“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty windowpane, the past is something he could see but not touch … If he could break through that dusty windowpane, he would walk back into those long-vanished years.”

These closing words from Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) encapsulate the film’s essence: nostalgia. The story, set in 1960s Hong Kong, follows two neighbours who bond over their spouses’ infidelity, forming an unfulfilled romance steeped in yearning and restraint. It is often regarded as his magnum opus and one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the 21st century. Twenty-five years later, it remains a cult classic, its allure undiminished even for those born after the turn of the millennium. What is it about this film that continues to resonate across generations? The film’s power lies within its evocation of nostalgia, not merely as a longing for a lost past but as an elegy for the disappearance of beauty in age of solipsistic repetition of artistic forms. Wong does not simply depict nostalgia; he transforms it into an aesthetic experience, offering a way out of the current cultural impasse in which art, particularly cinema, is trapped in self-referentiality.

In the Mood for Love’s leitmotif of nostalgia is subtly present in its Chinese title – 花樣年華 – which literally translates to “Flowery Years”, an idiom alluding to the ephemeral character of beauty and youth. Through the muted elegance of the cheongsam, the music that is textured with radio static and vinyl crackling, and its representation of more subtle social conventions, the film acts as what Walter Benjamin calls an “instrument of magic”, and in our case, a time machine that transports us back to 1960s Hong Kong, a time that seems unfamiliar and foreign.[1] Yet, Benjamin saw film as a medium to be emblematic of the decay of ‘aura’ – the unique presence of an artwork – since its mechanical reproducibility detaches it from time, space, and direct human experience. In In the Mood for Love, however, Wong seems to subvert this paradigm. Rather than succumbing to a loss of aura through mechanical reproduction, Wong finds new avenues to restore it. It is not through the uniqueness of the art piece, as Benjamin claims, but rather, that Wong transforms film into a palimpsest of memory, where its essence becomes clearer after multiple viewings. It is in this repetition of images, sounds, and aesthetic choices that the audience is able to see how the allure is created. For instance, in the scene where the male protagonist, Mr. Chow, lights a cigarette after confirming his suspicions of his wife’s infidelity, Wong’s slow-motion captures the dissipating smoke in a tactile attention to ephemera. This subtle style of employing gestures, slowness, and temporal ambiguity, restores lost intimacy between art and the viewer, in direct contrast to AI-generated images’ homogenisation of beauty into data patterns. Even as Benjamin observes film’s limitations, Wong makes the audience complicit in the protagonists’ yearning. If Wong Kar Wai’s manipulation of time mirrors the distortion of memory, nostalgia emerges not as passive longing but as an active hermeneutic – a way of perceiving that transforms absence into aesthetic possibility.

The exploration of In the Mood for Love leads us to consider nostalgia as an orientation – a lens through which we engage with aesthetic experiences, and perhaps in turn, our own existence. Benjamin refers to natural aura as “the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it (an object) may be.”[2] This distance eludes physical space and reveals an existential, if not metaphysical, separation between the subject and the world. Understood not merely as the remoteness of the subject, Benjamin’s distance points instead to the object’s active withdrawal which veils its countenance from the gaze of its viewers. If Benjamin saw aura as a characteristic of distance, Byung-Chul Han deepens this idea by arguing that beauty itself depends on what remains inaccessible. In a culture of hypervisibility and instant gratification, Han critiques how the collapse of distance does not simply erode true aesthetic experience but fundamentally strips away the beauty of its mystery and the Other of its otherness. Thus, natural aura can be understood as the lingering traces of the beautiful that is absent.

In a similar manner, memory does not only represent one’s temporal distance from the past; it is also the object of one’s existential identification with a time that no longer exists or never existed. This alignment with what is lost or displaced is one aspect of what cultural theorist Svetlana Boym understood as nostalgia, specifically in its reflective form. According to Boym, reflective nostalgia differs from the other, the restorative kind, in that the former is comfortable with inhabiting and lingering in the ambivalence of fragmented memories while the latter seeks to reconstruct the past by scavenging through its ruins and reviving its symbols under the guise of truth and tradition. Like the blurred image seen through a dusty windowpane, reflective nostalgia embraces the fragmented and incomplete nature of memory, acknowledging that the past is always mediated by our present perspectives. Meanwhile, as she put it poignantly, nostalgia can also be thought of as “a romance with one’s own fantasy.”[3] The power of the integration of nostalgia and fantasy, on a collective level, is perhaps evident in fascist artworks and architecture, like the Milan Central train station, where ancient symbols are often conjured up to evoke nostalgic sentiments of a lost nation and mythologies reformulated to incorporate ideological fantasies of the nation’s rebirth and the recovery of its past glories. In contrast, In the Mood Love embodies the reflective nostalgia that allows them to explore the “sideshadows and back alleys” of both personal and collective history, and at the same time, challenges us to creatively engage with the shattered fragments of our memory and even the affective burdens that accompanies it.[4]

Like Boym, Mark Fisher recognised nostalgia as more than a personal sentiment of longing – it is symptomatic of a broader cultural malaise endemic to our era. Adapting Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’ – the idea that the present is haunted by the spectres of past possibilities that never fully materialised – Fisher diagnosed the inability of our contemporary culture to produce artwork that represents our particular zeitgeist, leaving us haunted by the aesthetics of the past. Writing between the late 2000s and early 2010s, Fisher observed a phenomenon that has only intensified since, noting:

“In the last 10 to 15 years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or could it be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”[5]

Here, we can begin to see that the crisis of beauty at hand is inextricably linked to our ongoing crisis of temporality. Fisher’s hauntological nostalgia seems to be the result of the creative faltering of a culture where the repetitive reproduction of the past brings about what he considers as “the slow cancellation of future”. This resembles Boym’s restorative nostalgia in the manner that the future is merely a repackaged past that is not so futuristic after all.  Meanwhile, the past finds itself in danger as well. Before the deterioration of our relationship with time, the past and its memories retain their aura through its fragmentation which eludes ‘total recall’; they even had power over the subject’s conscious life in the way that memories seem to have a will of their own, resurfacing from deep waters whenever they wish, coming back to haunt us in the most unexpected times. However, in this endless process of reinterpreting and reproducing the past, this distance that sets the two apart disintegrates and what once was quietly loses its aura.

Our strained relationship with time, and its manifestations in creative and aesthetic expressions, is particularly evident in contemporary cinema and many of its trends. More and more often, we find ourselves surrounded by remakes (e.g., Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria or Robert Eggers’s recent production of Nosferatu) and sequels (e.g., Episodes 7-9 of Star Wars or Indiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny) of previously successful movies and franchises. Even though they may have their own merits in the manner they approach the original works, none of them seems to succeed in contributing or creating any serious impact on the wider stream of visual culture. This stands in stark contrast to filmmakers like Wong Kar Wai, whose cinematographic style has profoundly influenced different disciplines within the visual arts, or Akira Kurosawa’s ability to translate Shakespeare’s King Lear into a form that is culturally understandable by a Japanese audience as he did in Ran (1985). At the same time, as Benjamin foresaw in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, cinema is also witnessing a drastic increase in productions that dramatize the lives of historical figures with a wide degree of liberty taken regarding historical accuracy. These phenomena seem to be showing us bleak prospects where, on one side, the future of culture is reduced to repetition as Fisher had written, while on the other side, the past is co-opted into being a part of the present that can be conjured up and reconfigured at will – it seems like the walls are closing in on us.

Where does this leave us then? Contrary to Fisher, I believe that the present does exist. However, without the necessary buttresses of the past and the future, it is suspended within its own atomised self-referentiality, lacking any hermeneutic foundation. The motto, “only the now is relevant”, perfectly sums up our fateful predicament: a present that has no past to look upon and no future towards which it can move, and as such, finds itself only capable of reproducing itself ad infinitum. This suspension, or as I would like to call it ‘the eternalisation of present’, seems to be conceptually compatible with both Fisher’s understanding of cultural stagnation and the acceleration characterised by the deluge of cultural re-productions that endlessly assaults our cognitive horizons. To visualise this, imagine (without its scientific accuracies) a sphere spinning in an isolated space – it remains in its own position while continues to gain speed from its own momentum. In this everlasting ‘now’, the present loses its ephemeral quality. Without this sense of fleetingness, nothing new or different ever occurs, we are stuck in a sort of determinism where we unable to change our situations for the better or the worse. Tangentially, our cultural ‘now’ is also occupied conversely by a compulsive bid for relevance. Ranging from the everyday online content to more ‘professional’ artwork, we can see a homogenisation of cultural outputs caused by this need to “stay relevant”, which results in the flattening of our cultural horizons.

Applying this ‘eternalisation of the present’ to aesthetic pursuit, artistic production of our time can no longer either be considered revolutionary or be understood in terms of movements as they once did since it’d imply a progression where the new arrives and replaces its predecessor. Rather, it simply repeats what has been done before and perpetuates existing paradigms of perception and interpretation. For instance, in visual arts, particularly photography, we see an increasing appropriation and repetition of various trends that are devoid of any real attempt in creative pursuit or aesthetic significance. Also, with the rise of AI-generated art, our attentional lives are gradually filled with an almost metastatic-like proliferation of uncanny images that are nothing more than products of data patterns lacking any depth of human experience. These trends reflect a creative landscape that is trapped with a relentless cycle of self-referential cultural production that, paradoxically, moves rapidly while remaining fundamentally static. This eternal present is thus the temporality of the hell of the Same.

Despite our temporal and aesthetic crises, traces of the past linger, and they might just show us the way out of this mess. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin approaches the subject in an unconventional manner compared to his contemporaries, such as Theodor Adorno, who envisioned history as a dialectical progression toward future emancipation, whereas the former saw a redemptive power that lies within overlooked fragments of the past. Benjamin also critiques the notion of progress as move through “a homogeneous, empty time,” something similar to our current experience of the eternalisation of the present, where time seems to lose its texture and depth.[6] Drawing on Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus’, he imagines the angel of history as resolutely turned towards the past despite being violently blown into the future by the storm called progress. The angel of history is therefore a creature of nostalgia. However, Benjamin’s nostalgia is not simply sentimental or a form of escapism that can be dismissed as a failure in come into terms with progress. Rather, as a lucid dissatisfaction with the present, nostalgia acts the light that shows us a way to critique the limitations of our current cultural moment, and the stimulus to imagine and to give rise to our aspirations for a better future. Herein lies the revolutionary dimension of nostalgia, offering a path to break free from the homogenous time of the eternal present and rediscover the richness of historical experience.

Benjamin’s towering wreckage of yesterday does not submit to the present – it flickers unpredictably, revealing itself only in flashes before vanishing once more. In the usual poetic manner, he writes, “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again.”[7] The past’s true image escapes the logic of hurried, purposeful activity. It traverses our horizons in unpredictable ways, demanding a whole different kind of engagement. This fleeting nature of the past invites us to practice a form of pre-intentional attentive stillness, a prerequisite for contemplative reflection. Such an approach positions us to see the past not as a closed book but as a reservoir of open, unrealised possibilities. In turn, we can retrieve moments of potential and resistance, finding redemption in our time. Engaging with the past therefore demands from us a particular attitude in our nostalgic orientation, one which follows closely with Boym’s account of reflective nostalgia.

Meanwhile, as noted by Hannah Arendt, Benjamin’s flâneur is a character who, through their idle and aimless wanders, allow themselves to stumble upon something new in the same roads and alleys they have tread upon day after day. Their seemingly purposeless meanderings create space for unexpected encounters with the past, mirroring the unpredictable flashes of historical insight Benjamin describes. Thus, they can be considered as practitioners of reflective nostalgia. In an era of rapid acceleration and digital saturation that inevitably disrupts our aesthetic lives, the flâneur has itself become an image of the past that we should seize upon to find a new way forward in this increasingly muggy atmosphere. In its contemporary reincarnation, the so called “digital” flâneur explores the vast expanse of online environments that houses labyrinthine structures of digital media and algorithmic spaces, opening themselves to any unexpected encounters amidst the tsunami of information. This seemly purposeless exploration becomes a revolutionary act, countering progress’s relentless march forward and the flattening of experience. By cultivating an attentive openness to the spectral manifestations of the past within digital spaces, contemporary flânerie offers a way to navigate the increasingly complex intersection of physical and virtual aesthetics. Simultaneously, it also serves as a critical lens through which we can examine and potentially reshape our contemporary aesthetic lives. As we grapple with the challenges of digital oversaturation and algorithmic control, this ethos of open-ended exploration and reflective engagement provides a valuable paradigm for reclaiming agency in our aesthetic experiences, both online and offline.

To paraphrase writer and Benjamin’s close friend, Gerhard Scholem, if we stay in this eternal present, in this timeless time, we will have little luck. Therefore, as a part of our attempt to save beauty, perhaps being a Benjaminian flâneur is the most radical act of resistance against the homogenisation of culture and the acceleration of solipsistic reproduction of artwork by engaging deeply with the fragmented images of history that disclose to us a salvific path forward. In this sense, we should not resign to being victims or mere observers of progress but aspire to be custodians of forgotten potentials, practicing a form of aesthetic resistance through their reflective nostalgia.

Notes:

[1] Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Illuminations. The Bodley Head: London (2015), 218.

[2] Ibid., 216.

[3] Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books: New York (2001), xiii.

[4] Ibid., xvii.

[5] Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books:  Winchester (2022), 9.

[6] Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History in Illuminations. The Bodley Head: London (2015), 252.

[7] Ibid., 247.