The film district 9, is a South African science fiction thriller film which is directed by Neill Blomkamp. It was written by Neill Blomkamp Teri Tatchell and is produced by Peter Jackson and Carolyn Cunningham. The film also stars other actors such as David James, Sharlto Copley and Jason Cope. The film has won many awards and was budgeted at 30 million and was released in August 13th 2009. The film also pivots on themes such as xenophobia and social segregation etc. The filming of the film, was shot in Chiawelo, Soweto during a time of unrest in Alexander, Gauteng and some other African townships which involved clashes between native south Africans and Africans born inside other countries. As their consisted a lot of hand held camerawork, the producers and crew chose to use the Red One Cameras using build 15, Cooke SA primes and Angenieux zoom. As for the documentary style used for the film a Sony EX1/EX3 XDCAM-HD was used and the Aliens from the film were designed by Weta Workshop and the design was executed by Image Engine.The story is adapted, from Neill Blomkamp's, from his short film of Alive in Joburg in 2005. The title and premise of District 9 was inspired by events such as District six, Cape Town during the apartheid era. Even those it was shot in the location of Chiawelo, Soweto and includes fictional interviews, news footage and videos from surveillance cameras in a mock-documentary style format.What are the themes in District 9:
- Apartheid era
- Contempoary evictions and forced removals to new suburban ghettos in South Africa.
- Resistance
- Inhumanity in the irony of Wikus becoming more humane as he become less human.
- Betrayal
- The destruction of which humans are capable
- Racism, xenophobia when applied in the form os speciesmen applied to the aliens.
- State reliance on multinational corporations as a government funded enforcement arm.
- dangers of governments, particularly in their outsourcing of militaries and bureaucracies to private contractors
What is Postmodern media?Postmodern media rejects the idea, idea of stories (end of metanarratives.). Postmodern also hinds on the concept of how we live in a fixed time, where people are usually media texts and in life we are defined by our representations and images/pictures which is an association of simulacrum. Postmodern also rejects the idea that their is no fixed truth in society and also hinders on the concept of on how their isn't any originality or individualism anymore in the world. They poften play with meanings and postmodernism theory also present other oppositional readings simultaneously. Postmodern texts employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage and usually use images and ideas e.g. Nirvanna music video- Heart Shaped box. it also rejects boundaries between high and low forms of of art rejecting rigid genre distinctions etc.
http://www.slideshare.net/sgummer/postmodernism-for-media
http://www.slideshare.net/rikhudson/postmodern-media-postmodern-media-ocr-media-conference-2009
District 9(2009, Neil Blomkamp) can be considered a postmodernist film in terms of it style as for instance, it uses an eclectic(borrowing from other genres) range of camera and editing techniques to deliver the story. As at the start of the film, it uses a documentary style with the characters addressing an unseen interviewer-in these scenes the characters are seen discussing the protagonist in the past tense. Further documentary shots are included featuring the protagonist addressing the camera directly.
The direct mode of address(signification of documentary truth and authenticity) which suggests the film is self aware and how cameras and microphones were revealed to the audience which is realized by the "knowing audience. This coveys to the audience that its actually faux documentary(fictional events are shown in a documentary format).
The film is also playful in its mixing and blurring of genres and conventions, which is a major feature within postmodern media. As the film progresses, the documentary style previously used in the film is replaced by an fourth wall approach, to filming with occasional changes of mode of address like closed circuit TV footage.
A common aspect of postmodernist films, is the playing around with audience's suspension of disbelief and this is done by presenting a fictional narrative through the realist, self aware, hand held style of images and by stating at the beginning of the film that the footage was recovered from an abandoned camera or handed in anonymously.
The film takes the idea by combining faux documentary style with normal fiction film style. The film makes no judgement for it to be real or fake. It does not explain why the documentary footage is used, its used to trigger audience recognition of these media codes. In this way District 9 erodes distinction between reality and representation.
District 9 could also be considered to be postmodern in content, even those it uses codes and conventions of documentary which alternate and fabricated history.
Like Science fiction which deal with the unreal of being set in the future etc, District 9's back story starts with Aliens coming to Johannesburg in 1982, this is called the re-imagining of history and is considered to be an aspect in postmodern films.
The fragmentation of the film has the aliens (or prawns) as they are called corralled into a city slum and forcefully segregated from the rest of the human inhabited city. These are cultural references to the famous township or slum of Soweto- there are also cultural codes like pictorially represented "no aliens" signs signifying forced segregation and other cultural references with perhaps South Africans/Nigerian (rather then south African) mafia within township who deal in illegal goods like alien weapons.
Postmodernists argue that we are so used to seeing even being bombarded with media messages and representations that this has become the dominant way of constructing meaning of the world instead of reading the reality of the physical world. This is called fragmentation of representation, District 9 conveys an example of it through all those cultural references.
