Film School Generation

    There are two types of directors in film school generation, the one who minds the public when they make their own films and the one who doesn't mind the public at all. Some of the major directors of all time include Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Lucas and many others, which are known from producing remarkable films. But what kind of directors are they? Do they mind the public or not when they produce their own film?

             Directors such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Coppola, Paul Schrader, John Milius, Brian De Palma, Kathryn Bigelow, Robert Zemeckis, Spike Lee, David Lynch, John Carpenter, Martin Brest, George Miller, Martha Coolidge, Joel Coen, and Edward Zwick all studied film in college and/or graduate school.  They are the types of directors who mind their own perspective, and not the public when they make movies. Star Wars (Lucas), Jaws (Spielberg), and The Godfather saga (Coppola) to smaller, quirkier films such as The Comfort of Strangers (Schrader), Strange Days (Bigelow), and Barton Fink (Coen), these films reflect the tastes and worldviews of the individuals who directed them.

             However, directors such as Michaelangelo Antonioni, Francis Coppola and Brian De Palma focused in the theme of postmodernism when they made films like Blow up, The Conversation and others which are about the problems of understanding and connecting with the world.  They are the directors who consider the public when making films. These directors may be understood in terms of postmodernism, a cultural phenomenon that spans the arts from architecture to MTV. Broadly defined, postmodernism is an artistic style that seeks both to appropriate and dismantle the conventions of earlier periods.  Seen in the light of postmodernism, then, the film school generation’s adaptation of classical Hollywood references toward their own ends is part of a much wider cultural phenomenon of the late 20th century. To use a favorite postmodern term, they deconstruct not only the world they explore through art but the art itself, not to mention the consciousness of the listener, reader, or spectator.