The Coen Brothers

Joel David Coen and Ethan Jesse Coen, known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers, who write and direct their films jointly. The pair have written and directed numerous successful films, ranging comedies (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy) to thrillers (Miller's Crossing, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men), to postmodern movies where the genres blur together (Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man).

Combining eccentricity, humor, irony, and often brutal violence, the films of the Coen brothers are still a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres, especially film noir, while sustaining a postmodern feel. An example of one of their postmodern films is Barton Fink:



- This film is seen as postmodern because it crosses genres, fragments the characters' experiences, and doesn't have straightforward narrative.

-It's described as a "postmodern pastiche" which closely examines how past eras have represented themselves. It's an ironic reexamination of history as it is both a critique of the Hollywood system then and now, but also a reworking of the myth of the leftist artist in the 1930s.

It contains a mix of history and pure fiction. A similar methodology is adopted for 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' which offers a precise recreation of 1930s deep-south America but frames the narrative using Homer's The Odyssey. The mixture of historical detail with fiction narrative is incredibly postmodern as it's playing with conventions.