4 - Reconsidering the Nostalgia Film

Summary

The films discussed in Chapter 3 respond to the localized cause of a post-1960s era. Their highly coded images and generic sources refer to the past, but not to screen the present. The present intercedes and ruptures the nostalgic surfaces through trauma or displacement. With these observations in mind, I will reconsider two films classified by Jameson as nostalgia films, American Graffiti and The Conformist, and another seemingly incongruous addition, chosen because it wreaks havoc on the very notion of nostalgia, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As films of the early to mid-1970s, these works strongly refer to past cinematic images, styles, and genres. But they do not render an experience of nostalgia as much as a direct confrontation, serving to indict the historical or societal conditions of those eras. In this chapter, I will explore how these films confront the present through historical trauma, or through a carnivalesque immersion into an already compromised screen image.

American Graffiti

Fredric Jameson designates American Graffiti, which was directed by George Lucas, as the inaugural film of the new style of commercial filmmaking, and compared to the works already discussed, it seems a much purer example of the nostalgia film. Not only does American Graffitti return to the styles and songs of a trouble-free pre-1960s era, one before the political disruptions of the 1960s proper, but it also embodies an apparently noncritical, pleasurable style of filmmaking.