Comments on: Art Disguised as Crap: Contemporary Deconstructivist Film

By: vic

vic — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:31:40 +0000

it’s “crap disguised as art”

By: Franzeska

Franzeska — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:34:59 +0000

That’s an interesting take on Speed Racer. I haven’t seen the others, and you may be right, but I personally thought SR was just sincerely trying to appeal to those of us who don’t find that level of CGI splooge all that jarring. It looks (and I would argue is structured and plotted) like a video game, and it worked for me. Boy, did it work for me!

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:04:27 +0000

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this last night – in my defense, I was writing this until 5:00am …

Pulp Fiction actually references its genre right in the title. It plays like a somewhat exaggerated version – almost a parody – of pulpy films (something Tarantino came back to with Grindhouse, another decontructivist film – albeit a more obvious one). It too was hugely influential on genre storytelling in the years that followed.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:14:00 +0000

It’s interesting to contrast these films to those of the French new wave filmmakers, who tried to dismantle ideas of filmic narrative by storytelling in earnest while rejecting conventions of character, editing and cinematography in general.

While new wave directors tried to deconstruct convention by rejecting classic stylism, essentially removing the elements of genre they considered extraneous to storytelling, this new crop of contemporary deconstructivist films undermines genre not by removing conventions but by exaggerating them to the point where they become like an elephant in the room. The movie then represents a study of genre foremost, and storytelling becomes secondary, only there to support the superficialities of genre.