1. What is Cinema? Critical Approaches
Postmodernism

2. Lecture structure 1. What is postmodernism? 2. Periodisation
3. Depthlessness and the simulacrum
4. Intertextuality and pastiche

3. 1. What is postmodernism?
How are we invited to engage with characters in Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)?

4. Deborah Thomas: affective moments that invite ‘allegiance’ to characters vs ironic distance
Fredric Jameson: a ‘waning of affect’ characterises postmodern culture.

6. 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.

7. 2. Periodisation
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Is postmodernism a way of periodising history or a range of aesthetic styles?

8. Phenomena associated with modernity
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

9. modernity and barbarity

10. photography and film as symptomatic technologies of modernity

11. 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))

12. 3. Depthlessness and the simulacrum
Jameson: depth model (modernism) > surface (postmodernism). Postmodernism is characterised by a ‘new depthlessness’ and a ‘weakening of historicity’.

13. 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)

14. 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

16. Television as quintessential postmodern medium (consumerism, distraction)

17. Films like The Matrix and The Truman Show imagine what Baudrillard calls ‘hyperreality’, the replacement of reality by mere simulations.

18. 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

19. 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)

21. But postmodern irony, parody and pastiche can be oppositional and critical, as for example in ‘New Queer Cinema’.

22. Warren Buckland: is Wes Anderson’s work best understood in terms of the postmodern ‘smart’ film or the ‘new sincerity’?