“Does anyone here know me? No, that’s not Lear! Who is it that can tell me who I am?”- Narration in Film. Principles of Postmodernism

Abstract

It was over a century ago that cinematic art, with its then still unfinished language, attempted to tell stories, to transfer subjects, literary texts to the screen. The storytelling of modern cinematic art is characterised by a great expressiveness. With cinematic means, it is able not only to reproduce a simple story, but also to create an emotion, an aesthetically perfect form, the depth of thought. With modernism and later postmodernism, the art and content of storytelling has changed strikingly along with the outlook of modern humanity. This worldview finds its impact on different layers of cinematographic representation and is determined by principles, concepts and peculiarities of the said worldview.

Postmodernism consists of the diversity of the relationship to the world. Art is completely open to this diversity, although there are more or less characteristic themes for one or another genre of art. Film art also has its affection for chosen postmodern principles and concepts in which artistic reality and meaning express themselves much more deeply and interestingly. Among them, "death of the author" and intertextuality, empty sign, "death of the subject", "différence", "simulacrum", "indeterminacy", "irony", "multiplicity" are particularly important - concepts that have replaced the importance of the "image of reality" in film art with the "hyperreality" of postmodernism. The concepts of postmodernism, switched on in the narrative, embodied in the cinematic figures, form the novel play-connections in the scattered fragments of the dissolved narration, a context that establishes the multiplicity of sense in the perception of the artistic world of a film.  These concepts, presented in the different reality in the context of postmodernity, explain in a new way not only modern but also the older art of acting, they interpret the meaning of the nostalgically disappeared "ideal".

The present article constitutes an excerpt of the university's textbook for the subject of film studies. For this reason, special attention is paid to the short, concrete, illustrative examples. This concerns both foreign and Georgian film art. Emphasis is placed on the design of film narration, whose ambiguity and meaning are based on the ideas of postmodernism.