FILM THEORY

Metafiction and film

When the character, as is the case at the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), announces to the viewers that the film has just come to its end, that is called metafiction, a procedure much more frequent in the history of film than one would imagine.

With these procedures, movies, just like numerous literary works before them, draw our attention away from the scene and direct the viewers to themselves, their textuality and artificiality, while more recently we can even talk about a trend in motion pictures, although metafiction was more common in documentary and experimental film. In Woody Allen’s film Bullets Over Broadway (1994) heroes, for example, discuss best ways to motivate the characters, in Fellini’s 8½ (1963) Marcello Mastroianni plays film director Guido who has, after a successful career (filled with numerous films like Fellini’s) fallen into creative crisis. Although in this classical film Fellini assumes many metapositions — we should stress that the film is primarily about »a filmmaker who is engrossed in the process of creation«. With the help of films by Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino and others, the study explains the essence of metafiction and enumerates its most typical stylistic procedures.

Vanja Obad