Postmodernism theory and theories

Postmodernism theories and texts from raybloggs

Kanye Video

Examples of Sampling In Music

Sugarhill Gang 
Rappers Delight
0:18

Is sampled in:
Chic
Good Times
3:12

Daft Punk
Harder Better Faster Stronger
0:05 & 0:21

Is sampled in:
Edwin Birdsong
Cola Bottle Baby
0:00 & 2:55

Bob Marley & The Wailers
Buffalo Soldier
1:26

Is sampled in:
Banana Splits
The Tra La La Song
0:06

Characteristics of Postmodern Film

Bricolage: the process of assembling artefacts from bits and pieces of other things

1.Genre Cross-Over

2.recycling old forms

3.mixing high and low culture (kitsch)

Intertextuality: the multiple ways in which a text is entangled with or contains references to other texts

Pastiche (copying in tribute) and Parody (copying in jest)

Style over content; the image and visual excitement over narrative coherence

Confusions over time and space; the subversion of classical cinematic conventions; fragmented narratives; time-bending.

Self-reflexiveness / self-referentiality: texts that openly reflect upon their own processes of artful composition.

Metafiction: fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with fiction and its conventions

Flattening of Affect: Technology, violence, drugs and the media lead to detached, emotionless lives

Hyperreality: Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

Altered States: Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

More Human than Human: Artificial intelligence, robotics and cybernetics seek to enhance or replace humanity

Features of postmodern films

Pastiche

Self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture

Flattening of Affect

Technology, violence, drugs, and the media lead to detached, emotionless,

unauthentic lives

Hyperreality

Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

Time Bending

Time travel provides another way to shape reality and play "what if" games with society

Altered States

Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

More Human than Human

Artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace, humanity

Postmodern ideas

We no longer have any sense of the difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them.

The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of simulacrum.

Postmodernism rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgments of value are merely taste.

Culture ‘eats itself’ and there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute.

All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses – and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning’ discourse.

Postmodern texts are said to be intertextual and self-referential – they break the rules of realism to explore the nature of their own status as constructed texts.

In the postmodern world, media texts make visible and challenge ideas of truth and reality, removing the illusion that stories, texts or images can ever accurately or neutrally reproduce reality or truth

Postmodernism and Audience Theory

 Two commentators have developed some interesting ideas about postmodernism and audiences.

Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’ (157)

‘VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in relation to the moving image.’

Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to capture it.’

Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’

Postmodern & Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry.

Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy.

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms.