Lecture: Social Revolution
Postmodernism 
I'm going way out on a limb here, because thousands of pages have been written about Postmodernism, and I am not a philosopher. Here I consider Postmodernism as a cultural movement that consciously rejected utopian, abstract, rational modernism. It is related to the science of the day, such as quantum physics and chaos theory, which went beyond even the predictability of Eistein's physics to accept randomness and unpredictability. Postmodernism accepts the ugly and the disorganized in a way modernism does not, and thus provided a channel of expression for subjects previously submerged in society.
Art
One of the most important things about postmodern art is that it can be intensely political, intensely personal, or both at the same time.
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Yoko Ono's exhibit from 1966 in London was a ladder with a framed piece of paper above. As John Lennon recalled: I climbed the ladder, looked through
the spyglass, and in tiny little letters
it said: YES.
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Lennon
stayed and they married. In 1969, they
staged a "bed-in" for peace,
which some have called "honeymoon
as performance art". Knowing how
radical the couple were, reporters thronged
in hoping for something sexy, but found
John and Yoko serious in discussing world
peace. Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party
(1974-79) 
was
a huge installation piece based on one of the
arts most associated with women throughout history:
embroidery. Chicago called it a "reinterpretation
of The Last Supper from the point of view of
those who've done the cooking throughout history."
It contains place settings for women important
throughout history, with additional names from
each era embroidered on the tablecloths. It
was a feminist statement, designed to educate
as well as intrigue. The place settings caused
as much controversy as Chicago's choice of females,
since the plates contained differently-designed
abstract work that all resembled female genitalia.
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Place settings for
the Primordial Goddess, Christine de Pisan,
and Mary Wollstonecraft
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Film
I realize I have done little with film so far, except for movie star role-models of the 1920s. With the postmodern era the contributions of European and American film-makers provided a mirror on concerns ranging from the Cold War to personal inadequacy.
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British director Alfred Hitchcock set ordinary people in extraordinary, and often deadly circumstances. During the 1950s and 60s, he created films which wrapped such characters in elaborate psychological plots. Mistaken identity was a common theme. One example would be North by Northwest, wherein an ordinary businessman is mistaken for a CIA agent. The hero must extricate himself from the trap and catch the real perpetrators, all while seducing the girl. In this scene, the businessman tries to see a diplomat, at whose house he was threatened the night before. Small Version |
 HAL gets disconnected as he relives his programming, singing "Daisy, Daisy" |
Stanley Kubrick was an American author/director who
filmed Nabakov's Lolita in 1962 in such a way as
to get it past the censors, but his postmodern focus is
more evident in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In
this film, the movie moves from prehistoric times to the
future, considering space travel in broad, disconnected
terms. More memorable for most people, in the latter part
of the film a spaceship is run by a computer, the HAL
9000 (one letter difference from IBM), which takes over
control of the ship and has to be disconnected manually
and painfully by a human to prevent disaster. The film
is thus considered a harbinger of the power of computers
(including the computer I'm on, which doesn't always do
what I tell it!).
Francois Truffaut was at the forefront of French new wave cinema in the 50s, and became one of France's most important directors. He was a great admirer of the moral distance Hitchcock put between himself and his subjects, and indeed he wrote a study on Hitchcock which included lengthy interviews with the British director. In true postmodern style, his life and art intermingled. One film, Le Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) of 1973, is a tribute to filmmaking, starring himself as director. You get to see the backstage sniping and love affairs, as well as the techniques used to make a movie.
Italian director Federico Fellini once
said "There is no end. There is no beginning.
There is only the infinite passion of life."
Although
his works in the 1950s were realistic, beginning
in the 1960s mystical qualities entered his
films. His autobiographical movie 8 1/2 (1963)
features a hassled director who has lost heart
on his current film but can't back out because
of the money. Guido is plagued by former stars
and crew who want work, and can't find a good
idea for his story. He retreats into his own
dreams, and his own past, especially his life
as a boy and his love affairs as a younger man.
In these dreams he finds the will to carry on.
Considered Fellini's alter-ego, Marcello Mastroianni
played the lead in many of his films.
Literature
Postmodernism in literature continued some of the internal trends of the 1960s, but also contained examinations of literature itself. The first is evident in Margaret Atwood's poem.
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Workbook document: Margaret Atwood: They Eat Out |
When I read it, I imagine a couple sitting
at a restaurant, and he's yakking while she's
imagining stabbing him and tranforming their
dinner into a gory horror movie scene under
her control. It's feminist, but it's brutal.
Deadly serious. And very funny. If you don't
think so, try it again after hearing
"Love Is A Many-Splendored
Thing", the song to which her horrifying scene is set.
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Workbook document: Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) |
Czech writer Kundera seems to be reviewing the patterns of postmodern literature, even though this is a novel. He looks at writing in a similar way to Truffaut or Fellini lookiing at film-making, from the inside of the goldfish bowl.