Chungking Express - English subtitled
More info
Retro Reels: The '90s
A film series in which iconic films from the 1990s are placed in context: how did films respond to the prevailing existential angst at the time and what can we learn from it? With an introduction or post-discussion each time.
Special: series
The 1990s are calling, and they want their angst back.
There are uncanny parallels between the 1990s and our current times. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we thought that history had ended. A period of freedom, accelerating technology, and economic prosperity followed. But unlimited possibilities also led to existential dread. The pop culture of the 1990s captured this angst in different ways. Grunge, rave, and slacker culture walked the silver lining between progress and nostalgia, opportunism and fear. In cinema, new technologies were embraced, and the tension between reality and illusion became dominant.
What is real?
A pervasive sense of anxiety and uncertainty characterizes our current times. Climate change, political instability, disinformation, constant connectivity, and ideological conflict lead to a hallucinating situation in which fiction and reality are blurred, and social inequalities and injustices are magnified and push more and more people into precarious situations.
The starting point in the 1990s may be different, but the social effects are similar to those of our time. How did 1990s cinema deal with angst?
Theo Ploeg is a sociologist and journalist who teaches at the Academy of Arts Maastricht.
