nostalgia/cubism

Wednesday, 28 September 2005

in that film princesas, the one i said i would write about but still haven't, one of the characters, caye, talks about nostalgia. she talks about how she doesn't feel nostalgia because she's never had anything happen to her that was good enough to miss. but occasionally she feels nostalgia for things that haven't happened yet, for how wonderful things will be one day. i do nostalgia a fair bit over here. after hearing those words in the film i started thinking about a recent night, and the nostalgia came. what was the nostalgia? i think it was just the object of doctoring remembered images. of capturing them at their most fantastic and intense, of drawing out of the experience and viewing it from above. of making it filmic. because i imagined us walking down thaqt street and pulled back. i saw us how i could never have seen us in that moment. because i couldn't see me. all i could see was her and the streets in front of me. in my nostalgic moment, i could see us there, in that street. it struck me as being like cubist composition. where all points of perspective are combined into an image. making the two dimensional three dimensional. or at least, including more than conventional two dimensional representation. the nostalgic does something similar, taking in known perspectives, and combining them to make something more than just a conventional memory. the other point in my little nostalgia/cubism thing is the prominence of collage. people are always making nostalgic collages. and collage was always big in cubism, especially using found objects, or materials from the object. like sticking a piece of fabric into a collage with a picture of all your friends. the collage creating an assembled image of all your friends that would be completely impossible for any one photo of any one time-space.