FILM THEORY
Metafiction and film
When the character, as is the case at the
end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), announces
to the viewers that the film has just come to its end,
that is called metafiction, a procedure much more frequent
in the history of film than one would imagine.
With these
procedures, movies, just like numerous literary works before
them, draw our attention away from the scene and direct
the viewers to themselves, their textuality and artificiality,
while more recently we can even talk about a trend in motion
pictures, although metafiction was more common in documentary
and experimental film. In Woody Allen’s film Bullets Over
Broadway (1994) heroes, for example, discuss best ways
to motivate the characters, in Fellini’s 8½ (1963) Marcello
Mastroianni plays film director Guido who has, after a
successful career (filled with numerous films like Fellini’s)
fallen into creative crisis. Although in this classical
film Fellini assumes many metapositions — we should stress
that the film is primarily about »a filmmaker who is engrossed
in the process of creation«. With the help of films by
Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino and others, the study
explains the essence of metafiction and enumerates its
most typical stylistic procedures.
Vanja Obad |
