Postmodemism

John Fiske (1987) - believes that a representation of a car chase only makes sense in relation to all the others we have seen. For example, people will often say “its something like off a film”. Therefore we make sense of the world around us through the experiences that we have. 

Levi-Strauss developed the concept of bricolage. He saw any text as constructed out of socially recognisable ‘debris’ from other texts. He saw that writers construct texts from other texts by a process of:

• Addition 
• Deletion
• Substitution 
• Transposition 

Example: Inglorious Bastards

• A film based in Nazi Germany, where a bunch of Jews go around killing Nazi’s. 

Quentin Tarantino (director) deleted the battles within the film and added in different concepts. He substituted battlefields for cinema/bar interiors. 

Gerard Genette developed the term transsexuality and developed five sub-groups, but only 4 apply to film.

• Intertextuality - quotation, plagiarism, allusion
• Architextuality - designation of the text as part of a genre by the writer or the audience
• Metatextuality - explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another
• Hypotextuality - the relation between a text and a preceding hypertext - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation)

Postmodernist Theory

Baudrillard developed the idea of simulation and simulacra 

Simulation: the process in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented… the representations become more important than the “real thing”. 

4 orders of simulation:

• Sings thought of as reflecting reality: representing @objective truth;
• Sings mask reality: reinforces notion of reality;
• Sings mask the absence of reality; e.g. DisneyWorld, Watergate, LA life; jogging, psychotherapy, organic food
• Signs become… 

Simulacra - they have no relation to reality; they simulate a spinal tap, Cheers bars, new urbanism, Starbucks, the Gulf War, was a video game, 9/11 has become the coverage, not the event. 

Hyperreality - a condition in which “reality” has been replaced by simulacraargues that today we only experience prepared realities - edition war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the Jeremy Kyle Show.

The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.