Cultural Nostalgia, Orientalist Ideology, and Heritage Film

Writing about the phenomenon of the ‘selfie’ and the changing role of photography today, Julian Stallabrass points out how ‘some of the most popular camera apps play with nostalgia for the snapshot’ (Stallabrass, 2014, p. 20). The popularity of Instagram alone, with its ever-growing number of users (currently at 150 million and counting) who use this application to make their digital photographs look like analogue, aged Polaroids, testifies to the current nostalgic cultural bent. From AMC’s

Mad Men

(2007–2015) and ITV’s

Downton Abbey

(2010—) to Wes Anderson’s

The Grand Budapest Hotel

(2014), a strong trend in Anglophone TV and film production of late has been that of the past refashioned and remade — with a heavy dose of nostalgia — for contemporary audiences. This attitude to the past can, perhaps, best be described in Eric Hobsbawm’s words as:

a twilight zone between history and memory … For individual human beings this zone stretches from the point where living family traditions or memories begin — say, from the earliest photo which the oldest living family member can identify or explicate — to the end of infancy, when public and private destinies are recognized as inseparable and as mutually defining one another. (Hobsbawm, quoted in Walder, 2009, pp. 935–936)