On longing for loss: a theory of cinematic memory and an aesthetics of nostalgia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that ‘pastness’ becomes fantastical when nostalgic media use an artificial style: often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. Through a case study of Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), this article demonstrates how nostalgia may function audiovisually in the context of cinematic melodrama theory. These nostalgic aesthetics serve as both an articulation of mediated memory and a reflection of lived nostalgia, which is a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost—in other words, fantasy itself. Using phenomenologies of nostalgia by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this article defines nostalgia philosophically, as the contradictory position between emotional yearning and a self-reflexive distance from the past. Such a radically critical nostalgia locates nostalgics not in a regressive and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, in which we may long for the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was.