Shadowland

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Actors: Robert Nolan Clark , Jim Steinbrenner , Nicole Cummins , Don McLendon , Erin Calahan , Carlos Antonio Leon , Stephanie Kronenberg , Caitlin McIntosh , Donna M. Parroné , David Martyn Conley , Taylor Louderman , Dale D. Moore , Jay Kelley , Jason Contini , Bill Stine

Director: Wyatt Weed

IMDB Rate: 5.8 out of 10 (34 votes)

Plot Summary:Best-selling author and philosopher Umberto Eco is currently resident at the Louvre, and his chosen theme of study is the vertigo of lists. Reflecting on this enormous trove of human achievements, in his lyrical intellectual style he has embarked on an investigation of the phenomenon of cataloging and collecting. This book, featuring lavish reproductions of artworks from the Louvre and other world-famous collections, is a philosophical and artistic sequel to Ecos recent acclaimed books, History of Beauty and On Ugliness, books in which he delved into the psychology, philosophy, history, and art of human forms. Eco is a modern-day Diderot, and here he examines the Western minds predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a giddiness of lists but shows how in the right hands it can be a poetics of catalogues. From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhols compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times.