Postmodernism and Film
Postmodernism and film
This chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Jean Baudrillard’s and Fredric Jameson’s accounts of the postmodern have had a significant impact on the field of film studies, affecting both film theory and history. The most influential aspects of each theorist’s work are outlined in the first two sections. The first section focuses on two key texts by Baudrillard: Simulations and America, while the second addresses Jameson’s famous article “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” I shall indicate the ways in which their ideas have been taken up and/or challenged at the end of each section.
The critical debates surrounding these conceptions of the postmodern have impacted upon film history due to cinema’s dual status as both an icon of modernity and a symbol of the postmodern. The third section explores the many different definitions of the relation between the modern and the postmodern and traces the ways in which this distinction intersects with other key oppositions in film theory and history, such as classical/postclassical and narrative/spectacle. The final section will use current theoretical conceptions of affirmative postmodernisms in order to provide a reading of Face/Off that challenges its status as the ultimate in meaningless spectacle.
Baudrillard
One of Baudrillard’s key theses is contained within the title of the first work in his compilation volume, Simulations. “The Precession of Simulacra” reverses the traditional mimetic relation between art forms and reality, in which the image is said to be a copy of the real. The title asserts that the simulacrum or image has ontological priority and thus precedes the real. Baudrillard explains this reversal with reference to Hollywood disaster movies. “It is pointless to laboriously interpret these films by their relationship with an ‘objective’ social crisis . . . It is in the other direction that we must say it is the social itself which, in contemporary
This chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Jean Baudrillard’s and Fredric Jameson’s accounts of the postmodern have had a significant impact on the field of film studies, affecting both film theory and history. The most influential aspects of each theorist’s work are outlined in the first two sections. The first section focuses on two key texts by Baudrillard: Simulations and America, while the second addresses Jameson’s famous article “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” I shall indicate the ways in which their ideas have been taken up and/or challenged at the end of each section.
The critical debates surrounding these conceptions of the postmodern have impacted upon film history due to cinema’s dual status as both an icon of modernity and a symbol of the postmodern. The third section explores the many different definitions of the relation between the modern and the postmodern and traces the ways in which this distinction intersects with other key oppositions in film theory and history, such as classical/postclassical and narrative/spectacle. The final section will use current theoretical conceptions of affirmative postmodernisms in order to provide a reading of Face/Off that challenges its status as the ultimate in meaningless spectacle.
Baudrillard
One of Baudrillard’s key theses is contained within the title of the first work in his compilation volume, Simulations. “The Precession of Simulacra” reverses the traditional mimetic relation between art forms and reality, in which the image is said to be a copy of the real. The title asserts that the simulacrum or image has ontological priority and thus precedes the real. Baudrillard explains this reversal with reference to Hollywood disaster movies. “It is pointless to laboriously interpret these films by their relationship with an ‘objective’ social crisis . . . It is in the other direction that we must say it is the social itself which, in contemporary
References: hereafter in the text. 4. Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 56. 5. Callinicos suggests that the disintegration of use-value is typically said to mark the transition between Fordism and post-Fordism. See Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 134.