I recently posted a video in the Non-Fortean Films thread about Akira Kurosawa's use of camera movement. In one part the narrator compares a scene in a modern film (Avengers, I think) to a scene with a similar narrative purpose (to emphaise the enormity of the battle ahead and the resolve of the protagonists, or something like that). The modern film has Samuel L Jackson endlessly gibbering and cameras pointlessly drifting across faces for identical reaction shots. Kurosawa's scene, in contrast, is wordless, but it conveys the mood much more deeply through the employment of action and physical movement--stationary figures on a stationary space station simply are not memorable.
While not nearly as good an example as Kurosawa, who really was a master in wordlessly conveying meaning, I recently read a comparison of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World that really highlighted something I hadn't picked up when watching the latter movie for the first time.
Every shot in Jurassic Park is from a human's eye level. The first time you see dinosaurs, you're looking up at them in awe just as the characters are, the T-Rex towers over you, and everything that happens you are, on some level, in amongst the action. Compare that to Jurassic World, and there are shots of the T-Rex and the big new dinosaur where the camera is flying around above them, and there's just no sense of connection, because it's from no conceivable human viewpoint. At no point are you being invited to step into the shoes of the film's characters, you're just watching someone play with their toys.
On nostalgia in general, I think the feelings are fairly universal. We all grow up with a baseline, and assume that baseline to be "correct" - every move the world makes to deviate from that, it feels like a step away from our comfort zone, and it gets harder and harder to keep up. I hear the people I went to school with complaining about "young people today" in exactly the same terms that my parents' generation did, and probably every generation did since time immemorial. I hear the 18-21 year olds I have to deal with at work talking about stuff they think of as old, or memories of early childhood, that feel like only yesterday to me, and wonder where the time went.
An example I always use locally is that, when I was 16, all my older mates would talk about this amazing nightclub they were going to, but people older than
them would all talk about how much better the club was back in their day, and how it's all gone downhill. Fast forward a few years, and people my age are telling the younger lads that the same club was at its best when
they went there, and it's all gone downhill. So what's more likely, that the place has been steadily deteriorating in quality for a decade (but evidently not
that much as there's still one group of people thinking it's the dogs bollocks), or that the club itself hasn't changed a bit, it was just always great
when you were eighteen?
A few things I think will change nostalgia, though - there's (presumably) much less shared experience for kids these days. We're looking at the first generation of adults growing up with social media and mobile internet as the norm, and with the decline in traditional media. Socially, they're potentially more isolated, and the media they consume won't define them the way it did us - they're not restricted to a handful of TV channels and radio stations, to only being able to watch what's on TV at a designated time, and unlikely to have the kind of "rushing out to the record shop to buy the latest single" memories we tend to get misty eyed about.
