Postmodernism Sample Essay

Postmodernism Sample Essay The postmodernism term does not mean any narrowly restricted artistic directions or styles, but a certain cultural dominant of modern society, so we can only talk about how the postmodernist views and postmodern mentality are reflected in the approach to creating a film. Modernism and postmodernism use the rethinking of the role of language (ie, the means of organising and conveying meanings) as the basis for cognitive and artistic activity, are opposite one to another. Modernism exposes the conventional character of the conventional language as just a sum of techniques, it wants to reach the meaning with the help of some other, more adequate language and even directly, intuitively. Postmodernism announces the fundamental impossibility of acquiring meaning and closes on the stylised reproduction of various but equally conventional languages. As applied to the cinema, this means that if the original effect of the authenticity of the photographic reproduction of reality outweighs the conventions of editing and genre (especially when they are intentionally reduced to a minimum in neorealism), the language of the cinema is perceived as adequate and transparent. Postmodernism abandons any ideology and value hierarchy following the deconstruction, it produces a reverse reconstruction of the cinematographic language, but already within the framework of conscious stylization. Over time, the emphasis is shifted from the human content of the film, its psychological authenticity to its formal elements, to the text as such. Already in the Worker Drone by S. Raju (2010) and “Play” by Kaplan and Zimmermann, their formal alignment is more important than the content element. All kinds of cosmic fantasies and adventurous epics are built only on interest in formal narrative and tricks, and often both are presented in a parody manner Stylistic and parodic approach to the narrative causes abundant citation and associative links to other films, to the classics of the genre, as a result, the number of new films about old subjects (remakes) increases. Since for postmodernism the hierarchy of meanings and values looks like a manifestation of authoritarianism, an equality that leads to aesthetic populism is established between all texts, when elements of high and popular culture, styles, genres, etc. turn out to be completely mixed. One of the peculiarities that distinguishes postmodernist films is intertexting that you can see in both films “The Worker Drone” and “Play”. In the first film, the characters watch a video commercial while in the second film, the characters are inside of the video game. They question whether the surrounding world is real and they are not aware of who they really are. The feeling of paranoia is the problem that characters of both films face and they search for the answers throughout the films. The postmodernism examples are seen in the films and they represent the cognitive activity of the characters, their deprivation of real world or the world that they consider to be theirs. True feelings and senses of perception become questionable. Watching the films will provide the viewers with bright representation of the postmodern culture on the 20th and 21th centuries