Political Modernism
Film Theory and Criticism
Nabila Marzuk Shanta
Modernism
Modernistic literature is the
expression of the modern era (196775). It tends to revolve around
themes of individuality, the
randomness of life, mistrust of
government and religion and the
disbelief in absolute truth.
Modernism
Influences of modern literature The three thinkers who
influence the Modern Era and Modern literature the most
are probably Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Karl Marx (18181883) and Sigmund Freud. This is not to say that Modern
authors were ardent evolutionists, or Marxists or even
practitioners of Freudian psychology; rather, these thinkers
simply fuelled and framed the perspectives and debates
that formulated so much Modern art and literature. Today,
Freud's specific theories are largely dismissed as
unscientific. Still, these ideas had a profound influence on
art and literature as much as on our common, daily
perceptions/conceptions of existence and reality:
What is Modernism?
According to M.H.Abrams;
Marx
Freud
Darwin
Frazer
1880s
T.S. Eliot
1950s
James Joyce Virginia Woolf
Trends(cont.)
Anti-realism.
The Language of Everyday Life.
The Humanitarian Spirit.
The romantic Note.
Symbolism.
Semiotics.
Linguistics in Literary Criticism.
Russian Formalism.
Objective Correlativity.
New Criticism.
Language of Paradox.
Archetypal Criticism.
Sweet Movie
The Self- Critique of Political Modernism
Summary
There are four important interrelated but quite distinct points that shaped the basic
trends of the post-1967 period of modern cinema in Europe.
First, cinema has to reconstruct the concept of reality.
Second, cinema can be used as a means of direct political action, and films should
exercise a direct impact on social, political, or ideological debates.
Third, cinematic narration is a form of direct auteurial and conceptual discourse. And
fourth, the artist must create a self-contained ideological or mythological universe.
This chapter, which examines the trends of the period of political modernism between
1965 and 1975, looks at counter-cinema and discusses political modernism in
Teorema (1968), an Italian-language movie directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
It also considers the use of folklore or mythology in a film's visual style of narrative
and analyzes Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974).