ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author tells the story of her transition, descent, or spiral, from international relations professor and researcher into film-student and-maker. She wrote and co-edited Hard Corn in a pastiche style, and as a conscious recycling of aesthetic codes which ignored, transgressed or at least troubled the boundaries between high and low art, sacred and profane imagery, and public and private spaces and experiences. A fuller description of a postmodern aesthetic is given by John Belton who draws heavily on Fredric Jameson. Several elements of their combined definition uncannily mirror themes and techniques in Hard Corn. First, the cultural logic of late capitalism is depicted as producing alienation and societal fragmentation along with inner fragmentation of individuals as subjects. Methodologically, techniques like pastiche recycle aesthetic codes and materials in order to stage, simulate, or hail a past that will not return.
