Abstract
Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change. By combining nostalgia, retro, and heritage, Pride manifests an artistic practice I refer to as temporal layering, which draws attention to how any single moment implies potential relationships with numerous interacting others. I use this notion to understand both the role that the 1984–5 miners’ strike assumes in cultural revisions of the 1980s, and the kind of cinematic past that Pride presents. This past can be understood as a development in the heritage genre appropriate to reimagining modern British history, especially that of the 1980s, that could be called retro-heritage. By paying attention to the varied temporal layers thus present in Pride, a new perspective is offered on how nostalgia’s presumed conservatism sits alongside the ‘left-wing melancholy’ (Traverso, 2017) that has dominated in the era of defeats since the 1980s. My ultimate aim is to ask what potential nostalgia may have when envisaging a different future.1
Highlights
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change
If Pride offers an example of political filmmaking it is as part of the attempt to build a left populism, distinguished by the endeavour to be accessible, engaging, and widely appealing
Summary
Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change. It suggests that change occurs not according to a pre-determined course, but by a process of interacting—one might say dialectically transformative—forces Such opening considerations establish the aims of this essay as firstly, to understand the treatment of time in Pride as key to its status both as entertainment and what Raphael Samuel has defended as popular history (see Samuel, 1994). It would be better to acknowledge that nostalgia has a ‘constitutive and inescapable nature’ (Bonnett, 2010: 3), and that left wing culture has never limited itself to cosmonauts, Bauhaus living, and the benefits of technological change, and Luddite revolt, arts and crafts, and folk music Such acknowledgement seeks not to exempt nostalgia from criticism, nor ascribe to it some supposed predetermined political effect. The following discussion of Pride will ask what nostalgia has to offer beyond proof of the moribundity of the 21st-century left
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