Abstract
Postmodernism challenges many firmly held beliefs about what film realism is and does. Andre Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, John Grierson, and even “formalists” such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov all put forward theories of film’s relation to the “real,” that now must be reconsidered in light of cinematic postmodernism. In his seminal essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson mentions “false realisms” that “are really art about other art, images of other images.” In “Simulacra and Simulations,” Jean Baudrillard talks about the “desert of the real.” He links the image to the “real” by moving from the image’s initial claim to reflect reality to the final phase of the simulacrum, which bears no relation to reality at all. Theorists as diverse as Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze all seem to agree that engaging with the “real” is essential. (Žižek revivifies Lacan’s notion of the Real, while Deleuze looks for “reasons to believe in this world.”4) The relationship of the “real” to the postmodern culture of the spectacle characteristic of late-capitalism continues to be a central concern of contemporary philosophy and critical cultural theory.
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© 2011 Vivian P. Y. Lee
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Marchetti, G. (2011). Bicycle Thieves and Pickpockets in the “Desert of the Real”: Transnational Chinese Cinema, Postmodernism, and the Transcendental Style. In: Lee, V.P.Y. (eds) East Asian Cinemas. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307186_4
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