This article explores the definition of 'vintage cinema' and specifically reevaluates the fetishism for the past and its regurgitation in the present by providing a taxonomy of the phenomenon in recent film production. Our contribution identifies three aesthetic categories: faux-vintage, retro and anachronistic; by illustrating their overlapping and discrepancies it argues that the past remains a powerful negotiator of meaning for the present and the future. Drawing on studies of memory and digital nostalgia, this article focuses on the latter category: anachronism. It furthermore unravels the persistence of and the filmic fascination for obsolete analogue objects through an analysis of Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013).
As digital media have become more pervasive and entrenched in our daily routines, a nostalgic countertrend has increasingly valued the physical and tactile nature of the analogue image. In the past few years, technologically obsolete devices, such as lo-fi cameras and vinyl records, have not faded out of sight completely but are instead experiencing a comeback. At the same time, digital media capitalise on the nostalgia for the analogue and fetishise the retro aesthetics of old technologies. This article explores the emergence of photo filter and effect applications which allow users to modify digital photos, adding signifiers of age such as washed-out colours, scratches and torn borders. It is argued that these new technologies, with programs such as Instagram, Hipstamatic and Camera 360, bring back the illusory physicality of picture-taking through digital skeuomorphism. Drawing on media archaeology practice, this article interrogates the limits of the retro sensibility and the fetishisation of the past in the context of digital media, in particular by focusing on the case study of the start-up Instagram. This photo filter application neither merely stresses the twilight nature of photography nor represents the straightforward digital evolution of previous analogue features. Rather, it responds to the necessity to feel connected to the past by clear and valued signs of age, mimicking a perceived sense of loss. Faced with the persistent hipster culture and the newness of digital media, photo filter apps create comfortable memories, ageing pictures and adding personal value. As such, it will be argued that this phenomenon of nostalgia for analogue photography can be linked to the concepts of ritual and totem. By providing a critical history of Instagram as a photo-sharing social network, this article aims to explain new directions in the rapidly changing system of connective media.
Terrorism was arguably the greatest challenge faced by Western Europe in the 1970s with the whole continent shaken by old resentments which turned into violent revolt: Corsican separatists in France, German speaking minorities in Italy's South Tyrol, and Flemish nationalists in Belgium. Throughout that decade more problematic situations escalated in the Basque Provinces and Northern Ireland, where ETA and the Provisional IRA, as well as the Loyalist paramilitary groups (such as the UVF, and UDA) participated in long armed campaigns. According to Tony Judt, two countries in particular, West Germany and Italy, witnessed a different violent wave, as the radical ideas of 1968 did not harmlessly dissipate, but turned into a 'psychosis of selfjustifying aggression' (2007, p. 469). In Italy, the period between 1969 and 1983, where political terrorism reached its most violent peak, is often defined as anni di piombo, 'the years of lead'. This idiomatic expression derives from the Italian title given to Margarethe Von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981, W. Ger, 106 mins.), also known in the UK as The German Sisters and in the USA as Marianne and Juliane. 1 Following the film's Golden Lion award at the 1981 Venice Film Festival, the catchy phrase 'years of lead' entered common language, and is now accepted as a unifying term for the various terrorist phenomena occurred in the long 1970s, both in Italy and West Germany. By the mid 1980s, however, terrorism had begun to decline in Italy. Although isolated episodes of left-wing violence continued to occur-two governmental consultants were murdered in 1999 and in 2002 respectively-special laws and the reorganisation of anti-terrorist police forces enabled its eradication, as did the
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