Post Modernism Research

Post Modernism

As I have stated within many of my previous posts, I intend to create a post modern feel within my thriller opening. In order to achieve this I feel it is necessary to have a clear understanding of what exactly post modernism entails and the ways in which it is explored through the medium of film.

What Is Post Modernism?

Post modernism is a complicated term or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid 1980s. Post modernism is hard to define. This is due to the fact that it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines and areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. Historically, it is hard to locate as it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.

Perhaps the easiest way to comprehend post modernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which post modernism emerged from. Modernism has two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.
The first definition of modernism denotes the broadly labeled aesthetic movement "modernism." Modernism is defined as the movement in visual arts, music, literature, drama and film which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made and consumed, and what it should mean.

The main characteristics of modernism include:

• An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity; an emphasis on how seeing, or reading or perception itself, takes place, rather than on what is perceived.
• A movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions.
• A blurring of distinctions between genres
• An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials, thoughts, ideas and beliefs.
• A tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of work. So that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in a particular manner.
• A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs. Also a rejection of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.
• A rejection of the distinction between high and low or popular culture.

Post modernism follows many of the same ideas, such as rejecting rigid genre distinctions - hence the many sub genres available within the film industry - , emphasizing pastiche, parody, irony, and playfulness. Post modernism appears to favour discontinuity within narrative structures, whilst also exploring ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the de-structured, often off-center subject.

Whilst post modernism would appear very much like modernism, it differs in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history, but presents that fragmentation as something tragic - to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that these texts can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life. In sharp contrast, post modernism doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is presented as meaningless. Those who explore post modernism within their works do so in a manner which understands that art cannot make meaning. Instead post modern film, literature, music and art can be likened to playing with and exploring nonsense. The ideas explored throughout the texts produced in this style accept that they are a false reality and as a result often play with the codes and conventions of a variety of genres so as to allude and intrigue the audience.

Post Modernism In Terms Of Film

Post modernist film attempts to articulate post modernism through the medium of film. Post modernist films attempt to subvert the mainstream codes and conventions of narrative structure and characterisation, often choosing to either completely dismantle or toy with the audience’s suspension of disbelief. The French sociologist Baudrillard, suggests that what we are shown through the media is only one version of the event and the version of the story that we choose is our winning story. For example, September the 11th, for the majority of people, was only witnessed on the television and as a result we only believe what we have witnessed through media reports without actually witnessing the trueness of the event. Baudrillard calls this concept Hyperreality or Simulacrum, which is the inability to distinguish realty from the media or it’s replacing image. It is this very theory that many post modernist directors choose to explore within their films. Typically, these such films also break down the cultural divide between high and low art and often invert typical portrayals of gender, race, class, genre and time, all with the aim of creating something divergent of the more traditional narrative expression.

Postmodernist film, like postmodernism itself, is a reaction to modernist cinema and its movements. Modernist cinema, explored and exposed the formal concerns of the medium by placing them at the forefront of consciousness. Modernist cinema questioned and made visible the meaning-production practices of film. The Auteur Theory - the idea of an author producing a work from his singular vision - guided the concerns of modernist film. To investigate the transparency of the image is modernist but to undermine its reference to reality is to engage with the conventions of postmodernism. The modernist film has more faith in the author, the individual, and the accessibility of reality itself than the postmodernist film.

Postmodernism is in many ways interested in the liminal space that would be typically ignored by more modernist or traditionally narrative presentations. The idea is that the meaning is often generated most productively through the spaces and transitions and collisions between words and moments and images. Henri Bergson writes in his book Creative Evolution - 

"The obscurity is cleared up, the contradiction vanishes, as soon as we place ourselves along the transition, in order to distinguish states in it by making cross cuts therein in thoughts. The reason is that there is more in the transition than the series of states, that is to say, the possible cuts--more in the movement than the series of position, that is to say, the possible stops." 

The defining point of this argument is that the spaces between the words or the cuts in a film create just as much meaning as the words or scenes themselves.

Typically, post modernist film has three key characteristics that separate it from modernist cinema or traditional narrative film. These characteristics are:

1. The pastiche of many genres and styles. - Essentially, this means that postmodern films are comfortable with mixing together many contrasting styles of film and ways of film-making together into the same movie.
2. A self-reflexivity of technique that highlights the construction and relation of the image to other images in media and not to any kind of external reality. - This is done by highlighting the constructed nature of the image in ways that directly reference its production, and also through explicit intertextuality that incorporates or references other media and texts and the relationship they share. The deconstruction and fragmentation of linear time as well is also commonly employed to highlight the constructed nature of what appears on screen.
3. An undoing and collapse of the distinction between high and low art styles and techniques and texts.  - This is also an extension of the tendency towards pastiche and mixing. It typically extends to a mixing of techniques that traditionally come with value judgments as to their worth and place in culture and the creative and artistic styles.

Contradictions amongst technique, values, styles and methods are important to postmodernism and are, in many cases, irreconcilable, meaning they are so vastly different from each other that they cannot be made compatible. Any theory of postmodern film would have to be comfortable with the possible paradox of such ideas and their articulation.

Examples of Post Modernism In Film

Bertrand Blier's 1974 Going Places

Many film critics believe that the advent of post modernism began with The Godfather’s release on March 15th 1972. However it is the belief of the American director Philip Kaufman that the real birth of post modernist film came with the 1974 French film “Going Places”. It is a film about two young men who have no discernible interest except for seeking pleasure and they go to any limits to do so. In one episode (a development or progress within the film), they trap a woman on a train who is breast feeding her child and force her to have sex. Another episode shows them chasing a woman and continually pinching her buttocks. Compare this with Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”, a film made just three years prior. Both films explore the adventures of corrupted youth, however A Clockwork Orange is a societal work. The first half of the film frolics through the crimes of the youth whereas the second half focuses on the human rights he lost once imprisoned and cured. The shift takes the audience away from direct contact with such a volatile character. It comforts the audience because they know the film didn't subscribe to the ideals of its gruesome leading character. 

In Going Places, there is no such comfort. The film follows the characters to their very end. Late in the film, a disturbingly beautiful moment happens as the two men meet a bourgeoisie couple on vacation with their teenage daughter. The daughter feels repressed by her parents. The two men get her alone and convince her into having sex. During the intercourse, the camera focuses on the smile on the girl’s face and soundtrack features lighter music for the first time. The mood in the film distinctly changes. The girl’s feelings after are of freedom and joy. The men's accomplishment of sex again borders on rape, but the repression she felt was an abuse as well. The abuse fueled her attraction to them because they presented her with liberation. The audience here is challenged, because they can identify with her decision. While post modernism allows for the absence of morals, one of its best features has been the challenge for extremes in a higher context.

The American Director Philip Kaufman

It wasn't until the 90s that the post modernist film movement witnessed a major boom in discussion with the emergence of Quentin Tarantino. His debut film, Reservoir Dogs was a stylistic jazz riff on the robbery genre. The new trend in this film wasn't the excessive violence, but how commonplace violence was to the characters. Mundane conversations took place in the middle of horrific situations, with Tarantino making a complete mockery of the typical codes and conventions of the thriller genre. Reservoir Dogs drew a small following who championed the film's everyday approach to violence as a new marker in cinema. Then Pulp Fiction hit. For many who were adverse to Tarantino before, his second film was hard to deny. It expanded on all the limitations of Reservoir Dogs; the scope was enhanced, the story was more fleshed out and the film was not as inundated with violence. Tarantino was still playing his tune of a jazz riff, this time with the gangster genre, but Pulp Fiction also proved that Quentin Tarantino was a talented writer. 

As Tarantino is the purveyor of everyday violence, he is also a filmmaker of everyday conversation. His first two films had very little of what we understand to be a plot as it had an inhabitance of his characters beginning at the art of their conversations. As distinct as Mamet is in his prose, Tarantino is also for blending realistic subject matter into outrageous conversation. The realism of the conversation is that action doesn’t break up a character’s wordings. Characters go on the way we all do. In his original review, Gene Siskel commented that one of the best parts of Pulp Fiction was that conversations in a scene kept going a few minutes after the scene normally would have ended. The truth of the success of Pulp Fiction isn’t so simple. 

When Tarantino was promoting Pulp Fiction, he was routinely asked why he chose the structure of a shifting story that jumped from end to beginning and every other which way through out the film. Tarantino alluded to the example of the novel in every response. See, the shifting story of back-and-forth is nothing new in movies. The way Tarantino does it though is. Pulp Fiction does little to bring resolution to any of the major characters. While the alleged inspirational film of Pulp Fiction - Kubrick’s “The Killing” - has a similar story objective and a resolution that is tidy to finding an outcome for all the characters, the weight of Pulp Fiction rests solely in the strength of the scenes and the interactions. Novels have the challenge of detailing hundreds of pages with character portraits. Better novels focus on that challenge knowing the value of what they write is hardly ever found in looking for redemption in the final twenty pages. Tarantino makes Pulp Fiction memorable because he understands where the value of the films rests. While the film was well made in many ways, its rare quality was that it was encompassing of the helpful objectives of another art. 

Tarantino's Pulp Fiction- A Post Modernist Masterclass

The praise for Pulp Fiction has its limits though. In an early scene in the film, a routine drug pick up and execution goes wrong when an assailant, hiding in another room, jumps out on Jackson and Travolta and begins shooting. He misses them entirely and immediately is shot for revealing himself. The situation sets up the final scene where Jackson reflects on the unlikely chance of the shooter missing entirely not as good luck but as an intervention from God and a message to Jackson. Travolta argues his sincerity but when the two are held up at gun point, Jackson spares the robbers lives and proclaims he is through with being a criminal. In the context of true post modernism, the scene aches to have a personal context for the character. Alas, it does not. In no manner of societal or personal matter is a larger comment issued. The biblical reference begins and ends as stylistic mechanism, a motif. The rest of Pulp Fiction follows suit to be the introduction to the larger public of what makes Tarantino so appealing at surface level. 

As Going Places shows no sympathy for its characters' ruthless aggression, neither does Tarantino for his characters, who are the embodiment of the violence our new culture has grown up with. But the characters of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction stand outside and inside of movies: they kill as the casual heroics of the movies but bleed and die with realism outside of it. For Tarantino, this is how post-modernism existed. The problem with Tarantino is that he never expanded beyond this premise. His films became genre films, wrought with stylistic ambitions yet void of content. He was making films that interpreted genre as high art. While Pulp Fiction had no context, its popularity did. When the wave of imitative filmmakers came after the success and the new wave of filmmakers began to settle as the critical backbone of American cinema, Tarantino became the 90s version of Andy Warhol. The fact is, no filmmaker of this generation (including Tarantino) was able to progress beyond Pulp Fiction.

Filmmakers who were exceptions to that critical praise had to pick up the slack. Ironically, it was out of a Quentin Tarantino story that this began. When Oliver Stone made Natural Born Killers in 1994, he made it the same year as Tarantino revolutionary started with Pulp Fiction but he also had to be aware of the already established gore style of Tarantino. The film is about two serial killers who are in love and kill everyone they see. The filmmaking is anarchistic and flies with no flags of moral identity. It runs with the characters to a state of hyper-realism. This is not the reason why Quentin Tarantino denounced this adaptation of his short story. He denounced the finished film because there was a total transformation of his original story. Tarantino wrote the characters to be believed in. Oliver transformed them into clichés of bad films.

Natural Born Killers ends up as satire. It empties an arsenal of criticism into how America made the killers. It is also a piercing example of Tarantino's limitations. For me, post modernism is art that not only brings the most challenging scrutiny to our society, but also pushes the limits of its own aesthetic. Tarantino still glides at the top of the film world for his technique of referencing earlier films, but that is as dated as the oldest films made. Citizen Kane tops greatest films lists for a reason. It is the first film to combine all technical innovation and style of the film world into one film. The commonplace violence in Tarantino's films stuns the audience with how brutality is made into easy entertainment beyond anything else. As Philip Roth once said of literature and the media -

"The popular media have usurped literature's scrutinizing function - usurped it and trivialized it. The momentum of the American mass media is toward the trivialization of everything." 

The media need no assistance now because it has Quentin Tarantino.

Quentin Tarantino himself