New Hollywood
Film Foundation Degree

Research the term Postmodernism
Make notes or brainstorming drawing

What is Postmodernism?
• Difficult to define
• Not one theory
• Variations of when the term was first used...
1960s/1990s
• Variety of meaning: a period/attitude/mode of thought
• Can be applied to various disciplines: literature, painting, architecture, media, etc
• Reflection in the arts on society and rapid advances in technology, capitalism
• Pluralism, multiple theories and various meanings

3 Approaches to understand Postmodernism
1. Historical
2. Stylistic
3. Theoretical

It is a reaction to Modernism

What is Modernism?
Modernism is a philosophical movement appeared as a response to the new economic, social, and political environment of the industrialisation process from
Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Modernism expressions
• art
• film
• architecture
• literature
• religious faith
• philosophy
• social organization
• sciences

The simplification of form and elimination of ornament
Seagram Building, NY, designed by Mies van der Rohe

Experimenting with representation of people

Dissonance, distorted music effects, rejection of rules of harmony and composition

Bonding of the nuclear family

Modernism believed that the lives of people would improve thanks to science and a world based on logic

It was a time of optimism that carried over from the Victoria Era and
Edwardian and right up to 1914 until...

Turning point
• The terrible carnage of the the
First World War sowed seeds of doubt as to whether the world was becoming a better place.
• Science was turned to creating weapons to kill on an industrial scale; this was a trademark of the war - a wave of pessimism swept across Europe.

This idea of a loss in the goodness of people and suspicion of science and a world of logic and order was compounded by two main events of the Second World War
Holocaust
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs

The birth of postmodernism
•
• These events brought about the movement and the theories which are loosely titled postmodernism and
By 1968, these ideas reached fruition
Campbell’s soups, Andy Warhold (1968)
American Pop Art

• Postmodern texts embody skepticism towards the ideas and ideal of the modern era, especially the ideas of progress, objectivity, reason, certainty , personal identity and grand narrative.
• Postmodernism takes pleasure in playing with convention, pointing out nature of how everything is a construction https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lKomOqYU4Mw

Make a collage or mood board of postmodernism expressed in in art, architecture, society, painting, philosophy, social organisation. Make a presentation to the class.