Big Fish Modernism

Modernism
A modernist approach to production, which is reflected by many experimental and avant-garde works of video and film, often calls attention to forms and techniques themselves. Modernist works fail to create a realistic world that is familiar, recognizable, and comprehensible. A modernist media artist instead feels free to explore the possibilities and limitations of the audio or visual media without sustaining an illusion of reality. The modernist approach to production highlights a degree of artificialness in the elements of the production process.
One place where modernist approach to production differ radically from realist approaches is the way that they use light and color. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, the director

In Robert Wiene’s quintessential film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (full film), the sets are deliberately distorted with streaks of lights and shadows painted directly on the set pieces. Modernist will often use expressionism to emphasizes the interior states of individuals, and frequently they will distorts the physical appearance or the speech of characters to express their internal psyche.
Though flashbacks are often considered a realist narrative convention,specifically in tell the backstory of a character or event, a modernist interpretation would be to create another world in the flashback. In Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton, the father’s backstory is a fantastical tale of unlikely events that were present only in the imagination of the main character. Rather than be expository, the flashback became a spectacle, like viewing a freak show at a circus, and that spectacle became part of the narrative

The theoretical perspective of this editing style was first introduced by Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920’s in his films Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, and October: Ten Days That Shook the World, among others. Eisenstein advanced the In the beginning of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), images of projectors showing dozens of brief cinematic glimpses, including a crucifixion, an erect penis, a tarantula spider, a short clip from a comedic silent-film reel, and the slaughter of a lamb. The last, and longest, glimpse features a boy who wakes up in a hospital next to several corpses, reading Michail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, and caressing a blurry, transient image that shifts between the two main character's