Today:
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Postmodernism
Postmodernism
and Film
Key terms
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Postmodernism
Pastiche
bricoleur
Meta narrative
Hyperreality
Simulation
Modernism v. Postmodernism
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Modernism is a cultural movement which
rebelled against Victorian mores.
Victorianism valued human/nature
One true way of looking at the world.
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Modernism: Argued for multiple
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ways of knowing the world
Blurring of categories
-“experience in which
“all that is solid melts into air.” - Marx
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
-darker side to technology and communications
Markers of Cultural
Modernism
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ambiguity
doubt
risk
continual change
fragmentation
distortion
In art
Themes
interest in language & questions of
representation
uncertainty of “the real”
explorations of fragmentation
rejection of idea that it’s possible to
represent “the real” in any straightforward
way
meaning is below the surface
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POsTmOderNiSm
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Search for universals
Embrace diversity and contradictions
Rejects distinctions between high art
and low art
Watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL8M
hYq9owo&NR=1
Postmodernism
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incredulity of meta narratives
Big Stories
rejection of meta narrative
Watch: Julian Schnabel:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?i
d=4653135n
Pomo style
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Eclecticism
Collage
Pastiche
Irony
Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House”in Prague
Pomo terms
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Pastiche: Self-referential, tongue-in-
cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture.
Campbell's Soup (1968). Andy Warhol.
Examples
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Pulp Fiction
Jackie Brown
Scream
Scary Movie
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
This is Spinal Tap
Austin Powers
Pomo terms
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Flattening of Affect: Technology, violence,
drugs, and the media lead to detached,
emotionless, unauthentic lives
Examples
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2001-A SPace Odyssey
Natural Born Killers
A Clockwork Orange
American Psycho
Gattaca
Taxi Driver
Lost in Translation
Pomo terms
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Hyperreality:Technologically
created realities are often more
authentic or desirable than the real
world
Examples
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Matrix trilogy
The Thirteenth Floor
Total Recall
eXistenZ
The Truman Show
Pomo terms
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Time Bending: Time travel
provides another way to shape reality and play
"what if" games with society
Examples of Time Bending
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12 Monkeys
Paycheck
Dark City
Minority Report
Primer
Memento
Donnie Darko
Pomo terms
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Altered States: Drugs and
technology provide a darker, sometimes
psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities
Examples Altered States
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Videodrome
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Naked Lunch
A Scanner Darkly
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Pomo terms
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More Human than
Human: Artificial intelligence, robotics,
and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace,
humanity
Examples More Human than
Human
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Blade Runner
Screamers
Artificial Intelligence
Robocop
Pomo
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Nietzsche noted - arts often reflect what
is going on in a culture.
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Postmodernism and film
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A historical transformation of visual and narrative
forms.
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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
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As a “cultural dominant” defining a
distinct historical era.
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A philosophical concept marking the
end of the ideals of the Enlightenment.
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An art historical concept defining a
style of expression.
Three senses of postmodernism
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The cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson).
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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.
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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
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Postmodernism and post-Enlightenment
philosophy.
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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.
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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
Postmodern style (Jim Collins)
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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)
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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
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Subjective features.
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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
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1. Jameson’s idea of “cognitive
mapping.”
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A restoration of links and
interconnections effaced by the
fragmentation and atemporality of
postmodern space.
The political and didactic functions of
postmodern art.
The political task of postmodern criticism
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2. Huyssens: to locate the emergent
oppositional, cultural strategies within
postmodernism.
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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
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3. Jim Collins: the postmodern
subject as multiple and contradictory,
acted upon but also acting upon.
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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:
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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
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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
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upset mainstream conventions of
narrative structure
plays w/suspension of disbelief
less recognizable logic
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Examples
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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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