Postmodern Film

Question 1

historical factors

Answer 1

rapid development and ongoing convergence of different media and the proliferation of screens in our world since they have created a condition of media saturation

Question 2

postmodern aesthetics

Answer 2

• Lose of faith in certain philosophical traditions: all encompassing theory, search for truth
• Those that stem from enlightenment
• Response to enlightenment thinking: Jean Leotard
• Social movement politics + identity politics: movements
• Enormous demographic shifts: Baby boomer

Question 3

identity

Answer 3

•Redefined the way we define, understand, think about, role identity plays
oRefers to mass mobilization of identity
oRadical rethinking of identity that takes place through movements

Question 4

Rise of multinational capitalism

Answer 4

oProliferation of international corporations
oExacerbate income gap
oInternational division of labour
oDeveloping: industrial + Developed: service
•Continuous expansion of consumer markets
oCan’t escape adverts: part of our private lives

Question 5

rapid development and ongoing convergence of different media and the proliferation of screens

Answer 5

oEspecially by tv
oMakes sure we are bombarded by lots of info that we can’t process
oEngage with world through screen
•Our world is saturated with media

Question 6

postmodern condition

Answer 6

• Difficult to tell apart from real world

* Where reality ends + representation starts is difficult to tell

Question 7

Postmodernism + Modernism

Answer 7

continuation of modernism and a reaction against it
both tend to privilege fragmentation over unity, shock over beauty, and form over content, see the world anew, rather than familiar
•Both refuse that art can get access to truth, or even existence of truth
•Multiple truths, multiple perspectives + realities

Question 8

Postmodernism + Modernism: key difference + divide

Answer 8

postmodernism is characterized by skepticism about the possibility of creating anything new or original; as a result it claims that we must resign ourselves to citing and reciting past forms, past iconography, past traditions
•Exhausted modernism aesthetics
•No more original ideas
•Functioning as archaeologists

Question 9

Attributes of Postmodernism: Pastiche

Answer 9

Fredric Jameson explains the logic of postmodern pastiche when he writes, “in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum” (115)

Question 10

architectural discourse

Answer 10

• Strip things down to most basic elements
• Stripping away from ornamentation
• Postmodernism: adorned with ornamentation
• Play with multiplicity
• Reference to diff time periods, defined as a mashup

Question 11

Intertextual references

Answer 11

Postmodern texts cite other texts by making explicit or implicit reference to them

Question 12

Intermixture of “high art” and “low culture.”

Answer 12

serves to question prevailing distinctions between “high” and “low” and to generate works characterized by accessibility and reproducibility.
•Roy Lichtenstein: hand paints individual cells of comic strips, made up of a series of dots
•Jeff koons
•Implicitly question whether distinction can be made betw high + low
•Art by accessibility (recognizable) + reproducibility (employed mass production method, high output with no effort)

Question 13

Artists

Answer 13

typically willing to borrow anything so as to repackage it as something else or to recontextualize it within something else. In so doing, they may change or even annul the significance of the borrowed item

Question 14

Intermixture of “high art” and “low culture.”

Answer 14

•Film has widespread availability + appeal
•High art and low culture being put in conversation
•Barbara Kruger: reproduces 50s ads + slaps on texts with explicitly political agenda
oSubvert meanings of original images
•Andy Warhol: strips meaning, reproduces Marilyn’s profile so many times, it just becomes an icon

Question 15

Self-reflexivity

Answer 15

frequency and the functions it typically serves do. Respectively, the art film and the radical film often use self- reflexive techniques to draw attention to the film’s creator and to force spectators to engage with a film intellectually rather than emotionally. In the case of the postmodern film, however, self-reflexivity is commonplace and often serves to locate the text within a larger mediascape with which the viewer is assumed to have extensive familiarity

Question 16

Self-reflexivity

Answer 16

• Fredrickson: not capable of making political statements
• Other argue that it can: example Sadie Benning + Barbara Kruger
• More common now to see self reflexivity
• Way to place itself in larger context of media saturation