Sejour Saas FeeReview by Peter Harcourt

The Video McLuhan consists of an assemblage of all the television appearances of the great communications theorist, Marshall McLuhan. Elegantly narrated by Tom Wolfe, these tapes also trace McLuhan's development from his days as an English scholar at Cambridge University in the 1930's to his celebrity status as the media guru of Madison Avenue the 1960's. As the tapes abundantly make clear, McLuhan was a man who looked beneath the surface distractions of contemporary culture to the structures that subtend them and which, ultimately, determine their effect on us -- altering the way we think and feel. McLuhan was a thinker who was intricate and profound. Rather than relying on linear logic -- the stuff (as he would say) of typographic man -- McLuhan believed in "probes" that would startle our conventional phenomena in liberating ways. As we move from the analogic systems of conventional television into the digital systems of the cyberworld of the Internet, McLuhan's way of thinking becomes increasingly appropriate if not, indeed, necessary. Produced by Stephanie McLuhan-Ortved and directed by Matthew Vibert, the Video McLuhan presents selections from the television appearances of Marshall McLuhan in conversation with people as diverse as Gilbert Seldes, Frank Kermode, Robert Fulford, Norman Mailer, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Coincidentally, as we move from black-and-white to colour, these tapes also comprise a record of how the technique of television interviewing has altered over the years, as did McLuhan's own style. For scholars and librarians, the Video McLuhan also includes in full his first important television appearance in 1958 plus two extended lectures that he gave at Florida State University in 1970 and at York University, just before he died, in 1979. The Video McLuhan provides an invaluable record for all students of media and of the work of Marshall McLuhan. By presenting him in conversation with other people, these tapes demonstrate, in the words of Tom Wolfe, McLuhan's "fertile and facile mind."

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