Film and postmoden culture

Abstract

The relationship between postmodernism and film within the scope of visual culture is threefold: the form and style of a film can be postmodern, the subject matter of a film can be postmodern, and the way of film is interpreted can be postmodern. Films are usually very diverse while delivering any message and a proper film has always something to say. I believe there isn’t any postmodern message in a film rather the way of making, the screenplay or the story telling could be a form of postmodernism and that is what I exactly believe as postmodern film. Because my understanding of postmodernism is relatively entangled with postmodern visual culture as I believe postmodernism is a literary and historical movement though by no means an overreaching and unified metanarrative in and of itself. Postmodern films can detail the functionality of narrative structures by self-reflective commenting on the cinematic form itself and by combining or declining common film genres. They can reject any conventional character types, the screenplay or the story and the structure of telling inter-connected stories that could be fractured in time and space. The content of the films are usually postmodern: films particularly documentaries, in the postmodern period have begun to explore the illusiveness and ultimate relativity of an authoritative truthful account of an issue or event. I will eventually try to explain my thesis in accordion with postmodern visual culture, various forms of it and connecting the theory with few famous postmodern films and visual productions that are widely diverse and relatively made in the postmodern era.