Perspectives | Lecture 4

Keyword Definitions:

Avante-Garde: Something new and modern when placed in the context of it's place and time of creation. Things that are avante-garde have the purpose of pushing art, culture and/or politics.

Nostalgia: A desire to return to a specific time or place in one's own past. The reuse of previously existing media in order to create a sense of nostalgia, or desire, in regards to the past.

Appropriation: Taking something or aspects of a thing, (sometimes without the rights to do so), that belong to someone else and using it in another context thus altering the original meaning.

Pastiche: A piece of work that aims to imitate another artist's work, a time period or style. Often used as a way to reference prior works.

Parody: A piece of work that aims to imitate another artist's, their work, a time period or style in an exaggerated manner with comedic intent.

Irony: When a situation or text has a result that's contrary or different to what we expected. This often ends up being in a comedic way.

Ideology: A set of idea's or beliefs held or integrated into cultures, often considered as truths within those believing.

Genre: A style or category, often of films, i.e, 'Horror' and 'Romance'.

Sherrie Levine: Sherrie Levine is an American Photographer and Painter. Her work is often part of conversations about appropriation and originality. She uses her work, reproductions of other photographic works, to bring attention to females within art history.

Scream:

Scream - Movie Poster

Ways that 'Scream' is postmodern:

1. Scream is a pastiche to slasher movies as it makes use of the many tropes involved in that genre.

2. The film is also a parody as it points out the cliches of slasher movies while simultaneously using those same cliches in the film.

3. Appropriation is another reason this film can be seen as postmodern as the film's antagonist uses a mask of the figure in the artwork The Scream by Edvard Munch. Another way it uses appropriation is in it's use of tropes and cliches from previous slasher films.

The Scream - Edvard Munch

4. Irony is used in this film a few times, this is done for comedic value as it plays with our expectations of a horror film by setting a scenario up and having the characters mock it while still falling into the actions they mocked. One example being the main character, Sydney, and her rant against slasher protagonists for always 'running up the stairs when she should be running out the door' as moments later she herself is running up the stairs away from the killer. Another is when the character Randy is watching a slasher and yelling for the character to 'look behind them', all while the antagonist of this film is slowly walking up behind him.

5. Intertextuality is used in the film as it references multiple other films numerous times, both in the use of tropes from those films and in mentioning them during the film through dialogue.