Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film.

By Christine Sprengler.

New York: Berghahn Books, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-1845455590, $60. 208 pages.

Review by Greta Methot, Rhode Island School of Design

In this ambitious first book, author Christine Sprengler takes as her focus a specific form of nostalgia: the cinematic “visual pastness” made up of props, costuming, and other material cues and signifiers employed to evoke past eras. This nostalgic mode is often criticized for seemingly replacing history with an inferior aesthetic stand-in, in other words, for “turning the 1950s into Fiftiesness” (2). Screening Nostalgia asks, does this most derided expression of nostalgia sever our connection to history as some scholars charge, or, does it offer critical potential? Sprengler wants to rescue this form by delving into the aesthetic materials of nostalgia to reveal their semiotic potential. Even when not intended to critical ends, the author maintains that the visual apparatus of nostalgia film can, “reveal something about our own historical consciousness and what we expect history to do for us” (90).

Sprengler’s detailed and absorbing history of nostalgia informs us that the term originated as a medical diagnosis applied to the physical manifestations of homesickness suffered by Swiss soldiers serving abroad during the seventeenth century. Over time, this geographic conception of nostalgia morphed into a kind of nationalism; to be nostalgic for one’s homeland equated to patriotism. Such an ideological shift meant nostalgia could be harnessed for political purposes. While a medical definition of nostalgia persisted into the twentieth century, the upheavals of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism saw nostalgia increasingly characterized as a temporal longing—a pining for simpler days, for an idyllic past—what Sprengler calls a “necessary coping mechanism with the capacity to make modernity inhabitable” (15).

By 1970, nostalgia had become an industry. Material goods, television, radio, and film all catered to a consumer base craving a taste of halcyon days bygone. At the same time, the politicization of nostalgia crested as the battle continued to rage between conservatives advocating for a return to “traditional values,” and social liberals seeking reform. This resulted in a stigma for nostalgia in that it came to be associated with a kind of propagandizing conservative agenda, particularly in the employ of Ronald Reagan’s political juggernaut. Chief among the disparagements leveled at nostalgia by academics and cultural critics was the concern that it commodified, falsified, or fetishized the past. Not until quite recently have scholars begun to argue, as Sprengler does, for the critical potential of nostalgia.

In chapter two, Sprengler investigates how the Fifties came to be the privileged object of American nostalgia for later eras. The proliferation of visual mass media during this period, particularly advertising and domestic television sitcoms, produced a canon of objects to signify the lauded values of the American Dream. Populuxe items such as the exaggerated styling of cars, fashions, and household appliances created a visual language evoking the economic values of the postwar years. As nostalgia for the Fifties gained ground in the 1970s, especially in films and television, these material objects were employed as visual shorthand for Fifties ideology. In what is an otherwise thorough and fascinating discussion, Sprengler neglects examination of the 1960s—a period when the defenders of the “traditional” values of the postwar years came into conflict with the social renegades of the various arms of the counterculture. Though the impact of this period has been considered thoughtfully elsewhere (see Daniel Marcus’ Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, for example), some brief attention here would have been helpful to bridge the 50s-70s gap.

After defining the parameters of the nostalgia film genre and engaging briefly with its chief critics in chapter three, the remaining chapters examine specific aesthetic devices employed in several recent Hollywood films. First, Sprengler investigates 1950s automobile tail fins as a metonym for post-war consumerism in Frank Miller’s Sin City. The ostentatious, rocket-like design of the tail fin operates as an emblem of postwar technology, futurity, and prosperity. Sin City’s highly stylized, comic book-inspired vision of 50s noir and the corruption and crime evoked by that realm contrasts with the film’s fetishizing of the tail-finned car. Thus, Sprengler concludes, the film manages to offer oppositional views of the Fifties and provides a glimpse of the competing mythologies of that era.

The most engaging of Screening Nostalgia’s close readings provides compelling analysis of the use of costuming and color to suggest characters’ unexpressed desires and allegiances in Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven. Rather than reference the historical period overtly, Haynes’s film relies on sets, props, colors, and costumes to manifest the atmosphere established in the 1950s melodramas of filmmaker Douglas Sirk. Sprengler examines how the film strategically employs costume color and 50s fashion styles to convey the values of the era while simultaneously revealing the repressiveness and hypocrisy of those values.

Next, Sprengler takes on The Aviator’s use of what she terms a “technicolor aesthetic,” referring to that film’s digital recreation of mid-century film processes and palettes. Acknowledging that such films are frequently criticized for being overly indulgent in surface at the expense of substance, Sprengler attempts to recoup the historical value of Martin Scorsese’s film. While The Aviator may not faithfully reproduce Howard Hughes’s story, Sprengler finds that Scorsese’s painstaking replication of the look of two and three strip color film processing, “does important historical work” by informing audiences of the color film technologies of the 20s and 30s (149).

Finally, all the tools of visual pastness—props, costuming, black and white film— are put to work in The Good German in order to recreate the look and feel of a 1940s film. “Style is its alibi,” Sprengler asserts, and such a strategy allows director Steven Soderbergh to indirectly indict America for current geopolitical offenses while safely cloaked in the visual pastness of a nostalgia film (172).

Screening Nostalgia provides a cogent summary of the history of America’s love affair with nostalgia as well as offering useful examples of how to mobilize nostalgia in critically sophisticated ways. The text is engaging and accessible and should have wide appeal, particularly among scholars and students of film and American cultural history.