idea for opening shot of film

Ok, so I’ve been reading Jameson a lot for my blog post and he writes a lot about pastiche in postmodern culture and how it relates to what he calls ‘nostalgia cinema’ (basically cinemas obsession with an idealised idea of the past through reproduction of their images- whilst making them more and more devoid of meaning). He makes the distinction between parody and pastiche by saying

‘pastiche is like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practise of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody’

Its all very wordy I know, but I think the essence of it is something that is really interesting, especially when we’re thinking of a documentary about nostalgia.

And, I know it goes against the whole kind of intention of this text, but I was recently watching Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief and the opening shot is this brilliant sequence in which he shows the times from all round the world (at a certain moment- i.e Paris – 4’oclock, Moscow 6’oclock etc) and it really creates this feeling of a universal concept (something that nostalgia is). Then it cuts to a clock being smashed with a brick and then to a human hand removing the clocks hands.

I was wondering what people thought of potentially making a pastiche of this shot (i.e take it lmao) as our opening shot for the documentary. The influence of pastiche fits perfectly in the devoid nature of nostalgia (as talked about with Jameson), but the symbolism of the smashing of the clocks invokes this feeling of a disruption of time. This void in time is a space in which nostalgia can thrive (as seen with pretty much everything we’ve talked about), but it also links into Lizzie’s use of Fisher’s slow cancellation of the future (we live in a world where we collectively cannot imagine a future- therefore the ghosts of the past are reoccurring).

Its just a thought, but I think there is definitely some artistic merit to it, that would work really well as a sort of introduction to our visual piece. If anyone wants to read more about Jameson, I’ve put a link to a text and another to the opening shot of Oshima’s film.

http://art.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/Jameson_Postmodernism_and_Consumer_Society.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWFE-g9Ll-w

Plus its so Goldsmiths™. 

                Calum