Post Modernism

• Post Modernism - features

  Subverting the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization, and testing the audiences suspension of disbelief.

  Break donwn the cultural divide between high and low art and often upend typical portray of gender, race, class, genre and time.

  Do not abide traditional narrative expression.
• Post-modernism is interested in contradiction, fragmentation, and instability.
• What are the five characteristics of post-modern films that seperate them from modernist cinema?

  1 - homage - resulting from the blending of genre and tone

  2 - meta-reference / self-reflexifity

  3 - bridging the gap between low and highbrow activites and art

  4 - out of chronological order

  5 - contradictions
• What are the defining features of cult films?

  A cult following

  Breaking cultural taboos

  Excessive displays of violence, gore, sexuality and profanity
• What are the defining features of post-modern films?

  Intertextuality

  Self-reflexity

  Parody / Pastiche / Homage

  Bridging the gap between high and lowbrow art - popculture references

  Fragmented narrative

  Anti-realist
• How can fallen angels be seen as a post-modern film?

  Fallen angels is a mirror of fragmentation

  The film becomes a window into the reality of a region whose history is defined by the absence of an identifiable past

  Confronts the subject of identity

  Self-reflexive of WKW isolation in HK - (the mute)
• 'a convenient excuse for political apathy, and... an uncritical, cynical, or nihilistic endorsement of uncontrolled capatalism.'

  Christopher Norris on postmodernism
• How does the Killer reflect post-modernism?

  He is a symbol of HK himself.
• Postmodernism and Anti-capatalism in fallen angels.

  All relationships are an exchange of goods and services: charlie needs money for phone, wong chi-ming needs someone to make his decisions and He Zhiu needs customers for his businesses.

  Post-modernist view on relationships is examplified by Zhiu speech about feeling like a 'store' and charlie is the customer.
• How does WKW show Pastiche?

  WKW shows pastiche through links to french theorist Gilles Deleuze: welcoming a new form of filmmaking and a kind of neo-realism that calls our perception of time as linear and chronological to question.
• Jean Baudrillard

  Argues that media creates hyper-realities based on a process of mediation.

  Media images have come to seem more 'real' than the reality they supposedly represent.
• What is postmodernism?


  A post WW2 period where there was a loss of faith in modernity, this manifested in an emphasis on playfulness, playing with genre and the above representing a collapse of confidence in reality
• What are cult films?

  From the 1960s onwards, films began to be taught as a subject; cult films emerged meaning they had passionate following but doesn’t appeal to everybody