Today:

1. Today: • Postmodernism • Postmodernism and Film

2. Key terms • Postmodernism • Pastiche • bricoleur • Meta narrative • Hyperreality • Simulation

3. Modernism v. Postmodernism • Modernism is a cultural movement which rebelled against Victorian mores. • Victorianism valued human/nature One 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

4. Markers of Cultural Modernism • ambiguity • doubt • risk • continual change • fragmentation • distortion

5. In art

7. 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

8. 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

9. Postmodernism • incredulity of meta narratives • Big Stories • rejection of meta narrative • Watch: Julian Schnabel: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4653135n

10. Pomo style • Eclecticism • Collage • Pastiche • Irony Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House”in Prague

11. Pomo terms • Pastiche:Self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture.

16. Campbell's Soup (1968). Andy Warhol.

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

18. Pomo terms • Flattening of Affect: Technology, violence, drugs, and the media lead to detached, emotionless, unauthentic lives

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

20. Pomo terms • Hyperreality:Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

21. Examples • Matrix trilogy • The Thirteenth Floor • Total Recall • eXistenZ • The Truman Show

22. Pomo terms • Time Bending: Time travel provides another way to shape reality and play "what if" games with society

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

24. Pomo terms • Altered States: Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

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

26. Pomo terms • More Human than Human: Artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace, humanity

27. Examples More Human than Human • Blade Runner • Screamers • Artificial Intelligence • Robocop

28. Pomo • Nietzsche noted - arts often reflect what is going on in a culture. 28

29. 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).

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

35. 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)

40. 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.

41. 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.

42. 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. 42

43. 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. 43

44. 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 44

45. 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 45

46. Postmodern Film -responds to • 1) boy meets girl • 2) boy loses girl • 3) boy finds girl 46

47. Pomo film • upset mainstream conventions of narrative structure • plays w/suspension of disbelief • less recognizable logic 47

48. Examples • The Matrix • What the Bleep Do We Know? • Dark City • Crash • Being John Malkovich • Blade Runner 48

49. Run, Lola, Run (1998) 49