What is Cinema? Critical Approaches
Postmodernism
Lecture structure
1. What is postmodernism?
2. Periodisation
3. Depthlessness and the simulacrum
4. Intertextuality and pastiche
1. What is postmodernism?
• How are we invited to engage with characters
in Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)?
• Deborah Thomas: affective moments that
invite ‘allegiance’ to characters vs ironic
distance
• Fredric Jameson: a ‘waning of affect’
characterises postmodern culture.
Postmodernism and film studies
• John Hill: there is no unified body of
‘postmodern film theory’. Rather,
postmodernism has prompted film theorists to
turn away from the ‘grand’ (classical) theories
popular in the 1960s and 1970s towards
more local and specific issues.
2. Periodisation
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
• Is postmodernism a way of periodising history or a
range of aesthetic styles?
Phenomena associated with modernity
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Rise of the nation state
Industrialisation
Rise of capitalism
Emergence of socialist
countries
Rise of representative
democracy
Increasing role of science and
technology
Urbanisation
Mass literacy
Mass social movements
Proliferation of mass media
• modernity and barbarity
• photography and film as symptomatic
technologies of modernity
• Postmodernism: ‘a periodising concept
whose function is to correlate the emergence
of new formal features in culture with the
emergence of a new type of social life and a
new economic order – what is often
euphemistically called modernisation,
postindustrial or consumer society, the
society of the media or the spectacle, or
multinational capitalism’ (Fredric Jameson,
‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London:
Pluto, 1985), pp. 111–25 (p. 113))
3. Depthlessness and the
simulacrum
• Jameson: depth model (modernism) >
surface (postmodernism). Postmodernism is
characterised by a ‘new depthlessness’ and a
‘weakening of historicity’.
• Simulacrum: copy for which no original exists
• ‘The world thereby momentarily loses its
depth and threatens to become a glossy skin,
[…] a rush of filmic images without density’
(Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 34)
• Jean Baudrillard: signifier severed from
signified.
Cuban revolution,
anticolonialism, guerrilla warfare;
revolutionary and rebellious
spirit; wearer is likely to be a
leftie
Rebellious, exotic,
iconic, cool, tried
and tested; wearer
is postmodern
• Television as quintessential postmodern
medium (consumerism, distraction)
• Films like The Matrix and The Truman Show
imagine what Baudrillard calls ‘hyperreality’,
the replacement of reality by mere
simulations.
4. Intertextuality and pastiche
• Jameson suggests that postmodern
intertextual practices substitute a history of
styles for ‘real’ history.
• Eg Tarantino has been charged with making
‘contentless’ films that merely recombine film
references
• Jameson: parody (modernist) vs pastiche
(postmodernist)
• Pastiche: ‘a neutral practice of such mimicry,
without any of parody’s ulterior motives,
amputated of parody’s satiric impulse, devoid
of laughter’ (Postmodernism, p. 17)
• But postmodern irony, parody and pastiche
can be oppositional and critical, as for
example in ‘New Queer Cinema’.
• Warren Buckland: is Wes Anderson’s work
best understood in terms of the postmodern
‘smart’ film or the ‘new sincerity’?