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Postmodernism and Filmmore by Rajendra Gonarkar 67 Download (.pdf) Postmodernism and Film -- Rajendra GonarkarSchool of Media Studies, SRTM Uni.Nanded.Dr. Ramesh DhageSchool of Language, Literature & CultureStudies, SRTM University, Nanded Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows. Maxim Gorky, on attending his first filmscreening. Introduction: Watching a movie takes almost allviewers out of their everyday lives and landsthem into a complete different world. To this aRussian writer Maxim Gorky called thekingdom of shadows. Whether people watcha film in a theatre or the digitalized version athome on a DVD, they continue to visitGorkys kingdom (Tom Wallis, 2008) . Theyimmerse themselves in the lives of thefictional characters, develop opinions abouthistorical events, and get captivated by theartistic combinations of colour, light andsound. Film engages viewers on an emotionallevel, but some criticize the cinema as an escapist entertainment. It is also praised as animaginative art form that allows people torealize their dreams and fantasies. The realityis that films do both of these things and muchmore. The Theory of Film: The theory of film is almost as old asthe medium itself whereas the cinemadeveloped at the close of the nineteenthcentury. It evolved through the stages such asthe advances in photography, mechanics,optics and the scientific production of serialized images (chrono photography). It alsohas its roots in the ancient form of popularentertainment, ranging from magic lanternshows and phantasmagorias, large-scalepanoramas, dioramas and optical toys.From the very beginning, inventors,manufacturers, artists, intellectuals, educatorsand scientists asked themselves questionsabout the essence of cinema: was it amovement or otherwise, was it an image orwriting, was it capturing place or storing time? Besides its relationship to other forms of visualization and representation, the questionwas; was it science or an art? Did it elevateand educate, or distract and corrupt?Discussions cantered not just on the specificityof cinema, but also on its ontological,epistemological and anthropological relevance.All the discussions ended up in the answersranging from derogatory to scepticism. Thefirst attempt to make film as a new mediumtook place in the early twentieth century andtwo representatives whose work can lay claimto the title The first film theory are VachelLindsay and Hugo Munstgerberg (Richard Rushton and Gary,2010). Roots of Film Study : The acdemicization of film studiestook root in the late 1960s, as humanitiesscholars imported film analysis into traditionalhumanistic programmes simulated by a morewidespread renaissance of cinephilia withinAmerican culture, young professors, andstudents took seriously to the study a of cinema as an intellectual pursuit. Students inliterature classes attacked the Searchers (1956)and Psycho (1960) with hermeneutic fervour.Budding philosophers debated the existentialworldviews of Bergman and

Antonioni,Admitting film programmes into the academy,thus, established the legitimacy of film as anintellectual field of study. Postmodernism and film: Karl Marx is probably the mostinfluential thinker of the last two centuries,both for those who accepted his ideas and,oddly by those who rejected him. Marx hadargued that the economic base determines thesuperstructure of a society. The superstructureof society consisting of culture, ideology andpolitics follow the basic structure of societycalled capitalism. Ernest Mandel (1923-1995),for example, divided capitalism into threeperiods; Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded5 1 9 P L T L 2 0 1 2 : I S B N 9 7 8 8 1 9 2 0 1 2 0 0 1 a) Marketb) Monopoly &c) Post-industrial phaseThe post industrial period begansomewhere in between the end of the SecondWorld War. The 1960s saw the increasing useof nuclear power and electronic machines. Italso marks the beginning of the fall of the oldempires and the multinational corporations eclipsed the nation-state concept (Andrew M. Butler, 2009). The American academic,Fredric Jameson, was one of the majorscholars who labelled the era of the post-industrial as postmodern age.The names of the postmodernvanguards are Michel Foucault, JacquesDerrida, Jean-Francois Lyotrd and RichardRorty who are its leading strategists. They setthe direction of the movement. They alsoprovided potent tools for its assessment. Thereare other contributors to this ideology whohave earned infamous names for themselves,they are Stanley Fish and Franck Lentricchiain literary and legal criticism, CatharineMackinnon and Andrea Dworkin in feministlegal criticism, Jacques Lacan in psychology,Robert Venturi and Andreas Huyseen inarchitectural criticism and Luce Irigaray in thecriticism of science.Michel Foucault has identified themajor targets, thus, All my analyses areagainst the idea of universal necessities inhuman existence (Stephen R. Hicks,2004) .Such necessities must be swept aside,argues Foucault.Postmodernism, as a discursivestylistic grid has enriched film theory and itsanalysis by calling attention to a stylistic shifttoward a media conscious cinema. Much of the work on postmodernism in film hasinvolved the positing of a postmodernaesthetic, exemplified in such influential filmsas Blue velvet, Blade Run ner and pulp fiction (James Monaco,2000) . For Jameson, thepostmodernism was to be viewed with acertain amount of suspicion. This approach issupported by other theorists. These aestheticscelebrated the copy or simulacrum over theoriginal, style over substance, demonstrated afailure of emotion and individualism andfrequently would be characterised by pasticheor nostalgia for an imagined golden age( Robert Stam, 2000 ). Jameson wrote about thenostalgic film in relation to Star Wars (1977), American Graffiti (1973), Something Wild (1986) and

Blue Velvet (1984). Film, assupposedly a democratic, lowbrow, art form,was written about heavily by postmodernanalysts, with Blade Runner (1932) being theionic text for the new iconoclasts.Jameson discerns the neo-noir film Body Heat as nostalgia for the present.Films like American Graffiti for |Americans, Indo chine for the French and the rajnostalgia films (Heat and Dust, A passage to India) for the British convey a wistful sense of loss for what is imagined as a simpler andgrander time. For this stylistically hybridpostmodern cinema, both the modernist avant-garde modes of analysis with the cinema as theinstigator of epistemological breakthroughs and the modes of analysis developed forclassical cinema, no longer quite work.Instead, libidinal intensities compensate for theweakening of narrative time, as the older plotsare replaced by an endless string of narrativepretexts in which only the experiencesavailable in the sheer viewing present can beentertained. The movie Clueless by JoeDante could be seen as a reflection of postmodernism. The rewriting of Austensstory no longer just belongs to her. Thecharacters of Emma and Mr Knightly, depictedby the novelist have been pushed into oblivionby the versions in the movie. The joy is inseeing how the characters in the movie enjoysexual liberty, which is absent with thecharacters in the novel. (Tom Wallis & MariaPramaggiore, 2008) The liberty exercised bythe film maker made the characters in thevisual form more appealing than the ones inthe written version. Conclusion: In the present times when the world isdominated by information technology, filmcontinues to remain as an inevitable tool of public education and entertainment. The time-temper has dried human relations. Man hasbecome isolated and lost communication withthe outer world. This hollow space in humanlife constitutes the content of postmodernismwhich has been forcefully brought to thenotice of the world by cinema. It is, therefore, Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded5 2 0 P L T L 2 0 1 2 : I S B N 9 7 8 8 1 9 2 0 1 2 0 0 1 the assessment of cinema in the context of post-modern film theory is an inevitable need. References: 1. Tom Wallis and MariaPramaggiore, Film A Critical Introduction, Laurence KingPublishing Ltd. London, 2008.2. Richard Rushton and GaryBettinson, What is Film Theory, An Introduction to Contemporary Debates, open University Press,England, 20103. Andrew M. Butler, The pocket Essential Film Studies , 20094.

Stephen R. Hicks, Postmodernismscepticism and socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, ScholargyPublishing , New Berlin,20045. Robert Stam, Film Theory- An Introduction, BlackwellPublishing, Malden,2000 6. James Monaco, How to read A film , Oxford University Press ,New York,3 rd edition, 2000 Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded5 2 1 P L T L 2 0 1 2 : I S B N 9 7 8 8 1 9 2 0 1 2 0 0 1
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