Lesson 3

Nostalgia is often understood as a syndrome and a therapeutic mechanism for healing traumatic past experiences, a retrospective utopia of safety and stability, or a revisionist project of rewriting history in a more user-friendly and appealing way. The literature also highlights different uses of nostalgic sentiments, such as their commercial and aesthetic applications, affective nature, material dimensions, and political relevance, among many others. Previous research has shown that media, popular culture and creative industries are the central platforms for nostalgic productions, which not only allow for creativity but also manipulate users' attitudes towards the past and induce nostalgia in audiences. Such an abundance of perspectives and theories on nostalgia creates conceptual confusion. With this in mind, this essay aims at more clearly elucidating theories on nostalgia. As engagement with broader debates on the role of the media in nostalgic experiences has also been limited, this essay will provide some remarks on the relations between media and nostalgia.

Media and Nostalgia, 2014

Image Narrative, 2011

2018

Almost by definition, representations of youth are retrospective: they are made by adults, looking back from the perspective of the present. Retrospection may entail nostalgia – a sense of wistful longing for a lost past – but nostalgia may have several dimensions, motivations and consequences, not just personally but also socially and politically. In this essay, I explore these issues through a discussion of three pairs of Hollywood films from the last 40 years. The first pair consists of two well-known, and quite contrasting, films released within a few months of each other in 1973: George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Both are set several years earlier, in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The second pair are two time-travel films, in which the characters themselves ‘return’ from the present to a period in the late 1950s: Francis Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1998). The final two are both directed by Richard Linklater, a director whose work often reflects a preoccupation with the passing of time: Dazed and Confused (1993), set in 1976, and the much more recent Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), set in 1980. These films are quite heterogeneous, but in different ways and to different degrees, they seek to question or problematise nostalgia, or explicitly move beyond it. This essay is part of a larger project, Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945. More information about the project, and illustrated versions of all the essays can be found at: https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/.

İnsan & Toplum, 2023

This study focuses on the ways in which the feeling and rhetoric of nostalgia are constructed and made sense of on the basis of the memories of women who went to the movies in the 1960s and 1970s and who watched mostly Yeşilçam melodramas. Experiencing cinema and going to the movies with diverse goals and meanings, these female audiences of Yeşilçam not only provided information about the cinema practices of the past when talking about their memories, but also expressed their feelings, desires and beliefs related to the past. Looking at memories of female cinema audiences suggests looking at the structures of feeling involved in the transformation of experience to memory, and of memory to history in the relationship between the individual and the collective. In line with this suggestion, this article analyzes the feelings of nostalgia in the narratives of historical female audiences by using oral history methods, which I call the myth of the "golden age" and "desire for wooden chairs", within the framework of experiences and memories of cinema. The analysis shows that female audiences (as historical screen audiences) construct an ambivalent narrative between sense of nostalgia and anti-nostalgia when they recall memories of Yeşilçam melodramas, and sheds light on how women experience and make sense of nostalgia in different ways.

Transformative Works and Cultures, 2014

This essay and the audience reception projects it introduces alleviate the desperation of seeking the television audience by recourse to Ien Ang's influential book, Watching Dallas ([1982] 1985). Within the context of a unit on audience research in a master's-level course on media, two groups of students explored the possibilities of remixing Ang in the present digital media landscape via informants' comments on the first season of the new series of Dallas (2012–14). Discourses of nostalgia circulate within and around the text, as well as the project itself. Retro audience research generates not only data about the affective memories and critical reflections of informants but also insights into research methods and the production of new nostalgic subjects.

Consumption Markets & Culture, 2013

Nostalgia is not a singular phenomenon; it is multi-layered, diversely experienced and variously exploited, as I demonstrate by briefly outlining the history of nostalgia, especially the recent shift from modern to post-modern versions of the experience. The modern, temporal version of nostalgia is founded on the unattainable distance between the past and the present; the post-modern, atemporal version erases this sense of distance. Central to the modern concept of nostalgia is the experience of wistfulness, a hopeless longing for something lost and irrecoverable. But for post-modern nostalgics, the irrecoverable is now attainable, the difference between past and present flattened out. This is partly because post-modern nostalgia re-cycles images, objects and styles associated with the relatively recent past, a prime site of such re-cycling being the Internet. I therefore look at a range of websites that use nostalgia as a central concept in their marketing and which demonstrate some of these recent shifts in the experience of nostalgia. In the final part of this article, I explore these concerns in relation to the reception of four films about the English, past released in the 2000s: Ladies in Lavender (2004), Becoming Jane (2007), Brideshead Revisited (2008) and An Education (2009). How are films mobilised for nostalgic purposes at the levels of production, marketing and consumption? How is an experience of the past built into these films? Are some of the resulting images, sounds and pasts more resistant to nostalgic uses than others? Are these films discussed by audiences in terms of nostalgia? If so, is this is a positive or negative experience? Ranging in this way across a variety of material, my article is an attempt to bring together cultural history, conceptual, formal analysis and the analysis of reception or consumption.

Media Fields Journal, 2021