Movements in artistic expression often occur spontaneously and are then given a name to identify a perceived trend. This is clearly the case with reference to both modernism and postmodernism, and the very fact that we have seen a need to find a name for the changed environment after 1960 shows that postmodernism exists in some degree--it exists because we have named it, but that does not make it any more a coherent or "intentional" movement than was modernism. In film terms, postmodernism primarily shows a certain weariness with modernism rather than a drive to something clearly new. The elevation of film to a subject for study is itself a postmodern event, signaling as it does the end of the modernist division into High and Low culture. The increasingly self-reflexive nature of modern film along with the elevation of style over substance are also postmodern elements.
Modernism and postmodernism are forces that have been in competition but that are also part of a flow in the same direction, a flow of artistic movement yearning toward change within a technological age. Modernism was part of an effort to create a new environment to replace the old around the turn of the century, following in the wake of similar changes in political, social, literary, and other spheres of society. The application of these ideas to public space in particular shows some of the important dynamics at work in the movement the term describes, and such efforts were used to extend the meaning of public spaces directly to society as a whole, attempting to alter the way we think of ourselves in relation to our external, public environment in keeping with the other changes taking place in human thought and attitude. Postmodernity was a reaction to modernity as modernity was a reaction to what went before, but again a new way of viewing the world and our relationship to it were produced in terms of technological changes and possibilities. Modernism is i...