CHAPTER 2: POST MODERNISM

02 POSTMODERNISM AND FILM

What makes films postmodern? • Postmodernism is late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories. • Postmodernist film are known to challenge the mainstream conventions of narrative structures and characterization, while also destroying the audiences suspension of disbelief in order to create a work in which a less recognizable internal logic forms the mediums means of representation and expression. For the film to convey their desired meaning, they are also known to maintain conventional elements to help orient the audience.

What are the conventions of postmodern films? Postmodernist films include concepts such as pastiche, flattening of affect, hyper reality, time bending, altered states and more human then human. • Pastiche - an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work or artist Flattening of affect – this involves technology, violence, drugs and the media lead to detached, emotionless, unauthentic lives. • Hyper-reality – where technology creates realities which are original or more desirable than the real world. • Time bending – used to connote the importance of time travel, as it relates to how time travel provides another way to shape reality. Postmodern films are also known to include other key concepts. For example, postmodern films also include concepts like a pre-fabrication which is similar to how simulation is used in movies but this draws the audience closer to already existing and noticeable scenes, and these are basically reused in narratives, dialogue etc. A bricolage is also used, which is where a person such as a producer, editor or director usually builds a film like a collage of different film styles and genres. It also includes met fictional which is were someone within a film write someone writing within a film to demonstrate its functionality and is used for shifts in narrative, impossible jumps in time or to maintain emotional distance for the narrator. Historic met fictional is a technique referring to novels that fictionalise actual historical events and characters. Temporal distortion is the jumping of time backwards and forwards. Minimalism is a technique used to demonstrate characters that are unexceptional and events which usually occur. Postmodernist films are also known to use other characteristics such as techno culture, paranoia, maximalist, faction, participation and magical realism.

1994 CRIME/ CRAMA

Examples of postmodern films Pulp Fiction (1994) • Written by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary and Directed by Quentin Tarantino • Tarantino can be considered as one of the masters of postmodernist cinema. In fact most of all his films are a pastiche of every kind of film and pop culture he has admired for several years. Pulp Fiction is a dark comedy which does not separate the world into good and evil. In fact it tries to disqualify the division completely. • The film is told in chapters and follows a novel like style of telling its story which is also a feature in other Tarantino’s film. Unlike the classical Hollywood films with postmodernist cinema, the lines between the hero and the anti-hero blurred. Tarantino had once said, “I always hope that if one million people see my movie, they see one million different movies”. He also involves themes of intertextuality in many of his films, conveying them to be a good example of postmodernist cinema.