Allen / Mamet / Postmodernism
It is strange that the postmodern tendency in critical thought has not been applied in the most obvious way to cinema -- as a way of invalidating the auteur theory. Cinema is, after all, the modernist art form par excellence; and to a certain extent it is the burden of postmodern critique to undo the totalizing artistic concerns of modernism. As De Mul, paraphrasing Lyotard, writes of postmodernism:
We could agree with Lyotard…that postmodernism was implicit in modernism from its inception…. [O]ne could regard postmodernism as a critical reflection upon the starting points of modern existence that was made possible by modernism itself: post-modernism forms, in a manner of speaking, the guilty conscience of modernism, following, like a shadow, the modern aspiration toward an all-embracing meaning. (De Mul, 19)
De Mul's insight here is amply borne out in cinema: almost any film could be understood to employ seemingly postmodern techniques of allusion, pastiche, or meta-narrative. What does not change is the critical tendency, which emerged from earlier film criticism and has been epitomized mainly by Andrew Sarris, to regard films as having a single artistic authorship, which permits the critic to indulge the "modern aspiration toward an all-embracing meaning" intended by the auteur. I would like to offer a postmodern critique of the idea of the auteur by examining two films which have virtually nothing in common, save fertile ground for critics who still cling tight to the auteur theory -- these are Woody Allen's 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway and David Mamet's 2004 military thriller Spartan. I hope to demonstrate that, although these two filmmakers share a similar career trajectory, the notion that any film can be shown to have a stable artistic meaning intended by a single artist is problematized, if not wholly invalidated, by a postmodern critical approach.
Auteur theory, with its emphasis on a totalizing artistic consciousness on the part of a film's director, would seem to be modernism plain and simple: the same modernist-inflected critical approach that insists that (e.g.) "The Waste Land" by...
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