The Postmodernism in the Macedonian Film – part II

/, Gallery, Blesok no. 28/The Postmodernism in the Macedonian Film – part II

The Postmodernism in the Macedonian Film – part II

allegory

#5 Macedonian postmodern films also most use the allegory of all of the rhetorical figures. The allegory is an inversion of the metaphor. While with the metaphor the metaphorical frame of the reference is absent and the literal meaning present, at the allegory that is reverse. The allegory is the direct translation of the abstract concepts at the transparently motivated narrative (McHale, 1987:141). The allegory is attracted by the fragmented nature, the nature of the unfinished, of the incomplete. The allegory deed is synthetic, it is an accumulation, an impertinence, a hybrid. In the allegory can enter everything, but without internal communication within.
Exactly because of the unclear, hermetic and invisible allegorical sense, Macedonian films have burdened reception. In them we can see characters and action threads that only in delusional way move through a known and real “landscapes. There, the allegorical meaning pushes away all what precedes; it is only an annex to that meaning. The characters are only contours of some other ones, of some memories, of some known but lost narratives, which are only pale breaks into the memory.
Those are substantive and adjectival determinations and biblical allusions: Gavril, Mathew, The Enigmatition, The Virgin, The Searcher for Drills, the Garbage Man, The Stutterer, The Crying Man, etc. Or, is Kuzman – The Kuzman Kapidan, or Bolen Dojchin, or a vampire from the Cepenkov’s old folk stories or from the films about Dracula? Behind the sedimentation of the narrative and motive lines (post-apocalyptic time, aliens, heroin wars, political opposition protests, art performances, archaic beings), allegory opens itself towards outside, permanently attracting new meanings, and closing itself for the individual art.

parody

#4 Brian McHale thinks that the parody is a perfect postmodern form, and that it also incorporates and re-examines the models that are the object of its function. The parody inverts the meaning vectors and orientations of the object model that is parodied. The Macedonian films are exactly like that, tensed between the identification and the discrepancy, between the inversion of the meaning orientation and maintaining the original determinations. In those films there is no presence of that strict modernist parody in which, through that parody, the moral firmness and spiritual integrity of the author are kept steady and constant. In contrary, in the postmodernism, the parody is always a self-parody. Actually, the parodied model is always the only way that the film exists. In the above-mentioned sequence of the film Light Gray, the spaghetti-western model is being parodied, but that is the only and single way of the introductory part of the film. The parody of the national, up to myth raised models; then, of the biblical discourses, of the family dramas, of the high-budget films, etc., is the whole story of Goodbye to the 20th Century. The goal of the radical parody in Maklabas is the undergoing of the poetics idiom strategy – the underground as a sub-cultural trend. There, the science fiction genre is being parodied, with the choosing of the “low-tech” science fiction form, then with the hybridization of the genre with the conspirative theories as a proved subversive literature and through the additional travestying of the SF genre from within, with the parody of the genre canons. The advanced technique as a background isn’t taken seriously, it is an ugly distopia, the accent is upon the “cartelisation” of the future, upon the growing Mafia conglomerates that are a threat to the national government in a zero-level of the temporal distance. The sub-cultural milieu of Skopje is presented by the scum, the underground and the marginal figures. The degradation and the simplifying of the rationality and emotionality are drawn to the very limits, the parody of the characters and situations is realized with the burlesque roughness, the individual and social faults and defects are vulgarized, the simple and vulgar “langue” – the slang of the underground dominates and the melodramatic sequences are being “cleaned” from their pathetic. The central motive is the carnevalization of the dreadful social subject – the drug misuse. Even here the cheerful, anti-nihilistic relativization dominates. With the paronomastic bending of the names and toponyms from the reality (Mousedonia, Skotje, Gazi Babe, etc.) are parodied all the toponyms and characters that we can encounter in our real life.

2018-08-21T17:23:36+00:00 October 1st, 2002|Categories: Reviews, Gallery, Blesok no. 28|0 Comments