Postmodernist film
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Postmodernist film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism through the cinematic medium. Postmodernist film upsets the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroys (or, at least, toys with) the audience's suspension of disbelief to create a work in which a less-recognizable internal logic forms the film's means of expression.
Among the earliest and most significant events in postmodern film was the advent of the French New Wave in the 1950s and 1960s. Proponents of postmodernism as a movement cite such films as Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1960; deeply indebted to Bertolt Brecht's modernist epic theatre with its Verfremdungseffekt or 'defamiliarization effect'); and in Italy with Antonioni's L'avventura (1960) and Fellini's 8½ (1963). Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1928 surrealist short Un Chien Andalou provides an important modernist precursor, although its extreme deconstruction of structure and character make its meaning almost entirely arbitrary. To convey their desired meaning, postmodernist films maintain conventional elements to help orient the audience. Two such examples are Jane Campion's Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is shown in episodic segments arranged in reverse order; and Karel Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the private lives of the actors playing it, which we also see. French theorist Jean Baudrillard dubbed Sergio Leone's epic 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West as the first postmodern film.
By making small but significant changes to the conventions of cinema, the artificiality of the experience and the world presented are emphasized in the audience's mind in order to remove them from the conventional emotional bonds they have to the subject matter, and to give them a new view of it. An example is Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People in which the character based on Tony Wilson frequently breaks out of the constructed world of the film and talks directly to the audience straight through the camera lens. Jarring in effect, it conveys the characters' pre-occupation with breaking free of the cultural and economic constructions of the world they live in. Ingmar Bergman also made use of characters breaking the "fourth wall" and existing outside the diegetic reality of the film -- "The Passion of Anna" features all four of the lead actors speaking to the camera about the characters they are playing, interspersed brilliantly with the story being played out on screen.
Winterbottom's postmodernist effect, however, is hardly new: Federico Fellini, among other master filmmakers, used it memorably in Satyricon (1969) and Amarcord (1973). David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) exploits postmodernist aesthetics to an unusual degree while Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is considered an example of Postmodernist film.
In the fields of anime, Hideaki Anno's The End of Evangelion (1997) have elements of postmodernism, because of the visceral deconstruction of the character's emotions and feelings by using avant-garde techniques, which also can be seen as a deconstruction of conventional forms of storytelling.
The antithesis of postmodern cinema is remodernist film in which emphasis is placed on a subjective emotional connection to the film. Remodernism rejects postmodernism because of its perceived "failure to answer or address any important issues of being a human being".[1] This so-called "failure" is debatable. One such remodernist film is Jesse Richards short Shooting at the Moon.
These two styles of filmmaking, however, need not be mutually exclusive. Since postmodernism has been absorbed into the contemporary lexicon of filmmakers, it has become just another way to explore themes and characters.
Postmodernism is in many ways interested in the liminal space that would be typically ignored by more modernist or traditionally narrative offerings. The idea that the meaning can (and mostly will) be found in 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." [2] The basic thrust of this argument the spaces between the words or the cuts in a film create just as much meaning as the words or shots themselves.
