Photo credit: Twelve South LLC

Here we are in the middle of one of the most significant communication technology revolutions since the development of the printing press – and it seems we are enchanted with the past. I’m not talking about Downton Abbey or Mad Men, although they do evince the trend. According to the marketing and advertising agency JWT New York, the continuing replacement of many consumer goods with their virtual equivalents is bringing about a fetishisation of the old-fashioned, physical object – things like books, for instance. It’s a habit they call ‘objectifying objects’, and if you’ve walked into (or even past) a craft market, a bookstore or a vintage emporium in the last year or so, you won’t need JWT to tell you that objectifying books is a thriving industry.

Businesses like Melbourne-based Rebound Books create stationery by recycling classic children’s stories; the designer Jim Rosenau fashions bespoke bookshelves from cleverly selected vintage hardbacks; the team at Art Meets Matter have had unanticipated success by revamping the classic, orange paperback Penguin book design and stamping it on coffee mugs, tea towels and tote bags. Even the pocket-sized convenience of an iPhone’s networked online calendars and apps has proved no impediment to the popular success of the Moleskine notebooks made famous by many of modernism’s finest writers and artists.

And it’s not just books. The typewriter has become the latest hip collector’s item. According to an article in the New York Times, hipsters have embraced old Remingtons and Smith Coronas because of an existential enervation with digital life:

Though they grew up on computers, they enjoy prying at the seams of digital culture. Like urban beekeepers, hip knitters and other icons of the D.I.Y. renaissance, they appreciate tangibility, the object-ness of things. They chafe against digital doctrines that identify human “progress” as a ceaseless march toward greater efficiency, the search for a frictionless machine.

But does this strange new interest in old things merely point to the fact that books as we have known them are now nothing more than a retro relic ripe for recycling?

In his recent book, Retromania, Simon Reynolds observes, ‘the accent, today, is not on discovery but on recovery. All through the noughties, the game of hip involved competing to find fresher things to remake. […] We live in the digital future, but we’re mesmerised by our analogue past.’ From the fad for collecting manual typewriters to the desire to own a shelf full of vintage Penguin paperbacks, something about the present dematerialisation of our literary culture is turning us into preemptive nostalgics (after all, let’s not forget – the printed book is still very much available in our present culture).

Even though printed books are not yet outmoded, the powerful feelings associated with nostalgia are being applied. Rather than interpreting this strange turn as a desire to hurry along the disappearance of print, applying this aura of nostalgia to reading and writing could be described as an attempt to demonstrate the emotional power that books have acquired over the last 400 years. That is, this application of nostalgia to all things bookish is the literary equivalent of apps like Instagram, which makes modern-day photos look ‘authentically’ old-fashioned.* Just as you can apply a vintage filter to your snapshots in order to signal to your social network and yourself that this thing happened, was important, felt special and so on, revamping the world of literature, by making it appear older than it really is, is a way to maintain contact with all that is permanent and significant. In this regard, a book with a tangible history of production and ownership compares favourably to its e-book counterpart, which can give its owner no real sense of its origin, carrying as it does fewer messages about its production.

In an age of digital excess, items like typewriters and printed books stand for both material and emotional authenticity, and realness. Although reading books on a Kindle or listening to music on an iPod is undoubtedly convenient, the absence of the material object can make us uneasy – how are we to demonstrate to ourselves and others what we value? The e-reader, for all of its utility, introduces anonymity and alienation into the world of reading. A printed book manifests both the identity of its reader and the experience of its reading. For example, in reading expansive novels like War and Peace or Infinite Jest on an e-reader one does not physically experience the book’s vast terrain in the same way as with the print copy – nor can one impress others with the conceptual weightiness of one’s reading tastes.

I suspect it won’t be like this for too long. One enterprising company in the United States has already started to produce iPad cases fashioned to resemble classic leather-bound books. Now (already!), even the e-book is vintage.

*The idea that Instagram’s popularity can be explained by its presentation of the (virtual, ephemeral) digital present as (real, significant) analogue past, is expressed by Nathan Jurgensen in his excellent essay ‘The Faux-Vintage Photo’.

Caroline Hamilton is a Killings columnist. She is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne investigating the future of publishing, writing and reading. She has also written a book about the publishing success of Dave Eggers, One Man Zeitgeist.

When cinematographer Don McAlpine (‘Breaker’ Morant, Patriot Games, Moulin Rouge!) accepted his deserved Raymond Longford Award, he described the film industry as ‘fashion driven, facile and egocentric’. It was presumably meant to be a joke about Hollywood, but sadly it seemed to perfectly sum up the awards and its dumbed-down coverage. There was a disproportionate focus on what people were wearing, a model presenting an award, ads for Hollywood blockbusters, advertorials for upcoming films written into some of the presentations and actors being credited for their Hollywood films rather than their Australian films (‘Twilight’s Xavier Samuel!’).

I guess I should have seen it coming when switching on Channel 9 I caught the end of Two and a Half Men and then saw an advertisement for a reality show, in which footage of a guy running into a tree was replayed three times. The coverage itself began with vacuous red-carpet interviews by Julia Morris and Richard Wilkins, who by focusing on celebrity and fashion rather than the cinematic craftsmanship of the Australian film industry made sure that the awards came across as light entertainment.

During the actual ceremony the most painful element was every nominated best film being presented as a ‘comedy’ song, regardless of the content of the film. The fun and irreverent Red Dog got a fun and irreverent ditty, but so did The Hunter and The Eye of the Storm (take that, films adapted from literary novels, now you’re cut down to size!), and so did Oranges and Sunshine and Snowtown, films about traumatic events. If the songs had provided witty and clever observations about the films they may have worked, but instead they were just rhyming recaps of the plots. Curiously, Mad Bastards, a film about troubled Indigenous Australian men, did not get the same treatment. Instead we saw a song from the Mad Bastards soundtrack performed live, which was a welcome highlight of the ceremony. But it did leave me wondering who decided Mad Bastards was off-limits for a comedy song while Oranges and Sunshine (a film about forced child migration) and Snowtown (a film about the ‘bodies in the barrels’ serial killings) were not.

It wasn’t all bad. Pretty much everything Geoffrey Rush said was wonderful, and awarding filmmaker Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds, Toomelah) with the Byron Kennedy Award for his contribution to contemporary Australian cinema was an excellent move. I personally would have preferred to see Mad Bastards and Oranges and Sunshine clean up, as they are both well-crafted films, moving dramas with a sense of hope, with subject matter that went beyond the confines of the cinema. However, it was still great to see Snowtown do so well: it’s the kind of brave, bold and purposeful film that Australia should be proud of, and the complete antithesis of the manufactured glitzy side of the industry the awards were perpetuating. Plus, Richard Wilkins hated it.

I was a little disappointed, but not surprised, that Red Dog won the Samsung AACTA Award for Best Film and the AFI Members’ Choice Award as I thought it was the least deserving of all films nominated. I certainly don’t begrudge Red Dog for being popular or for being made in the first place, despite my not particularly enjoying it. I’m glad such films continue to be made in Australia, as they contribute to film diversity. Unlike some commentators, who think the industry is in crisis every time they see a film they don’t respond well to, I think there would be something wrong if I loved every Australian film.

Still, I wish a film that aspired to more than Red Dog got the top gong. Its win did sum up the overall attitude of the ceremony and Channel 9’s coverage, and that was to devalue films that aspired to be more than light entertainment. I prefer to ignore the ill-informed and knee-jerk response that Australian cinema is all doom and gloom, and I think the attempt by AACTA to actively debunk the myth is necessary and impressive. I just wish they didn’t swing the pendulum so hard to replace one set of misrepresentations with another.

Full list of all ACCTA winners and nominees

Thomas Caldwell is a Killings columnist, and a writer/broadcaster specialising in film criticism.

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