Wielkie żarcie i postmodernizm : o grach intertekstualnych w kinie współczesnym

Abstract

This book represents an attempt to describe those tendencies in the contemporary cinema which are evidence of postmodernist thinking. The author has made the assumption that postmodernism — a concept difficult to grasp or define in creative practice — is a symptom of the clinical state (the death throes) of the world of today. The culture on which this world was founded, constructing a specific scale of values, is now exhausted. Beating the road towards the future are now the thinkers whose ideas are anti-Cartesian and antipositivist The motif of „grand eating” (in Le rande bouffe) in which is focused as in a lens all the kinds of death and destruction, has become the dominating factor in art and has taken over, among other things, the minds and imaginations of many film directors. In the opinion of the author the obsessional repetition in various versions of a portrayal of the break up of the world may be treated as the key to postmodernism in the film world, deprived, it is true, of its own poetic thought and artistic programme, but despite this allowing itself to be distinguished due to the thematic and formal determinants characteristic of the given artists and films. The author’s interest is particularly drawn by the creative work of those directors who point up the processes of global entropy (which naturally necessitates breaking own of structures, dismantling of accepted means of expression, nonrespecting of homogeneous forms etc.), they do not hide their disposition towards aggressive destruction and with obvious pleasure play the unconstrained intertextual word games, of which the trade marks are, inter alia, refined eclecticism, pastiche, parody, taking on poses or usurping the iconic repertoire in a thoroughly perverse and untrammelled manner. The present author has traced the symptoms of these disintegration tendencies in the cinema of the nineteen seventies and eighties. In the film productions of B. Bertolucci, M. Ferreri, J-.L. Godard and other eminent directors he has discerned the first signals of the breakdown in both the artistic and the popular cinema. Next again, on the example of the work of P. Greenaway, D. Lynch, the Coen brothers, D. Byrne and J. Jost he analyses, in the context of poststructural theory, the principal characteristics of the intertextual word play. He also focuses attention on criticism of the deconstructivits type and also on criticism inspiring the so-called new hermeneutics, on the basis of these works exemplifying the points of departure and approach of postmodernism, which rejects the matrix of the world, repudiates the feasibility of reaching the truth and rejects the universally binding ethical norms.