huckelberry wrote: ↑Wed May 31, 2023 12:23 am
honorentheos wrote: ↑Sun May 28, 2023 11:10 pm
I watched this Youtube video this weekend and thought others may find it interesting as well. The subject is ostensibly the evolution of movie narrative from its roots in moderism through today where the deconstruction of postmodernism and often nihilist or absurdist inevitability it brings to art, to the increasing search for meaning and sincerity within the many strands of narratives of hyper-modernism.
https://youtu.be/5xEi8qg266g
And, frankly, true to the subject, I thought there is much more to take from this than a video essay on film. The topic extends to every topic we discuss on this board. It is, at many levels, truly a discussion of...art.
Honoretheos, I watched and have put a little effort into considering but am a bit unsure where to proceed. There is postmodern in visual arts, philosophy and literary criticism. I think it is a bit of a different thing in each with perhaps some similarities. Is it a blessing that we have little postmodern popular music, or sort of popular music?
The look at movies pointed out shifts in stylistic trends , changes in what sort of methods are favored or employed. The most recent movie mentioned which I have seen was Once upon a time in Hollywood which I found to be a surprisingly effective movie. I do not see a philosophical reflection in the choices of how the movie was made. It is probably true that the mix of strategies used have been developed in the past few decades. Familiarity would make it easier to make the fictional retelling of real events work. Most everybody watching the movie would know about the substantial divergence from the real events. The tension between fact a fiction becomes an expressive commentary on the facts. (as is all good fiction despite its relationship to modernism, what ever form of that may be in view)
I once heard the best definition of pop media on NPR, which was, "Pop is anything that does the work for you." It's such a subjective (postmodern?) take on what constitutes pop culture and pop media yet seems to capture exactly what makes "pop" pop. The converse being media that demands a cost to appreciate it fully, usually through both study and attempts at practice. Jazz has both a low and high bar for appreciation. Low in that it can be pleasantly "pop" in its own right. High, in that the best jazz musicians can only be appreciated by being familiar with the structure of the music. Coltrane is appreciable at almost any level, but to see his genius requires more than tuning in. Visual media being the same, I think your conversations with Morley about art highlights there are points that only land when the other party is sufficiently prepared to understand the references, follow where the other person is not just pointing to, but where the point originates.
In that sense, I think the video essay benefits from someone being a bit of a film aficionado. Knowing the films, even the ones he only uses visuals from but doesn't mention or break down probably leads to moments of recognition and intuition that help explain it that I assume exist everywhere but on reflection shouldn't.
One aspect of this I think matters is narrative - both as storytelling devices we use to convey information to others. And as devices we use to explain the world to ourselves. The narrative of the essay is about the narrative of film as a medium in which one can see the zeitgeist of a time. And it makes sense that there aren't many post-modern pop songs except when someone does something for the lolz and the folks being lol'd at miss the joke and buy the single. That happens more often than we may realize, really.
But there's a broader point here. I think our society is at a point where we've deconstructed ourselves into societal failure. While I didn't agree with MG's points, I actually agreed with MG's concerns in the broad strokes in his thread where he mistakenly blamed Gen Z for being irreligious and ruining society as a result. And like the essay points out, those who would push a return to High Noon or, more likely, Top Gun Maverik, aren't responding to the state of the world as it is but as they fantasize how it OUGHT to be. MG would have the world return to making High Noon.
Now, folks like Culty and many others who post as contrarians are far along the deconstruction of postmodernism to the point they don't care about anything beyond their myopic ego-centric emotions. They would see the world only as No Country for Old Men, and piss on anyone who says they like that movie at the same time. There's no future with the populist bullshitters because there is no actual "there" there, just criticism of what others think or believe or do or vote or participate in the meaningless machine of society. And it's easy to imagine there is meaning and purpose in just opposing their nihilism through critic or absurdity. Why not? Nothing matters.
So that gets to the point about hypermodernism and metamodernism. If postmodernism asserts the end of ideologies because any one person's ideology will disadvantage someone else, and hypermodernism is the overwhelming cacophony of ideological views being pushed through all the forms of media that demand a person code shift constantly to simple tread water in the sea of multiplicity of competing realities, how does one find meaning? I think most anyone who has left religion gets accused of descending into meaningless existence. And the response back that there is meaning in one's life and relationships gets met with a stiff-armed defense in favor of the interloper's ideology of choice. I think there's something to this idea that as we, as a society, struggle with not rejecting the varied experiences and realities of others, as individuals we do need to make meaning that works for us. And there is the metamodern.