Postmodernism in the Cinema

"these essays . . . provide interesting reading strategies and different systems of interpretations that may help us with the difficult task of being post-modern." - Film and Theory Although "Postmodernism" has been a widely used catch word and its concept extensively discussed in philosophy, political thought, and the arts, many scholars still feel uneasy about it. Despite the fact that the concept can be traced back to Arnold Toynbee's 1939 edition of A Study of History, or even back into the nineteenth century, its amorphous nature continues to confound many scholars, not least because there are not one but several kinds of postmodernism, each one pointing to different states of questioning and to diverse ways of remembering, interpreting, and representing. This anthology makes a significant contribution to the current debate in that it offers sophisticated and multi-faceted discussions of a number of key issues in relation to cinema such as auteurism, national cinemas, metacinema, the parodic, history, and colonization. Cristina Degli-Esposti received a Doctorate in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Bologna and one in Italian Studies from Indiana University. Since 1991 she has been Assistant Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies at Kent State University.