Nostalgia

and

P

o            s

                     t        modern

                                          is       m

No more grand theories

“Postmodernist analysis prefers montage to perspective, intertextuality to referentiality, `bits-as-bits' to unified totalities. It delights in excess, play, carnival, asymmetry, even mess, and in the emancipation of meanings from their bondage to mere lumpenreality”

 

Deconstructing the Po-mo

•      Open systems of possible relations between diverse discourses, of difference itself as an ultimate and irreducible element in all life, language, and thought.

•      Multi-cultural, pluralistic & eclectic.

Deconstructing the Po-mo

•      Modern science rhetoric like logical consistency, analytical reason, straightforwardness, simplicity, justification, system, proof & the interconnectivity of knowledge are rejected

 

Deconstructing the Po-mo

•      Subjective - veers away from the objective explanation, seeking an alternative to scientifically verifiable data in its attempt to describe reality.

•      Individual perception is reality.

•      Decentralized and individualistic

Deconstructing the Po-mo

•      Distinction between the appearance and the real is lost.

•      Simulacra: appearances and representation can seem more real than reality itself.

•      Thus the ‘mood' or `state of mind' becomes more important than reality or factual happenings.

 

 

Deconstructing the Po-mo

•      Fluid non linearity

•      Flux

•      Chance rather than planning

•      Paradoxical, playful and ironic

•      Deconstructive

 

 

 

Nostalgic, not historic

•    Historic films : genre of documentary where authenticity of historical reference is emphasized; presented in a genuine way to convince the audience

•    Nostalgic films : presented history in a stylized or allegorical form; an imagination of human history

Features of nostalgia films

· A way to reconstruct, to reproduce the past through a series of images without historical depth

· Jameson: nostalgia cinema is one of the dominant form of postmodern culture

· Subverts the meaning of historicity through intertextuality (time past and time present)

· Alters time and space

Personal or Collective Nostalgia

· Personal nostalgia: personal memory and individual retrospective of the past

· Collective nostalgia: social level where collective identities, memories, histories and consciousness or unconsciousness are invoked

 

Main characteristics of
 nostalgic cinema

· Pastiche

· Simulacrum

· Schizophrenic

· Use Hong Kong films for most of our examples – the relevance of Hong Kong cinema to describe nostalgia films.

Main characteristics of
 nostalgic cinema

· Pastiche: imitation of a peculiar or unique style

· an imitation of the past – eg: the costume, the mood, the setting, the music

· Eg: 1960s ness of In the Mood for Love, Tempting Hearts, Days of being Wild and City of Glass

· It is a reconstruction of the simulacrum with the lost of “genuine historicity”

Simulacrum?
            Simulacrum?

· Defined by Jean Baudrillard

· The generation by models of reality without the origin or reality, that is, a hyperreality

· Hyperreality: bears no relationships to any reality, it has its own simulacrum

· A vehicle that conveys truth on screen with the original copy

 

Back to Pastiche…

· Pastiche can be either:

1) Imitation of the settings

2) Or adaptation of cinematic style, dialogue, and the plot

    - Take the Hong Kong cinema for example

    - Eg: He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father,

        92 Legendary La Rose Noire

· The mixed style – pastiche

 

Schizophrenia as a
characteristic of nostalgia films

 

· As defined by Jameson, schizophrenic is “ an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinous material signifiers that fail to link into coherent sequence.”

· The pastiche of different style, cinematic effects, the historical settings of the past in the nostalgia film – representation the schizophrenic structure of postmodernism

 

 

Life was beautiful

 

· Fred Davis: “ positive feeling towards anything past, no matter how remote or historical

· Remembrance of things past

· Eg: For Hong Kong – 1997, back to China ( the uncertainty after the hand-over, wants to stay in the past, not to look forward)

· City of Glass – use 1997 hand-over to tell part of the story

 

 

Search for identity, locate the past

 

· A search to find who we are, what we are

· Help manage the unpleasant present by celebrating the past and transcending the future

· A form of root searching/ a form of identity locating

· Constructing identity

· A form of escapism

 

Does nostalgia mean postmodern?

 

· Not necessary as many postmodern movies exist without nostalgia and vice versa.

· However the playful irony and the existence of plurality in postmodernity facilitates simulacrum and pastiche needed in nostalgic movies. 

· When nostalgia and postmodernity comes together, a symbiotic synergy is created.

 

Gianni Vattimo 8

 

“Should we counterpose to this world the nostalgia for a solid, unitary, stable and ‘authoritative’ reality? In its effort to reconstruct the world  of our infancy, where familial authority was both a threat and a comfort, such nostalgia is in continual danger of turning into neurosis.”

Postmodern without the baggage

•      Postmodernism does not necessarily have a need for nostalgia.

•      Nostalgia but one of the concerns a postmodern film can address.

 

•      E.g Fight Club “Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy” Jack fighting against his and the film’s own postmodernism.

 

 

 

Losing back without the irony

•      Nostalgia does not necessary need postmodernism.

•      Faithful retelling of objective historic events.

•      Professes none of postmodernism’s irony and subjectivity.

•      E.g. “Sense and Sensibility”, “Emma” and “The Ice Storm”

Necessary bedfellows

 

•      Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner: Four components of their nostalgic paradigm basically define the postmodern condition:

–   1) the notion that history is departing from a golden era saturated with the concept of ‘home’

–   2) the pluralization and fragmentation of beliefs and practices (which implies loss of some former singularity and wholeness)

–   3) the loss of the individual and individual autonomy

–   4) the loss of simplicity, authenticity, genuineness, and spontaneity.

 

Necessary bedfellows

 

•      Intertextuality and the displacement of time and space makes it necessary in a postmodern era to reference its history.

•      However history is personal and intensely subjective.

•      E.g. “In the mood for love” and “Days of being Wild”

 

Necessary bedfellows

 

•     Time:

•      The loose treatment of time is seen as a continuity from the past to the present.

•      Necessary basis to the erasure, re-writing and the selection of temporalities and the consequent reduction to more predictable or promising historical externals.

 

Necessary bedfellows

 

•     Place

•      Fin-de-siècle mood of sensory and emotional bombardment exacerbates feelings of geographical displacement in wake of the simultaneity of jet travel

•      Amidst intertextuality, displacement and globalization, there is a need  for original space.

•      Rise of localisation in the wake of engulfing globalisation.

•      E.g. The Beach.

Mind the gap
“Irony is a central feature of the postmodern narrator, left alone with self-awareness, fragmented and supposedly beyond illusions”    Teleky, Richard

•      Nostalgia weighted by postmodern oppositions challenges the need for fixity and continuity.

•      The challenge resides in bridging the gap, negotiating an estranged, dis-integrated self, diffused by spatial and temporal distance, and the longing to somehow fit into an abstracted identity.