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|    |    | | vol. 7 no. 42, November 2003 |  |    |     | | |



Kristi McKim

Remembrance of Cinema Past:
Reading Nostalgia and Writing Possibility in Annette Kuhn's _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_


Annette Kuhn
_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory_
New York: New York University Press, 2002
ISBN 0-8147-4772-8
xii + 273 pp.

In the Reagan administration's playing of 'Edelweiss' to honor the Austrian Ambassador's arrival at the White House, we witness cinematic memory's extreme overtaking of cultural memory. Intended as a fitting tribute and touching homage to Austrian folk culture, the rousing musical rendition was hardly received as such. Written for and popularized by _The Sound of Music_ (Robert Wise, 1965), 'Edelweiss' offered more nostalgic warmth for musical fans than for Austrians, who held no cultural referent for the song beyond its Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein origins. Clearly the Reagan administration confused the intensity of the diegetic nostalgia surrounding the song, for a memory that resonated beyond the film's parameters. This incident embodies the confusion between cinematic memory and cultural memory, in its positing cinematic historicity as the actual. We cannot overestimate the degree to which cinema has affected our negotiation of time. While this claim might seem broad reaching, within the context of Annette Kuhn's project, its truth finds generous illustration.

_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory_, [1] Annette Kuhn's new cinematic ethnohistory, resides within this intersection of cinema memory and cultural memory. Informed by numerous surveys, questionnaires, and letters, Kuhn's project assembles a portrait of 1930s British cinema culture that ultimately resonates, she claims, beyond both British cinema culture and past film audiences to 'ways of thinking about films, cinemas, and cinema cultures of all kinds, past and present' (3). Respondents whose memories comprise this book's material were all born prior to 1925; they were sought within specific areas (Glasgow, Greater Manchester, East Anglia, and Harrow) and contacted through media appeal, day centres, residential homes, and local organizations. Given the parameters of and venue for this review, I am less inclined to evaluate the method of Kuhn's inquiry than I am to contemplate its conceptual tenets. How does Kuhn mobilize memory as a term? How does the book conceive of memory relative to cinematic aesthetics and ontology?

In her work prior to this, _Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination_, Kuhn asks how film theory can,

'address itself to the emotions films evoke, to the ways in which these emotions enter into people's fictions of the past . . . Any feeling response to a film -- and indeed recollections of such a response even more so -- threatens our attempts to explain or intellectualise . . . because each category (memory/feeling as against explanation/analysis) seems to inhabit an altogether distinct register'. [2]

She explains that, in cultural and film theory, experience often becomes 'the trump card of authenticity, the last word of personal truth, forestalling all further discussion, let alone analysis'. [3] _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ takes up materially this problem that she poses abstractly at the outset of _Family Secrets_. While _Family Secrets_ looks inward at her personal history as a kind of memory work, _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ casts such temporal reflection outward upon a historical, spatial, and cultural moment. Instead of attempting to account impossibly for the dialectic between art and its community, Kuhn pares her inquiry to a manageable time period, locale, and subject that allows her to appreciate the intricacies of that dynamic more fully.

_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ remains unique for its focus on cinema as an object and site of memory work. Discussions of cultural memory have previously included consideration of ritual and art objects. Most notably, Walter Benjamin's 'Artwork' essay famously explores the potential of such artefacts and practices to behold authentic or sacred value. The mechanically reproduced status of cinema, in addition to its early locales, at first undermined its worth as a legitimate focus of cultural inquiry. While social histories of film have since been written, Kuhn's project is the first to explicitly undertake a discussion of memory work within the cinema. In doing so, she elevates the cinema to a realm shared with other arts that have more endurably been regarded with a historical and cultural legitimacy (e.g. paintings, monuments, sites, etc.). _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ posits the cinematic space and experience as equivalent to other, more unquestionably valid, historical sites, events, and rituals.

Within film studies, _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ fits into the tradition of reception studies most notably begun with Janet Staiger's 1992 _Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema_. While Kuhn underscores her focus on the social audience as differentiating her work from other texts in this tradition, I would additionally highlight the term 'memory' as  the most distinguishing attribute of _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_. Other important texts -- such as Jackie Stacey's _Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship_ and Barbara Klinger's _Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk_ -- consider elements of social audience within their respective projects of female spectatorship/stardom and Sirk's melodramas; but they do not isolate memory as a primary term of their study.

_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ acknowledges the temporal dimension of reception studies, as it introduces the term memory to underscore how any study of audience (whether of 1930s or contemporary cinema) will be one of memory, since perception and reflection are never simultaneous. Any recollection of reception necessarily privileges memory as its most apparent, if latent, term. Kuhn's attention to memory, what ostensibly figures as the vital gap between the moment of perception and of articulating that perception, enriches the questions that can be asked and conclusions that can be reached in researching film's social audiences. What this study misses, however, is a consideration of how her findings reciprocally enrich and complicate memory. For all her carefully documented original research, she earns the authority to contribute more conceptually to ideas about cultural memory in general. She more apparently and rather insightfully situates her text within frameworks of reception studies; her casting such a contextual eye toward memory work would have been helpful. Though her study straddles the fields of cultural memory and film reception, her leanings seem more toward the cinematic than the cultural, especially in her overt discussion of the film traditions within which she writes. Thus this project exists more as a presentation of original research than it does as a theoretical exploration of the intersection of memory and cinema.

The particularities of my criticism follow, though I want first to establish that I champion this study for its impeccable fulfilment of its objectives. Kuhn's lucidity and persistence of research and its presentation are rather stellar. The audience's seemingly uninhibited evocation of passion for the medium bespeaks a vibrant cinephilia that even seduces the reader to reflect upon and appreciate the innumerable ways cinema has enriched and continues to enrich our world. The energy and spirit is contagious; to Kuhn's credit, she allows that love to propel the reader through the book without weighing the prose unmercilessly with heavy theory. The book reads quickly and with great fun. Yet to approach this book with the desire for a substantial consideration of film and culture's reciprocity, the satisfaction level might be somewhat decreased. My criticism should be contextualized, in that I was most optimistically seeking a rigorous and provocative synthesis of what I wish I could read, if not write. Implicit in my review (and in any review) is a delineation of what I value in current academic scholarship.

At exactly the point that her reading or framing of responses begins to take on a theoretical bent, she seems to divert and undermine her own project by turning to a respondent's quote in the expense of saying something worthwhile of her own. Instead of concluding her chapter on memory and place with Walter Benjamin's 'A Berlin Chronicle', for instance, she might have taken some of his suppositions as starting points rather than briefly mentioned ends. Granted, her method allows the respondents to speak for themselves instead of situating their comments within a pre-existing framework; she admirably looks for the surprises and trends among responses instead of squeezing them into an overarching argument she hoped to make. Her words neither dominate nor override the respondents' words. On the other hand, it still would have done no injustice to infer, from these surprises and trends of the responses, a conclusion of her own. The book feels all too governed by the spectators' memories, and it would have done well either to acknowledge such predominance or to balance it with context and readings of readings.

The final page of _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ consists almost entirely of an assemblage of respondent quotations instead of a conclusion by Kuhn. Here and elsewhere, she favors the spectators' words to a fault, such that her own argument seems merely supplementary and diluted relative to the respondents' ideas. While we could read this as an ultimate scholarly benevolence, resisting the commonplace tendency to exert erudite authority over the subjects of her study, I think Kuhn would do them more justice were she to develop the ideas they introduce. It should be possible to draw from their memories without hierarchically downplaying their significance; such extrapolation wouldn't be speaking for or summarizing, rather it would be the performance of a scholarly respect for their contributions.

While the words of the audience members seem to constitute their own individual conclusions to their cinematic experiences, Kuhn's reluctance to privilege her own insights detracts from the project's ostensible merits. As she indicates through name-dropping or brief footnotes, she knows where and how particular theories would have strengthened her analysis, but she seems instead to presume the connection and to devote her textual time toward the quantitative inclusion of more voices, more comments, and less of her own analysis. She positions herself more as a collector and organizer of these responses than a scholar who cites them within her own analysis.

Nowhere does her aspiration to offer salient conclusions yet inability to articulate such arguments seem more apparent than in the text's 'Epilogue', a glossary-like attempt to summarize her project's contributions to broader fields. In these three epilogue pages, Kuhn acknowledges that her book 'has covered a great deal of ground on its journey around and through cinema and cultural memory, and in the course of the journey some new directions have been explored and some lessons about the conduct of inquiries into popular culture learned' (237). Kuhn lists nine headings (film studies, spectatorship in cinema, the cinema audience, canonicity, cultural memory, memory work, childhood, ageing, and elders' stories), each of which are followed by a short paragraph that explains the relative contributions of her project. Unfortunately, what could be a succinct and persuasive reiterance of her argument instead exists as an empty, self-evident, deferral of a conclusion.

Far too many sentences hint at a 'deeper understanding' of these categories, the 'interesting', 'informative', 'revealing', 'instructive', 'entertaining', 'surprising', and 'thought-provoking' memory-stories of her book (239). Such a string of adjectives importantly does nothing to indicate why these stories and her project actually merit such esteem. She addresses the 'value of memory work in itself' (238), yet resists articulating this value in this space where it would be convenient and compelling to do so. She claims that 'examining the detail and the discursive registers of memory stories of the 1930s cinemagoers throws into relief the distinctive qualities of cinema memory' (238), yet refrains from overtly committing to just what these 'distinctive qualities' are within the cultural studies context she conjures. Kuhn too frequently refers to the way her study 'enhances, deepens, and modifies understandings', 'offers a productive way', 'permits a deeper understanding', and can 'throw light on the cultural as well as the psychical processes involved in ageing' (238-9), all without clarifying just what these deeper understandings and insights are.

Throughout the preceding text, she similarly hints at such evasion; in the chapter 'All My Life, and Beyond', she writes the following sentence that seems either to entrust us with more wholly understanding her argument or to avoid delineating her argument altogether. She writes: 'These observations are telling not only because they shed light on the workings of cinema memory but also because they flesh out discussions in previous chapters' (206). The phrases 'shed light' and 'flesh out' are neither 'telling' nor enlightening in the furthered ideas they sufficiently cloak.

To its credit, _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ shines as a successful and clear presentation of original research into 1930s cinema-going, as remembered decades later. Kuhn illustriously organizes her findings and perceptively notes trends, surprises, and exceptions; this book would be one well-suited for the philosopher or theorist (or Kuhn, in a later work; as I've indicated in this review, she seems well poised to offer such extension of her findings, but just turns from it) to take up in a more advanced situation of spectatorship, memory, time, and aesthetics.

Such development might consider the following: what connections might be made between the duration and time she addresses and the temporal discrepancy implicit in the respondents' memories, the disparate times of watching and recalling that become narratively elided in the telling? How does cinematic time relate to memories of cinema? How do Pierre Nora's famous lieux du memoire relate to the movie theater or the films themselves? What do Benedict Anderson's imagined communities mean for the cinema audience, or Maurice Halbwach's collective memory? How does Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of narrative selfhood relate to these particular cinematic recollections? The cinema, and the research Kuhn impressively presents, becomes a terrifically suited site for this unique elision of time, place, and subjectivity; moreover, the cinema becomes an aesthetic form catalyzed by modern technological developments. How does this art form and its reception work within and create our modern notions of fantasy, memory, hope, and community? More concretely, how does cinema affect our experience of time, both the reconciliation and opposition of the moment and its duration? Granted, Kuhn is by no means responsible for these questions; most definitely, she is not responsible for their answers. But in reading her text, I couldn't help but acknowledge my own scholarly fantasy that she undertake the pressing questions that lurk behind and within her own readings of spectators' cinematic memories.

An example of how she nearly arrives at such considerations occurs at the end of the 'All My Life, and Beyond' chapter, wherein she explores the case of _Maytime_ (Robert Z. Leonard, 1937) and concludes that its reception maps the 'death of the star . . . onto the deaths of the film's central characters' and produces 'love . . . as triumphing over death' (212). She nicely compares the 'enduring fan's devotion to a reluctance to grow old and a nostalgia to remain young. Implicit in these sentences is an attachment to the materiality of the film for its recurrent, repetitive (and many would claim, hysterical and traumatic) cycling of its narrative; the characters and story remain unchanged and unaged, while the film stock bears the time that otherwise would be made visible through the body. Kuhn might have written several more paragraphs (or chapters) extending the idea upon which she momentarily touches here. The cinephilia that pervades her respondents' memories seems inextricably caught up in a cinematic consolation of temporal and romantic anxieties beyond the diegesis, and the degree to which such reflections complicate and lend clarity to such intersection would be worth considering.

Another example of her proximity yet resistance to contextualizing theoretically her original research involves the consideration of time and magic in the cinema. In her final chapter, 'Oh! Dreamland!', Kuhn writes that:

'In the magical ambience of the cinema auditorium, time as well as space take on new dimensions, and time spent in the pictures is remembered as qualitatively different from ordinary time. It is more elastic, more flexible, more giving. While time-memories are rarely explicitly articulated in these terms, repeated allusions in informants' accounts to a particular way of organizing cinema time are revealing in this respect' (224).

Kuhn's distinction between 'ordinary time' and 'cinema time' introduces the simultaneous temporal dimensions at stake in her project, to which I would further add the specificity of the moment of watching, the duration between the watching and the recollection, and the moment of recollection (which necessarily involves an ordering of the multiple times that have preceded that moment of remembrance).

Kuhn addresses the continuous programming that lent itself 'to begin watching a feature film part way through the story' (226). Such programming resulted in a modification of 'narrative time, narrative trajectory, and narrative closure' and a misalignment of 'narrative time and viewing time' (226). However, the stakes of this modification and asynchronicity are never elaborated; moreover, Kuhn neglects to acknowledge that story and film duration are hardly ever aligned (Classical Hollywood cinema particularly strove to collapse time within its narratives, with 'real time' characterizing the art cinema). Kuhn considers that the continuous programming 'lends remembered cinema time a quality of expansiveness and circularity' (226), though immediately upon introducing this fine direction her study might take, she turns to the words of her respondents and hereby dodges yet another chance to explore worthwhile and expansive dimensions of the complicated temporality implicit in her study.

A respondent exclaims that the cinema 'was all new and wonderful, just as the internet and computing are today' (221). Kuhn frames this comment with the following: 'Letter-writer Sheila Black explains what it was that made cinema so exciting for her, offering a telling comparison with present-day attractions' (221). At a point when she might draw important conclusions between the cinema and modern technology (or at least be invited -- by the respondent's own words -- to consider the contemporary implications and value of her study), she turns from explicit mention of such technological developments and dilutes them in the phrase 'present-day attractions'. In moments such as this, she misses her chance to develop her project into a contemplation of the new and magical relative to emerging technology; she neglects the opportunity to explore the ways this study resonates beyond 1930s cinema. Of course, it is not for me to declare the directions she ought to have taken her study, and then to critique her work on the basis of such exclusion. I want to reiterate that this book works extraordinarily well on its own terms; it successfully fulfils the objectives it sets for itself. But given my own objective of assessing the book's value to film and philosophy, I need remark upon the theoretical gaps that remain open and unfilled in its pages.

Her framing of audience response seems to beg theoretical development without, as I have indicated, following through upon such concepts. Another example includes her claim that 'imitation memories are centrally about explorations of masculinity, femininity, or sexuality' (181). Here might be another place for her to substantiate if not sophisticate her argument by incorporating Judith Butler's notion of gender as performance, which undeniably beholds vital implications for the idea of imitation. Even Homi Bhaba's mimicry would be helpful to include. One page later, it is clear that she's essentially describing the myth of entertainment so eloquently elaborated by Jane Feuer; she could have saved numerous paragraphs if only she could have cited Feuer and moved forward from her ideas. The spontaneity, integration, and audience Kuhn describes in 'An Invitation to Dance' reflect almost identically the myths Feuer made apparent years ago. Vital research on the musical (Richard Dyer, Jane Feuer), memory, cinema, and community would have together enriched Kuhn's reading of these respondents' comments. The absence of her own close readings becomes most apparent when she quotes at length Rick Altman's analysis of _Top Hat_ (Mark Sandrich, 1935); as this example demonstrates, her most substantial analysis consists of quotes from other theorists. I wish that that she had applied her critical and reflective voice from _Family Secrets_ more substantially in this book; even addressing the stakes of privileging nostalgia as a focus of cultural inquiry could have strengthened this project.

'Oh! Dreamland!' constitutes the chapter that best approximates such reflection; though it includes weak places as noted above, this chapter also gets closest to approximating the level of analysis I would have liked to read throughout the text. In her consideration of American sociologist E. Wight Bakke's 1930s study of London unemployed men's relation to cinema, Kuhn explains that his responses 'are uncoloured by hindsight or popular memory as replies to questions about cinemagoing in the 1930s might be today' (216). Clearly, this 'hindsight' and 'popular memory' of 'today' constitutes the subject of _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_, and she values the nearly seventy-year temporal disparity between moments of viewing and recollecting for what it offers cultural memory. It is in this chapter that Kuhn most explicitly speaks the importance of her study:

'the power and value of these memories as evidence lies less in what they reveal about the individuals articulating them -- it is neither helpful nor proper in an inquiry of this kind to attempt to psychoanalyze informants -- than in the insights they yield about the collective imagination of a generation' (219).

It is also in this chapter that she more astutely and critically reads her respondents' words:

'At one extreme, some accounts deal with matters which may seem relatively superficial and which informants rarely seem to have difficulty putting into words. At the other extreme, some testimonies betray an intensity of engagement which touches on the transcendent; and where words fail here, the feeling may find expression in circumlocutions as well as in hesitations, silences and other nonverbal modes of expression' (220).

Within additional passages that, for sake of space, I will refrain from quoting, this chapter concludes the book with the very substance I wish had been present from the outset. As my criticisms have indicated, the book succeeds at what it aspires to do; but I simply would have preferred those aspirations to bespeak a greater awareness of their existence within critical and cultural theory.


Epilogue

Since my greatest appreciation of Kuhn's project lies beyond realms philosophical, I include this epilogue so as more fairly to indicate the parameters of my esteem. In evaluating Kuhn's book critically, what I cannot account for is the sheer pleasure of reading the respondents' stories. Gaining momentum in the fifth chapter, the book celebrates cinema's contributions to these people's lives more than it perhaps wants to wax philosophical or even poetic in analyzing them. When you finish the book, you might feel as if you've just enjoyed a reunion of your most articulate and enthusiastic elderly relatives (if you should be so lucky; and, if not, then imagine a group of eager eighty year olds clamoring for interviewer attention and smilingly swooning over the cinema), most of whom have stories you want to hear. I'm left with some kind of reverence for the cinema that these stories behold. At once a respect for the respondents' memories, this reverence also feels like a renewed belief in cinema magic, for what happens in the theater as much as what the films themselves constitute. The respondents' fervor for their memories almost makes it seem that human happiness was veritably unshareable before the cinema. The fact that these stories would, for even a moment, convey such an idea bespeaks the heightened suspension of criticism necessary to appreciating this book in its fullest.

_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ validates and celebrates cinephilia by emphasizing how we remember through an art (and how art constructs those memories both through reflection and through intensifying our temporal experience). Kuhn's project nobly illustrates how the cinema imbricates its mechanical self inextricably in the most personal and effusive of human sentiment. The innumerable and superlative idealizations of cinema, stars, and movie houses can be met with both exhaustion and appreciation: exhaustion, or a kind of depleted suspension of disbelief (if everything inspires awe, then the threshold to read it is proportionally altered); and amused appreciation, a fondness that the reflector might be any loved one, that we are enamoured -- not patronizingly, but admiringly -- to read the optimism with which cinema is beheld.

More than that, we might even feel our own kind of gratification, the heightened faith in what cinema can mean and the ways in which it explicitly contributes to people's, to our, lives. Depending on what we need and want this work to be, we can either feel a charmed affection or a critical disappointment. In truth, my first time reading, I felt short-changed; but upon my second reading, once I knew what the project did and didn't include, I was much more readily seduced by the heartfelt nostalgia intrinsic to the respondents' memories. Once I established for myself that this text simply didn't aspire toward theorizing cinema and time and sentiment, I felt in a better position to appreciate the bemused affections these people felt not only toward their (often shared) pasts but also for the cinema's place in that past.

In writing this review, I realize my own optimism in wanting this book to chronicle hope and faith as rendered cinematically, mediated mechanically, and expressed nostalgically. More specifically, I'd like to read any book about which I could make such claims for its temporal and aesthetic consideration of faith and hope. To claim that _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger _falls short for its neglecting such aspiration would hardly be a fair criticism. What this book implicitly emphasizes through privileging memory, however, is the mutual consideration of nostalgia and temporality relative to the moment of sensation and of recalling the sensation.

Kuhn's project presents the construction of a prior notion of hope and possibility in proportion to a present loss or dissatisfaction; largely, these respondents bespeak a desire to believe in some kind of former happiness. Regardless of present satisfaction, they relish the opportunity to wax nostalgic for what their lives once seemed to promise; the memory of this promise relates inextricably to the present need to remember this promise. Whatever motivates such rosy coloration of the past varies for each person; and even at the level of the personal, we could not imagine that we might know, individually, such motivation. What this project valuably affirms is the tenuous and contingent negotiation of selfhood and relationships, within time, relative to the cinema.

By writing their pasts as they do, these respondents retrospectively build possibility as they correlate their temporally bound lives with the repetitious, cyclical nature of cinematic art. This project writes the cinema, a temporally contingent aesthetic, within the span of an individual life (and, ostensibly, within collective memory). That cinema becomes inscribed within the time of a life (and that the time of a life can be written relative to cinema) bespeaks a particular contingency that stands as an exemplar for how our lived experience might be expressed, heightened, and knowable within modernity. _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ postulates cinephilia in time, a delineation of audience memory as nostalgically existing in time and for the sake of sentimental intensity.

I suppose that we should not be surprised that her project ultimately becomes so very seductive. In reading Kuhn's organization of such impassioned testimony, we can be moved firstly for the appreciation of their appreciation; and secondly for the reflection that it ultimately catalyzes in our own relationship to cinema and time. Doesn't it make us want to tell our memories that coalesce in the cinema? Even here, how tempted I could be to share my own earliest memory, which happens to include my family and cinema. That Kuhn makes such a telling appealing perhaps highlights the achievement of her study. In _Family Secrets_, Kuhn explains that memory work engages both the psychic and the social, and 'bridges the divide between inner and outer world'; she hopes that the case studies therein can be read,

'for the stories they tell about a particular life, stories which will perhaps speak with a peculiar urgency to readers in whom they elicit recognition of a shared history; as a contribution towards understanding how memory works culturally; for what they offer more generally to theories of culture and methods of cultural analysis; and perhaps most important of all, as a recipe, a toolkit, even an inspiration, for the reader's own memory work' (10).

While I wish that, in _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_, she had explored at greater length the ways in which her research contributed to a cultural understanding of memory, the very fact of her project's catalyzing memory work -- of the respondents, and potentially my, our, own -- speaks to the legitimacy (or indulgence) she offers such endeavors.

The fairest assessment I can make of _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ is that I was invested and intrigued enough to want to experience her learned and wise synthesis of what she, in fact, concludes about cinema memory, cultural memory, and social audiences. This scholarly desire exists as testament to Kuhn's enriching material and its lucid organization. Perhaps my greatest compliment and criticism is to wish that I could have read more.

Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia, USA


Notes

1. Originally published in the United Kingdom as _An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory_.

2. Kuhn, _Family Secrets_, p. 33.

3. Ibid.


Bibliography

Klinger, Barbara, _Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994)

Kuhn, Annette, _An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory_ (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
--- _Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination_ (London: Verso, 2002).

Stacey, Jackie, _Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship_ (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

Staiger, Janet, _Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).


Copyright © Film-Philosophy 2003


Kristi McKim, 'Remembrance of Cinema Past: Reading Nostalgia and Writing Possibility in Annette Kuhn's _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 42, November 2003 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n42mckim>.


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