As for architecture or literature, postmodernism is also a movement in the cinema and it wants to break the old and strong tradition and the rich classical values of the theoretical and rational items. However, it's difficult to distinguish the postmodern by the modern cinema: we could affirm that all of the last century's cinematographric productions appear to be postmodern and we could not return to our analysis of the Adorno and Horkheimer's fight between high culture and low culture. A good point of start is the Lyotard's distinction between discours and figure in his book "L'a-cinéma": the French author discusses that on one hand there is a "speeching cinema", which is the logical, rationalist and full of meaning; and on the other hand there is the "figural cinema", which has shape but not substance, a being but not a function. While Barthes discovered the non-representable in the heart of the presentation, Lyotard found it in the presentation, which in a lot of ways overset the apparently established laws. All that represents the mass culture, the values' downfall, the reality fragmentation, and sometimes the extreme and hard reality, the rupture of the distinction between culture and society, the real violence, the abandon of individualism and the lack or the totally new birth of the religious items set up the baggage of the postmodern cinema. There is not an exact temporal location in which there exists the birth of the new trend, given that already in Bertolucci's La strategia del ragno (The strategy of the spider, 1970), in Fellini's Satyricon (1969) or in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) we can see the rupture, which goes against the traditional ways of cultural cinema.

We only can analyze the main and general lines and take out the postmodern features, which are closer to art and architecture. So the cinema becomes the right-most medium to express the importance of the image like a mirror of the reality. The postmodern movies present wry and difficult situations, fragmented and reduced to the extreme, in which the actors confront themselves with the real world and with the existential problems, but without every type of linear logic. The psychoanalysis becomes, as in Woody Allen's movies, the exact science and the deviating behavior is part of the consumption and capitalist life, like for example we can see in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996). The postmodern movies are the presentation of the everyday life or of a shallow reality without deep meaning; sometimes the same cinema shows us new values, new beliefs and religions, which are far away the dominant system, as in the Bernardo Bertolucci and Steven Spielberg's movies. The postmodern, above all in films like Spike Lee's Clockers (1995) or Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo (1995), don't want to keep the status quo, which in many centuries was the target of a lot of scholars, don't lead back its reality to rationality or to a first parmenidean being, the totality can be disarray and violence, but is pure reality, not reproduction. Maybe Quentin Tarantino's famous Pulp fiction (1993) is the clearest example of postmodern cinema: in that film, using the tradition of Peckinpah, De Palma, Godard, Leone's great gangster movies, the filmmaker presents violence like a condition of the world and without moral attitudes. Tarantino's heroes, represented by hyperreality, have no sociological connotation and they are unable to locate themselves in the system. In the French cinema also, starting from the Nouvelle Vauge (new cinema or new wave) and from Godard to arrive to William Burroughs and Ishmael Reed and to the French new novel until to Thomas Gilou and Mathieu Kassovitz, we find a lot of postmodern characteristics.

The Nouvelle Vague is the starting point of our analysis: it explodes in France at the end of the 1950s. The spark of the renewal is given by the desire to break out from the social obligations and to make room for subjectivity, the requirement is the rupture with the traditional ways not only to do but also to think of cinema. The fracture had to be pursued in all fronts: first in the way to make cinema, then in the formulation of new critic categories. At the end of the 1950s François Truffaut, considered one of the most famous exponents of the new trend, expressed his negative opinion against what the actual criticism considered the "good French cinema". The script-writers' movies controlled the field of the cinema: there were films in which the visual part was a simple translation or a completion of the literature part. Such a formulation favored the story on the staging, but also considered peddling the work of the filmmaker. In agreement with the Nouvelle Vague and exponent of avant-garde's cinema, Godard, in his movie Vent d'est, created the manifesto of the counter-cinema radically against the current orthodox trend. Indeed, the movie stressed some important turning-points. First, the narration passes from a "transitive" way to "intransitive": the story didn't set in a linear way from one episode to next, but it presented holes, bounces, digressions and moments closed in themselves. Then, the strangeness displaces the identification: the spectators didn't stick to the vicissitudes of the personages, they are kept at arm's length, aware of the theatrical figment. So, it passes from the closure to the opening: there are no internal recalls ready to reinforce themselves, but set in some references to other movies, to the other novels, to the other media. The pleasure leaves the place to the regret and the hate: the spectator finds no satisfaction following the story, but he is shocked and provoked by what he was watching. Finally the reality substitutes the fiction: the actors don't interpret a role, but are themselves who work for a film.

The Godard's rupture, who was the first step to the birth of the postmodernism, has had numerous counterchecks in the 1980s and 1990s for French cinema, where we find two main trends: the so-called "heritage film" (le cinéma du patrimoine) and the so-called "le cinema du look" (also know as "le cinema du Forum des Halles). Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1985) and Manon des sources (1986) and Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) represent a classical production, that have their reference sometimes in the literature and take the "qualité" tradition as a starting point, which the Nouvelle Vague's filmmakers rejected. They are an example of heritage cinema, which is linked to the pastiche concept, where there is no longer celebration of tradition, but only a detached glance to the past. Like in Lucas's American Graffiti (1983), in the Berri's movie the life in the fields and in touch with nature is not more a bucolic compromise, but only a lucid representation of malice and strong disposition. Instead, the cinéma de look is the trend to which movies like Luc Besson's Subway (1985) and Nikita (1990) and Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva belong. The concert between the existential troubles, typical of Nouvelle Vague, and the mainly superficial and spectacular characteristics of Hollywood's cinema is the main feature. A new trend, called "cinéma de banlieue" arose in the middle of the 1990s in answer to the Mitterand's defeated and to the right-wind ascent in France. On this line we find movies like Kassovitz's La Haine (1995), Thomas Gilou's Raï (1995), Jean-François Richet's État de lieux (1995) and Karim Dridi's Bye Bye (1996). The way to shoot, the analyzed argumentation, the select places and the low budgets get these movies very close to Nouvelle Vague. They point out their objective on the youthful discomfort in the suburbs of the big French cities to image a real situation of life in France. So, in Gilou's Raï and Kassovitz's La Haine we can watch scenes of youthful gangs of various nationalities being abandoned to the violence and the barbarity of outlying quarters. Dridi's Bye Bye represents a large vision of the Arab-French suburbs in Marsiglia, where drugs and violence are features of every day life. From these arguments, we can start our analysis on the Kassovitz's movie like an a example of postmodern cinema.