‘포스트-노스탤지어’: 90년대 르네상스 영화와 욕망의 시선

Abstract

Since 90's, British and American film industries have produced a number of Renaissance films depicting the old times with nostalgic sentiment. Some of them, in turn, become the nostalgic objects for the 21st century cinema. Which seems to rectify Susan Bennett's argument that reproductions of the time of Shakespeare, however experimental they seem, basically have conservative intentions, based on the nostalgia for the past. However, nostalgia for the Renaissance, primarily represented by “faithful" reproductions of Shakespeare, also gives way to the alternative representation. Modern interpretation of Christopher Malowe exemplifies such a case, in which neither the past nor the present is idealized. At first glance, post-modernity in Derek Jarman's Edward II seems to reinforce Fredric Jameson's critique against ahistoricity commercialized and reproduced within the contemporary cultural system. However, the political realm activated in the film's representation of power, class and desire, points to the possibility of communication between self-reflexive awareness, which is ahistorical in a fundamental sense, and political radicalism, which is clearly anchored in history. Diagnosing this kind of scepticism about the con-temporiness as rooted in cinematic convention of realism, this essay proposes that we should pay attention to our own ‘gaze' manifested in Renaissance films, instead of looking for the historical indices. Through articulating Slavoj Zizek's “distorted gaze," we could find the so-called “post-nostalgia" in historical films. The nostalgic genre, in fact, has the potentiality that it can return our own gaze, since it preys on the “lack" as things lost, without actually showing, but activating our desire of looking. We will find such “eyes" which look back upon us and our gaze in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth. By exploring how these films constantly gear and mediate the spectator's gaze to the present desire of one's own, this paper hopes to bring the ironic aspect of nostalgia to light. That is, in discussing Renaissance films, the nostalgic irony lets us move beyond the temporal boundary and finally overcome the teleological historicity in cultural (re)production.