Nostalgia in Film and Filmic Memorials

I recently wrote a paper on memory and remembrance in film. This is the abstract/outline.

Nostalgia in Film and Filmic Memorials
THESIS:
Within film and video the filmmakers have the capacity to relive moments and experiences that are too far from reach in reality. Thus, film work has become a vehicle to memorialize the past, creating narratives with strong nostalgic overtones, plus a new breed of documentary, experimental documentaries using home-movies in order to re-tell the stories of those they have lost. Both are unique memorials to the past, and have the ability to transcend that of a stationery monument.

OUTLINE:
Nostalgic memories:
Narrative films that use nostalgia as a theme within the films.

Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch (Elvis, Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Joe Strummer)
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/59/59mysterytrain.html
http://www.kamera.co.uk/features/mystery_train.php

Badlands by Terrence Malick (the American dream, idyllic, 1950s)
Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film by Vera Dika

Nostalgic Memorials:
The use of home movies in order to memorialize those we’ve lost.

Loss — Years after her father dies, director Kristen Nutile attempts to resurrect memories of him through old family movies. In a beautiful mix of grainy old footage, music and interviews with her family, she recreates a portrait of her father. We go on this moving journey with her to rediscover the past.

My Olympic Summer — In the context of his own cracking marriage, filmmaker Daniel Robin explores his parents' union. He discovers a letter detailing his mother's unhappiness, feelings which were then swallowed up by historical dramas that kept his parents together. So what truths are these home movies telling?
http://shortendmagazine.com/content/view/451/101/
http://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/reviews.php?film_id=12974

THE PASSENGER
Kathryn Ramey
Documentary 2006, (16:00), 16mm on Video Chicago Premiere
A personal, experimental, 16mm film that addresses the filmmaker’s tenuous relationship with her mentally ill mother and her own reservations about pregnancy, birth, and parenthood.The physical reworking of the film’s surface serves as a signifying device for the process of building a life, becoming a mother, and repairing that which is broken between mother and child. The fracture between experience of a mother’s illness and memories of joys with her were literally sutured in the editing.
“At the funeral I was the only one of her children to speak. I said she had perfect penmanship and that she loved to dance and sing. The later were her gifts to me.” – Kathryn Ramey

DEAR ZACHARY:
A LETTER TO A SON ABOUT HIS FATHER
2008, Kurt Kuenne, USA, 95 min.
“A gut-wrenching true-crime story…a virtuoso feat.”—Peter Debruge, Variety
“One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen…unfolds like a masterful thriller.”—Erik Childress, eFilmCritic.com

“Every last person who steps foot into a theater to see this will walk away changed.”—Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net
A tale of madness, murder, revenge, and thwarted justice plays out in escalating increments of horror in a documentary begun as the filmmaker’s tribute to a friend. The 2001 murder of personable 28-year-old Dr. Andrew Bagby by a 40-year-old former girlfriend prompted filmmaker Kuenne, his best friend since earliest childhood, to begin a documentary in the form of a letter to the dead man’s infant son. Fast-breaking events involving the ex-lover/accused murderer, the child, Bagby’s parents, and the law, take the film in an unanticipated new direction with Kuenne scrambling to keep pace with the unfolding of an emotionally powerful real-life drama of Shakespearean dimensions. Beta SP video. (BS)