Perspectives: 5 Reasons Why Funny Games is Postmodern

1: The film challenges the ideological genre of horror films. The director Michael Haneke draws the audience in but deviates the expectation of the horror genre. In the horror genre the viewer is expected to see the most brutal scenes, Haneke has deconstructed and flipped this making the most macabre parts of the film unimportant to its understanding showing it as an anti-horror horror film. A loud gunshot is heard but shown while one of the Antagonists Paul is seen casually making a sandwich.

2: Haneke appropriated his own film as the original was German, Haneke remade it shot for shot for the American audience with American actors.

3: Heneke also breaks the boundaries of horror genre with the set design and costumes, usually we are familiar with the antagonists wearing dark colours and the set reflecting the scenes which unfold in horror with dark hues prevalent, however Paul and Peter the main protagonists are seen wearing white which represents purity and innocence while the house is also of light colours.

4: Parts of the film are non linear and fragmented as Paul and Peter make a bet with the family that they will be dead or alive before sunset, Paul turns to the camera and asks the viewer "who are you betting on". Paul and Peter are also seen towards the end of film dictating the pastiched way in which the horror genre is structured saying"struggle is boring" and "we want a real ending with a plausible plot". The most unfathomable scene in the film is after the mother Ann shoots Peter and then Paul picks up the remote to the TV and rewinds the whole scene to revert back to before her grabbing the gun to which he then now knows to reach for it before she gets the change to kill his sidekick Peter.

5: Funny Games is a simulacra of film. The ending sees Paul and Peter saying "But isn’t fiction real" “Why?” “Well you can see it in the movie, right?” fiction is described as not being real but if our viewing of something is the only connection to the outside world, and if both “fiction” and “reality” can be seen, how can someone distinguish between them?. speaking of the self referral parts of Funny Games where Paul speaks to the camera Haneke describes "It allowed me to understand illusion intellectually.”

Perspectives: 5 Reasons Why Moulin Rouge is Postmodern

1: The film appropriates many pop songs and mashes them together in a bricolage of telling the story of the characters emotions through the lyrics of the songs. Everything from David Bowie, Madonna and Nirvana is heard.

2: The films storytelling is fragmented with a non linear narrative. The start of moulin Rouge has very quick edits with fast past fades blending the different cuts into one. The main protagonist Christian tells the story at the start of how his one true love Satine died, setting up the viewer for what will entail making it seem almost dream like as the whole film is played out from Christians memories.

3: The film is a pastiche of many different genres, not just musical but also a mash up of comedy with drama. The more surreal elements of the film such as the singing moon, and Kylie Minogue as a flying fairy give a sense of a whimsical fantasy genre.

4: The overall set design of Moulin rouge is a feast for the eyes with many different styles juxtaposed together, 19th century Paris nightclub scene, mixed with can-can and Indian design influences are all prevalent with a lustful red denoting the romance of Moulin Rouge.

5: Moulin Rouge also shows signs of a show within a show telling the audience that the show must go as they try to perfect the show "Spectacular Spectacular"
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Perspectives Lecture 5: Key Words

The Canon

Refers to a classification of literature or art. It is a term used widely to refer to a group of literary works or art that are considered the most important of a particular time period or place which is established by critics.

Dead White European male (DWEM)

A writer, philosopher, or other significant figure whose importance and talents may have been exaggerated by virtue of his belonging to a historically dominant gender and ethnic group.

Phallocentricism

Phallocentrism concentrates on the idea that masculinity is the central focus and source of power and authority.

Eurocentricism

Eurocentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European (and, generally, Western) concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. 

PostColonism

The consequence of exploitation of native people and its lands.

Multiculturalism

 The support of many different distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society.

Feminism

A patron for Woman's rights which supports equality between both sexes

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Perspectives: Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of conceptual artists—including Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine—known as the Pictures generation, began using photography along with appropriation techniques to scrutinise the strategies of visual representation. In 1981, while many of her coevals got their inspiration from everyday life images and the mass media, Levine began re-photographing abstracting or digitising reproductions of photographs by canonical male modernist photographers like Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and Alexander Rodchenko. Levine says "I want to put a picture on top of a picture, This makes for times when both disappear and other times when they’re both visible.” Sherrie Levine

(Left) Walker Evans,"Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife," 1936

(Right) Sherrie Levine, "Untitled" (After Walker Evans) 1979 

Levine has injected herself into the heroic male dominated world of photography. As a woman Levine is appropriating around the critique of art with a feministic point of view, adding a parasite meaning. Levine is using a postmodern manoeuvre to bring the discussion around to what is art? by removing the boundaries of expectations. 

"I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn’t give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority." Sherrie Levine  

Marcel Duchamp - Fountain 1917,
Right Sherrie Levine, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp: A.P.), 1991

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain can be considered as one of the most postmodern pieces there is as he is denoting that art doesn't have to have a meaning or skill behind it, art can be something as mundane as a toilet if i say it is. Levine has interpreted herself as a parasite, turning something as tedious as a toilet into something which looks like it costs millions, also critiquing the market.

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Perspectives: Postmodernism in Scream

Scream Poster

Scream is a pastiche of many other prevailing horror movies, although scream acknowledge's this by showcasing the overabundant horror genre where the heroine is a virgin who always ends up being the final girl while her hard partying friends are slaughtered. A quote from The heroine Sydney about the genre reads "What's the point? They're all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting."  

The characteristic of defining the horror genre in Scream where the leads know horror movies inside and out makes Scream fresh and innovative and is one of the substanstoul reasons why Scream is adored by critics and fans as it has moved away from the horror trope's. 

Scream is avant-garde as it moves away from mimicry in the horror genre as it transformed the slasher movie into the Art of murder, something that Scream has taken inspiration from the Hickcock classic "Psycho". 

Scream paved the way for the horror genre as it made millions Hollywood latched onto the notion of telling the horror genre in a more pastiched and avant-garde way.

Perspectives: Postmodernism in Mulholland Drive

Skitzoid: Mulholland Drive directed by David Lynch is a fragmented skitzoid vision of the unconscious with a non linear narrative which does not have a clear idea of who's story is being told or who's head the viewer is in throughout the film:

Aleatory: Lynch's directorial vision for Mulholland Drive has random stories and scenes from different characters that are hard to make sense of and are intertwined with a bricolage for the Meta Narrative showing stories within stoires which makes the viewer question if everything is connected or not at all.

Pastiche: Mulholland drive is very pastiche in particular with Betty's view of Hollywood as being this magical world where dreams come true and stars are born, something that is often depicted in Hollywood in Cinema.




Hyper reality: Hyper reality is superabundant in Mulholland drive as its unclear who's reality is being told. It seems as though the main protagonist Betty is unable to decipher what is real and what is in her subconscious, or if her subconscious is bubbling to the surface and manifesting with her reality jilting her mind and skewing her perspective.

Lynch makes it clear to the viewer that Mulholland Drive is abstract and determining what the story means to the viewer is left up to interpretation. Parts of the film dictate that Lynch is telling the viewer that it is a movie and he makes it known, in particular when Diane and Betty are in the theatre a trumpet is heard but it doesn't show while the magician states its "all in your imagination". The question is why is the viewer shown this?

Perspectives: Postmodernism in Inception

Inception is skitzoid showing a non linear narrative with the main protagonists in the film jumping from dream to dream with the viewer shown the hyperreality from one persons perspective to the next leaving one wondering who's unconscious are we in.

Simulacra is a main theme in inception with Cobb's wife Mal seen as an imitation and with each dream playing on the last.

Inception is extremely pastiched of many action films with the environments in the dreams feeling like something out of a James bond film with exuberant explosions and slow motion scenes being rampant throughout

There is a particular scene where Ariadne moves a mirror horizontally across another mirror which shows Cobb in an endless Archway, postmodernism relates to reflection, in that it is ubiquitous in us and in this case with Cobb as we are in his subconscious
"Reflexivity as a turning back on oneself, a form of self awareness, has been part of philosophy from its inception,"

The semiotics of the penrose staircase also known as the Never ending stairs showing intertextuality.