Nostalgia Film Research Articles

The Constructed Past in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Nostalgia in the Star Wars Films

Star Wars (1977-2019), directed by George Lucas, is a science fiction (fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes) saga that takes place in the outer space universe. The whole story is an intergalactic adventure surrounding the ongoing battle between the Jedi Order, which represents the bright side and the Sith Order, which represents the dark forces. Despite that were massive number of studies done on them as films of science fiction, few have looked at Star Wars from a perspective that would categorize them instead as nostalgia films. According to Fredric Jameson, a theorist and critic of North American culture and literature, the nostalgia film is a separate category (from historical films) that does not directly employ historical objects but exhibits a resemblance of them to reflect a longing for the historical past. Combining sections from the Star Wars films with Fredric Jameson's theory on nostalgia films, this essay attempts to explore the purpose of George Lucas blending elements of the past with futuristic designs and seeks to argue that nostalgia was the intended overall atmosphere of the franchise.

The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements

The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements

The Last Picture Show: Reconsidering Nostalgia, Desire and the Real

Peter Bogdanovich's masterpieceThe Last Picture Show(1971) remains a highly influential example of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it has largely escaped the sustained critical attention enjoyed by many of its contemporaries. This article seeks to revisit the status of the film and its critical reputation. Amongst the critics who have appraised this unique film, opinion is split. On the one hand, it remains an influential example of the “post-western” impulse in the American New Wave. On the other hand, it has been critically maligned as a “nostalgia film.” This article revisits these perspectives and argues that a holistic understanding of the inner dynamics of the film must necessarily take both perspectives into account. It examines how these dynamics are organized around a central formal tension between the cinematic codes of the western and those of social realism. Finally, it argues that the pejorative critical categorization ofThe Last Picture Showas a “nostalgia film” does not adequately grasp its rich, complex and contradictory affects. Instead, it proposes that the sense of loss, nostalgia and disappointment that Bogdanovich articulates can be read as an expression of that confrontation between “Desire” and the “Real” that the Marxian critic Fredric Jameson theorized was central to the “political unconscious.”

Długi żywot filmu nostalgicznego: o funkcjonalności kategorii Fredrica Jamesona w badaniach nad kinem

The article analyses the way in which Fredric Jameson’s notion of “nostalgia film” was developed in contemporary film studies. In the text I argue that although Jameson’s critique of post-modernism and its nostalgic orientation is provocative and inspiring, his category of “nostalgia film” turns out to be of little use for film studies, when it’s disconnected from the whole Jameson’s project of critique of late capitalism ideology. The definition of nostalgia film, which Jameson pro-posed and theoreticians of film developed after him, is too wide and sketchy, therefore its applicabil-ity remains problematic. This turns out to be evident in the uses of “nostalgia film” in film studies over the last thirty years. In my article I demonstrate some limitations not only in Jameson’s own movie examples, but also in film studies reflection on “nostalgia film”. Drawing mainly on fem-inistsʼ critiques of Jameson’s work, I argue that they suffer a lack of strict criteria, by which film theorists could convincingly differentiate “nostalgia film” as a separate film genre. That’s why in my opinion future research on cinematic nostalgia should re-double its efforts to re-think Jameson’s term or try to find a more promising conceptualisation, going beyond “nostalgia film”.

Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded, by Andra Ivănescu

<i>Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded</i>, by Andra Ivănescu

‘These are modern times’: Nostalgia and the adaptation of history in Billy Morrissette’s Scotland, PA

Abstract Set in America in the 1970s, Billy Morrissette’s 2001 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Scotland, PA, waivers between nostalgia and critique. In order to understand the film’s conflicting attitudes towards the era in which it is set and to appreciate how adaptations, generally, often feel ambivalent about their past(s), this essay begins by discussing Scotland, PA’s construction of the 1970s. In an effort to answer Lynne Bradley’s call for ‘a new model’ of modern adaptation, seeing it as ‘a complex double gesture’, the essay discusses how although Scotland, PA appears to illustrate many of the qualities of what Fredric Jameson has called the nostalgia film, this categorization of the adaptation neither accounts for its use of irony nor for the inherently complex nature of nostalgia. Ultimately, Scotland, PA’s ambivalence about history, the essay proposes, encourages us to conceive of the relationship between source/past and adaptation/present as a site of complex, dynamic negotiations rather than a static dichotomy that obliges us to choose between an adaptation’s acceptance or rejection of its forebears.

‘The past is a foreign country’: exoticism and nostalgia in contemporary transnational cinema

ABSTRACTGlobal interconnectedness has resulted in cultural homogenisation and a growing disenchantment with the perceived deficiencies of contemporary (Western) culture. This has led, on the one hand, to an elegiac longing for an idealised past and, on the other, a buoyant interest in cultural difference, specifically, the exotic. The essay aims to advance scholarly debates on exoticism in cinema by tracing its close affinities with nostalgia, attending to the concepts’ shared aesthetic and ideological trajectories. It theorises and differentiates between the ‘imperialist nostalgia film’ and the ‘exotic nostalgia film’ by using Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017) and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) as case studies. While the former evokes nostalgia for the British Empire, the latter engenders a universal longing in the spectator for a time and place when intensity of feeling was possible. In a second line of argument, the article develops a model of transnational reception which explores the hypothesis that nostalgia and exoticism evoke different aesthetic responses in local and global spectators. While nostalgia is premised on familiarity and the remembrance of shared local traditions, the exotic gaze is that of an outsider to whom the cultural Other seems enigmatic and alluring.

Nostalgia film tourism and its potential for destination development

ABSTRACTCinematic nostalgia can influence visitors in choosing destinations where particular films have been made or shot. Focusing on the case of Hong Kong this study investigated the incidence of nostalgia amongst Taiwanese filmgoers, and whether this generates feelings of familiarity that induce subsequent travel intentions. As an input to potentially wide-ranging destination experiences, it is found that nostalgia film tourism provides tourists with psychological benefits and constitutes a destination experience that is responsive to the ambient surroundings. The researchers identified five film nostalgia domains, namely: memories of backdrops, stories and movie stars, mimicking, envy, and culture and history. Memories of backdrops and mimicking were found to be the best predictors of perceived familiarity with the films’ origin territory and of future travel intentions. Given the continuing preference for “blockbusters” amongst contemporary filmgoers and the faddishness of audience preferences, there is some risk that fading memories may cause film destinations to lose their appeal. Film nostalgia nevertheless provides a potential medium to maintain the profile of destinations which have served as film locations.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Re-Reading Gender in the “Nostalgia Film”

Upon its release, American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) was much admired by critics and audiences alike. Yet, in subsequent years, the film became known for its supposed “flattening of history,” and celebration of patriarchal values. This article demonstrates that such a judgement owes much to Fredric Jameson’s historically contingent work on postmodernism, which argues that American Graffiti constitutes the paradigmatic nostalgia film. In contrast, using close textual analysis, I demonstrate that American Graffiti provides a more complex construction of the past, and of gender, than has hitherto been acknowledged. Far from blindly idealising the early 1960s, the film interrogates the processes through which the period and its gender relations come to be idealised. This article has consequences not only for our understanding of Lucas’ seminal film, but also for the American New Wave, and the “nostalgia” text.

Segmentation of potential film tourists by film nostalgia and preferred film tourism program

ABSTRACTThe current study sought to identify the role of nostalgia in film tourism, specifically in relation to the development of preferred film tourism products and activities for potential Korean film tourists visiting the shooting locations of Hong Kong films made from the 1970s to the late 1990s. The findings suggest that the concept of nostalgia in the context of film tourism is multidimensional and consists of five identified domains. Of these domains, “reminiscence of mimicking”, “memory of film backdrops”, and “memory of Hong Kong history and culture” were highly significant in explaining familiarity with film destinations and the intention to engage in nostalgia film tourism. Differences in characteristics of respondents’ profiles were categorized into clusters generated using extracted domains. Among the four extracted clusters, the high film nostalgia group (Cluster 2) and the low film nostalgia group (Cluster 3) showed completely different characteristics. These differences included preferred activities or tour programs and socio-demographic profiles. As a result, this study found film nostalgia to be an important segmentation variable. The results of this study can be prudently used by film destination marketers to develop new products or programs and to satisfy their on-site experiences.

“Taking This from This and That from That”: Examining RZA and Quentin Tarantino’s Use of Pastiche

“Taking This from This and That from That”: Examining RZA and Quentin Tarantino’s Use of Pastiche

Političko nesvesno postmodernističkog filma nostalgije / Political Unconscious of Postmodernist Nostalgia Film

In this paper I will engage in the theory of American Marxist Fredric Jameson. To begin with I will give an overview of his Marxistic hermenautics and his concept of political unconscious. According to Jameson, every artistic text contains three levels of political unconscious: textual level, social level and historical level. At all three levels it is possible to detect a certain contradiction. At the first level, this contradiction is a textual and formal one, at the second it is based on a class antagonism, and at the final, third level it witnesses the antagonism between different modes of production. After words, I move on to the Jameson’s critique of postmodernism. Postmodernism has difficulties with a signification of the present mode of production, because late capitalism successfully removed the remains of the other modes of production. Lacking the active engagement with the past, postmodern texts are not able to constitute coherent representation of the present for which Jameson has come up with the term cognitive map. Paradigmatic example of this impossibility of cognitive mapping in postmodernism is nostalgia film. Jameson gives the best explanation of nostalgia film in his analysis of Stanley Kubric’s film The Shining. He concludes that political unconscious of nostalgia film is desire for cognitive mapping in the form ofclear class hierarchy that would enable construction of a new collective utopian program.

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music

“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading

This mesmerizing new aesthetic mode [of the late twentieth-century film] itself emerged as an elaborate symptom the waning our historicity, our lived possibility experiencing history in some active way. I don't remember any longer whether I am responsible for this term [i.e the nostalgia film], which still seems to me indispensable, provided you understand that the fashion-plate, historicist films it designates are in no way to be grasped as passionate expressions that older longing once called --Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic Late Capitalism (1) I. Introduction AMONG THE MANY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS SEDULOUS TO ENACT what Adam Smith called his era's love William Cullen, the well-esteemed Edinburgh physician and Professor Medicine at Glasgow and later Edinburgh, deserves a place in the first rank. As its title suggests, his Nosology, or a Systematic Arrangement Diseases, By Classes', Orders, Genera, a,d Species, with the Distinguishing Characters Each, and the Outlines the Systems Sauvages, Linnaeus, Vogel, Sagar, and Macbride aspired to be the key to all nosologies (classifications of human illness according to a Linnaean botanical model), for it provided synopses all the major existing schemes. It had the widest influence, as well. First published in 1769 and then reprinted without interruption into the early nineteenth century, Cullen's disease circulated around the emerging imperial with British doctors on voyages conquest and exploration, and with the nation's armies fighting on the continent; it also enjoyed great popularity at home as a handbook and a teaching manual. Cullen translated his own work (from Latin to English) and revised it continually, thereby testifying not only to the love system but also to the truth Smith's self-knowing corollary: We take pleasure in beholding the perfection so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy until we remove any obstruction that can in the least disrupt or encumber the regularity its motions. (2) However, there was such an obstruction, encumbering both systems, medical and imperial, and it bore the name nostalgia. Unlike the predecessors scrupulously catalogued in his epic title, who had classified with melancholia and other likely relatives among the mental illnesses, Cullen moved into the class called Locales (impairments a part the body) and, within that class, he placed it in the order the Dysorexiae, the false or defective appetites. There it stood, flanked by some unlikely next kin, in the following sequence: Bulimia (Appetite for a greater quantity food than can be digested); Polydispsia (Preternatural thirst), Pica (A desire eating what is not Satyriasis (Excessive desire venery, in men); Nymphomania (Uncontrolable [sic] desire venery, in women); (In persons absent from their native country, a vehement desire revisiting it); Anorexia (Want appetite for food); and more. (3) As if aiming for greater precision, Cullen also distinguished between a simplex and a complex (nostalgia accompanied by other diseases). Yet, for all his attempts at taxonomical precision, an uneasy footnote at the start Dysorexiae offered a retraction sorts: I have formerly observed that the Morositates Sauvages are improperly referred to the class Vesaniae. I have therefore brought them under the Locales, as almost every species Dysorexiae is evidently an affection a part, rather than the whole body. Nostalgia alone, if it be really a disease, cannot properly come under this class, but I could not well separate this uncertain disease from the other Dysorexiae. (4) The systematizing project falters, short its end, and nostalgia, almost squeezed out, occupies an uncertain place at the bottom the page. …

Nang Nak: Thai bourgeois heritage cinema

From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, history has been flooding commercial Thai cinema as never before. These contemporary ‘films that go back in time’ (nang yon yuk) can be distinguished by their ambition to maximise visibility at both domestic and international levels. Their novelty in the Thai context lies in combining the aesthetics of the nostalgia film, the promotional practices of the high concept film, with the insistent claim of attentive historical representation as a mark of quality and seriousness. The article explores Nonzee Nimibutr’s ghost remake Nang Nak (1999) as an exemplary instance of contemporary Thai bourgeois heritage cinema. It argues that the film’s signification of heritage takes the narrative form of self‐exoticisation, or the inscription of generically arcane Old Siamness for the fascinated gaze of the bourgeois Thai spectator. The article considers the tension between the self‐exoticising aesthetics and the yearning for national self‐representation, brought out especially acutely in this heritage film’s international foray on the film festival circuit.

Strategies of subversion in colonial nostalgia film: militarism and marriage in Brigitte Roüan's Outremer

Brigitte Roüan's Outremer (1990), whose female protagonists carry the primary symbolic weight of French identity, tends toward what Frederic Jameson has identified as ‘national allegories’, in the sense of texts that metaphorize the public sphere even when narrating apparently private stories. In this context, the soundtrack and the discursive meaning of Roüan's film are inseparable, for it is ultimately what we hear that allows us to appreciate Roüan's film fully and accurately as both national allegory and gendered discourse. Thus Outremer's parodic and parallel subversion of the narratives of romance and of colonialist conquest is first announced during the opening credits and attains its apotheosis in the final credit sequence.

Review: Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music by Caryl Flinn; Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film by Kathryn Kalinak

Review: Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music by Caryl Flinn; Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film by Kathryn Kalinak

Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music

Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music

Review: Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music by Caryl Flinn

Review: Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music by Caryl Flinn