What Do Art Cinema and Contemporary American Postmodern Cinema Have in Common?

POSTMODERNISM – BETWEEN PASTICHE/PARODY AND A NOSTALGIA FOR THE By

Attempts to define postmodern cinema.

Marking the showtime of a historical period with political, cultural, aesthetic, scientific, and moral experiences which are distinctly different from those of an earlier stage of history ordinarily called modern or Enlightenment, postmodernism is associated with the historical transformations that followed World War II and with the cultural logics of late commercialism. Together they brought nigh pregnant changes in homo sensibility and subjectivity and aesthetically led to the emergence of a new artistic manner. This essay will discuss to what extent the postmodern style is characterised by pastiche/parody and a nostalgia for the past by referring to Woody Allen'south mock documentary Zelig (1983) and the controversial motion picture Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch.

There are many disquisitional positions and views taken in relation to postmodernism. Ihab Hassan points out that the term tin can exist interpreted equally an oxymoron with a brusk history: if the modernistic represents the present or the recent moment, how can something be postal service, or after the modernistic? (1985:121). From this perspective, postmodernism could even be viewed equally a continuation of modernism (Updike 1984 quoted in Denzin 1991:2) and indeed some critics simply deny its separate beingness.Commencement used by Federico de Onis in the 1930s to indicate "a minor reaction to modernism" (Featherstone 1990:7), in 1947 by Toynbee to designate a new cycle in western civilization and in 1959 by C. Due west. Mills (1959:166) to describe the Quaternary Epoch in world history, the term became popular on New York'due south artistic scene in 1960s and used to refer to a movement across the "exhausted" high modernism (Featherstone 1990:seven). In the 1970s and 1980s the term gained wider usage in compages, the visual and performing arts and music and came to be associated with the following traits: the erasure of all kinds of boundaries and distinctions (between art and everyday life, between "high art" and mass/popular culture, between past, present and future); a specific style defined by eclecticism, reflexivity, cocky-referentiality, quotation, artifice, randomness, chaos, fragmentation, playfulness and the mixing of codes which results in parody, pastiche, irony, allegory (Sarup 1993:132); a consumer civilisation that celebrates the surface and "depthlessness" of culture; a shift of emphasis from content to form or style; simply also a nostalgic, conservative longing for the past; an intense preoccupation with the real and its representations; intense emotional experiences shaped by anxiety, alienation, resentment and a detachment from others (Denzin 1991:vii) etc. Thus, postmodernism tin be viewed to comprise many contrasting and contradictory tendencies and it tin be argued that what best distinguishes postmodernism from the preceding periods is, as Jim Collins pertinently remarks, the artistic cohabitation of competing styles: ""Post-Modernism departs from its predecessors in that as a textual practice it actually incorporates the heterogeneity of those conflicting styles, rather than asserting itself as the newest radical alternative" (1989:114-115).

Yet, a specific, distinctive postmodernist manner may exist identifiable. Frederic Jameson, for case, argues that postmodernism is, higher up all, a culture of pastiche, a civilisation that is marked by the "complacent play of historical allusion" (1988:105). He makes the stardom between pastiche and parody, both practices of imitation and mimicry: whereas parody has a purpose – to mock, ridicule, satirize and has polemical, critical and comic potential, pastiche is a "bare parody" (1991:17), a mere imitation that apparently does non do anything. The critic condemns the earth of pastiche every bit "a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible: all that is left is to imitate expressionless styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum" (Jameson 1985:115). According to him, postmodern culture is a culture of quotation as opposed to a culture of creativity, in other words, "a civilization of flatness, of depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality" (1984:lx).

This is a strong critical viewpoint that could be polemically contrasted with the arguments put forward by Richard Dyer whose book, Pastiche (2007), is the first full study of the term and its usage. In Dyer's in-depth study, pastiche is defined as a compilation of disparate elements with two remarkable artful claim: richness and vitality. These qualities derive from the clash of styles, the subversion of dominant white cultures, the breaking of the boundaries of medium and genre. Thus pastiche is regarded as liberating, challenging, revolutionary, politically progressive, multivocal (Dyer 2007:20-21). Similarly, Ingeborg Hoesterey argues that postmodern works based on pastiche have "emancipatory potential" (2001:29) for their "dialectical opinion toward history" (ibid. 25) or for the mode they rework "cultural codifications that for centuries marginalized unconventional identities" (ibid. 29).

To this consequence, Woody Allen'south film Zelig, a pastiche of a black and white documentary from the Thirties, is a piece of work of outstanding creativity and remarkable technical virtuosity (Bendazzi 1984:173).This false biographical documentary is a mix of 18-carat archive film cloth likewise equally scenes shot specifically in the style of a 1930s traditional documentary using grainy silent film and stills. Starting in the 1920s, the moving picture goes through the sound era and ends in color in the 1980s, thus also mapping the history and evolution of cinema. Making clever usage of library footage and newsreels, the whole moving-picture show is passed off as accurate in such a way that a completely fictitious and implausible story is presented as a testimony to an epoch. Past ways of truly expert flim-flam photography, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow hug Josephine Baker or James Cagney. The lighting is done in the way of the period and there are "rain-type" streaks to give the effect of worn picture show. The sound is metallic, imitating the repeat that characterizes early on film and the tone and words of the spoken comments seem to have come from the archives besides. The make new songs written for the film ("Leonard the Lizard", "Doin' the Chameleon") are pastiche musical numbers totally in keeping with the style of the Jazz Era. Thus Allen recaptures an entire world, its atmosphere, tastes, customs, ideology and stylistic peculiarities beingness reproduced with precision and love.

Existence based on pastiche, Zelig is what Jameson calls a "nostalgia film", a film that reinvents "the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period "(1985:116) and evokes a sense of the narrative certainties of the by. Jameson is however very critical of the nostalgia film arguing that it effaces history, being a motion picture almost other films, a representation of other representations through its "random cannibalization of all the styles of the past" (Ibid.:65). Also, in his view, nostalgia films practice non attempt to recapture the "real" past only are structured effectually certain cultural myths and stereotypes about the past, offering an epitome of "false realism". A second stylistic feature of the nostalgia picture show is thus "cultural schizophrenia", a term borrowed from Lacan and used to signify a language disorder and the failure of a temporal relationship between signifiers i.e. the experience of time not as a continuum just every bit a perpetual present. To exemplify, in Zelig at that place is a scene of Adolf Hitler making a voice communication with the effigy of Leonard Zelig lurking in the background. Created by parodic juxtaposition of superimposing newly staged fabric into borrowed material, a sense of incongruity emerges from this historically impossible juxtaposition. Thus, through the absurd neighboring of a contemporary thespian with long-decreased public figures, Zelig displays a sort of "freedom from historical limits" (Stam 1989:198) that is characteristic of the postmodern effacement of boundaries between past and present. Although this can exist equally related to a sense of postmodernist playfulness (a play of signifiers), to the fact that in postmodernism the work of art (a modern concept) is replaced past the "text" which can be "read", deconstructed and reassembled co-ordinate to other criteria, Jameson argues in a very serious vein that such a culturally schizophrenic product (e.g. the nostalgia film) has lost its sense of history and its sense of a hereafter unlike from the present, being locked into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents and suffering at the aforementioned fourth dimension from "historical amnesia". This concept volition be explored further in the discussion of Blueish Velvet which is even more representative of the nostalgia film, being set in the tardily 1950s which for Americans stand for "the privileged lost object of desire" (Jameson 1984: 67).

Returning to the notions of pastiche and parody as being representative of the postmodernist mode,  Zelig tin too be considered a parody of the traditional documentary genre, with the ulterior purpose, information technology can be speculated, of ridiculing the unreliability of contemporary media, the capricious nature of social opinion, the status of celebrities, the trend to adapt, etc. Even so the extent to which Zelig is a parody as opposed to an "innocent" pastiche is a matter of interpretation. Denby for instance sees the film equally "a loving parody of the "serious" style of historical film investigation, consummate with stock footage, archive stills, catamenia music, newsreels, and interviews with savants…" (1983:51).Considering that parody is always polemical, critical, satirical and involves a distancing effect from the parodied source, "loving parody" strikes one as an oxymoron. Notwithstanding, the confusion over pastiche/parody tin be solved by arguing that the picture show contains both devices: its course is a pastiche (pure simulated without the intent to mock that which it imitates) whereas the content is parodic, hence its great comic potential: a journalist'south aboveboard admission that the media usually deforms and plays with the truth in club to sell newspapers, Zelig's confession under hypnosis of a rabbi'southward attempt to charge him a fortune for Hebrew lessons (here Allen is fulfilling audience expectations past playing with ethnic stereotypes), the allusion to Fascism and its operation as an escape into anonymity which could help Zelig "to make something anonymous of himself" etc.

Among its other techniques of achieving humor, irony and parody, the film makes apply of "celebrity intertextuality" defined as "a filmic situation where the presence of a film or television star or celebrity intellectual evokes a genre or cultural milieu …" (Stam et al. 1992:207). Thus, real gimmicky cultural heroes such as Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Bruno Bettelheim are interviewed and offer their interpretations of the "Zelig phenomenon". The humour evoked with this type of intertextuality arises from audiences being familiar with their extra-textual performances and the witnessing of their juxtaposition in the pseudo-documentary. Also the fact that they are famous people playing themselves adds an chemical element of similarity and validity to the parody.  Thus the film's discourse teeters betwixt fictional construction and documentary validity by identifying subjects who take an extra-textual beingness but are actively discussing fictional subjects without a blink, with ironic incongruity equally a result.

Thus it can be argued that far from being uncomplicated mimicry that is parasitic of its object and that "does not create anything" (Dane 1988:five) parody and pastiche are complex devices that can actually create new textual configurations and modifications to pre-existing canons. They as well foster new "ways" to view texts, developing critical spectatorial strategies (Harries 2000:7). Linda Hutcheon (1985: 94) posits that the reading of any ironic discourse requires a triple competence: linguistic (the reader has to embrace what is said only also what is implied), generic (comprehension of what "logonomic system" is being parodied), ideological (sensation that norm violation is occurring and its implications). For case, Susan Sontag's interview delivers lines that not only parody typical "expert" responses establish in historical compilation documentaries just also parody her own way of critical assessment: "He was the phenomenon of the 1920s. Nosotros think that, at that time, he was as well known equally Lindbergh –information technology'south really quite astonishing". The subtlety of the ironic soapbox calls for great familiarity with the target texts and serves to make Zelig "a one-act for the cognoscenti" (Sarris 1983:39 quoted in Harries 2000:109).

Another film that displays pastiche, parody and a nostalgia for the past is Blue Velvet. Aesthetically within the classic film tradition of the 1940, the picture is based on the appropriation of film noir conventions  and intertextuality, recycling images from the past and reassembling them in the form of bricolage/pastiche: the ideas of modest town innocence allude to Hitchcock'due south Shadow of a Doubtfulness, the opening heart-attack sequence is reminiscent of the Lumiere brothers 50'Arroseur Arrose (1896) and the Badalamenti score seems derivative of the music in Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards, 1962). The purpose of utilizing these prefabricated images is to either subvert them in parody or to simply quote them in pastiche, which can also exist a mode of paying homage to the source textile. In Blue Velvet the presentation of grotesque amid the normalcy of everyday life, the juxtaposition of sacred and profane, calorie-free and night, innocence and criminality might work in the service of unmasking, of satire, of subversion, or they might not. Lyotard for instance sees the flick every bit waging a war on nostalgia due to the fact that information technology locates terror in the by whose signifiers tin can work equally signs of destruction (1984:81).

Thus, critical opinion is divided between those who read the film as a mock-nostalgia parody and an ironic, subversive comment on the values and hypocrisy of small town America in the 1950s, and those who read the film's evocation of innocence as sincere which would brand information technology a genuine nostalgia film "with a divergence" i.east. the dark subtext to a Frank Capra flick. Co-ordinate to this, Lynch tin be viewed equally either a great subversive satirist or as a sentimentalist and reactionary. Lynch's own estimation of the moving-picture show is that it is non a critique or subversion but a contrasting view of contemporary America with its innocent, naïve side as well as its horror and sickness (Lynch in Rodley 1997:139). This is in line with Denzin'southward view of postmodern motion picture that tries to repeat and reproduce the tensions and contradictions that define our time (1991: 177).

The problem with a reading of Blue Velvet as either in league with, or ironically distanced from the forms of nostalgia information technology invokes, implies that, past today'southward standards, irony or the lack of it has become a measure of a film's level of critique. This propensity towards an ironised reading may be a product of what Wallace calls "the ironic tone of telly" (1992:62), a medium whose rapid-fire editing and juxtaposition of "real" (news) and simulated, loftier and low unwittingly deconstructed the traditional Hollywood genres past making their skeletal formulas visible as narrative products, leading to the emergence of an ironised audience in the 1950s and 1960s.

An alternative reading of Blueish Velvet could see it as neither entirely ironic and parodic, nor entirely serious and "nostalgic". This reading is supported stylistically as the film operates two very different stylistic registers and runs a double standard throughout.  For case, the opening sequence is surreal and conspicuously parodic, which immediately frames the moving picture as postmodern: the slow-move rhythmic waving of the fire fighter, the children orderly crossing the street, the scenes are colourful and brightly lit, even the father's eye attack is treated in a comic register. Similarly the closing sequence parodies many cinematic standards, being the conventional closure of classical narrative: club is restored, the return of the father re-establishes a patriarchal hierarchy, Dorothy is "cured" of her sadomasochism and reunited with her child, the heterosexual couple of Sandy and Jeffrey is constructed (this subversion of cinematic class betrays a questioning of meta-narratives which is another characteristic of mail service-modernism).

However in that location is a sharp contrast between the opening and endmost sequences and the heart of the film, the dark world of criminality where the main events happen at nighttime in gloomy settings. This is filmed in a "realistic register "and the violence itself is real, shocking and unsafe. As Laura Mulvey suggests, "the film excavates a topography of the fantastic, of an underworld, out of a social setting which appears to repress its very possibility"(1996:152). Thus, the juxtaposition of the two worlds has a confounding outcome on the viewer. A very easy caption is to translate the middle of the film as Jeffrey's dream or his fantasy (boy saves girl) that starts with the long shot that slowly zooms into the cut-off ear and ends with a like zooming shot out of an ear that turns out to belong to Jeffrey when he awakens on a dominicus lounger in his garden. This is similar to the Wizard of Oz narrative structure, in which the Oz story is a dream experienced by the protagonist Dorothy. However, the contrast between the surrealism of the opening and closing and the grim realism of the fantasy suggests that Jeffrey's reality is more than "unreal" than his dream. Thus the mechanical robin in Jeffrey'south garden reminds us that it is a film we are watching, which is a simulacrum a reality, hence hyper-real, and hyper-reality is according to Baudrillard some other characteristic of the postmodernist way (1984).

Considering that the film seems to elude the sincerity/irony binary reading paradigm that holds sway in postmodernism, Rombes suggests that Blueish Velvet and Lynch'due south films in general pillage quondam styles and genres not to demystify old forms just to build unstable narratives. This can exist seen as a movement beyond postmodernism'due south ironic, parodic cribbing of historical genres and narrative conventions. Thus Lynch seems to create an alternative sensibility through his "aesthetics of juxtaposition" (Rombes in Sheen & Davidson eds. 2004:61-75). For instance, the pastiche in Blue Velvet is achieved past juxtaposing and mixing a traditional Hollywood narrative with the experimentalism of an advanced cinematic form.  This disparity between advanced and classical modes derives from the fact that Lynch explores American myths in a cinematic linguistic communication that has a history, which is what makes intertextuality (as expressed in pastiche and nostalgia) unavoidable and not a simple fake and recycling of retro styles.

As illustrated with examples from Zelig and Bluish Velvet, the postmodern aesthetic relies heavily on iv tightly inter-related concepts: parody and pastiche, prefabrication and intertextuality, all imbued with a 18-carat or ironic nostalgia for the past. Whereas modernism was nearly product and consumption, postmodernism emphasizes reproduction and re-consumption, the master implication being that art has become mere repetition and simulated, that the author is dead. However this essay tried to demonstrate that far from being reduced to a mere recombination of various stereotypes from the past, as Jameson seems to suggest, postmodern film is a sophisticated and complex act of taking stock of the cultural heritage of the past and filtering it through new criteria, creating new configurations of meaning which make the audience more than critical of the cultural products of the past (every bit seen with parody). Thus the certainties of the metanarratives of the modern era are replaced with cryptic and uncertain narratives that betray a sense of the fragmentary and the inability to distinguish betwixt the "real" and the artifice, as well as a blurring of high and low cultural boundaries, every bit Lyotard suggested. The modern sense of unified, centred self is replaced with a decentred self and multiple, alien identities, the source of this transformation being also based on the uncertain social realities that followed World State of war Ii: the Cold War, the Vietnam War. In America for instance, the Pentagon Papers scandal, Watergate demythologized and destabilized old narratives of American exceptionalism and nationalism with the upshot that a new logic emerges – the postmodern logic, which is based on rhetorical shifts and jump-cuts between sincerity and irony that are mixed with a confounding effect. Postmodernism seems thus to be mimetic of the social realities of its time, as art is in full general, and it cannot exist accused of lacking creativity and being parasitic of the former forms of the past, equally the use of pastiche, parody and nostalgia films appear to imply. On the contrary, as pointed out in the case of pastiche, these stylistic and rhetorical devices have clear aesthetic merits such as richness and vitality, and stalk from a sense of postmodern playfulness that leads to artistic hybridity and a violation of generic boundaries, postmodernism being a recombinant culture par excellence.

REFERENCES

Baudrillard, J. (1984) The Evil Demon of Images, trans. Paul Patton and Paul Foss, Sidney:Power Institute Publications, no. 3

Bendazzi, Grand. (1984) The Films of Woody Allen, Ravette, London

Collins, J. (1989) Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Mail service-Modernism, London:Routledge

Dane, J. (1988) Parody: Critical Concepts Versus Literary Practices, Aristophanes to Sterne, Academy of Oklahoma Press

Denby, D. (1983) The Past Revisited, New York, xviii July 1983

Denzin, Northward. K. (1991) Images of Postmodern Society. Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, SAGE Publications, London

Dyer, R. (2007) Pastiche, Routledge

Featherstone, Yard. (1990) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London:Sage

Harries, D. (2000) Motion-picture show Parody, BFI Publishing

Hassan, I. (1985) "The Culture of Postmodernism", Theory, Culture & Guild, 2:119-32

Hoesterey, I. (2001) Pastiche: Cultural Retentivity in Art, Pic, Literature, Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press

Hutcheon, L. (1985) A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, New York, Methuen

Huyssen, A. (1984) The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Civilization, Postmodernism, Indiana University Press

Jameson, F. (1984) "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Tardily Capitalism", New Left Review, No 146

Jameson, F.(1985) "Postmodernism and Consumer Social club", Postmodern Civilization. Hal Foster (ed.), London, Pluto

Jameson, F.(1988) "The Politics of Theory. Ideological Positions in the Postmodern Contend", The Ideologies of Theory Essays, Book two,  London, Routledge

Jameson, F.(1991) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Tardily Capitalism, Verso, Knuckles Academy Press

Lyotard, J.F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press (originally published in 1979)

Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press

Mulvey, Fifty. (1996) "Netherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue Velvet", in Fetishism and Marvel, Bloomington, Indiana University Press

Rodley, C. (1997) Lynch on Lynch. New York and London: Faber and Faber

Sarris, A. (1983) "Woody Allen at the Elevation of Parody", Village Voice, 19 July 1983

Sarup, 1000. (1993) An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism & Postmodernism, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf

Sheen, Due east. & A. Davidson eds. (2004) The Movie house of David Lynch. American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, Wallflower Printing, London & New York

Stam, R. (1989) Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film, John Hopkins University Press

Stam, R. et al. (1992) New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond, New York, Routledge

Updike, J. (1984) "Modernist, postmodernist, what will they think of side by side?" New Yorker, 10 Sept.: 136-viii, 140-two

Wallace, D. F. (1992) "Eastward Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" in D. F. Wallace A Supposedly Fun Matter I'll Never Do Over again, Boston, Little Brown

FILMOGRAPHY

Blueish Velvet, David Lynch, 1986

Zelig, Woody Allen, 1983

kosovichfortand.blogspot.com

Source: https://ideasfilm.org/postmodern-cinema/

Share this post