One Last Gasp of Hipster Throwback Nostalgia. Or The Most Important Cultural Phenomenon of Our Lives.

So I'm a little late to the game on this one. In fact I'm still not convinced there's a game at all. But intrepid cultural observer that I am, I have to seize the moment even if that moment was many moons ago- or even if there was never any moment in the first place.

And I guess I shouldn't be surprised. With the global ubiquity of vinyl record albums, it should have seemed like just a matter of time before another anachronism was non- ironically resurrected for underground cultural consumption.

So when I saw a vending machine stocked to the pressure vents with old skool film canisters- in a dazzling variety of flavors- I should have been utterly unsurprised.

And as a matter of fact I was. But a short while later, when I stumbled across a genuine camera-n-film shop that appeared to predate the current maybe-trend by at least a decade, I went from being unsurprised to just being confused.

This was Kuala Lumpur, after all, until very recently a true international backwater. Had I simply stumbled upon a dust strewn holdout from the pre-90s megapixel revolution- as I found myself in the completely unimproved KL Central Market, replete with antiquated trinket and barely culturally relevant tchotchke shops surrounded by a second storey of noodle and rice joints not worthy of KL’s newly adorned status as global foodie hub - or was I witnessing a trend that was moving at a clip that was already outpacing far flung but culturally preeminent Southern California?

Or maybe the vanliving hipsters in America just couldn't afford film.

It was a puzzle. But intrepid, though I may be, I didn't look into it any further. Firstly due to laziness and indifference. But secondly because if it were a TRUE cultural movement , then it would find ME on its own without me needing to peek under the cultural couch cushions with a spyglass like a latter-day Sherlock Holmes.

Of course if this were merely a hipster phenomenon, it might take a generation for their cultural innovations (or really revivifications) to reach me, given that being culturally cloistered is the hipsters’ stock and trade lest the blaring light of cultural mainstream economical considerations mar the purity of the mission of their cultural self importance. And besides, you wouldn’t get it anyway.

But I weave comfortably enough into occult cultural enclaves (and social media algorithms) that I suspect the trend would find me fast enough if a trend at all it really be.

And today it sorta did. Film ads started appearing in my feed, well produced, unironically messaged, and with a sense that there were people out there who would be receptive to the technical nuance they were proferring in their ads, which would have been completely lost on me (had I bothered to pay any attention to it at all). I, after all, was not one of those people, but I was duly impressed nonetheless that someone was betting hard that they are out there. This may yet be a thing.

And as eye rolling as I might want such a phenomenon to be - it’s almost a caricature of hipsterific obscuriphilia, as if Saturday Night Live had done a send up of the nascent emergent subculture back in the late 90s - I'm actually very open to what gems might yet come out of it.

As with vinyl, there's a deliberate snubbing of our cultural values of efficiency, technological advancement, and convenience (and the costs associated with all of them). But they're also not entirely wrong.

As incredible as the digital manipulations of music have become in the last 30 years, there really, really is something about vinyl - and even more so for albums that were recorded FOR vinyl and which, when "remastered," often *sound* the way boomers wearing skinny jeans and fedoras *look.* A little try-hardy, and in the end losing the unforced casual cool that once gave them the charm and meaning they wore so well in their heyday, and saddest of all causing us to retroactively re-wonder if they ever had such genuine charm and cool in the first place now that we see them primped, digitized, and tailored up to try to blend in with the autotuned ethos of a whole new generation.

Plus, the same technological development which brought us Garage Band and its descendents also brought us improved turntables, needles, and speakers. So the amplification of the more organic playback methods can enhance rather than zap into square-wave compliance, the acoustic delights of ages past.

Can the same happen with film? Just looking at the array of options in the glass box, I have to at least conclude that someone thinks it can. And the global brain, which didn't exist 30 years ago, is certainly capable of coming up with innovative - and less expensive generic alternatives to defunct brand name - technologies that are sure to delight us in ways we never experienced back in the Kodachrome 70s.

So I'm actually excited.

As a newly minted Instagrammer, I genuinely appreciate my Lightbox sliders and the ease of manipulation (to say nothing of redemption of) my often careless and indiscriminate shootings.

But I also remember the value of craft that limitation (like a 21 image roll) enforces on us and that deeper - and more personal - truths may sometimes be told when there are fewer coverup options downstream to disguise them with.

And that's probably just the point here. Yes, there is the thumbing the nose at the soulless hyper-efficiency of modern culture (and boy has Asia embraced that), there is the deliberate shunning of economical equilibrium by choosing a vastly less efficient mode of creation than that which is so readily available elsewhere, but most importantly, there is that genuine desire to remember the authentic, the simple, and that more elusive quality than ever: the "real."

By handicapping our own abilities to lie with post-script editing, we hold our own selves and our own lives accountable to a reality that nearly all of us feel completely cut off from, fallen, as we have become, into a world where we can't trust what we see, feel, or hear even for a second, and worse, a world where we have grown completely accustomed and numbly indifferent to same.

What do the film artists have to show us about this? Will we remember what it is like to see reality? Will we even like what we see?

I'm guessing it will be an uncomfortable re-introduction for most of us, all the more so for the ease of slipping right out of it back into our tinted, saturated, and tilt shifted reproductions of what wasn't even a "real" image to begin with.

But that is the artist's job I suppose, to stick our noses back into what we have chosen to ignore in ourselves and force us to reckon with it. And the film maybe-revolution may be one avenue for the artists to affect that dreadful reckoning, and just at the moment when the deep fake reality seems the most impossible for us to claw ourselves back from.

Perhaps.

For me, I am still wondering where we will actually SEE all of these filmic works, if not in a local gallery after a few hours in the dark room (or perhaps a new chain of instamats).

If our only way to connect with analog art is through digital reproduction, then kind of what are we doing here? I suppose by analogy, you can still listen to a compressed, desaturated Mp3 of “Rhiannon” on Spotify and then go home and play it "for real" on a 331/3. Will we have the same options to purchase hand printed film repros of images we first experienced digitally on our social media feeds? How does this work?

The young cultural masters will have to educate me on this one, though I suppose if there is this much investment in the tech so far, someone has thought of something that is sticky enough to work, even if just for aging hipsters yearning for one more non ironical throw back to make them feel alive as they pack their kids off to their first barista jobs and suspenders fittings.

As for me, I'll wait eagerly on the sidelines for a tasty dose of reality and cultural churn, as those with nothing to lose and too late of a start to become digital arts scions dabble in a re-virginized sphere and conjure up delights and annoyances that will enrich my life, recalibrate my visual field, and maybe, just maybe, show me something about myself that I thought had been lost forever.

Post Script:

This piece was written before commercialized AI captured the piublic's imagination at the end of 2022.. It should go without saying that film, real film, may be the last bulwark the culture has against the deep faking of everything. So beyond the artistic essentialism here, we can envision a far more pragmatic future for the heretofor lost technology in establishing the physical reality of an event. As clumsy and cumbersome as this might be, we sholuld not underestimate the value of having a real record of certain events in the coming decades. Perhaps there is even more here than meets the eye and far more hard nosed practicality than dewy eyed nostalgia. We will certainly see.