A few general characteristics
#3 Not only because of the reception effect, I’ll claim that Macedonia still awaits its first full-postmodern film. None of the existing films here can be defined as a real postmodern film in the very meaning – how we define the postmodernism in real. There is a risomatic, parallel existence of more distinctive characteristics, and by the inclusive logic – “everything passes”. That mustn’t be understood as an existence of a total anarchism and chaos, but as a convocation principle: the unity of the opposites (coincidentia oppositorum); namely, it should be understood by the negation of the principle of the “excluded third” (the known Aristotle’s’ Tertium non Datur), with the replacement of the disjunctive logic or/or with the conjunctive and/and logic. The process of the postmodern episteme (the convocation principle and/and) happened in two phases. The first one is the post-structural phase, or as we call it – the first phase, the early postmodernism of emphasized inclusion of the elements that the binary logic of the modernism use to exclude. The second phase, as we call it, is the simultaneous existence of both elements of the binary pair; namely, it presents the forsaking of that binary logic and its replacement with the deconstructive, convocative logic that, by our opinion, speaks of their simultaneous existence. That kind of an existence creates tensions and transformations, differences and paths that aren’t placed in the center of the one or in the center of the another, but always somewhere in some accidental or constructed path – concentration that is mobile and decentralized.
#4 The Macedonian postmodern film is still in the early phase of the postmodern experimental, anti-realistic and postmodern level that in global frames happened in the 60’s and the 70’s, and in the Macedonian literature, for example – in the first half of the 80’s. The most explicit Macedonian postmodern authors: Aleksandar Popovski, Darko Mitrevski, Aleksandar Stankovski, and Milčo Mančevski are still much more subversive and destructive than deconstructive and convocative. And that’s really weird, I must say, that adolescent author’s anger within our most talented filmmakers… Especially because of the fact that they spend large amounts of our taxpayers’ money in local, and Mančevski in global frames. And by our humble opinion, the postmodern aesthetics is that magical wonder-stick for the success of the so-called small nation cinematographies. Anyway, that postmodern aesthetics is actually and primarily created to answer and apply the commercial needs of the growing western market, and secondary – to answer to the author’s needs and ideas, as a strategy to maintain the survival of the authors faced with the cataclysmic “pulp” raid of the mass-culture. In our conditions, it would be said that the convocation principle and/and could serve well in favor of the cultural politics’ goals (political fairness, state and national identity etc.), and along with it, quite subversive, and with sufficiently wise esthetical pace – to introduce the needed individual interests.
#5 Unfortunately, such kind of a film in Macedonia – we don’t have, yet. The great success of the Mančevski’s film “Before the Rain” owed that to the over-correct political orientation of the film and to the insufficient author’s subversiveness, and his “Dust” suffers from the very opposite of that – the over-sufficient esthetical subversiveness and the insufficient political correctness, in spite of the aggressive advertising campaign that tried to blur the difference between these two categories. And, not to mention the other film authors and their films. That’s why the reception of those was so bitter, by the audience and the critics, about this few postmodern films here. Although the accent of the critics was mainly focused upon the esthetical matters, I believe that the basis of this reception revolt were exactly because of this, above mentioned specifics.
#6 Whatever, according to all mentioned above, will look into the corpus of postmodern characteristics mostly upon the examples of the explicit Macedonian postmodern films: Goodbye to 20th Century, directed by A. Popovski and D. Mitrevski and Maklabas, directed by A. Stankovski, mostly because of the fact we didn’t analyzed them much in any of our previous texts, and in some reduced form, we’ll do some retrospectives on the films Light Gray by A. Popovski, D. Mitrevski and S. Janikievic, then Dust and Before the Rain by M. Mančevski, because we did analyzed them before in some previous texts published in the Magazine Kinopis. Also, we will look into the some of the characteristics that incline to, or contain some postmodern values, but in whole couldn’t be defined as full-postmodern films. They are Happy New ’49, Tattoo and Gypsy Magic by Stole Popov and Angels on A Dump by Dimitrie Osmanli. So, let us note that we do focus only onto long-length feature films in this case, although postmodernism is surely present within the short-length feature, documentary and television films, as well within the video-art forms and video-clip works, also. Only, those cinema and TV segments and forms aren’t subject of our analyses here.