. Generic blurring
. Intertexuality
. Playfulness - parody, pastiche
. Hypereality etc.
Audience:
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.’
Institution:
Convention:
Typically, such films also break down the cultural divide
between high and low art and often overturn typical portrayals of gender, race,
class, genre, and time with the goal of creating something different from
traditional narrative expression.
Representation:
Some representations associated with film and postmodernity:
Meta-textual-ism - characters are aware they are characters
Other Realism elements become fluid, such as time (plot)
Perhaps the major feature of Postmodern works are their emphasis on play or games.
