Modernism & Postmodernism

Movements in artistic expression often occur spontaneously and are then given a name to identify a perceived trend. This is clearly the case with reference to both modernism and postmodernism, and the very fact that we have seen a need to find a name for the changed environment after 1960 shows that postmodernism exists in some degree--it exists because we have named it, but that does not make it any more a coherent or "intentional" movement than was modernism. In film terms, postmodernism primarily shows a certain weariness with modernism rather than a drive to something clearly new. The elevation of film to a subject for study is itself a postmodern event, signaling as it does the end of the modernist division into High and Low culture. The increasingly self-reflexive nature of modern film along with the elevation of style over substance are also postmodern elements.

Modernism and postmodernism are forces that have been in competition but that are also part of a flow in the same direction, a flow of artistic movement yearning toward change within a technological age. Modernism was part of an effort to create a new environment to replace the old around the turn of the century, following in the wake of similar changes in political, social, literary, and other spheres of society. The application of these ideas to public space in particular shows some of the important dynamics at work in the movement the term describes, and such efforts were used to extend the meaning

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ning how its fundamental characteristics are to be described and whether it even exists, is both an aesthetic and political issue: The various positions that can logically be taken on it, whatever terms they are couched in, can always be shown to particular visions of history in which the evaluation of the social moment in which we live today is the object of an essentially political affirmation or repudiation (Jameson, Postmodernism 55). Sarup addresses the issues raised by Jameson directly and finds that Jameson has been much affected by structuralist thinking, such as the idea that the notion of "individual consciousness" is incoherent, since Jameson would say that the concept implies some sort of "collective consciousness" or total social system. At the same time, Jameson rejects aspects of post-structuralism, especially those who would reject the idea of a master code or master narrative: He finds the notion of master code a valuable one and uses it in his own work. He argues that formalism, whose claims are based on immanent interpretation, is really a form of transcendent interpretation in disguise (Sarup 179). The master code for any interpretive method is the ideology it seeks to perpetuate: Ideology is the

Category: Arts - M