2. OBJECTIVES
• To introduce aspects of postmodern
style/aesthetic
• To introduce aspects of postmodern form
(narrative, genre)
3. KEY TERMS
SIMULACRA,
PARODY & PASTICHE,
HYPERREALITY,
BRICOLAGE,
INTERTEXTUALITY,
HYBRIDITY,
DISLOCATION FROM TIME & SPACE
4. What is Post Modern Media?
• Postmodern media rejects the idea that any media product or text is of
any greater value than another. All judgements of value are merely
taste.
• Anything can be art, anything can deserve to reach an audience, and
culture ‘eats itself’as there is no longer anything new to produce or
distribute.
• The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now
live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of
simulacrum. Images refer to each other and represent each other as
reality rather than some ‘pure’ reality that exists before the image
represents it – this is the state of hyper-reality.
• All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses and
what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning’
discourse.
5. Postmodern Media as an
STYLE aesthetic
• Hybridity - (the mixing and sampling of different kinds
and levels - of hip hop music, of material in television
ads, films, etc.) Postmodern texts 'raid the image bank'
of popular culture which is so richly available through
video and computer technologies, recyclesome old
movies and shows on television, the Internet etc. Music,
film and TV provide excellent examples of these
processes.
6. Bricolage
• This is used to refer to the process of
adaptation or improvisation where aspects of
one style are given quite different meanings
when compared and collidewith stylistic
features from another or a combination of
multiple. Look at the inside of the recent
Doctor's Tardis for examples of Brocolage –
the old typewriter with the modern viewer etc.
7. Self Reflexivity
Is the text aware that it is itself a constructed
simulation or reproduction. In using
intertextual references and creating hyper-
reality does it play with the idea of this by
making reference to itself as a simulation
of reality?
8. Self Reflexivity
Is the text aware that it is itself a constructed
simulation or reproduction. In using
intertextual references and creating hyper-
reality does it play with the idea of this by
making reference to itself as a simulation
of reality?
9. Parody & Pastiche
Post Modern texts use Intertextuality to
reference existing texts, sometimes as an
HOMAGE – paying tribute to its influence
and sometimes as PARODY & PASTICHE
invites the postmodern audience to make
sense and meaning of the reference by its
understanding and experience of
consuming a bank of previous media,
often for the purpose of comedy & humour.
10. HYPERREALITY
• Reality is no longer pure or truth – our culture is
saturated by media simulations of reality that we can no
longer seperate them. The blurring of real and
‘simulated’, especially in film and reality TV or
celebrity magazines, Simulation or hyperreality can refer
to not only the increasing use of CGI in films like Avatar,
but also the narrative enigmas of The Matrix, Blade
Runner or Inception.
11. SIMULACRA
• This has implications for realist forms of media, since our sense of
reality is now said to be utterly dominated by popular media images;
cultural forms can no longer 'hold up the mirror to reality', since
reality itself is saturated by advertising, film, video games, and
television images.
• Moreover the capacity of digital imaging makes 'truth claims' or the
reliability of images tricky – think about the use of Photoshop in
magazine and advertising images. Advertising no longer tries
seriously to convince us of its products' real quality but, just shows
us a fake about the product.
12. The Erosion of History
In a society where a constant flow of images via mass media and mass communication becomes
part of everyday life, we are treated to an endless barrage of signs which we accept, not as
being real, but, as Baudrillard would argue, as supplanting the real. The real loses its meaning,
and what we believe and deal with are simulacra. Baudrillard would, as Jameson did, relate
this idea to history. Without any grounding in the real, and having no way to prove the real,
our knowledge of the past is confined to whatever symbols we associate with it when we
attempt to portray it. For example, "The 80's," as an historical entity, is not anything real, but
merely the amalgamation of the symbols that we have accumulated for it, whether they be
images of stonewashed designer jeans, new wave pop, breakdancing, Ronald Reagan, Just Say
No, glasnost, greed, or the Challenger. There is no history, only a distorted nostalgia, distorted
because it relies only on the symbols, icons, and indexes that we have access to at any given
moment.
13. Blurring of boundaries
• The boundaries between form and structure of
settings in time and periods in history have been
blurred so that they are set in a dislocated
narrative space – no time and no place. Films
such as Inglorious Basterds demonstrate the
'erosion of history'. In addition to this the
boundaries of genre have been blurred to produce
Hybridity.
14. Disjointed Narrative Structures
• These are said to mimic the uncertainties and relativism
of postmodernity in films like Pulp Fiction as
contemporary narratives often won’t guarantee
identifications with characters, or the 'happy ending' or
meta narratives which have traditionally been achieved
at the end of films. They often manage only a play with
multiple, or heavily ironic, perhaps 'unfinished' or even
parodic endings, Similar to Memento and Fight Club .
Narratives can also be disjointed in time and space –
see modern / retro films like Blade Runner
15. Summary
• We usually think of the media as being 'in
between' us and reality, hence the word 'media'
and the idea of 'mediation'
• Postmodernists claim that in a media-saturated
world, where we are constantly immersed in media
- on the move, at work, at home - the distinction
between reality and the media representation of it
becomes blurred or even entirely invisible to us. In
other words, we no longer have any sense of the
difference between real things and images of
them, or real experiences and simulations of them.
Media reality is the new reality.
16. You have 0 friends
This becomes more complex but accessible when
we consider the building of virtual worlds in games
for example Liberty City in GTA, but also online
our identity and relationships through memes &
the projection of our selves into avatars, facebook,
and Second Life
18. FIGHT CLUB
Weds 2nd Feb 2 – 5pm
Fight workshop
Design a sequence that demonstrates some
or more of the postmodern stylistic
approaches we have discussed here
Consider particularly how we planning this
relies on us make sense of fighting as
'simulacra' & 'hyperreality'