#4 As said before, the film (the text) “Dust” on the things we can count out, explicitly belongs to the Postmodern aesthetics i.e. to its segment called Modern in the Postmodern, or Modern after the Postmodern, because of the mixture i.e. the significant presence of modernist techniques, but in a new postmodernist frame. The Modernism after the Postmodernism characterizes by a few important aspects which are different from the typical postmodernist text: utopian project, reductionism, formalism, originality. The utopian project consists of, diegetically, into the text, in the final triumph of the man over the nature with the help of the culture. No matter the “essence and the form” of the narration, that way the man succeeds to put a trace in time, a trace of his existence, i.e. he conquers the time. The film tells us where do our voices go when we are gone and no matter all the arbitrariness, that is not a bad thing, on the contrary. The memory of Angela continues in the power of narration of Edge and after he accepts the holy secret in a kind of initiation, the technique and also the passion of narration, he continues to remember Angela, but already knows and makes space for a new story, his own. The narration, i.e. the film is a recipe, a utopian project, how should the man come out as a winner over the death. The formalism of “Dust” is perceived through the enormous interest for the formal aspect of the text and it’s emphasizing, through the wondering (-ostranenye) and the constant destruction of the illusion of the fictional world. The reductionism is the main conduct through which Mančevski paints (i.e. he doesn’t paint) the characters, by which he doesn’t give or gives very few characteristics of the intradiegetic context, also of the formal film picks: the way of framing the sequences, editing, racourse. The originality, as we have said before, belongs to the extradiegesis, i.e. the consciousness and the intention for an original work to be made , something new, something unseen and superior in respect to the already seen.
Let’s try now to locate the text by genre. The overstepping of the genre and the poly-genre is the main feature of the Postmodernism, i.e. translocation of the genre of one discipline into another and implementation of different genre characteristics into the basic and beginning genre scheme. The hybridization of two or more disparate genres is the most common manner. That’s why Milčo Mančevski defines the film by genre as an eastern – western or as baklava – western. I.e. on an intrafilm level he tries to merge the tradition, the film practice of two completely different areas: Hollywood and Skopje, the western pattern with the pattern of the Macedonian rebellions (“komiti”) films. But while the Postmodernism uses the disparate models to cause a short circuit, willing to show the ontological instability and the existence of more parallel, uneven worlds (according to Bryan Mchale), the strategy of Milčo Mančevski is epistemological, modernist, using that kind of combination he tries to create more implicit or explicit analogies, to show that behind the disparity of space there is unification of time, i.e. that both the Macedonian rebellions films and the cowboy films follow the same formatting patterns. And here again, the strategy is not that to be shown through eclectic pastiche of the both genre models. The basic models are given intertextually, in absentia, and in praesentia, it aims to their destruction, through a renovation of the modernist authors who have once destroyed the “classical” (cliched, stereotyped, kitschyfied) patterns: ”The mountain of rage” by Ljubisha Georgievski, or the “Wild bunch” by Sam Peckinpah.
#5 On a wider, poetical level, the film represents a historiography metafiction (the model by Linda Hutcheon). Some researchers (Venko Andonovski) have classified the film (the script) as a metafiction, giving quite right the characteristics of a metafictional text. But a little more precision is needed: the text belongs to the model historiography metafiction, because of what is denied in the film is the history, the relation between the present and the past, our presentation of what has gone, our formation of what we have seen or haven’t seen and quite little to the relation between the faction and the fiction. Indeed, the first, the basic story in the film is made into the limits of the realistic model, it represents a model of the extradiegetic world and there are almost none metafictional interventions in it; and even if there are (as when Edge puts himself among the cowboys on the photography), it’s again a try to witness the past, to make its self–position in the history. Therefore, it is more correct for this film to be considered as a historiography metafiction. The historiography metafiction is a critique on the traditional understanding of history, in which the language is accepted as neutral and the both have non-problematic discourse character. (look over at Alison Lee). The traditional history novel or film, looks at the history as to a naked fact, it never makes a problem out of it, it’s thought of as a sum of extratextual facts. But in the Postmodern, a theory prevails that the historical texts can’t catch the past anymore, but only the ideas and stereotypes we have of it (Frederick Jameson). The faith that the reality can be reached and represented in the picture is lost. There is no external truth which can verify and unite, but only internal truths. The referenciality has always been written in the discourses of our culture. The Postmodern understands that we are epistemologically unable to cognize the past and disputes the relation between the events and the facts. The events become facts through conceptual patterns they must get in so they can become facts. Thus, according to the postmodernist theory, the history has its relation to the referential, to the reality, but it also underlines the discourse of history, it examines the nature of extratextual reference, considers that the memory can produce only text, there is no reproduction of events. The meaning of the past has its textualized character and means a personal choice, a selection of facts, mediation of the historian himself as an analyst. (Šeleva, also Hutcheon). So the History and the Language are verbal fictions that use narration strategies and manipulate the recipient. #7
the art is inside
