Postmodernism April 11

You are not yourself (untitiled) Barbara Kruger 1982

5 Characteristics

a fragmentation

b who am I ? When I erase the code?

codes: gender , identity

difference between gender and sex: performativity of your sexual identity

How do I come to presive as a man/ a woman?

How a woman/man should behave?

The being itself is a text to be read.

The postmoderiser see the world like neo. They see the world, breaking the code/inlusion and seeing the truth.

What is reality? What is real/fiction?

Documentary: Genius of Photography

consumption of the society: hamburg/young boy whore

influence of the media: black whore, black person on TV

Main characteristics of Postmoderism:

  1. vervreemding
  2. toevalligheid
  3. fragmentatie
  4. anti autoriteit
  5. interactiviteit
  1. alienation
  2. accident
  3. fragmentation
  4. anti-authority
  5. interactivity

Is postmodernism a period?

Is postmodernism a set of ideologies?

Is postmodernism a set of style?

It is widely agreed that there is no precise moment of rupture between the modern and postmodern. Rather, postmodernism intersects with and permeates late modernity.

They collect things from different aspects, and then make a new version out of it.

Postmodernism challenge the high archicy,  there is no social status, everyone is equal when talking about art. They are anti-authority.

Ideology: a system of thoughts

Main characteristics of  Postmodernism:

  1. Doesn’t make a distinction between high art and popular culture and questions traditional binary opposites such as male/female, nature/culture, original/copy, culture and traditional values such as authorship.
  2. Puts emphasis on the idea of “style” and upgrades everything that is fleeting and has to do with the “surface of things” (fashion etc.)
  3. Interrogates history (and historiography) and is against the master narratives (or mate narratives) of society such as a religion, science, Marxism, psychoanalysis, Enlightenment, myths of progress and other that intend to explain all facets of life.
  4. Puts the emphasis on ideas pluralism and multiplicity (the idea of difference is central to postmodern thought and leads to a great interest in the concept of identity politics.)
  5. Believes that there is no such a thing as a direct understanding of the world through one’s sense: everything we experience is mediated through language, images, social forces etc.
  6. Postmodernism emphasizes irony and one’s own involvement in low or popular culture.




Jan 11st The 1930s Movies


The 1930s:The Golden Years of the Hollywood Studio System

Background: The Great Depression

The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936


At that time, a few big studios had created an oligarchy and specialized in specific genres, stars and director.

Paramount: “European” style productions. produced the bizarre film like Duck Soup.


Loew’s/MGM: Big production with directors like George Cukor and with big star like Katherine Hepburn.


Warner Bros: Concentrated on creating popular genre and then mining them: They Busky Berkleley musical, The gangster film, the problem film based on current headlines, the “biopic”.



Universal: New stars in visually striking horror films


Also at that time, the rising of the Nazism. So a lot of people from Europe massively immigrated to United States, which leads a “Brain Strain” situation in Europe.


Cinematography Style in 1930s

  • “Soft” images with an extensive range of grays to create glamorous images.
  • “Deep focus” created using optical printing or by placing certain elements very close from the lens and others in the background at a considerable distance

Technical Innovations

  • Sound Recording: Light weight booms
  • Camera movements: cranes
  • technicolor
  • special effects

Overall, the new techniques improved a lot, but narrative action and character psychology still remained central, and continuity rules still promoted spatial orientation. Sound, color, deep focus and other techniques enchanted the style.

Orson Welles was the most influential director to emerge in the 1930s. Citizen Kane

Some new genres arsed and new variats are introduced in the old ones.

  • The Musical
  • The Screwball Comedy
  • The Horror Film
  • The Social Problem Film
  • The Gangster Film
  • Film Noir
  • The War Film


Jan 11st The Introduction of Sound

The Introduction of Sound

  • Multiple discoveries and patents around the same period of time, the second half of the 1920.
  • Main countries in the race: United States, Germany and the USSR
  • First Sound Film: cheap way of reproducing stage acts and music
  • On October6, 1927. The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland) premiered by Warner Bros. This film developed into a major hit, demonstrating the profit potential of feature-length “talkies”.

  • In 1928, The Lights of New York (Bryan Foy) is the first 100% talkis

When Sound Came In:

  • Microphones were multiple-directional and insensitive
  • Sound had to be recorded on the spot
  • The sound track occupied part of the left of the rectangular images
  • cameras were noisy and were put in bulky booths

So in this way

  • Difficult to get precise frames
  • camera booths had wheels, but these were usually served to move the camera between set-ups: too noisy and awkward for tracking shots (only short panning movements through the booth windows were possible)
  • Yet multiple-camera shooting wasn’t abandoned. (Film makers were reluctant to surrender the flexibility and convenience.)

A little later, in the beginning of 1930s

  • Technicians were quick to solve the previously intentioned problems
  • Studio build padded metal “blimps” that silenced the camera
  • Microphone booms came into use
  • It became increasingly possible to record more than one track of sound for a scene and to mix them into a single final track

The Introduction of Sound & Globalization: Crossing the Language Barriers

The language barrier threatened to limit export possiblities.

Several solutions:

  • No translation at all, thus is musicals.
  • Dubbing a new sound track, which was clumsy and expensive since the mixing of sound was impossible in the early years: recording dialogues and music at the same time and it was difficult with lip-synch
  • Added subtitles
  • Eliminated dialogue

Later, big companies decided to created the Multilingual film , but it was too expensive.

How problems was solved later? Advances in sound mixing techniques came into use, such as lip-synch recording technology. Meanwhile, other countries apart from Us has developed their own industries, such as Indian Bollywood.

Jan 11th Cause and Effects

Most of films are character-driven.

Within a film’s formal system, characters make things happen and respond to event. Their actions and reactions contribute strongly to our engagement with the film.

Why does these character-centered stories are dominate in right now film industry? Because film is like a building, a Matrix, a network of different elements. When we watch a film, we are following the film’s internal logic, we follow the rules within that specific film, and we build a coherent visual.

The Importance of Characters:

Unlike characters in novels, film characters typically have a visible body. And even sometimes, one character may be embodied by different actresses to suggest the different sides of that character.

A character has traits: attitudes, skills, habits, tastes, psychological drives and other qualities that distinguish the character. When a character has possessed several varying traits, some at odds with others, but we tend to call the character complex or three-dimensional.

For example: Sherlock Holmes is a mess of traits.

And always at most, father-son relationship dominates the theme in movies. A boy is to become a man, he has to become a father. In most cases, action plots are interactive with love plots within each movie.

To build a character, first need to give him/her as many problems as possible. He should be moved by reasons, his external or internal drives. All basic situation should be bad, then the character needs to take action, in this way, a story will start.

The Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey is a pattern of narrative identified by the American scholar Joseph Campbell that appears in drama, storytelling, myth, religious ritual, and psychological development.  It describes the typical adventure of the archetype known as The Hero, the person who goes out and achieves great deeds on behalf of the group, tribe, or civilization.

Its stages are:


The hero, uneasy, uncomfortable or unaware, is introduced sympathetically so the audience can identify with the situation or dilemma.  The hero is shown against a background of environment, heredity, and personal history.  Some kind of polarity in the hero’s life is pulling in different directions and causing stress.


Something shakes up the situation, either from external pressures or from something rising up from deep within, so the hero must face the beginnings of change. 


The hero feels the fear of the unknown and tries to turn away from the adventure, however briefly.  Alternately, another character may express the uncertainty and danger ahead.


The hero comes across a seasoned traveler of the worlds who gives him or her training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey.  Or the hero reaches within to a source of courage and wisdom.


At the end of Act One, the hero commits to leaving the Ordinary World and entering a new region or condition with unfamiliar rules and values. 


The hero is tested and sorts out allegiances in the Special World.

Jan 3th.

The Power of Montage: Soviet Cinema (1924-1930)

  1. War Communism (1918-1920)
  2. The New Economic Policy (1921-1924)
  3. Growth and Export, increasing State Control

1924 Lenin (who liked avant garden)died, and soon came the Stanley, who only wants socialistic realism/ muscle  identity. There are young man who come of age during the Russian Revolution in October 1917. Most of them came from fields outside of film.

The Russians adored editing. This was partly because, in the years after 1917 when the Soviet Union was encouraging a nascent film industry, would-be film-makers didn’t have enough cameras or film stock to shoot anything. Instead they experimented in the cutting room with found footage, from pre-revolutionary Russian melodramas to rare Hollywood imports. A crucial moment was the smuggling into Russia of a print of DW Griffiths’s Intolerance (1916), the most brilliantly edited early Hollywood film. Under the influential teacher Lev Kuleshov, a group of film students in Moscow re-ran the film constantly, then re-edited it themselves, discovering the radical effects produced when they changed a sequence.

Sergei Eisenstein(1898-1948)

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the “Father of Montage”. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958).

Vsevolod Pudovkin(1893-1953)

Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin (16 February 1893 – 20 June 1953) was a Russian and Soviet film director, screenwriter and actor who developed influential theories of montage. Pudovkin’s masterpieces are often contrasted with those of his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, but whereas Eisenstein utilized montage to glorify the power of the masses, Pudovkin preferred to concentrate on the courage and resilience of individuals.

Dziga Vertov (1896-1954)

David Abelevich Kaufman  better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov, was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the Cinéma vérité style of documentary movie making and, in particular the Dziga Vertov Group active in the 1960s.


Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into he visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten.

—Provisional Instructions to Kino-Eye Groups, Dziga Vertov, 1926

1. rapid means of transport
2. highly sensitive film stock
3. light handheld film cameras
4. equally light lighting equipment
5. a crew of super-swift cinema reporters (etc)

—Vertov op cit

Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)

Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov  was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist who taught at and helped establish the world’s first film school (the Moscow Film School). Kuleshov may well be the very first film theorist as he was a leader in Soviet montage theory — developing his theories of editing before those of Sergei Eisenstein (briefly a student of Kuleshov) and Vsevolod Pudovkin. For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiment. In this now-famous editing exercise, shots of an actor were intercut with various meaningful images (a casket, a bowl of soup, and so on) in order to show how editing changes viewers’ interpretations of images.

Soviet montage cinema was suppressed under Joseph Stalin during the 1930s as a dangerous example of Formalism in the arts, and as being incompatible with the official Soviet artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism.

They were young man who come of the age during the Russian Revolution in October 1917. Most of them came from fields outside film industry.

For them: my freedom ends at some one else’s freedom starts from.

Background history: government wants all the film materials, so the young people had to edit the existing footage, thus a new way of editing came, we call that montage.

These filmmakers work in the same revolutionary spirit as the visual artists of the constructivism. Because they believe art should be a way to shape people’s mind.

New Media (then photography) allows for new ways of seeing (literally) photo example. Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. New media was often used in the creation of works, which helped to create a style of art that was orderly.

With constructivism, art becomes a form of social engineering.

Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953).

Tatlin was considered the father of Russian Constructivism. His most famous piece remains his “Monument to the Third International” (1919-20, Moscow), a 22-ft-high (6.7-m) iron frame on which rested a revolving cylinder, cube, and cone, all made of glass which was originally designed for massive scale.

Tatlin’s goal in art was to create as many perspectives as possible.

New forms of theater are invented as well, such as “Biomiechanical Acting”

Biomechanics,  antirealistic system of dramatic production developed  by the avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold in the early 1920s . Meyerhold drew on the traditions of the commedia dell’arte and kabuki and on the writings of Edward Gordon Craig for his system, in which the actor’s own personality was eliminated and he was entirely subordinated to the director’s will. Coached as gymnasts and acrobats and emphasizing pantomime rather than words, the actors threw themselves about in puppetlike attitudes at the director’s discretion. For these productions the stage was exposed to the back wall and was then furnished with harshly lit, bare sets consisting of scaffoldings, ladders, and ramps that the actors used. Biomechanics had lost its appeal by the late 1920s, though Meyerhold’s emphasis on external action did become an element in Soviet actor-training techniques.

Abstract art becomes graphic design and propaganda. For example:

Ei Lissitzky  “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919)

And there is no more difference between high art and popular culture…for example:

Aleksandr Rodchenko, filmposter of the Battleship Potemkin, 1926

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: “One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.”  Much of the work of 20th century graphic designers is a direct result of Rodchenko’s earlier work in the field. His influence has been pervasive enough that it would be nearly impossible to single out all of the designers whose work he has influenced.

The Russian artists were influenced by Dada, but they have different believes, they believed that art could change society, and they also had belief in revolutionary.

Showing the Power of Editing: ” The Kuleshov Effect”

The Kuleshov Effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s.

Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mozzhukhin was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, a little girl’s coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mozzhukhin’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was “looking at” the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience “raved about the acting… the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.”

Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings. Kuleshov believed this,along with montage, had to be the basis of cinema as an independent art form.



Eisenstein’s montage theories are based on the idea that montage originates in the “collision” between different shots in an illustration of the idea of thesis and antithesis. He describes five methods of montage in his introductory essay “Word and Image”. Which are:

Five Methods of montage

  1. Metric – where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the audience.
  2. Rhythmic – includes cutting based on continuity, creating visual continuity from edit to edit.
  3. Tonal – a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots — not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics — to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage.
  4. Overtonal/Associational – the overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.
  5. Intellectual – uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning.

Einstein’s intellectual montage was influenced by the idea of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and in particular his dialectical materialism. Eisenstein agrees that, especially intellectual montage, is an alternative system to continuity editing. His idea was that “Montage is conflict” (dialectical) where new ideas, emerge from the collision of the montage sequence (synthesis) and where the new emerging ideas are not innate in any of the images of the edited sequence.Thus a new concept, which illustrates Marxist dialectics explodes into being.

Marxist Dialectics

Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. Karl Marx presented Dialectical materialism(Marxist dialectics):

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (Capital, Afterword, Second German Ed., Moscow, 1970, vol. 1, p. 29).

Sergei Einstein’s Film:

Strike (1924)


Battleship Potempkin (1905)


October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928)


Soviet Ciname Form and Style

Narrative story telling is prominent. Besides that, society forces (instead of individuals) are central cause of all agents, individual represents types and sometimes it’s the masses that is used as a protagonist. You have the masses or the social types.



–       Vivid and dynamic rather than continuous

–       Rapid (sometime even one or two frames long) for rythmic sound or to enhance the violence and explosiveness of the action

–       Use of more shots for each action (directors believe that cuts, in and of themselves, stimulate the spectator)

–       Specific strategies involving temporal, spatial, and graphic tension a overlapping (for emphasis) or elliptical temporal relations (jumpcuts) = contradictory temporal + spatial relations

–       Use of thematic intercutting (intellectual montage)

–       Conceptual and metaphircal use of non-diegetic inserts (intellectual montage)   What is outside the realm of the story, create metaphor

–       Create graphic contrast from shot to shot (flipped images) à to increase conflict or comedy

Camerawork & Muse-en-Scene

Avoid the conventional chest-height, straight-on framing: Favors dynamic angles à people and places look heroic or threatening

–       Canted or decentered framings à deynamic

–       Extremely low horizon line

–       Exploitation of special-effects cinematography: split screen framing, superimposition for symbolic purpose (rather than psychological as in the French Impressionism)

–       Real settings

–       Juxtapostition of contrasting shapes, textures, volumes, colors, and the like in the frame itself

–       No use of fill light on the sets à characters appear against black backgrounds

–       Use of a variety of types of acting, ranging from the realistic to the highly stylised – often within the same film

–       Use of typage: embody a social type; non actors

–       Many performers borrowed stylized techniques from constructivist theater and from circus: biomechanics and eccentricity.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) by Soviet director Lev Kuleshov. It is notable as the first Soviet film that is explicitly anti-American.



Jan 3th The Man with a Movie Camera

Film Analysis this movie:

The Man with a movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera (Russian: Человек с киноаппаратом), sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors.

  “The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
Of visual phenomena
(a film without intertitles)
(a film without a scenario)
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)

The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere. For instance, the film uses such scenes as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, even filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed.

Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put it in a database, which Svilova later edited. The narrative part of this process was her job. She had to go into that random pool of clips that Vertov filmed, edit it, and put it in some kind of order. Vertov’s purpose of all this was to break the mold of a linear film that the world was used to seeing in those days.

The film also features a few obvious stagings such as the scene of a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed and the shot of chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot spliced in backwards so the pieces expand outward and stand in position). The film was criticized for both the stagings and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director’s frequent assailing of fiction film as a new “opiate of the masses.”

All the techniques to make the image distorted. Camera is everywhere. For him, a movie camera can and should go every where literally, to create a new version.

Film taking about film. Self-reflection-ism against realism.

modern film like DOGMA 还有昆丁

Nov 27th Color Research: Les Amours Imaginaires

Heartbeats (French: Les Amours imaginaires) is a 2010 Canadian drama film directed by Xavier Dolan. It follows the story of two friends who both fall in love with the same man.

It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

I like the images of this movie, each frame looks like an oil painting, the bold color contrast and bright color uses make the film stands out.

With color filters and slow motions, Les Amours Imaginaires gave us a glorious visual feast.



In the movie, there are four scenes with extreme intense mono color to show the inner emotions.

Red- anger in love. Red – is a bold color that commands attention! Red gives the impression of seriousness and dignity, represents heat, fire and rage, it is known to escalate the body’s metabolism. Red can also signify passion and love. Red promotes excitement and action. It is a bold color that signifies danger, which is why it’s used on stop signs. Using too much red should be done with caution because of its domineering qualities. Red is the most powerful of colors.

Yellow- longing for love. Yellow – is the most visible color and is the first color the human eye notices! Yellow, the color nearest to “light” leaves a warm and satisfying impression, lively and stimulating and in many cultures symbolizes deity. Dark yellow can be oppressive while light yellow is breezy.

Green- greedy jealous in love. Green – is the most restful color for the human eye. It’s the universal color of nature as well as represents fertility, rebirth and freedom. (That answers the question why it’s the best background for birds.) Bright green can be uplifting while dark green evokes a mental picture of a pine forest. Street signs are painted a metallic green background contrasted with white letters because the combination is believed to be the easiest to read and recognize for the human brain. However, as with most colors, green also brings forth some negative connotations. The phrase “green with envy” also gives way to guilt, ghastliness, sickness and disease.

Blue- sadness in love. Blue – represents temperature, sky, water and ice. It is the second most powerful color. It obviously represents coolness, mist and shadows. In some applications it can represent peacefulness and calmness. And as pink represents femininity, blue represents masculinity. Blue is often associated with somber emotions like sadness, gloom and fear.