Last night, I watched Tristram Shandy. I liked the film a lot. It's well-written (by Frank Cottrell Boyce), well-directed (by Michael Winterbottom), and brilliantly acted (by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon). But watching it, I couldn't help feeling that it tolls the death knell of post-modernism. "Tristram Shandy," the novel by Laurence Sterne, was published in 1759 and was arguably a precursor of what would come to be called post-modernism - a style conscious of itself and of its history and in which form becomes content (the greatest example of which is arguably James Joyce's "Ulysses"). "Tristram Shandy," the film, released in 2006, announces the end of post-modernism as a radical movement that was once on the cutting edge of consciousness. Despite its excellence as a film, its post-modern strategies fail to surprise and are easily assimilated. We've all seen it before, and we all understand it only too well. The film, which would like to think of itself as cutting-edge, announces instead the final and complete exhaustion of post-modernism as an artistic strategy.
The question for artists today is: What's next? What speaks to the truth of today?
Because post-modernism clearly no longer does.
Laurence Sterneposted by Caveh Zahedi at
1:58 PM
