FILM OF THE NINETIES

American Film Postmodernism — A New Epoch or a Delusion

This text analyses American cinema in the context of historical periodization. In spite of the widely accepted premise that the era of the classical narrative style of the 1960s has been replaced by modernism, this article starts from the assumption that this switch never actually occurred, at least not in American cinema, and ends on the conclusion of the non-existence of the postmodern stylistic epoch. The main thematic and formal paradigms of the classic Hollywood cinema — the invisible style and the resolution of incompatible values remain dominant even though a number of contemporary films use some modernistic stylistic devices. In elaborating this premise the paper also analyses the possibilities of defining postmodernist style as expressed in the essay The Postmodern and Postmodernist in American Cinema by N. Gilić, published in this review, and concludes that there is not enough evidence to accept the term postmodernist in dealing with contemporary American cinema. By citing Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Titanic, The Game and L. A. Confidential the author argues that the classical narrative style in American cinema has not yet come to an end.

Bruno Kragić