meta-textuality
#13 Postmodern films point upon their status of artifact systematically and with a self-conscience. The traditional and the modern films try to minimize the fiction and to reassure the audience that he experiences the reality itself, and to build an illusion of the world that will capture the recipient in that it. The metatextual films maximize the fiction and remind the recipient that he’s experiencing only something created, something made (and “false” in the very reality of the real world). Stole Popov uses that meta-textuality in his film opus: Gypsy Magic begins with the Gypsies watching an Indian film; the way they experience that film is a mini-essay of the “film vs. reality” relations, and the forms of the art reception. In Tattoo, when a few of the prisoners simulate a film crew, on of the other prisoners (Kiril Pop Hristov) addresses the audience directly, among who he places his father also, and with that, he takes the recipients out of the film illusion.
intertextuality
#12 The intertextuality is a concept by which the art is consisted by art itself, but not in the old sense that it contains traces and influences from the previously made art, but in much more radical way: every film sequence or segment is the re-creation of the previous actual film/films. By this, there is no such thing as originality or origin deed: all art is intertextual. The postmodernism points that there is nothing else to do (to tell), but to explore and use the already existing (already told) stories. The multi-genre interlacing of the Macedonian postmodern films is in the function of maintaining the links with the whole (and not only the film) art universe. The Macedonian postmodern film recalls the general genre models, but also the individual models – films, directors, poetics, even partial sequences or quotes. In that sense, the postmodern film doesn’t try to distinct itself from the large world cinematography whole, or to impose its own way of narration as a superior image of the eternal and the impossible. The recalling the previous and contemporary art forms and deeds is the acknowledgement of its limited posibilities of the every individual art-deed. These films often, and very intentionally, imprint the impression of incompleteness, and leave the “edges” between the different aesthetic patterns unpolished, with which they point both on the material and the spiritual aspect of the art-deed’s genesis. The intertextual link is realized through the technique of quoting.