A Filmmaker's Guide to: Postmodernism

In this chapter of ‘the filmmaker’s guide’ we’re actually going to be learning about literature and film together. I understand that many of you are sitting in university during difficult times and finding it increasingly hard to study and I understand that many of you who are not at university or not planning on it are possibly stuck of what to do, need a break or even need to catch up on learning film before you get to the next level. This guide will be brief but will also contain: new vocabulary, concepts and theories, films to watch and we will be exploring something taboo until now in the ‘filmmaker’s guide’ - academia (abyss opens). Each article will explore a different concept of film, philosophy, literature or bibliography/filmography etc. in order to give you something new to learn each time we see each other. You can use some of the words amongst family and friends to sound clever or you can get back to me (email in bio) and tell me how you’re doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmaker’s guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.

Postmodernism

What is it?

Postmodernism is an arts movement that began in the mid-twentieth century that basically covers the fact that truths, narratives and identities are relative and cannot be defined by one sole meaning.

Features of postmodernism:

1. Skepticism
2. Existentialism
3. Nihilism
4. Moral Relativism
5. Subjectivism
6. Stream of Consciousness
7. Internal Conflict and Chaos
8. Black Comedy
9. Intertextuality
10. Metafiction
11. Fabulation
12. Minimalism
13. Fragmentation
14. Paranoia and Insanity
15. Magic Realism

Postmodernism has always been known as the one movement that everyone has heard of but nobody can define. When we have a look at the way in which a novel can possibly be described as 'postmodern'. The book we will use for this is "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende.

Example: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

This book covers many generations of a family living through war and even though it is style in a linear narrative, it covers themes of magic realism in which Rosa and Clara are both 'magical' and 'supernatural' and though Rosa is dead from the beginning of the book [and I mean the first page] we still feel as if the two sisters are connected. Clara is a clairvoyant and there is a massive amount of internal conflict after she marries the man who was supposed to marry Rosa and has children with him. Her 'magic' becomes a point of scrutiny because of the fact she is seeing things that are not intended to turn out happily for the family. We have multiple instances where the third person limited changes the person it is following even though for the vast majority of the first half of the novel, it is following Clara.

Here are some other books contained within the postmodern realm that you could read:

• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
• The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
• Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Revenge for Love by Wyndham Lewis
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanazaki
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

What about in film?

Postmodern film is very popular. Films with a non-linear narrative, internally conflicted characters, characters who are paranoid, extreme, chaotic or overtly virtuous are becoming more and more popular by the day. One could argue that postmodern cinema has practically taken over every genre except for the superhero genre. Even films adapted from texts that are not postmodern are being made into postmodern films. There are therefore three categories that we would split them into:

Postmodern Films Adapted From Postmodern Books include:

• Cloud Atlas
• Jackie Brown
• American Psycho
• Fight Club
• A Clockwork Orange
• American Beauty
• Blade Runner
• Memento

But Postmodern Films Adapted From Non-Postmodern Books:

• The Great Gatsby
• Little Women
• Brideshead Revisited
• Murder on the Orient Express
• Rebecca
• The Hobbit
• Death on the Nile
• The Big Lebowski

And then there are original scripts for Postmodern Films which, in my opinion, are the most successful after adaptations from postmodern novels since they are created specifically to be postmodern. This means that they will be openly so:

• Synecdoche, New York
• The Matrix
• Inception
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Requiem for a Dream
• Mulholland Drive
• Barton Fink
• Eraserhead
• Pulp Fiction

Further Reading:

• Butler, C (2002). Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. UK: Oxford University Press.
• Constable, C (2015). Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood's Aesthetics (Short Cuts): Rethinking Hollywood's Aesthetics. 2nd ed. USA: Wallflower Press.
• Duncan, P (2018). The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory's Other (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies). UK: Routledge.
• Jameson, F (1992). Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 2nd ed. USA: Verso Books.