Two commentators have developed some
interesting ideas about postmodernism and audiences.
Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new
phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who
may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves
and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship,
making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern
communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least
potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her
hyper-cinematic experience’ (157)
‘VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs
have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in
relation to the moving image.’
Anne Friedberg has argued that because we
now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we
increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively
in public places, ‘cinema and televison become readable as symptoms of a
“postmodern condition”, but as contributing causes.’ In other words, we don’t just
have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films
have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and
playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. ‘One can
literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on
a VCR….the VCR allows man to organize a time which is not his own…a time which
is somewhere else – and to capture it.’
Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and
the armchair equivalent – the home-video viewer, who commands fast forward,
fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between
channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator
lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and
the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now…described as the
postmodern condition.’
Postmodern & Media Industries
Whereas modernism was generally associated
with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more
commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the
industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist)
economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a
manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is
typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of
financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and
the decline of heavy industry.
Postmodernism and the Film Industry
It has been argued that Hollywood has
undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to
the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of
postmodern economy.
The incorporation of Hollywood into media
conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify
a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices,
technologies, and cultural forms.
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