Portfolio Visual Knowledge Building Minor, Wim Honders

Jos Maria Restolho Mateus Pinheiro, 524214, 31th of October of 2012

4) Its undeniable that the concepts of postmodernity, postmodernity society and postmodern style intersect and work in tension with modernity and modernism. The discussion about the concept of postmodernism began at 1980, being an attempt in understanding the changing concepts of the human subject and an analysis of the effects of globalization, post industrialization and communication technologies on concepts of the self and on worldviews in late modernity. The concept of simulation is seen more in the context of digital technologies due to the popularization of the postmodern way of thinking. So, genetics, rhizomes, remake culture, are all new kinds of economic and spatial relationships which result from globalization and trade liberalization. For example, nowadays the remakes in cinema are a new fashion, achieving sometimes even more success than the original version. Thats the example of The Departed, the Martin Scorcese movie which is the remake of a very popular Asian film, scoring such important academy awards as Best Picture and Best Director. The Sims is a very popular simulation computer videogame where we can follow the life of different human characters created by us, and we are responsible by their survival making sure that some basic necessities as social contact, bladder or alimentation are always at regular levels. Such popularity of videogames like this are a proof of the postmodern view, because the possibility of living in a fleshy body that can be injured, can feel pain and can become ill and die is something that everybody wants to see and feel, even if simulation sometimes cannot replace certain live experiences with virtual experiences. Postmodernism is above all a questioning of master narratives, frameworks that explain society, if not the world in accessible terms, like Religion or Science. In the other hand while modernism became popular with its appeal to popular culture, mass culture and its saturation of the world with images, postmodernism prefers to focus attention on the irony and the sense of ones own involvement in low or popular culture.

Portfolio Visual Knowledge Building Minor, Wim Honders

Jos Maria Restolho Mateus Pinheiro, 524214, 31th of October of 2012

The 2007 Disney blockbuster mixture of live-action/traditional animation movie Enchanted was the hit movie of the Holidays and it was the breakthrough role for Amy Adams, who was already popular with such expressive roles in such cult films as Juno. Enchanted is based on the conventions of the traditional fairytale, with the story of an animated princess who has been cursed into the real world and she is waiting for Prince Edward to rescue her. As a cultural text of postmodern style Enchanted is full of references to earlier Disney fairy-tales, and its filled with many jokes which work either as parodies or homages. The film is also able of doing this while pursuing a love story where we should love the ones who complete us, not the ones everybody expect us to love. So we are able to see and appreciate a traditional love story while laughing at all the jokes and parodies. In the Scary Movie Saga we find a lot of intertextual meanings, in which different famous horror movies like The Exorcist or Hannibal are addressed. In the end its different jokes inside the movie that makes reference to other movies. That is the point of intertextuality, that the viewer knows the text that is being referenced. The use of celebrities in ads can be seen as an intertextual tactic. For example, the Dior Ad with famous south-african Charlize Theron is the perfect example of that. She is able to bring the sensuality and the femme fetale look of her roles that made her so popular in Hollywood. One of the most popular tv shows of our days, Family Guy, its used to remade some famous historical movies, using parody to play the codes of the film and the

Portfolio Visual Knowledge Building Minor, Wim Honders

Jos Maria Restolho Mateus Pinheiro, 524214, 31th of October of 2012

cultural history. For example, the legendary figure of Darth Vader is played by the family baby, Stewie, while the creature Chewbacca is portrayed trough the family dog, Bryan. With so many different new twists and nonsense storylines, the movie was able to make homage to the Star Wars Saga. Meanwhile, this is not the usual sign of modernism where reflexivity is used in order to make the viewers stand back in critical distance: is thought the objective playful storyline that we can involve ourselves in both the old text and the parodic remake. Of course that in order to understand this the viewers need to be aware of the original movie plotline and also of the main aspects of the tv show, in order to being able to make a connection and understanding the different jokes that are being presented during the episode. After all that Ive said, I think I can conclude that we are not living necessarily in a post-modern world but in a place where the problems and tensions of modernism and postmodernism are present, a place where we are living in premodern lifes of poverty and subsistence.