Subject - 518

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;

The term Modernism is widely used to

identify new and distinctive features in
the subjects, forms, concepts and style of
literature and other art in the early decades
of the present century.

The Background of Modernism:

Critics- society could not move forward in its present
form.
Progress of history and civilization was questioned.
A series of movements..
Prominent thinkers and precursors:
Nietzsche

Marx

Freud

Darwin

Frazer

The High Modernism:

1922

1880s
T.S. Eliot

1950s
James Joyce Virginia Woolf

The social Background of

Modernism:
The end of rural England.
Intellectualism.
Scientific revolution.
The Invasion of Psychology.
Marxist influence.

Trends(cont.)
Anti-realism.
The Language of Everyday Life.
The Humanitarian Spirit.
The romantic Note.
Symbolism.

Literary Criticism of Modern Period:

New discoveries in Psychology, anthropology,
sociology, Economics have brought revolution in
critical methods.
Two dimensions in criticism.
Critics- distinguished University Professors.
After World War-l, traditional ideas of criticism
were broken.
Everything was sought to be explained in
psychological terms.
Strong opposition of biographical, historical,
sociological, comparative approach of
conventional criticism.

Prominent Critical Theories:

Semiotics.
Linguistics in Literary Criticism.
Russian Formalism.
Objective Correlativity.
New Criticism.
Language of Paradox.
Archetypal Criticism.

Sweet Movie
The Self- Critique of Political Modernism

Sweet Movie is a 1974 avantgarde art house comedy-drama

film by the Yugoslavian director
Duan Makavejev.
The film follows two women: a
Canadian beauty queen, who
represents a modern commodity
culture, and a captain aboard a
ship laden with candy and sugar,
who is a failed communist
revolutionary.
Director of photography is Pierre
Lhomme.

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).