Postmodern Bricolages

This chapter focuses on the 1970s and 1980s and illustrates how some of the most celebrated world cinema directors became profoundly affected by postmodern thought and cultural practice, among them auteurs like Kurosawa, Brocka or Scola, all of whom have approached the slums of their native countries and cities in their films. The author argues that the cultural and architectural practice of bricolage may serve as a key paradigm that subsumes the otherwise quite disparate styles of these directors. Postmodern concepts and aesthetic strategies such as bricolage – and, by extension, intertextuality, intermediality or hybridisation – put the traditional claims of realist and documentary practices in doubt. Instead, postmodern films, like the chapter’s main example Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica 1989), mix what are apparently contradictory notions, such as magic and realism. However, the chapter also discusses other examples of (predominantly ‘Third-Worldist’) filmmakers who have been trying to preserve and recover the historically inherited, but now vehemently questioned (ethical, social and political) concerns of realist and documentary modes to approach their countries’ social problems, but without turning a blind eye towards the new postmodern realities of increasingly consumer-oriented ‘Third World’ cultures.