Parker Tyler
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"As a reader I am peculiarly, indeed fatally, attracted to the special kind of critical daring practiced by Parker Tyler in The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the Movies. This daring consists of two major elements: a willingness to risk overinterpretation of specific objects (the popular films and film stars that catch his endlessly roving eye) and the courage to build on these fragile and transitory creations a towering theoretical structure (a structure from which, it should be added, one can gain a unique view of the way one of our most significant cultural institutions actually works—or used to work at the height of its powers—on us)."Richard Schickel in the opening lines to The Hollywood Hallucination (1944) by Parker Tyler |
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Harrison Parker Tyler, better known as Parker Tyler (6 March 1904, New Orleans - June 1974, New York City) was an American author, poet, and film critic. Tyler had a relationship with underground filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse (1926-1994) from 1945 until his death. Their papers are held by the New York Public Library.
He wrote The Young and Evil (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1933) with Charles Henri Ford, an energetically experimental novel with obvious debts to fellow Villager Djuna Barnes, and also to Gertrude Stein. Tyler and Ford co-edited the Surrealist magazine View until it folded in 1947. A writer for the journal Film Culture, Tyler is one of the few film critics to write extensively on experimental film and underground film. From its inception in 1946, Tyler was film commentator for the historic film society Cinema 16 founded by Amos Vogel. His Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972) was one of the first books about homosexuality and film, preceding Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet (1981).
His books of film criticism include
- The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age, 1944)
- Magic and Myth of the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947)
- Chaplin: Last of the Clowns (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1948)
- The Three Faces of the Film: the Art, the Dream, the Cult (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960)
- Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictorial Treasury (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1962)
- Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1969)
- Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press, 1969)
- The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973)
He often wrote for the View, the Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Evergreen Review, and the cineaste magazines Film Culture, and Film Quarterly. Some of his books are collections of his magazine work. He received a Longview Award for Poetry in 1958.
Tyler's books became popular—and some old titles reissued after being out-of-print for years—after Tyler was mentioned several times in the novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) by Gore Vidal.
Black Sparrow Press published his poetry, including a complete and corrected text of The Granite Butterfly, first published with Bern Porter, Berkeley, Calif., 1945, as:
- The Will of Eros: Selected Poems 1930-1970 (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972)
