Lecture - Modernism (OUAN401)

What interested me most about this lecture was the way it explored how media is always changing. This surely means that whatever I create will inevitably become obsolete. People look for new things. I could invent the funniest cartoon in the universe but it will surely grow stale with time and be forgotten, which is a bit of a shame.

Modernism, we were told, is about improving on old art and developing a new vocabulary of styles. I’m all for this since variety is the spice of life and status quo is the bland muesli with a dog poo in it of life.

Back in the days of old, critics of modernism described it as a sensory overload, and that it caused the world to become too fast paced. One guy, an anti-modernist named Max Nordau wrote about his concerns of the modern world. He was concerned that the next generation would not struggle to “read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily” and that we would be “constantly called on the telephone” and “thinking simultaneously of the five continents of the world”. Max Nordau is referring to sensory overload, too many things happening for the brain to process. Many of his predictions have come true in a sense, but modern human brains have adapted somewhat to a constant stream of media. (I still think that boredom can be healthy, but I shouldn’t judge considering that as I write this I’m watching eight different films at once on different Apple watches strapped to my arm)

This relates to filmmaking and my field of study because it got me thinking, since our attention spans are getting shorter and new technology is becoming more immersive, embodying the principles of modernism, will this contribute to making modern films obsolete faster in the future? Just in the same way that nowadays we look at a lot of old films and think they are really slowly paced, people will look back on our films in the same way.

For instance, in 2017, virtual reality is taking hold as the hot new immersive way of absorbing media. Will we become so adapted to it that we can’t watch regular films anymore without losing interest? As an example, after photography was invented, painting had to revolutionise itself drastically to be more meaningful and different than just used for reference.

When it comes to this, I would say that I am both a pro-modernist and an anti-modernist in ways. Of course, societies always need to develop a new range of art styles but at the same time I don’t want to lose appreciation for what we already have, the brilliant movies, animated and otherwise, that established the principles of modern movies. I think we are a long way off this, as books and theatre haven’t died out yet and classic cinema shows no indication of going extinct any time, but it’s an interesting thought.