Authors
Abstract
Received: 08/14/2015
Accepted: 01/25/2016
Extended Abstract
Introduction and Problematic of the Research: Her we will use some well-known literary techniques in the critical theories of postmodern novel in order to study novels of the postmodern era. The authors here, select the movie She’s Star and base their analysis on Payandeh's book entitled Postmodern Novel and Film where he claims that “novel and film are two comparable genres” (Payandeh, 2007, 29). As he argues,” both of these artistic genres have narrative structures and provide the reader/audience with a story or narrative which seems to be an interpretation of reality. He also argues that the comprising elements of these two genres are also similar . . . .” (Payandeh, 2007: 29-3).
She’s Star is novel and a movie written and directed by Fereydoon Jeyrani that has some qualities which distinguish it from the movies made in the modern era. These qualities have given the movie a special position that has made the authors of this study to have a closer look at it. If there is a claim here that She’s Star is just an acceptable and not a perfect example of postmodern film, it is because a postmodern work in its perfect form includes all the multiplex qualities that are found in this type of literary or artistic works. She’s Star deploys some of the major techniques dominant in a postmodern genre such as meta-fiction, vicious circle, metonymy-metaphor polarities, ِauthor’s presence in the story, paranoia, mixing the genres, and the death of the author (‘s authority). Though not a perfect example, it owns enough postmodern features to make it an interesting piece of work to be scrutinized for analysis and for the discovery of how these qualities have been employed to distinguish it from the works produced in a previous era.
Cinema as a visual text, in the sense that poststructuralists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida have depicted, includes techniques that are also traceable in a written text. It is, therefore, not wrong to claim that Intertextuality of Jeyrani’s movie is related to this interconnection between visual and written texts, i.e., the ones that use signifiers as the sole means of their signification. A written script for Cinematic production and the eventual moving picture is therefore not different from the stock words in a novel and they are open to the same kind of scrutiny. Thus, by deploying the devices that are common in postmodern novel, it is possible to analyze a film and bring the contemporary theories of criticism to the help of film studies. It is not, therefore, surprising to find studies as part of the programs offered by the departments of literature and cultural studies. Besides, this paper introduces an analysis of a postmodern Iranian movie in order to pave the way for other critical analyses of the contemporary movies. This analysis makes a connection between film industry and postmodern fiction, demonstrating the technical and philosophical congruity of the two forms of art.
Theoretical Framework: In order to study Fereydoon Jeyrani’s She’s Star we employed the postmodern theoretical perspective, in which ideas of such critics as Patricia Waugh, David Lodge, Barry Lewis, and Jean Baudrillard were taken into consideration. Waugh’s ideas about meta-fiction, Lodge and Lewis’s short circuit (vicious circle) and Baudrillard’s ideas of hyper-reality and simulacrum have been some of the parameters by which Jeyrani’s film has been analyzed.
Methodology: In this study, the authors have deployed the postmodern theories of fiction in order to elaborate on the postmodern features of the Jeyrani’s movie, She’s Star. By comparing the postmodern critical theories of fiction and applying them to a film, we made an attempt to make a connection between film industry and postmodern fiction, demonstrating the technical and philosophical congruity of the two forms of art. Thus, this research has to answer the following questions in order to reach its results:
1. What are the postmodern techniques that Jeyrani’s She’s Star gets use of in its depiction of its story line?
2. How will the comparison made between the film and postmodern theories of novel help develop the film industry in Iran? In other words, how can the film producers and directors or film script writers benefit from the critical theories of postmodern fiction?
Findings and Discussion: As mentioned earlier, She’s Star deploys some techniques which are very common in the world of postmodern fiction. These techniques will be elaborated in detail. The meta-fictional features are the first quality that will be discussed. Patricia Waugh has designated the postmodern novels as meta-fiction. She believes that “meta-fiction is that kind of fiction or fictional narrative that self-consciously and quite systematically attracts the attention of its reader to its artificiality so as to pose question for the connection between fiction and reality” (Payandeh, 2007, 54). She’s Star uses meta-fictional elements in order to reflect on how the movie focuses on its own artificiality and eventually makes its audience quite aware of the artificiality of life itself erasing the borderline between reality and fiction. The second quality to follow meta-fiction in this research will be what commonly known as vicious circle/short circuit (to use Barry Lewis’s terms) or the presence of the author/film maker inside the story/film. According to him, short circuit in the postmodern fiction happens when both the text and the world are insinuated or when they are vulnerable to the presence of the other in the self when the self and other are indistinguishable. This combination of reality and fiction is made through the presence of the author in the text/film or the presence of real (historical) people inside the fictional world of the story/film. When these two opposing concepts, i.e., reality and fiction, merge with one another, the literal and the metaphoric intertwine (Payandeh, 2004, 104). There are other interesting means by which the authors construct a short circuit in their works and Jeyrani has also been very good in creating it in his fascinating movie. They are the metonymic-metaphoric polarity and baring the devices. There are also other techniques which are examined and scrutinized in detail in this study, such techniques as paranoia, mixing the genres, and the death of the author or his authority.
Keywords
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