Video Reflection

With the final cut of the video up, we've shared our 10 second previews and links to the full video and survey on instagram and received several hundred views. The editing team did an amazing job in bringing together the vision in the way I think we all imagined, with the overall impression being very similar to an Adam Curtis documentary and the choice of clips effectively appealing to the nostalgia of what turned out to be the majority of our audience (friends on social media). I've had several individual responses complimenting the quality of the editing and the intensity of the journey the video takes you on. It's been really interesting to see the more detailed responses from Sam's messages and the survey monkey results.  Two comments I felt were particularly accurate in revealing what we had intended were these: 

• Shamelessness of contemporary political culture raiding the past for malign purposes.
• By beginning with creating a strong sense of nostalgia before incorporating harrowing political footage, I was forced to analyse my own relationship with nostalgia and the past, and how this influences my own politics. Therefore whilst the documentary took aim at right-wing nostalgia, it also included ideals that could be spread to any section of political thought.

These themes of particularly contemporary politics in the last decade or so being rife with nostalgic rhetoric and the way it is utilised on both sides of the political spectrum brings up a question of why now? Why now is the past so much more tantalizing to us than the future or the present? I believe our video is definitely effective through its visuals and music in drawing attention to the way that we are cushioned and comforted by these cultural memories of a simpler time and how a preoccupation with these pleasures easily contributes to a rosy-tinted blanket shrouding the darker reality that others were experiencing and still are. We are too fond of and wrapped up in the past to be giving the present and the future the critical attention that it needs to avoid the atrocities that have already occurred at the hands of the figures in our video. The nostalgic rhetoric often seems to go hand in hand with exclusionary talk, for example in Brexit, a form of empire nostalgia is apparent alongside the anti-immigration speech. However, this idea of reclaiming our country and our 'golden past' back from certain people and things is a right-wing approach, in the US, populism on the Left and Right has been fuelled by these references to allegedly better times. Examples are present all over the world and it seems that there are greater forces at play as to why so many are so disillusioned with the now and thus so susceptible to the persuasive political rhetoric of nostalgia. These key ideas that were the purpose of our video are only becoming more obvious to me as I explore further research for the essay. 

Liz