A Theory of Cinematic Memory and an Aesthetics of Nostalgia
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ON LONGING FOR LOSS: A THEORY OF CINEMATIC MEMORY AND AN AESTHETICS OF NOSTALGIA by Zoë Anne Laks A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Film Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2018 © Zoë Anne Laks, 2018 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: On Longing for Loss: A Theory of Cinematic Memory and an Aesthetics of Nostalgia submitted by Zoë Anne Laks in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Film Studies Examining Committee: Lisa Coulthard, Theatre and Film Supervisor Brian McIlroy, Theatre and Film Supervisory Committee Member Chelsea Birks, Theatre and Film Supervisory Committee Member ii Abstract Nostalgia is everywhere in media today – be it films, television, ads, or social media. But what does it mean to say that a media text is nostalgic? Beyond simply presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts also express nostalgia through their form and style. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This thesis explores the aesthetics of nostalgia in the context of film studies, positing that “pastness” becomes synonymous with fantasy when films and other nostalgic media rely on an artificial audiovisual style – most often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. By pairing stylistic analysis and film theory with a philosophy of nostalgia, this project argues that this aesthetic serves as both a theory of cinematic memory and a reflection of the experience of lived nostalgia, which is effectively always a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost – in other words, fantasy itself. Relying on theories by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this study takes a phenomenological approach, describing nostalgia as the experience of a dialectic between proximity and distance to the past. This contradictory position between emotional proximity and distance points toward a radically critical nostalgia, an area that remains relatively underexplored in nostalgia studies. This thesis also takes its cue from key works by Christine Sprengler, Rebecca Comay, William Beard, Jane M. Gaines, and Bliss Cua Lim, discussing nostalgia via two case studies on films by Canadian director Guy Maddin. Chapter Two applies this theory of nostalgic aesthetics to Careful (1992), using a melodramatic framework to explore how nostalgia inheres in the form of the film itself. Chapter Three interrogates these ideas on a more abstract level, positing that the spectral imagery in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) serves as another way of expressing nostalgia as a dialectic between past and present. Ultimately, this nostalgia locates nostalgic audiences not in a static and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, where time splinters into its heterogeneous parts and is rendered in subjective, emotional terms, so as to be experienced as the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was. iii Lay Summary With the popularity of nostalgic media today, this thesis considers some of the basic philosophical questions in the field of nostalgia studies – what does it mean to be nostalgic? How might visual media like films or paintings themselves exhibit or transmit nostalgia? This project explores an underdeveloped area in nostalgia scholarship, creating a theory of a more critical form of nostalgia that embraces the past even as it recognizes it to be lost. Such a nostalgia can exist as part of the look and feel – the aesthetics – of audiovisual media, and this thesis demonstrates this through case studies on two films by Canadian director Guy Maddin, Careful (1992) and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). Later chapters explore how this theory of nostalgic aesthetics works through the language of melodrama (the emotionally excessive) and the spectral (the ghostly and fantastic). iv Preface This thesis is the original, unpublished, and independent work of the author, Zoë Anne Laks. v Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii Lay Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iv Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..v Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..vi Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….viii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………x Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: Classifying Nostalgia and Nostalgic Artifice………………………………………………………………………14 1.1 A Brief Overview of Nostalgia Studies…………………..…………………………………….………………………16 1.2 Nostalgia as Phenomenological…………………..…………………………………….…………….…………………24 1.3 Nostalgia as Memory…………………..…………………………………….…………….…………………………………26 1.4 Nostalgia as Aesthetic.…………………..…………………………………….…………….………………………………32 1.5 Nostalgia as Dialectic …………………..…………………………………….…………….………………………………..37 1.6 Conclusions…………………..…………………………………….…………….……………………………………………….41 Chapter Two: Melodrama and Nostalgia in Guy Maddin’s Careful…….…………………………………………………..43 2.1 On Methodologies – Why Maddin? Why Careful?....…………………………………………………………..45 2.2 Careful and Nostalgic Artifice……………………………………………..………………………………………………50 2.3 Careful’s Melodramatic Time……………………………………………..………………………………………………55 2.4 Conclusions……………………………………………..…………………………………………………………………………60 Chapter Three: Spectrality and Nostalgia in Guy Maddin’s Dracula……………………………………………..………..62 3.1 Spectrality and Heterogeneous Time……………………………………………..…………………………………..65 3.2 Dracula’s Spectral-Nostalgic Artifice……………………………………………..……………………………………68 3.3 Spectral Nostalgia as Temporal Critique……………………………………………..………………………………78 vi 3.4 Conclusions……………………………………………..…………………………………………………………………………83 Coda: A Nostalgia of the Present……………………………………………..……………………………………………………………85 Bibliography…………………………………..……………………………………………………………………………………………..………94 vii Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my supervisor, Lisa Coulthard, for guiding me through the tangles and thickets of thesis writing and more generally my academic career at UBC. Your thoughts and suggestions for this project over the past year were always insightful and your encouragement helped keep me afloat in the deepest writing-inspired crises. Thank you also to my thesis committee members, Brian McIlroy and Chelsea Birks. Brian, thank you for your thoughtful comments, ideas, and kind words. Chelsea, your enthusiasm and belief in my ideas were always incredibly appreciated. To everyone I’ve worked with at UBC, and especially to my cohort – Matthew Gartner, Amanda Greer, Morgan Harper, Jared Aronoff, Ellie Berry, and Zoë Sherman – all of you are incredible thinkers and incredible people and I thank you for enriching both my academic and social life at UBC. My own schema and perspectives on the world are all the richer for having known and worked with each of you. Morgan – all those lunchtime chats and hours we stood around debating in the rain and cold involved some of the most engaging and fascinating academic discussions of my life. Thank you for always being a supportive and challenging colleague and friend. To all of my friends and family who politely asked about and/or strategically avoided discussing my thesis and my snail’s pace writing progress, thank you for your love, interest, and support through the continual frustrations and backpedalling that is my writing process. To my parents, both of whom enthusiastically read parts of this thesis, thank you so much for your intellectual and emotional support throughout the past year and my life as a whole. I wouldn’t be where I am today if you hadn’t both expressed such an openness and belief in my life decisions and academic pretensions. To my little family, some furrier than others, thank you for making our warm little bubble the most important thing in my life. To my partner, you are my rock, my best friend, my everything. viii My baby dog, who I shared my childhood with, passed away as this project was still in its infancy. You were a beautiful creature and I miss you so much. Thank you for being such a vibrant part of my life and memories. The intense nostalgia I feel when I remember you strengthens my belief in the idea that to be nostalgic is to be brave in the face of what we have lost. ix To Wolfie, Who I will always remember with the greatest love and nostalgia x Introduction A starry sky, lights just a bit too vivid, twinkling madly. A slow dissolve to orange haze, a spectral sunset on the horizon above a barely glimpsed gleam of ocean waters, panning incongruously to the looming and artificial facade of a ship bound for the fantasy land of Mandragora, where the sun never sets… So begins Guy Maddin’s 1997 feature Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a film that is nostalgic for a past that never could have been. The aesthetics1 of this film are hazy and hyper-coloured, presenting a quality of “pastness” despite their self-conscious roots in the realm of fantasy. While this may be considered a “fringe” film, belonging to the obscure category of Canadian experimental cinema, this aesthetic trend where nostalgia becomes linked to the iconography of fantasy (i.e. the overtly stagey and the unreal) extends beyond the realm of Guy Maddin, to popular films, television, video games, and other visual media in global mainstream circulation today. We are in the midst of a contemporary nostalgia boom, with