Get out of retromania

Halloween is over and the ghosts are banished. Only in pop culture do they continue to wreak havoc, namely as hauntology. The philosopher Mark Fisher, who died in 2017, famously borrowed the term from Derrida, who in “Marx’s Ghosts” contradicted the “end of history” invoked by Francis Fukuyama: the present is haunted by ghosts from the past. Since then, a diffuse “everything used to be better” vibe has been wafting through pop discourse, in which melancholic men in particular are stuck in an endless loop of unrealized utopias. Simon Reynolds took up this in “Retromania” in 2011.

Now the London philosopher Matt Bluemink counters this with “The Future Is Not Lost: On Music, Technology, and the Creation of New Worlds”. For him it is clear that genuine new beginnings and utopian thinking are still possible. His volume of essays is pure anti-hauntology: the avant-garde producer Sophie

Fisher famously asked whether current music would have shocked nineties listeners or whether it would have sounded familiar because it sounded familiar. Taylor Swift certainly wouldn't irritate anyone. The catalog of Nyege Nyege, the underground label from Uganda, definitely. But the fact that “Thriller” is at number 13 in the German album charts now seems to prove Fisher right again.

Reiner Holzemer's documentary "Leica - A Century in Pictures" also takes a look back into the past. Iconic images were taken with a 35mm camera, such as that of the soldier hoisting the red victory flag on the Berlin Reichstag on May 2, 1945. Oskar Barnack brought the 35mm format camera onto the market in 1925, thereby laying the foundation for photojournalism.

The documentary shows photographers at work with their beloved Leica: for example the New Yorker Joel Meyerowitz, the chronicler of the Arctic Ragnar Axelsson, the investigative journalist Jane Evelyn Atwood, the star photographer Greg Williams and the war reporter Dominic Nahr. Andy Summers, himself a photographer and guitarist with The Police, contributed to the score. Despite the occasional advertising hit, the film makes you want to immediately capture the ghosts of tomorrow with your own camera.