Future Oddities: Nostalgia, Music and Film
Looking at a series of recent Hollywood film productions that feature anachronistic musical media technologies and use pre-recorded soundtracks as its point of departure, this dissertation offers a future-oriented re-reading of nostalgia in the context of the contemporary digital media economy. Watching The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999), High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000), Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000) or The Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014) while focusing on their conceptions of nostalgia from a musical-material perspective, places the emphasis on a continuing trend and strategy to popularize not only nostalgic soundtracks but also anachronistic musical media technologies and the practices of their owners.
I argue that in the age of digitized media technologies, film serves as a privileged configuration for various musical media considered obsolete by using certain strategies to highlight their individual character, specificity, and their emotional value compared to the homogenous stream of digital goods. Hollywood cinema’s practice of collecting obsolete musical media will thus be seen as a strategy to emphasize their endurance as objects capable of delivering repeatable “aesthetic experiences”. In doing so, this dissertation strives towards a certain kind of thinking about film and its role to help reflect upon the cultural significance of obsolete media.



Profile
Karin Fleck is a film and media scholar. From October 2017 to October 2020, she was a research fellow and PhD candidate in the Graduate Research Training Program Configurations of Film at Goethe University Frankfurt. She subsequently worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University, where she has been an external staff member since 2022. In July 2025, she received her doctorate with a thesis titled Future Oddities: Nostalgia, Musical Media, and Film, which will be published soon. She has also been actively involved in Nippon Connection – Japanese Film Festival Frankfurt, and will begin teaching as a lecturer in the winter term 2025/26. Her research interests include the history, theory, and aesthetics of media, as well as popular music.
fleck@tfm.uni-frankfurt.de