postmodernism, film
"Without much difficulty, postmodernism may be conceived as sharing some characteristics with the avant-garde that oppose it to mainstream cinema. These include "narrative intransivity" (gaps, interruptions, and digressions as contrasted to clear causal development of the story line) and Brechtian estrangement (an alienation effect rather than the viewer identification with characters sought by traditional filmmakers). ...[however] postmodernism does not share the avant-garde's overarching desire "to connect with the experience of particular classes and to place that experience within new explanatory models"...." (43)
"A. Spica is above all a speaker. Although Albert does not acknowledge the pleasures of speaking (he says early in the film: "money is my business; eating my pleasure") and says that he is always hungry, it is just as true to say that he is always speaking. As he speaks, he cannot tolerate any dissent, anything that will interrupt the relentless flow of words from his mouth-- and his mouth alone, for he is incapable of dialogue. He knows only monologue. Albert's monologue, which revels in puns and is constantly ripe with vulgarities, never shies from verbal abuse and is supplemented occasionally by acts of physical abuse. Albert's smearing Roy with dog shit and pissing on him at the beginning of the film is a grim harbinger of much worse to come." (47)
"Offered the opportunity to speak, Michael has the change to create a discourse of his own; as a reader, Michael has always been a consumer of others' discourses. Even Georgina is unable to understand Michael's pleasure in reading. ... She asks him, "What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them. How can they make you happy?" "I've always found them very reasonable," replies Michael, "They don't change their minds while you're not looking." It seems that Michael regards the texts he reads as essentially static, having stable fixed meanings.... These texts, then, are not postmodern. The bookkeeper's passive reading (which suggests that intentionality is somehow independent of his reading and is fixed within the pages of the book) is a far cry from the active reading encouraged, for example, by Roland Barthes. "The goal of literary work (of literature as work)," says Barthes, "is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (S/Z 4)." (48-49)
"Jameson shrewdly suggests that it is misleading to talk about realism, modernism, and postmodernism as existing independently of one another. In fact, these three terms represent three stages in the evolution of capitalism; and "the three stages are not symmetrical, but dialectical in their relationship to each other" (Signatures 157). Thus, although we may imagine that we can escape postmodernism and find outselves in realism or that we can move from realism into postmodernism, it is not a question of moving backward or forward in time, but of existing constantly within the dialectic. At a particular stage of the dialectic, the tell-tale signs of postmodernism remain for Jameson the eclipse of the individual self and a privileging of space rather than time, but a work can never be purely postmodern any more than it can be purely modernist." (50)
Pagan, Nicholas O. 1995. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover": Making Sense of Postmodernism. South Atlantic Review 60(1):43-55.
"A. Spica is above all a speaker. Although Albert does not acknowledge the pleasures of speaking (he says early in the film: "money is my business; eating my pleasure") and says that he is always hungry, it is just as true to say that he is always speaking. As he speaks, he cannot tolerate any dissent, anything that will interrupt the relentless flow of words from his mouth-- and his mouth alone, for he is incapable of dialogue. He knows only monologue. Albert's monologue, which revels in puns and is constantly ripe with vulgarities, never shies from verbal abuse and is supplemented occasionally by acts of physical abuse. Albert's smearing Roy with dog shit and pissing on him at the beginning of the film is a grim harbinger of much worse to come." (47)
"Offered the opportunity to speak, Michael has the change to create a discourse of his own; as a reader, Michael has always been a consumer of others' discourses. Even Georgina is unable to understand Michael's pleasure in reading. ... She asks him, "What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them. How can they make you happy?" "I've always found them very reasonable," replies Michael, "They don't change their minds while you're not looking." It seems that Michael regards the texts he reads as essentially static, having stable fixed meanings.... These texts, then, are not postmodern. The bookkeeper's passive reading (which suggests that intentionality is somehow independent of his reading and is fixed within the pages of the book) is a far cry from the active reading encouraged, for example, by Roland Barthes. "The goal of literary work (of literature as work)," says Barthes, "is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (S/Z 4)." (48-49)
"Jameson shrewdly suggests that it is misleading to talk about realism, modernism, and postmodernism as existing independently of one another. In fact, these three terms represent three stages in the evolution of capitalism; and "the three stages are not symmetrical, but dialectical in their relationship to each other" (Signatures 157). Thus, although we may imagine that we can escape postmodernism and find outselves in realism or that we can move from realism into postmodernism, it is not a question of moving backward or forward in time, but of existing constantly within the dialectic. At a particular stage of the dialectic, the tell-tale signs of postmodernism remain for Jameson the eclipse of the individual self and a privileging of space rather than time, but a work can never be purely postmodern any more than it can be purely modernist." (50)
Pagan, Nicholas O. 1995. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover": Making Sense of Postmodernism. South Atlantic Review 60(1):43-55.
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