Frederic jameson nostalgic film article

1. Frederic Jameson: “The Postmodern
Nostalgia Film”
Posted on November 18, 2010 by Jaap Verheul
Frederic Jameson’s concept of the “nostalgia film” has to be interpreted in
relation to his view on postmodern culture. Jameson argues that the
“postmodern nostalgia film” represents the commodification of history.
Postmodernism, he asserts, is “the cultural dominant” of late or multinational
capitalism and outlines two features of postmodernism. First of all,
postmodernism is a culture of pastiche; a culture that is marked by the
“complacent play of historical allusion.” [1] Pastiche is often confused with
parody in that both involve imitation and mimicry. However, whereas parody
has an “ulterior motive,” to mock a divergence from the convention or a norm,
pastiche is a “blank parody” or “empty cow,” which has no sense of the very
possibility of there being a norm or a convention from which to diverge.
Jameson condemns the world of pastiche as “a world in which stylistic
innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to
speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary
museum.” [3] Rather than a culture of creativity, postmodern culture is a
culture of quotations, that is, cultural production born out of previous cultural
production. It is therefore a culture “of flatness of depthlessness, a new kind of
superficiality in the most literal sense.” [4] According to Jameson,
postmodern culture is a culture of images and surfaces. It derives its
hermeneutic force from other images and surfaces, that is, from the interplay
of intertextuality.
Jameson’s principal example of the pastiche of postmodern culture is what he
calls “the nostalgia film,” which sets out to recapture the atmosphere and
stylistic peculiarities of America in the 1950s. The category includes a number
of films from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got
Married, Rumble Fish, Angel Heart, and Blue Velvet. Jameson claims that,
“for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire –
not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana, but also the first
naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and
youth gangs.” [5] A nostalgia film “does not reinvent a picture of the past in its
lived totality”. Rather, it reinvents “the feel and shape of characteristic art
objects of an older period.” [6]
In Jameson’s view, the nostalgia film evokes a sense of the narrative
certainties of the past. Therefore, it works in two ways; that is, it both
recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing of the past. Crucial for
Jameson, however, is that nostalgia films do not attempt torecapture or
represent the “real” past but are structured around certain cultural myths and
stereotypes about the past. As such, they offer what Jameson calls “false
realism:” films about other films, representations of other representations,

2. films “in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history.” [7] In
doing so, the nostalgia film effaces history through its “random
cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic
allusion.” [8]
Its failure to be historical relates to a second stylistic feature of the nostalgia
film as identified by Jameson: “cultural schizophrenia.” Jameson uses the
term in the sense developed by Lacan to signify a language disorder, a failure
of the temporal relationship between signifiers. The nostalgia film is
characterized by a cultural schizophrenia that experiences time not as a
continuum (past-present-future) but as a perpetual present which is only
occasionally marked by the intrusion of the past or the possibility of a future.
The reward for the loss of conventional selfhood – the sense of self as always
located within a temporal continuum – is an intensified sense of the present.
Hence, a culturally schizophrenic film such as the nostalgia film has lost its
sense of history and its sense of a future different from the present. As such,
nostalgia films suffer from what Jameson calls “historical amnesia,” locked
into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. [9]
Even though Jameson’s neo-Marxist discourse relates nostalgia to the
postmodern era of late capitalism, he fails to address why this nostalgia
emerges in the first place. In her chapter on “The Sexual Politics of Nostalgia,”
Susannah Radstone argues that the critical discourse on nostalgia is limited in
that it too often situates nostalgia in a social, political, and cultural context.
Instead of discarding nostalgia as a form of commercialized history, Radstone
argues that one should also take into account nostalgia’s place in the
constitution of social identities and groups, as well as the “politics of
nostalgia,” that is, “the question (…) of the meanings and significance of the
view(s) of the past offered by nostalgia culture” [10] as well as the social and
political desires expressed by nostalgia.
Source: www.mediamemoryhistory.wordpress.com