would undercut Poster's thesis that May of '68 vindicates the importance of existential marxism. To be fair, including the SI would have meant lengthening the book pretty substantially, and introducing several new concepts that wouldn't have advanced the story Poster wishes to tell. Most of my problems with the book arise because it's a work of intellectual history, not of philosophy, something that Poster admits. In spite of its flaws, I'd recommend this book for anyone looking for a good introduction to the points of contact between marxism and existentialism, or anyone who's interested in the intellectual history of post-war France. It's well-written, fairly concice, well-paced, and informative.

Like so much travelling these days under the fashionable banner of "post-modernism," Baudrillard and his ilk fuel the arrogant irrelevancy that has reached epidemic proportions in the lower reaches of the Humanities, exemplified by that most dubious of 'disciplines,' "cultural studies." A no less fashionable curative to this pretentious non-sense is the (otherwise, but much more fruitfully, problematic) work of Richard Rorty, particularly his widely-read book, CONTINGENCY, IRONY AND SOLIDARITY.

critics of "postmodernism" often fail to see past ideological blinders or perhaps are just too lazy to actually read the works of (anti)theorists like jean baudrillard. this collection is superb as mark poster offers a concise overview of baudrillard's "project" and also reveals baudrillard's work in all its iconoclasm and hyperbole all at once. this definitely makes for a fascinating read if not a critical insight into late modern society.

Yet another tiresome volume devoted to post-everything pseudo-disciplines. Poster has almost nothing original to say, but that doesn't stop him. Read on, if you must, to be regailed yet again with clueless francophile jargon about our postmodern, post-colonial, post-structurlist, post-disciplinary society and you just may go postal.

Poster's work is basically about how Foucault and other poststructuralists are great in understanding phenomena of the "past." Unfortunately, the crux of his argument doesn't appear until the final chapters where he reads (and misreads) de Certeau and Foucault. It's good that he tries to cross disciplinary boundaries, but his reading and articulation of "cultural history" is just too narrow.