Film as a Conceptual Nostalgia

Film as a Conceptual Nostalgia

-The film director Jennifer Montgomery, when referring to the extinct film stock Kodachrome said, “A lot of people seem to have nostalgia for things they never experienced.” This statement sums up most of everything I experience in everyday life. Nostalgia for times I have never experienced. I’m in love with the sixties. But yet what for? For the music, the film scene, the community, the active role people were taking in society, and the massive amount of change that was happening. Maybe it is because it is a time before I experienced extreme emotional pain and loss. I revert back to a time I idealize in order to erase what happened in my lifetime, maybe to have some sense of comfort in knowing what is going on at that exact moment. Yet there is that feeling of history and longing I have embedded in my mind when referring to this past. I base everything I do on history. This past is mysterious to me and by working with it through my art I can try to formulate some kind of cohesion on why it means so much to me. In a way these new genre types categorize the films that I make: Mystery History and Optical Mystery.
-I’m also fascinated with other uses of history in culture. Like when songs are covered: for example “I Put a Spell” on you has been covered at least 50 times. I’m also intrigued in the fusion of media, music, and art in the 1960s. Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page were making music for Kenneth Anger. Cinema Verite filmmakers were capturing the protests and spirit of the times. Art and music became historic references for social change.
-I don’t think that the enthrallment with nostalgia is a new thing. I think for a long time people have been terrified by the present and are able to cocoon themselves into a safety net of the past. This has the potential to be a threatening problem to society and culture of today. There is no room for progress in this case. But this is hardly a national problem, yet.
-Yet as a filmmaker and artist the way that I deal with the nostalgic urge is to conceptually use film as a way to revert back to these eras I couldn’t experience. In a way it is a filmic Happening. If I cannot live this era I must create it. A reenactment of sorts.
-Let’s try an experiment right now.
-I want you to close your eyes and visualize the 60s.

-When I close my eyes I see grain, super saturated 16mm color or stark black and white contrast. I see neon signs, roadhouses, blues, heartache, powerlessness, and control. Travel, highways, Americana, and individualism.
-There is grit and humanism to everything that I relate to the sixties. I romanticize this era and I know that there was war, oppression, and similar issues we are dealing with today. There is violence and hate. But I can visualize it all. I see it in frames. And I’m intrigued that a time can have such stark correlation with image.
-Ultimately I realize I use nostalgia as an escape. The urge to run away from the present and drop off the radar is in the core of a lot of us. But film is an opportunity to escape and tell stories without disappearing. The ability to explore places and things that exist or have existed without experiencing them out right. This is why so many of us have an obsession with movies and film.