The article examines how old imaging technologies figure in AMC’s Mad Men, including the Kodak slide projector and the Super 8 home movie, and more broadly speaking, postwar advertising and ideals of home and family. It links the nostalgia for these old media to contemporary masculinity and the ephemeral nature of new media in order to question what significance the baby boom era holds today.
All in the Family. 1973. Seasons 1 to 9, first broadcast January 11, 1973 by CBS. Created by LearNorman.
2.
An American Family. 1973. Episodes 1 to 12, first broadcast May 30. 1970 by PBS. Created by GilbertCraig.
3.
BallM.1998. Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present. Dartmouth, MA: Dartmouth University Press.
4.
BarthesR.1982. Camera lucida: Reflections on photography, 2nd ed.New York: Hill and Wang.
5.
BoymS.2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
6.
ForgacsP.2007. Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal reflections on home movies. In Mining the home movie: Excavations in histories and memories, edited by ZimmermannP. R.IshizukaK. L., 47–56. Berkeley: University of California Press.
7.
GuffeyE.2006. Retro: The cultural of revival. New York: Reaktion Books.
8.
KuhnA.1991. Remembrance. In Family snaps: The meaning of domestic photography, edited by SpenceJ.HollandP., 17–25. London: Virago.
9.
Mad Men. 2007. Episodes 1-13, Season 1, first broadcast July 19, 2007. by AMC. Created by WeinerM.
10.
Man with a Movie Camera. 1929. Directed by VertovD.Los Angeles, CA: Image Entertainment. DVD.
11.
MulveyL.1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen16 (3): 8–16.
12.
SprenglerC.2009. Screening nostalgia: Populuxe props and Technicolor aesthetics in contemporary American film. New York: Berghahn Books.
13.
TodorovT.1970. The fantastic: A structural approach to a literary genre, translated by HowardR.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
14.
Van DijckJ.2007. Mediated memories in the digital age (Cultural memory in the present). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
15.
ZimmermannP. R.1995. Reel families: A social history of amateur film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
16.
ZimmermannP. R.1996. Geographies of desire: Cartographies of gender, race, nation and empire in amateur film. Film History8 (1): 85–98.
17.
ZimmermannP. R.IshizukaK. L.2007. Mining the home movie: Excavations in histories and memories. Berkeley: University of California Press.