By Tom Swift
This is the first installment in a group of reviews I’m doing on the use of meta in film. Meta, vaguely put, is when a concept is abstracted from another concept which is then used to inform or complete the latter; some well known examples are A Midsummer’s Night Dream’s or Hamlet’s play within a play, Italo Calvino’s hypernovel If on a winter’s night a traveler(1979) - a novel imbedded with 10 false novels - or Roland Barthe’s Criticism and Truth (1970), a critique on traditional literary critique in France. Film achieves this most frequently by producing films about producing films or making a film about the failure of its own production, each using the film inside the film to establish a more oppositional realism, but each to their own respective ends. I will be exploring their ends, one by one and attempting to find out how deep each goes.
