Today:

Today: Postmodernism Postmodernism

and Film

Key terms Postmodernism Pastiche bricoleur Meta narrative Hyperreality Simulation

Modernism v. Postmodernism Modernism is a cultural movement which

rebelled against Victorian mores. Victorianism valued human/natureOne true way of looking at the world.

Modernism: Argued for multiple ways of knowing the world

Blurring of categories

-“experience in which

“all that is solid melts into air.” - Marx

-darker side to technology and communications

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are needed to see this picture.

Markers of Cultural Modernism

ambiguity doubt risk continual change fragmentation distortion

In art

Themes

interest in language & questions of representationuncertainty of “the real”explorations of fragmentationrejection of idea that it’s possible to represent “the real” in any straightforward waymeaning is below the surface

POsTmOderNiSm Search for universals Embrace diversity and contradictions Rejects distinctions between high art

and low art Watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL8MhYq9owo&NR=1

Postmodernism incredulity of meta narratives Big Stories rejection of meta narrative Watch: Julian Schnabel:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4653135n

Pomo style

Eclecticism Collage Pastiche Irony

Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House”in Prague

Pomo terms

Pastiche: Self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture.

Campbell's Soup (1968). Andy Warhol.

Examples Pulp Fiction Jackie Brown Scream Scary Movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer This is Spinal Tap Austin Powers

Pomo terms Flattening of Affect: Technology, violence,

drugs, and the media lead to detached, emotionless, unauthentic lives

Examples 2001-A SPace Odyssey Natural Born Killers A Clockwork Orange American Psycho Gattaca Taxi Driver Lost in Translation

Pomo terms

Hyperreality:Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

Examples Matrix trilogy The Thirteenth Floor Total Recall eXistenZ The Truman Show

Pomo terms

Time Bending: Time travel provides another way to shape reality and play "what if" games with society

Examples of Time Bending 12 Monkeys Paycheck Dark City Minority Report Primer Memento Donnie Darko

Pomo terms

Altered States: Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

Examples Altered States Videodrome Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Naked Lunch A Scanner Darkly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Pomo terms

More Human than Human: Artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace, humanity

Examples More Human than Human Blade Runner Screamers Artificial Intelligence Robocop

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Pomo Nietzsche noted - arts often reflect what

is going on in a culture.

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Postmodernism and film A historical transformation of visual and narrative

forms. Challenging logic of binary oppositions. New emphasis on the activity of the spectator that

acknowledges cultural and social specificity of subject. Interest in hybrid cinema and identity politics. Aesthetic strategies of appropriation and pastiche that erode

distinction between avant-garde and popular art.

Renewed interest in the popular. A breakdown in the distinctiveness of media (film,

television, video, the digital arts).

Three senses of postmodernism

As a “cultural dominant” defining a distinct historical era.

A philosophical concept marking the end of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

An art historical concept defining a style of expression.

Three senses of postmodernism The cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson).

Huyssens: “a noticeable shift in sensibilities, practices, and discourse formations which distinguishes a postmodern set of assumptions, experiences, and propositions from that of a preceding period” (181).

A cultural dominant appropriate to the Third Machine Age of electronic information.

Realism and industrialism or market capitalism (steam power). Modernism and imperialism or monopoly capitalism (electric and

combustion power). Postmodernism and multinational or global capitalism (electronic and

nuclear power).

The ever intense penetration of the commodity form into every aspect of culture.

Three senses of postmodernism Postmodernism and post-Enlightenment

philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy as foundationalist and

epistemology centered. Truth is based on the identity of subject and object.

The turn from hermeneutic or depth models of interpretation (Jameson). Postmodernism and post-structuralism (Huyssens).

Lyotard: the decline of metanarratives. Progress as the story of history. Reason as knowledge of totality. Universality of reason. The aesthetic as a domain separate from the social and the

everyday.

Postmodern style (Jim Collins)

The move from abstraction and geometrics to the overly familiar and mass-produced.

The replacement of purity with eclecticism.

The replacement of internationalism with cultural specificity.

The replacement of invention with rearticulation.

Postmodern style (Fredric Jameson and others)

Effacement of the boundaries between a modernist “high culture” and a mass or commercial “low culture.”

Depthlessness, or accent on surface and superficiality.

Intertexuality, collage, pastiche. Cannibalization and juxtaposition of past styles.

Syntax based on discontinuity and fragmentation, or the proliferation of ideolects: ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, class-based.

Simulation: the disappearance of the referent as a ground for meaning. (Baudrillard)

Postmodern style

Subjective features. Schizo-culture: unified cogito replaced by

a decentered, fluid, “schizophrenic” mentality.

Waning of affect and the experience of intensities.

The weakening of a sense of history.

The political task of postmodern criticism

1. Jameson’s idea of “cognitive mapping.”

A restoration of links and interconnections effaced by the fragmentation and atemporality of postmodern space.

The political and didactic functions of postmodern art.

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The political task of postmodern criticism

2. Huyssens: to locate the emergent oppositional, cultural strategies within postmodernism. The aesthetic image is not distinct from

society, but intimately defines it. To critique the presumed universality of art

and the aesthetic. Restoring a sense of the relation between

art and the popular: a renewed interest in the (multiple) pleasures of popular media.

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The political task of postmodern criticism

3. Jim Collins: the postmodern subject as multiple and contradictory, acted upon but also acting upon. The technologically sophisticated

bricoleur and textual “poacher,” appropriating and recombining signs according to personal or social contexts.

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A project might be pomo if: It is a rehash of old ideas Superheros become super sexy heros Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

become moments in their lives. Entertainment Tonight + Sit Com = The

Osbournes

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Pomo film 1950s & 1960s: French New Wave Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht,

Fellini, Salvador Dali Later: Jane Campion’s Two Friends’

Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Terantino’s Pulp Fiction; David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

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Postmodern Film -responds to

1) boy meets girl 2) boy loses girl 3) boy finds girl

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Pomo film upset mainstream conventions of

narrative structure plays w/suspension of disbelief less recognizable logic

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Examples The Matrix What the Bleep Do We Know? Dark City Crash Being John Malkovich Blade Runner

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Run, Lola, Run (1998)

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