Postmodernism and Film

Book excerpt: This volume focuses on postmodern film aesthetics and contemporary challenges to the aesthetic paradigms dominating analyses of Hollywood cinema. It explores conceptions of the classical, modernist, post-classical/new Hollywood, and their construction as linear history of style in which postmodernism forms a debatable final act. This history is challenged by using Jean-François Lyotard's non-linear conception of postmodernism in order to view postmodern aesthetics as a paradigm that can occur across the history of Hollywood. This study also explores 'nihilistic' theorists of the postmodern, Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson, and 'affirmative' theorists, notably Linda Hutcheon, charting the ways in which the latter provide the means to conceptualize nuanced and positive variants of postmodern aesthetics and deploying them in the analysis of Hollywood films, including Bombshell, Sherlock Junior, and Kill Bill.