> -----Original Message----- > From: Greg Earle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 16 August 2004 17:29 > > > much the same now as it was in, say, the late 1960s. To > > think otherwise ("films were much better in the past") is, > > I'd suggest, another way in which nostalgia can override > > one's critical faculties. > > Whoa, cowboy. Is it nostalgia, or simply fact?
It is way OT, I agree, and not really my own specialist subject either, so this'll be my last comment as well! The general point I'd make is this: when someone in 2004 thinks to themselves, say, "what movies came out in 1971?", I would be pretty confident that they'll forget a whole heap of awful cash-ins, turkeys, flops and bombs that came out this year. Selective memory will make the most critically lauded films leap to the fore, and this sort of thing can generally lead to a perception of the past being better than the present. To be honest, this is a principle I find myself applying to music nostalgists more than to movie buffs, and I feel that I'm on safer ground when talking music. It's a common misconception, for example, that the 1960s wasn't all Hendrix and Coltrane, and that an awful lot of crap came out then; my general point to Rob was that the same thing applies to movies. No-one spends too much time thinking about the rubbish, and so they only tend to remember what was good. > Plz 2 tell me your "particularly insightful" > and "thought-provoking" Hollywood movies of the present day, > Brendan. I don't quite know about present day - will "fairly recent" do? I thought that The Truman Show was a fairly timeless film, in that it didn't really smack of contemporary Hollywood output. I also like Groundhog Day and the games it plays with time and causality. These are pretty crappy examples, I admit. But I'm sure I could dig about on IMDB and find loads of *really* crappy movies from the 1970s, 1960s or even earlier. As I said, though, I'm no expert on film in general, and am not denying in any way that Hollywood is largely bankrupt in a creative sense. However, I'm not totally convinced by the argument that every film made in the 1970s was a masterpiece - surely it's obvious that bad films are as old as the movie industry itself? > Ob313: It's kinda like Techno to me - 10 years ago, the expanse of > the sonic palette to fill in with new Techno was utterly vast. > I was so happy to be around back then and hearing all this > amazing music which truly sounded like "The Music Of The Future". > Nowadays I hardly hear anything that sounds "new" to me anymore - > so much music has come out in those 10 years that the sonic space > has been filled up. Is it nostalgia on my part, or just the simple > fact that, as time goes on, motifs get used up, styles get > invented, used and over-saturated, and pretty soon there's > hardly anywhere new to go (then the "revivals" happen ... lol). My own musical taste in the early 1990s was pretty much defined by the amount of "new" motifs, styles and sounds I heard in any particular track. Once my taste in electronic music was locked down, so to speak, I'd gravitate towards tracks that were most effective at integrating the motifs I was most drawn to (cf. Detroit techno). As I get older, I'm aware that this is more and more the case, and as you say, I don't find myself hearing anything that sounds "new". But the question is, is it a sense of nostalgia for the old stuff that's somehow leading people like you or me away from the "new" stuff? That it is getting made, but we're all too esconced in our own musical comfort zones to encounter any of it? Or that, when we do hear it, age (and a nostalgic sense of what "new"-sounding music should be like; namely that it should be made with 909s and Juno synths!) somehow prevents us from perceiving the "newness" in a piece of music? Brendan
