Post-War (1945 – 1975)
Thirty years in the shadow of the Bomb and the camps — in which existentialism peaks, cinema becomes a serious art form, and the Enlightenment project has to answer for Auschwitz.
What Defined It
Europe rebuilds under an American umbrella and a Soviet counter-umbrella. The Cold War structures everything. In philosophy, existentialism goes mainstream: Sartre’s 1945 lecture [[existentialism-is-a-humanism|Existentialism Is a Humanism]] makes “freedom,” “anguish,” and “bad faith” into café words. Camus writes The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus. Beckett stages Waiting for Godot. Borges invents the modern short story.
The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, later Habermas) asks how reason produced the camps and builds critical theory as the answer. By the 1960s, structuralism and then post-structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan) start dismantling the humanist subject the existentialists had defended.
And cinema — cinema becomes the era’s great new art. Bergman in Sweden makes theology into film. Kurosawa brings a Japanese moral seriousness to world cinema. Tarkovsky in the USSR makes slow, devotional films that feel like prayer. Kubrick moves from American noir to the cold rationalism of 2001. The New Hollywood (Coppola, Scorsese, Altman) comes at the tail end and turns American cinema adult.
Key Figures
- Philosophy/literature: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Borges, Celan, Levi, Arendt, Adorno, Marcuse, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida
- Cinema: Bergman, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, Truffaut, Ozu (late), Bresson
Why It Matters
The post-war era is when philosophy, literature, and cinema start treating each other as peers. A Bergman film is genuinely a philosophical event; a Sartre novel is genuinely a cinematic imagination on paper. The lines between arts blur because the question behind all of them is the same: how do you live meaningfully in a universe that just produced Hiroshima and Auschwitz?
Connections
- Sartre — Existentialism Is a Humanism
- Bergman — The Seventh Seal
- Kurosawa — Ikiru
- Kubrick — 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Tarkovsky
- Scorsese
Lineage
- Predecessors: Late Modernism; WWII
- Successors: Contemporary era; the digital turn