Self-reflexive cinema

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Chris Stolz comments:
" American film, which is at its basic mythical level       
purely psychological (Lynch), sociological (the Western, marriage
comedies) or religious (Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino) does not
lend itself to purely artistic, aesthetic reflexivity, i think.
It would be the Europeans who would experiment with this kind of
form, since their cinematic traditions do not have as their
primary concern the Americans myths of societal foundation,
Puritan redemption or psychological archetypes.'


Chris is right about self-reflexivity for its own sake becoming mere
glossiness, but perhaps because its become so pervasive, the self-reflexivity
of American cinema of the last 20 years or so gets overlooked.  Many of
the films of Scorsese, Coppola and Tarantino use precisely the kinds of 
elements that would have been labeled "disruptive" if not outright self-
reflexive--which shows their own influence by those European directors.
PULP FICTION, Oliver Stone's films and even FORREST GUMP all--for better
or worse--are highly "self-aware" films.  Whether they represent an advance
on the European Art Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s is another question.

Proposition:
	Jean-Luc Godard is to Quentin Tarantino as
	Thomas Pynchon is to     ?


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)