the postmodern attitude. thesis: you live in the postmodern world, and prefer the aesthetics and...
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The PostmodernAttitude
Thesis:
You live in the postmodern world, and prefer the aesthetics and values of postmodernism, whether you are aware of it or not.
(You probably will like Run Lola Run more than Blue)
Thesis:
The Hollywood Model is based upon modernism (but it is changing).
•20th Century capitalism
•Resolved linear narratives
•A center to the universe
•Respect for metanarratives
•Social decorum
Thesis:
Not all parts of the world share the postmodern vision.
•Fundamentalist Islam
•Fundamentalist Christianity
•Ultra-Conservative Americans
•Ultra-Orthodox Jews
•Fundamentalist Hindi
Thesis:
World cinema is a battleground between fundamentalism, modernism and postmodernism.
Agenda:
What is postmodernism?
What is modernism?
What films reflect the postmodern vs. modern vision?
How does the fact that we live in the postmodern era impact our ability to appreciate both postmodern and alternative cinema?
1947
Modern or Postmodern?
Modern or Postmodern?
US Steel
Aluminum Company of America
International Business Machines
Modern or Postmodern?
A gay Southern Baptist who practices Buddhist meditation and believes in the Big Bang theory.
From Realism to Hyperrealityby Way of Postmodernism
(It’s a European thing)
“European cinema’s defining aesthetic is realism.[It] has pre-cinematic origins in the nineteenth century European realist novel and in pre-twentieth century Western visual arts…as progressive attempts to represent a concrete ‘reality.’ The ideology of ‘realism’ is one of the means by which European cinema has traditionally sought to differentiate itself from Hollywood.”
--Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema
Social Realism in Crime Films:Hollywood vs. Europe
Part III 4:29 1990 HQ 2:28
The Origins of Realism(It’s a European thing)
History of European Art
Rooted in the “classics” and Scripture (metanarratives)
Formal and stylized
“High art”
Modernist, rational view based upon the principles of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
Depictions of the ideal
God at the center
The Modernist View
God, reason and progress
Twin pillars of the Judeo Christian tradition and Greek/Roman culture
There was a center to the universe.
Progress is based upon knowledge, and man is capable of discerning objective absolute truths
Modernism is linked to capitalism—progressive economic administration of world
Modernization of 3rd world countries (imposition of modern Western values)
Liberal Humanism: View of Literature & Art
Good literature is of timeless significance.
The text will reveal constants, universal truths, about human nature, because human nature itself is constant and unchanging.
Good literature is honest and sincere.
Art is to be respected, and belongs on a pedestal.
There are accepted traditional standards for different art forms & genres that should be obeyed and respected.
Late 1800s
Industrialization of Europe
Rise of naturalism and realism in the arts
Questioning of tradition values
Focus of art shifts from “kings and rulers” to the common man
Themes of alienation, oppression, dehumanization, poverty
Birth of existentialism
1900-1950
World Wars I & II
Marxist challenge to capitalism
Oppression of workers and lower class
Imperialism and colonialism
Questioning of traditional worldviews in the arts and science (Freud and Einstein)
A Questioning of Modernity
“Things fall apart,The centre cannot hold,Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” --Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Realism & Naturalism
Naturalism: The idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world.”
Influenced by Darwinism
Focus on common people
Victims of industrialized society
Abandonment of artificial literary conventions
Loss of decorum
Neorealism in European Cinema
Italian Neorealism French New Wave British Social Realism
Andre Bazin (1918-1958)
Liked films that focused on everyday psychological experience
Italian Neorealism (The Bicycle Thief)
Disliked modernist, expressionistic
Disliked films that imposed a political ideology on the viewer
Long takes, of surrounding environment
Impact of environment on people(French determinism)
Italian Neorealism (1940-50s)
Response to artificiality of cinema of the Fascist period
Influenced by French poetic realism and American literary naturalism (e.g., Hemingway)
Experiences of poor and socially marginalized
“Slice of life”; things and facts in time and place (versimo)
Ambivalence of everyday experience
Some took strong social political stance
Marxist, with a hopeful, humanistic dimension
Italian Neorealism (1940-50s)
CHARACTERISTICS
On-location shooting
Long takes
Natural light
Medium and long shots
Non-professional actors
Working class protagonists
Environment as important as actors
Italian Neorealism (1940-50s)
CESARE ZAVATTINI
“Some Ideas on the Cinema” (1953)
1. Portray real or everyday people, using nonprofessional actors in real settings
2. Examine socially significant themes
3. Promote the “organic” development ofsituations--the “real flow of life”--in which
complications are rarely resolved
Italian Neorealism (1940-50s)
CESARE ZAVATTINI
“Identification with the common man in the crowd.”
“Take dialogue and actors from the street.”
“Reality in American films is unnaturally filtered.”
French New Wave (1958-64)
Response to French “tradition of quality” (“staged” literary scripts)
Cahiers du Cinema
Auteurism
Rebellion against authority & convention
Existential outlook (post-WWII)
Zeitgeist: France, Late 1950s
The Fourth Republic
20 governments between 1946-58
Algerian War for independence (people questioned colonial policies)
More Algerians killed by French than French killed by Germans (ironic occupation)
Failed occupation in Indochina
Threat of nuclear war (Cold War)
French “Tradition of Quality”
“Le cinema de papa”
Producer-controlled studio system
Required certification from national film school (Institut Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques)
Highly institutionalized (15 studios, unions, apprentice system)
“Beautiful images to illustrate screen plays”
A “highly mannered style removed from everyday reality”
Zeitgeist: Culture & Popculture
Sartre and Camus (existentialism)
Influence of avant garde, “Beatnik” culture on society
Hedonistic “youth culture”
All-night dancing at jazz clubs
Rejection of bourgeois values
Fascination with things American:
Hollywood
Coca-Cola
Blue jeans
Origins
Sociological survey on the values of postwar French youth
Clothing, habits, morals, values
Generation wanted to be liberated from traditions of the past
Obsession with the “new” (TV, appliances, automobiles)
Emergence of the “new liberated French woman” (Bridget Bardot)
New Generation
Candid attitude toward sex
Young women identified with the Bardot image
Rejection of parent’s values
Accent of individual freedom and expression
Infusion of American culture(jazz, cars and Rock-and-Roll)
Young Film Makers
“40 who are under 40”
Rejected French “tradition of quality”
1959 Cannes Film Festival(Existential novelist Andre Malraux was the Minister of Culture)
La Napoule colloquium of young filmmakers
Cine clubs in the Latin Quarter of Paris
Cahiers du Cinema
Godard and Truffaut started as critics
Met Andre Bazin
Bazin was the “founding father” of film theory and New Wave cinema
French New Wave
UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHY:
Personalized existential visions
Stressed “the individual, the experience of free choice, the absence of any rational understanding of the universe and a sense of the absurdity in human experience”
French New Wave
UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHY:
Characters seek to act authentically, taking responsibility for their actions, instead of playing roles dictated by society
Marginalized anti-heroes, who act spontaneously and often amorally
French New Wave
FILM AESTHETIC:
“Low-budget” anti-Hollywood look
Casual, natural appearance
Location shooting (not studio)
Ambient sound and light
“Real,” often improvised dialogue (overlapping)
Improvised scripting
French New Wave
FILM AESTHETIC:
“In the streets and cafes”
“Bored couple having meaningless conversation in Paris café, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and absinthe” (Skutski)
Mobile camera (tracking & panning)
Jump cuts, “free” editing
Admired Hitchcock & Italian Neorealism
French New Wave
FILM AESTHETIC:
Auteurism: the personal stamp of the director
Long takes
Flux and flow of time
Breaks with common expectations of cinema
Loose plots
Self-referent
French New Wave: “Left Bank”
More experimental & cerebral
Philosophical investigations
Fascination with memory
Play with time and space
Political left
“Pre-postmodern”
French New Wave
Jean-Luc Godard
Francois Truffaut
Alain Resnais
Eric Rohmer
Claude Chabrol
Agnes Varda
Louis Malle
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Five Periods of British Social RealismDOCUMENTARY
John Grierson
BRITISH NEW WAVE
Angry Young Men
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
SWINGING LONDON
Blowup
CONTEMPORARY (Mike Leigh, Ken Loach)
Secrets & Lies
HYPERREALISM
Trainspotting
A Question of National IdentityTHEMES / EMPHASIS
1930s – 1955: Nostalgia for Old England, the EmpireCommon heroes and mythBritish heritage films & literary adaptations“Englishness”
British New Wave: Questioning of government’s visionProtest against consumerism, suburbanism and AmericanizationClass struggle (Angry Young Men)
1960s-70s: Counter-culture experimentation
1980s: Deindustrialization, unemploymentChanges in social roles, masculine identity
1990s – 2000s: Multiculturalism, alternate heritagesHyperreality
John Grierson (1889-1972)
MODERN DOCUMENTARY REALISM
Father of the documentary film
Film as an effective means of communications between individual and the state
Purpose is to create social unity and encourage reform
John Grierson (1889-1972)
MODERN DOCUMENTARY REALISM
Focused on poverty, hunger, unemployment, and other social problems
Intuitive/experiential films can enable people to understand social issues better than rational, cognitive analysis
Use of realistic and naturalistic images to signify abstract realities
Launched British Documentary Movement(1940s--100 plus films)
British Social Realism
ZEITGEIST OF THE 1950s
Collapse of British Empire
Suez Canal crisis
Cold War (Ban the Bomb)
Working class / student protests
Materialism and consumerism
British Cinema: 1945-54
“Several pressures prevented films from adopting more radical social positions in that period. Foremost was the industry's fear and suspicion of involvement in controversy. Behind this was the repressive form of censorship imposed at that time by the British Board of Film Censors. Attacks on the establishment were not only discouraged, they were actively forbidden. Social criticism, at least of things British, tended to be retrospective. Hence the flurry of historical costume pieces. It was all right to discuss the bad behaviour of the Victorians .
--www.britmovie.co.uk
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
FREE CINEMA
“Free” from the dictates and restraints of the commercial film industry and UK studio system
Comparable to French New Wave rebellion against “cinema du papa” and tradition of quality
Title of film program at National Film Institute in 1956: Anderson: O Dreamland Reisz/ Richardson: Momma Don’t Allow Mazzetti: Together
“Kitchen Soup” Manifesto
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
FREE CINEMA
Sight and Sound and Sequence magazines
“The camera eye they turn on society is disenchanted, sad, occasionally ferocious and bitter.”
Signed films, with a point of view (not documentaries)
Make films “in the streets”
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
Lindsay Anderson O Dreamland (1953)
Reisz / Richardson Momma Don’t Allow (1955)
Jack Clayton Room at the Top (1958)
Tony Richardson Look Back in Anger (1958)
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)
Karel Reisz Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1960)
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
Soup Kitchen Manifesto (1956)
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Protests by college students and working class
Questioning of the “myth of the British Empire”
Frustration over lack of class mobility
Loss of traditional moral and cultural values
Females depicted as “clinging, entrapping” individuals, forcing men to stay in home town, raise family and buy new consumer products
Alienated youth
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
ANGRY YOUNG MEN
New Left Review
Called for a fundamental restructuring of the British economic system
Attacked:
Unfair labor practices
Middle class values
Immoral popular culture
Class structure
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Part of a larger social movement, assailing the British class structure and calling for the replacement of bourgeois elitism with liberal working-class values.
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Frank approach to sex and other taboos
Protest against the mechanization of life
The “sadness of urban life”
Found Board of Censors overly-protective and obsolete
British New Wave (1950s-1960s)
“The film coincided with the upsurge of
discontent with Britain's direction, distaste for
the government and anxiety over nuclear
involvement which produced the CND and the
Aldermaston marches. Room at the Top, with
its opportunist hero screwing the
establishment of his northern town and the inn
owner's daughter, provided a readily
identifiable index of reaction for the suburban
filmgoer. “
--www.britmovie.co.uk
Room at the Top
British New Wave (1950s-1960s) The People D. H. Lawrence
Ah the people, the people!
surely they are flesh of my flesh!
When, in the streets of the working quarters
they stream past, stream past, going to work;
then, when I see the iron hooked in their faces,
their poor, their fearful faces
then I scream in my soul, for I know I cannot cut
the iron hook out of their faces, that makes them so drawn, nor cut the
invisible wires of steel that pull them
back and forth to work,
back and forth, to work
like fearful and corpse-like fishes hooked and being played by some malignant
fisherman on an unseen, safe shore where he does not choose to land them
yet,
hooked fishes of the factory world.
Swinging London
London center of counter-culture revolution
Music, fashion, art, film
Recovery of the British economy from the post World War II austerity
Creation of alternate view of reality(beyond rebellion of “angry young men”)
“Don’t get angry, get crazy”
Swinging London
Emphasis on hedonism, free-love, drugs, experimentation, mysticism and “the East” (vs. West)
Also focuses on the lost, isolated individual alienated from tradition and convention, out of touch with Swinging London values (e.g., Alfie, Morgan, Georgy Girl)
Georgy Girl
Swinging London
http://
www.youtube.com A Decade to Remember-The Sixties
Current British Social Realism
MARXIST SOCIAL REALISM
Expose social injustices, poverty, crime, etc.
Economic determinism
PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIAL REALISM
People forced to live in horrific conditions
Society dealt them a bad hand
Still human beings with free will
Current British Social Realism
KEN LOACH (Marxist)
Film as medium for social reform
Location shooting & non-professional actors
Class inequality, unfair labor practices, child welfare, poverty, crime
Marxist political perspective
“Not an exemplary example of cinematic realism”
“Characters tend to be innocent victims, often cardboard figures” (Skutski)
My Name is Joe
Current British Social Realism
MIKE LEIGH (Psychological)
“Master of psychological cinematic realism”
Social commentary without sermonizing
“This is the way life is, the way people are”
Characters are the key
Unique approach to filmmaking
All or Nothing
Mike Leigh: “All or Nothing”
Introduction toPostmodernism
The Postmodern View
“The narrative is unravelled, the author is dead, the Enlightment project is toast, and history is history.”
What is Modernism?
The world according to White Anglo-Saxon males, based upon the mythology of Western Europe, rooted in the Judeo-Christian religion and Greek-Roman philosophy.
Western man is superior.
Progress, reason and science are the highest manifestations of humanity.
Western man was put one earth to modernize the world (e.g., Manifest Density, Columbus).
The rest of the world consists of barbarians, and “orientals.”
Postmodernism: Basic Concepts
Life just is
Rejection of all “grand narratives.”
All “truths” are contingent cultural constructs
Skepticism of progress; anti-technology bias
Sense of fragmentation and decentered self
Multiple conflicting identities
Mass-mediated reality
Postmodernism: Basic Concepts
All versions of reality are SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS
Concepts of good and evil
Metaphors for God
Language
The self
Gender
Taste (aesthetics)
EVERYTHING!
Postmodern Literature & Film
No guiding traditional grand narratives
Extreme freedom of form and expression
Rejects traditional linear narratives
Plays with time and space
Repudiation of boundaries of narration & genre
Intrusive, self-reflexive author
Deliberate violation of standards of sense and decency (which are viewed as methods of social control)
Postmodern Literature & Film
Characters on the margins of society
Mix of high and low brow art forms
Integration of everyday experience, pop and consumer culture
Playful treatment of serious subjects (no gnashing of teeth)
Doesn’t take itself seriously (no pretentious universal truths)
Has fun with language and imagery (MTV like)
Postmodern Literature
Parody, play, black humor, pastiche
Ambiguities and uncertainties
Ironic detachment
Postcolonial, global-English literature
Global
Celebrate diversity of views and lifestyles
Modern Postmodern
History as fact
Faith in common social order
Family as central unit
Authenticity of originals
Mass consumption
Art on a pedestal, with rules;linear narratives
Distinction between “high brow” and “low brow”
Heroes
Serious approach to serious subjects
Respect for social decorum
Existential “gnashing of teeth”
Written by the victors
Cultural pluralism
Alternate families
Hyper-reality; prefer copy to original
Niches; small group identity
There are no rules, and it’s only art (have fun with it); plays with time and space
Mix of “high brow and low brow”(e.g., pop culture and classics)
Anti-heroes and fringe elements
Playful approach to serious subjects
Deliberate violation of standards of decency
Life just is—deal with it
Hyperrealism
“The burning intensity of a copy where an imprint of the real becomes a starting point for its stylization and refinement.”
--European Cinema
Gritty, intensification of “the real”
Postmodern, time-condensed, hyperbolic and parodic depiction of social reality
Reality on steroids
Extreme edges of society
Edgy characters
We’ve Come a Long Way!
Brazilian Cinema
1960’s Cinema Novo: political themes
Government withdrew support in 1990
Restored in mid 1990s
Globo Television created commercial film division (partial support of City of God)
Co-productions/US distribution
Common themes:
Police corruption
Favelas
“general malaise in society”
“unviable nation”
Source: Nagib, Lucia, ed., New Brazilian Cinema
"a…celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist [police] thugs.”
Weissberg, Jay. Variety, 2008.