Modernism- A definition
In the field of art the broad movement in Western art, architecture and design which self-consciously rejected the past as a model for the art of the present. Hence the term modernist or modern art. Modernism gathered pace from about 1850. Modernism proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. It is thus characterised by constant innovation. But modern art has often been driven too by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the Realism of Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as Postmodernism.
(Mr Ford’s Blog)
Modernism relates more to art and architecture than film. It was theorised in the 1850’s alongside the industrial revolution, with the idea of Innovation.
Post Modernism
any of a number of trends ormovements in the arts and literature developing in the 1970s inreaction to or rejection of the dogma, principles, or practices ofestablished modernism, especially a movement in architecture andthe decorative arts running counter to the practice and influenceof the International Style and encouraging the use of elementsfrom historical vernacular styles and often playful illusion,decoration, and complexity.
(Dictionary.com)
Postmodernist film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism through the cinematic medium. Postmodernist film upsets the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroys (or, at least, toys with) the audience's suspension of disbelief to create a work in which a less-recognizable internal logic forms the film's means of expression.
Postmodernism-a definition
Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (ie experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading (check out your Reception Theory) and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously. Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (eg using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).
HyperReality
The Blurring of the line between reality and fantasy
Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterize the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Some famous theorists of hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco.
Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.[1]
Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges (who already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.
Postmodern Theories
Jacques Derrida proposed that a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text
(Derrida 1981, 61).
Levi Strauss and his theory of 'binary opposites', he also however developed the theory of 'bricolage'.
Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan who coined the phrase 'the medium is the message'. By this he means that the manner in which the message is shown becomes more important than the meaning of the message itself.
Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.
Frederic Jameson sees postmodernism as vacuous and trapped in circular references. Nothing more that a series of self referential 'jokes' which have no deeper meaning or purpose.
Jean-François Lyotard
rejected what he called the “grand narratives” or universal “meta-narratives.”
Grand narratives refer to the great theories of history, science, religion, politics. For example, Lyotard rejects the ideas that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress. He would reject universal political ‘solutions’ such as communism or capitalism. He also rejects the idea of absolute freedom.
In studying media texts it is possible also to apply this thinking to a rejection of the Western moralistic narratives of Hollywood film where good triumphs over evil, or where violence and exploitation are suppressed for the sake of public decency.
Lyotard favours ‘micronarratives’ that can go in any direction, that reflect diversity, that are unpredictable.
Rosenau (1993)
1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5. By adamently rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.
Hyperreality examples
1.A magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer.
2.Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI(e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with all settings super-imposed).
3.A well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).
4.Any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts" (e.g. "General Ignorance" from QI, where the questions have seemingly obvious answers, which are actually wrong).
5.Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of the human beings.
6.Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally 'creation out of nothing'): Disney World; Dubai; Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas.
7.TV and film in general (especially "reality" TV), due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds. The current trend is to glamorize the mundane using histrionics.
8.A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating a world of endless identical products.
9.A life which cannot be (e.g. the perfect facsimile of a celebrity's invented persona).
10.A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of a bodily or psychologically unattainable partner.
11.A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artifact, by simulating the feel of age or aging.
12.Constructed languages (such as E-Prime) or "reconstructed" extinct dialects.
13.Second Life The distinction becomes blurred when it becomes the platform for RL (Real Life) courses and conferences, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or leads to real world interactions behind the scenes.
14.Weak virtual reality which is greater than any possible simulation of physical reality.
The fourth wall
3 walls around the actor and the fourth wall is the camera, with the viewer behind the character. When actors look down the camera and interact with the audience, this is breaking the fourth wall.
Michael Cain – Alfie. Famous for breaking off to look down the camera at audience and talk to them.
By showing the walls of the set reminds the audience that this is just a film.
Bricolage
Combining 2 elemnets that shouldn’t go together to create something new (Such as the Queen with a safety pin through her nose)
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