Postmodernist Film

Postmodernist film attempts to articulate postmodernism (its ideas and themes and methods) through film. Postmodernist film tries to subvert the mainstream conventions of narrative structure, characterization and destroys or toys with the audiences suspension of belief. Typically these type of films also break down the cultural divide between high and low art and often upend typical portrayals of race, gender, class and time with the goal of creating something different from traditional narrative expression. 

Postmodernist film is a reaction to modernist cinema and its tendencies. Modernist cinema is known to explore  and expose the formal concerns of the medium by placing them at the forefront of consciousness. Modernist cinema is known to question and make visible the meaning production practices of film. Auteur theory and the authors/directors idea of producing work from a singular vision guided the concerns of modernist cinema. "To investigate the transparency of the image is modernist but undermines the references to reality, to engage with the aesthetics of postmodernism. Although modernist film is known to have more faith in the author, individual and accessibility of reality itself than the postmodernist film. 

Postmodernist films are known to have three characteristics, which separate it from modernist film/cinema or traditional narrative film, these include characteristics like:

1. The pastiche of many genres and styles. Which means postmodernist films are comfortable with mixing together many disparate kinds film/styles etc and ways of film-making together in the same movie. 
2. Self reflexivity of technique that highlights the construction and relation of the image to other images and not to any kind of external reality. Which is done through highlighting the constructed nature of the image in ways that directly reference its production and also by explicit intertexuality that incorporates or references other media and texts. The deconstruction and fragmentation of linear time as well also commonly employed to highlight the constructed nature which appears on screen. 
3. An undoing or a collapse of the distinction between high and low art styles, techniques and texts. Which is also an extension of the tendency towards pastiche and combining. It also extends to the combination or mixing of techniques which traditionally come with value judgments as to their worth and place in culture and the creative and artistic spheres.  
4.  Lastly contradictions among values, styles, technique, methods and are important to postmodernism and are many cases irreconcilable Any theory of postmodernist film would have to be comfortable with the possible paradox of certain ideas and articulation.