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12 results

New Punk Cinema
  • Edited by Nicholas Rombes
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005
  • New Punk Cinema is the first book to examine a new breed of film that is indebted to the punk spirit of experimentation, do-it-yourself ethos, and an uneasy, often defiant relationship with the mainstream. An array of established and emerging scholars trace and map the contours of new punk cinema, from its roots in neorealism and the French New Wave, to its flowering in the work of Lars von Trier and the Dogma 95 movement. Subsequent chapters explore the potentially democratic and even anarchic forces of digital filmmaking, the influences of hypertext and other new media, the increased role of the viewer in arranging and manipulating the chronology of a film, and the role of new punk cinema in plotting a course beyond the postmodern. The book examines a range of films, including The Blair Witch Project, Time Code, Run Lola Run, Memento, The Celebration, Gummo, and Requiem for a Dream. New Punk Cinema is ideal for classroom use at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as for film scholars interested in fresh approaches to the emergence of this vital new turn in cinema.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Nicholas Rombes, University of Detroit Mercy
  • Book:
    New Punk Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time

    (Richard Hell and the Voidoids, ‘Blank Generation’)

    We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives.

    (Tyler Durden, Fight Club)

    An advertisement for the Samsung VM-A680 video-phone, featuring a beautiful woman standing beneath a movie marquee that reads ‘We All Have a Movie Within. What's Yours?’ offers a promise of the phone as movie-camera, and the user as star:

    You already have drama in your life. All you need now is a phone that lets you capture it. Enter Samsung's VM-A680 video phone. It allows you to record up to 15 seconds of digital video and audio as you walk down along the red carpet of your life. You can save it, play it, email it, and send it to your friends.

    The advertisement ends with the phrases ‘Your life. Now showing’, giving new meaning to Andy Warhol's prediction that, in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And the digital film festival, Resfest 2004, offers a section on ‘Handheld Cinema’: ‘After years of hype, finally PDAs, mobile phones and portable entertainment devices can play short films … [T]here's already a group of inspired filmmakers pushing the boundaries and crafting unique moving images just right for the micro-screen’ (RES Magazine 2004:9).

  • 4 - Sincerity and Irony

  • from PART I - BACKGROUNDS AND CONTEXTS
  • Edited by Nicholas Rombes, University of Detroit Mercy
  • Book:
    New Punk Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 72-86

  • Summary

    But you see, I think the Sex Pistols and the other groups would be quite acceptable if they seemed more ironic to people. But I think they're not perceived as ironic and once they are perhaps that will be their form of domestication. Then it will be perfectly all right.

    (Susan Sontag, quoted in Bockris 1998: 80)

    New punk cinema developed during a time when irony became a mainstay in popular culture in the post-1970s era. As such, the moments of intense emotion and melodrama in key films, Magnolia, The Idiots, Breaking the Waves, Fight Club, and Blair Witch Project can be read through conflicting registers that blur the boundaries of sincerity, irony and camp. In his 1993 essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction’, David Foster Wallace offers one of the more challenging and insightful readings of the commodification of irony in post-war US culture, especially as it is expressed in literary fiction (notably metafiction) and television. For Wallace, the first wave of post-war irony – being shown the difference between the way things appear to be and the way things are – worked to expose the ‘absurd contradictions’ (Wallace 1993: 35) and hypocrisies of American culture. Television – with its ubiquity, repetition of images and ability to ‘repeat’ shows over and over again – is for Wallace the ultimate ironic medium, because it has helped to transform us into knowledgeable viewers, that is, viewers who can see through the very narratives that constitute television.