ABSTRACT
Fredric Jameson’s philosophical impasse of the late 1980s regarding the cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism is partially resolved in his writings on magic-realist film, which reflect on broader debates on the avant-garde. Magic realism, as Jameson defines it, is both mode and discourse. Jean-Francois Lyotard believed that the return of the modernist avant-garde carried the future, that postmodernism was not the fall from, but the beginning of a revitalised modernism: ‘that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable’. The films in ‘On magic realism’ are strange, geopolitical allegories that explore the potential of human transformation against political action, each locked into a ‘perpetual’ present in time. The application of colour to particular images creates an affect that Jameson believes to signal the materialisation of thought as repressed or unfulfilled desires; and a sudden application of colour operates on viewer like ‘punctual beats of energy’.
