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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The political task of postmodern criticism

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.

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. 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.