That's not how I remember it...

WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
version said:
Shame I couldn't flesh this one out. It's something I feel very strongly, but struggle to articulate. I need to come up with a term for it, or find one someone else has.
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Granular temporality? The football thread did something similar this end jogging Football Italia’s theme tune in my neural synapses.
 
M

martin

----
I remember seeing black and white footage of the Beatles and the Stones (in their 'mop top / introduced by Jimmy Savile' phases) as a kid in the early '80s, and it seemed so antiquated - like something beamed in from WW2. Even now, I can't imagine them or Hitler existing in colour. Insane to think you could still buy black and white TVs in the '80s.

What makes me do a spit take now is if I see '80s archive TV stuff where they're talking about the internet or in-flight movies. For some reason I thought in-flight films were some recent-ish (as in 2000s-onwards) thing...but I didn't get out of the UK much before then.

'Endsleigh League Extra' seems like another planet now.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
version said:
I think it's a phenomenon of mediation and technological progress. You can't go back, memory can be vague and the image is powerful. It usurps memory and tricks you into thinking that's how it was, or that's how you remember it. That the 90s were grainy, the 40s were black and white. You know the way your eyes operate and that you're watching a recording, but it's the closest you can get to looking directly at the past and there's an immediacy and potency that comes with actually seeing something.
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I remember an experiment (well, the general thrust of it anyway, details I'm not so sure) where they photoshopped people into pictures of places where they had never been - like say by the Parthenon or some other landmark - and then said something like "Remember you nipped to Rome for a weekend in 1993" or whatever and apparently it was surprisingly common for them to say "Oh... yeah, yeah I'd forgotten about that".
 
version

version

Well-known member
Bit of a tangent to the initial post, but it's been interesting to see the retroactive editing that's been enabled by the switch to digital, e.g. Beyonce being able to remove an offensive lyric from a song more or less immediately, Netflix cutting whole scenes from shows.

It's not a new thing to go back and tweak things but the ease with which it can be done is new. You get people joking about patch updates for albums like they're talking about software now.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
Another tangent - i find it fascinating how we can contextualise footage instinctively - e.g we can tell immediately whether it's live or acted, which era and which country, based on subconsciously detected cues like: the film/video stock, subtle details of the the setting, the tone of voice, as well as i reckon even more subtle clues such as how the camera moves and whether or not there is artificial lighting, which are hard to register unless you understand something of how tv/film is made.

like that game we used to play where you name that tune or ad on the tv, we can identify characteristics that betray origins of whatever we're watching incredibly quickly and rarely get it wrong innit?

& there's very little spoofing of those identifiers, though occasionally you'll see some pastiche trying to be like the 80's or whatever, it always looks rubbish and is transparently fake

d'you even get what i'm on about here?
 
shiels

shiels

_
sufi said:
& there's very little spoofing of those identifiers, though occasionally you'll see some pastiche trying to be like the 80's or whatever, it always looks rubbish and is transparently fake

d'you even get what i'm on about here?
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yes I do know what you mean. I think we are highly attuned and build our identity and sense of self around cultural environment and certain familiar objects, and there’s a deep sadness and confusion almost too big to think about and articulate…nausea in how technology has moved so quick and pulled the rug from under us , in terms of how we place ourselves in the here and now and relate.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
shiels said:
yes I do know what you mean. I think we are highly attuned and build our identity and sense of self around cultural environment and certain familiar objects, and there’s a deep sadness and confusion almost too big to think about and articulate…nausea in how technology has moved so quick and pulled the rug from under us , in terms of how we place ourselves in the here and now and relate.
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Dall-E and Adam Curtis and the entire Movie Colorisation industry all exploit this, but we generally spot the organic from the artificial effortlessly
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
version said:
Anyone find themselves struggling with the disconnect between footage of the past and how it actually looked at the time? I can't really envision the 90s, despite living through them, because the grainy footage we have now seems to have usurped what I actually saw. The 90s were grainy the way the 50s were black and white.
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Quite aside from film quality, though, one thing I've found with seeing news footage (in particular) from the 90s is how notably posh the newsreaders sound. The absence of regional accents stands out too.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
martin said:
I remember seeing black and white footage of the Beatles and the Stones (in their 'mop top / introduced by Jimmy Savile' phases) as a kid in the early '80s, and it seemed so antiquated - like something beamed in from WW2. Even now, I can't imagine them or Hitler existing in colour. Insane to think you could still buy black and white TVs in the '80s.
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What's crazy is there is actually plenty of colour footage from WWII (and of Hitler in particular, since it was Germany that pioneered the tech).
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
6ovr8z.jpg
 
version

version

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
I remember an experiment (well, the general thrust of it anyway, details I'm not so sure) where they photoshopped people into pictures of places where they had never been - like say by the Parthenon or some other landmark - and then said something like "Remember you nipped to Rome for a weekend in 1993" or whatever and apparently it was surprisingly common for them to say "Oh... yeah, yeah I'd forgotten about that".
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Do you think this was because they'd genuinely been tricked into believing it or because they'd deferred to authority?
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
version said:
Do you think this was because they'd genuinely been tricked into believing it or because they'd deferred to authority?
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You've reminded me of a post that I'd forgotten about which was based on an article I'd all but forgotten about at the time I wrote the post and which I'd read on the way to work one day, no doubt half-asleep. But this is a thread about memory so let's see what I can dredge up... I think, in fact I'm pretty sure, that the article was basically saying that photos showing someone in a specific place were so powerful that they tricked people pretty much every time. I'm also fairly sure that in the article they didn't offer any proof of that, that's not to say that they may not have had some good reason to make that claim but it was a short article and if they did have reasons they were not included. Really the only thing I can think is that after people said "oh yeah I remember that" they then told them about the trick and asked them if they had been fooled or what.
 
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