Since this week’s topic involves an examination of documentaries “in the Postmodern Era,” it’s useful to begin our discussion by determining the definition of “postmodern.” It’s a phrase that has been thrown about in popular culture for years, but what precisely do we mean when we say that something is “postmodern”?
Scholar Fredric Jameson famously theorized the postmodern in his 1991 work Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (and yes, get ready for a brief VM200 Media Theory and Criticism refresher). Jameson identified 10 characteristics of the postmodern, and claimed that the following features inform our contemporary lives:
- Aesthetic populism (there is no difference between “high” and “low” culture anymore)
- Depthlessness (everything is reduced to an image, flatness, the primacy of the surface)
- Waning of affect (Our emotional responses to our cultural phenomenon is changing, now our emotions are impersonal and free-floating)
- The end of the subject/ego (there is no more individuality, no more unique style, no more unified concept of identity)
- Pastiche (a “cut and paste” decontextualization and recycling of artifacts from the past, collage; there is nothing original being create)
- “Historicism” over history (we are disconnected from our past, our history no longer bears any resemblance to our current experience, we can only “signify” the past without ever being able to access it)
- Nostalgia (our longing for the past, our attempts at recapturing idealized visions of what the past was like - whether these visions bear any resemblance to what the experience was actually like has no relevance)
- Schizophrenia (the fragmentation of the self, feeling disconnected from your lived experience, the breaking down of the “signifying chain”, free-floating and unrelated signifiers)
- Radical Difference (everything in life is a “text” that we read and it only gains meaning through how it is different - and not how it is the same - as everything else)
- The Hysterical Sublime & Our Relationship with Technology (technology now seems to dominate our daily existences to such an extent that we have an ambivalent relationship with it; we simultaneously experience euphoria, delight, and marvel AND we are terrified by it; our human brains also can’t begin to fathom the implications of technology and all of this leads to the feeling of the hysterically sublime)
Given the above list and what you know about postmodernism, do you think that postmodernism has affected recent documentary filmmaking? If so, how? Can you give examples of recent non-fiction films that you consider to be “postmodern”? Do agree with film historian Lucia Ricciardelli when she characterizes Errol Morris’ The Fog of War as “a paradigmatic example of American postmodern documentary films” (35)? Why or why not? How does viewing the work through a “postmodern lens” help us understand how Morris (re)presents McNamara and history?
