BTW--I should also point out that I've decided, after contemplating it for a few weeks, to change the title to Haunted Nerves / Nostalgia in the Age of Digital Cinema, which seems more specific (and more marketable) than the old title. I preferred "time" for awhile because it didn't have the same negative connotation as nostalgia, and because the book's not only about nostalgia. But once I embraced the idea that my definition of nostalgia is taken largely from Jameson--and thus, "nostalgia" in the manuscript also always refers to the equally important concept of "history"--then I made peace with simpler, and perhaps more "sexy" (in that publishing sense of the word), title.
Anyway, here's a draft of what I came up with, but I'm not sure if--in the end--it will ultimately frame the work in the way I want. The postmodern angle, of course, is not yet sufficiently foregrounded, etc.:
We have always been haunted by the future. [. . .] Our sense of past time—dare I say, our nostalgia—is always a reflection of the irreducible anxieties felt in a present time which is always already fading into the future.
How to pull back against—not the lure of the past, but—the rush to the future? In 2011, a series of nostalgic cinematic love letters—The Artist, Hugo and Midnight in Paris—dominated the end-of-the year accolades amongst film critic circles and industry award shows. In their own idiosyncratic ways, all three celebrated the imagined simplicity of moviegoing in Paris in the 1920s. At the same time, though less celebrated, 2011 was also the year that saw two key shifts in cinema’s decades-long digital transition—the wide-scale industrial push both to end celluloid projection in theatrical exhibition in movie multiplexes, and to cease the production of 35mm cameras (Panavision, ARRI) altogether. At the technological dawn of the most fully realized “digital cinema” yet—where every aspect of traditional moviegoing (production, distribution, exhibition) was now quite possibly digital—we instead saw an emphatic celebration of film’s past.
If the intense juxtaposition of film’s past and cinema’s future seemed ironic at the time, it really shouldn’t have. Nostalgia is always the most intense during periods of dramatic cultural and technological upheaval, whereby the perceived reassurances of a simpler past anchor our perception of an uncertain future. Nostalgia is really about death; it’s our awareness of mortality, our sense that everything must one day end, which plants the idea within us that moments and memories lost will never come again. As a result, personal and collective (cinematic) fantasies of a past that often never existed in the first place become the only way to relive it.
Thus, it’s easy to see how the dying medium of film—imagining its own mortality in sight—would resist the inevitability of its own digital mummification by retreating back to its joyous youth (though, as everything from Wild Strawberries [1957] to Broken Flowers [2005] reminds is, there’s always as much pain in the past as there is pleasure). There is certainly something sad, even pathetic, about nostalgia here. But if we see such melancholic impulses as only as an attempt to hold onto an idealized past, we risk missing so much more. After all, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is a painful reminder that forgetting the ambivalences of the past, only to live in a perpetual present, isn’t too wise either. It seems to me that nostalgia is everywhere in the age of digital cinema—the useful question is not how to get rid of it, but what to do with it?
If nostalgia is a cultural dominant in the postmodern era—a guiding impulse to the aesthetic choices, industrial strategies and political (in)action of everyday cinematic life—we need to take its use value (as well as its dangers) more seriously. To begin, I would also point out, with a nod to the work of Svetlana Boym, that there’s a temporal paradox at the core of nostalgia—our obsession with the past is really about the future. Certainly, the notion of loss is inherent to nostalgia, the idea that there is something about the past—a lost moment, person, place—that can never be reclaimed in the present except through the ambitions of the human (and posthuman) imagination.
Yet while some forms of nostalgia disavow that absence through the unconditional love of an illusory, idealized past—refusing to entertain the idea that perhaps life wasn’t really as great as one remembers it to be—other forms embrace that same sense of loss, hoping that attempts to understand the uncertainty will retain a powerful role as one looks ahead. At its most conservative (surely, the more common kind), nostalgia is a rather unreflexive, uncritical attempt to make sense of—or, to outright avoid—the drastic cultural and technological changes ahead that one is powerless to change. More progressively, though, the acceptance of that sense of loss can allow us to reflect on the gaps and contradictions of the past, to create a critical space of reflection, in the hopes of imagining, maybe even enacting, a better future to come.
0 comments:
Post a Comment