Review by Bruce Powe

Alberghi PortugalWe see McLuhan alive again. eerily present, vivid and vital, his mind sparking, probing. Here the process of his thinking is exposed over two decades of conversations, arguments, interviews, lectures, debates, jokes, provocations, puns and illuminations, above all illuminations. The Man still wakes you up, makes you sit up, involve yourself, ask questions, and laugh. This is what these indispensable video documents present to us and preserve for us: the play and exploration of a unique sensibility, part poet, part philosopher, part merry intellectual prankster, part searing critic. The Video McLuhan invites Tom Wolfe to link the analogical channels of McLuhan's mazes into analytical cohesion, an arresting point of view. Wolfe invaluablycites the Teilhard de Chardin background to McLuhan's visionary glimpses of the electric, connected cosmos. And this is part of what we see: McLuhan's sensibility responding, his mind making quick connections, finding connections, his every pronouncement declaring that all is connection. And more: we get long uninterrupted lectures that offer arias of insight withcomic digressions, satirical spasms. Invaluable too are the exchanges between McLuhan and Frank Kermode -- cigarette smoke swirls in the TV studio where the two talk, all the wisps and curlicues looking uncannily like sprites and spirits accompanying the talking heads -- and between McLuhan and Malcolm Muggeridge and Norman Mailer. I admire what Stephanie McLuhan-Ortved has accomplished with these archives: she has given in these tapes a portrait of the whole man moving, changing, expanding his ideas, discovering new links, trying first this and then that, improvising, expanding what we can know and see. How will we remember McLuhan? I believe through something like this, in these restored black and white and colour images, where a courageous and curious intellect and sensibility both registers and investigates the transformations of the wildfire new world of electronic media.

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