Ouroborus - Perspectives

This week’s lecture was on Ouroborus or story loops.

Definitions

• Ouroborus - a circular symbol of a snake or dragon devouring its own tail, standing for infinity
• Meta - talks about its own category
• Metafiction - fiction about fiction
• Metanarratives - philosophies mentioned before
• Metafiction - fiction which is self-consciously reflects upon its own nature, modes of production etc.
• Mise en abyme - “placing into infinity” or “placing into the abyss”
• Intertextuality - the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text
• The 4th wall - a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this “wall”, the actors act as if they cannot. 

• Metafiction was coined in 1970 as experimental texts that broke with the tradition of literary realism
• Mise en abyme is commonly used to describe standing between two mirrors to create infinite images. It is used in deconstruction to describe intertextuality of language - never quite reaches the foundation. 

Dancer in the dark

Reasons the film is postmodern

• Simulations (dream sequences) vs reality (sad situation)
• Intertextuality to other musicals - dance and song sequences
• Self-reflexive on media as musical - songs at very strange times
• Handheld footage and heavy use of jump cuts creates an uneasy feeling opposite to traditional filmmaking 
• Challenging the meta narrative of capatilism vs individual