Rejected Article Abstract - Vintage something or other, 2015

Dr Paula Blair
Teaching Fellow in Film, Newcastle University
Paula.Blair@ncl.ac.uk [no longer valid]

Title slide for my BAFTSS paper in 2014

Belfast had the reason: Vinyl revival, punk nostalgia, and the television archive in Good Vibrations

Although Northern Ireland has experienced relative peace since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, it has been argued that the region is only post-conflict in the sense that the thirty-year period of violence known as the ‘Troubles’ has already been archived (Longley, 2011). In response to the Agreement’s authoritative processes of ‘official forgetting’, many contemporary artists and film-makers confront issues stemming from the conflict, often by appropriating and re-presenting archival material to explore the spectral anxieties which tether society to a state of past-presentness (term borrowed from Mulvey, 2010). The Belfast-made film Good Vibrations (Barros D’Sa & Leyburn, 2012) is the commercial apex of this activity.

The film chronicles the life and work of Terri Hooley who was instrumental in cultivating the vibrant counter-culture – and counter-conflict culture – that was the punk rock scene in Belfast. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, punk gave voice to a disaffected youth culture that rejected the sectarianism and trauma saturating audio-visual culture: the dual images of violence on the streets, and what was viewed daily through mass mediation. Around 2007, a vibrant and thriving music scene re-emerged in the city alongside an interest in Hooley’s stories, which were published in 2010 and soon adapted as a biopic. The past-presentness of the live music scene intersects with widespread renewed interest in vintage vinyl records and clothing, evidenced in the many retro outlets which have opened in Belfast during these years.

In examining how Good Vibrations depicts ‘Troubles’ Belfast through the lens of ‘new’ regenerated Belfast, the article will demonstrate how the postmemory processes of nostalgic recall decry official narratives of forgetting. It will argue that through its ‘discursive appropriation’ (Groo, 2012) of the archives depicting trauma, and their juxtaposition against a rose-tinted nostalgia for the iconicity of vinyl and the visuality of punk, Good Vibrations embodies the city’s defiant refusal to forget.

Bibliography

Groo, K. E. ‘Cut, paste, glitch, and stutter: Remixing silent film history’. Frames Cinema Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012: 1-16.
Hirsch, M. The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
McLoone, M. and McLaughlin, N. Rock and popular music in Ireland: Before and after U2. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012.
Navas, E. Remix theory: The aesthetics of sampling. New York and London: Springer Wein, 2012)
Shuker, R. Wax trash and vinyl treasures: Record collecting as a social practice. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Biography

Paula Blair is a Teaching Fellow in Film at Newcastle University, and the author of Old Borders, New Technologies: Reframing Film and Visual Culture in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Peter Lang, 2014). She holds a PhD in Film and Visual Studies from the School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast. Her other publications include articles in POST SCRIPT and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and a chapter in the forthcoming volume Post-Conflict Performance, Film, and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan). Her research interests involve convergences between cinema and visual art, and how artists and film-makers confront mediatized conflict.



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