Can there be a Progressive Nostalgia? Layering Time in Pride’s Retro-Heritage

or experimental factor, the nostalgic narrative emphasises the importance of time in the lives of its characters, and to the development of the narrative as well. Pride is a coming of age story, or of several ages, with Joe coming out, Gethin reuniting with his mother, and Mark eventually learning of his HIV diagnosis, to impart to a newly conscious Joe the moral that ‘life is short’. This coming of age includes an affectionately infantilising relationship of LGSM to the villagers: Mark likens gay pride to standing up to bullies, and when he jumps up to make a speech, Hefina sharply tells him to get his feet off the table. Time also belongs to the creation of pathos. The film’s climactic events employ the melodramatic temporality noted by Franco Moretti of being ‘too-late’ (2005): a committee meeting is rescheduled by three hours to prevent Dai from intervening on behalf of LGSM as he is still on his way back from London; Mark bumps into a lover after the triumphant Pits and Perverts gig who has already learned of his diagnosis; and Joe’s mother withholds the news that Gethin has been hospitalised in a homophobic attack. Although stopping short of avant-garde abstraction, the film’s temporal layering nevertheless reaches a bewildering degree. During the first visit of LGSM to Onllwyn, a local picket, Carl goes to shake Jonathan’s hand after Jonathan’s legal advice gets him released from jail, replicating the image on the miners’ banner of ‘two hands shaking’ which has just been the topic of conversation, part of a wider motif of handshaking, which will also be depicted in the film’s final image. Playing in the background is ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’, whose lyrics bear ironically on the situation; but rather than The Supremes’ 1966 original, it is the less well-remembered 1982 Phil Collins cover version—a more precise marker of the historical setting and itself a painstaking reproduction of the by-then outdated studio sound of Motown. It segues into ‘Karma Chameleon’ (a song about transformation) by Culture Club, whose lead singer Boy George introduced the idea of a ‘gender-bender’ to the language but who Bayman: Can there be a Progressive Nostalgia? Layering Time in Pride’s Retro-Heritage 13 in 1984 was not publicly out as gay. Showing the past as embryonic with the present, this moment is one of the implied presence of gay culture within the mainstream at the specific juncture after liberation but before mainstream acceptance. As indicated by the motif of sonic transition, music literally takes precedence in retro narratives for its ability to be at once the carrier of meaning, affective charge, collective memory, and temporal shifts. The women remark to Jonathan on the local historical significance of ‘a first this—men on the dancefloor’. Jonathan requests the song ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’, a moment of transformation in a film called Pride, but still a marker of the past within the past, as Jonathan ends his bravura dance performance on the line ‘God I miss disco’. Carl is encouraged to join in by fellow villager Hefina, who states that she saw him dancing around naked as a child; this gives continuity to the scene’s representation of a lifestyle change from traditional masculinity towards a more modern acceptance of myriad ways of being. The scene exemplifies the film’s jumble of temporal markers, as it also furthers its principle of transformation. Its brilliance as a stand-out set piece lies in its encapsulation of historical change in one exhilarating moment, locating the passage from old to new in the enjoyment of the retro item (the disco song ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’). It contains further layers still. Jonathan is the one LGSM member to represent longevity, providing a bridge with gay liberation and having all of the most nostalgic lines, responding to an admonition to show less ‘flamboyance’ with ‘I haven’t spoken 1950s in quite a while’. He functions as the LGSM’s contact with history and anchors the motif of transformation that underlies the film. But the scene ends on an implied elegy for the soon-to-be devastated community, as the characters go home at closing time and a brass cadence plays over a longshot of the terraced village streets. On LGSM’s return to Onllwyn months later, the film’s structural principle of repetition with transformation returns as the female members of the hall spontaneously stand to sing ‘Bread and Roses’, a song about the drudgery of ‘marching, marching’ and the desire for future pleasure (as well as another multiple reference point).6 In this structural repetition, the transformation is that the miners’ 6 The phrase ‘Bread and Roses’ originated in a speech by Rose Schneiderman, which inspired a poem Bayman: Can there be a Progressive Nostalgia? Layering Time in Pride’s Retro-Heritage 14 vision of future liberation will remain unrealised, as will the class-conscious socialism to which mining communities adhered for over a century. Repetitions with transformations bridge the initial opposition of LGSM and the mining community—Gethin returns to the Welsh village of his estranged mother while Jonathan is a reminder of the pre-liberation past. Yet in its relation to time, the world of the miners, encapsulated by the village of Onllwyn, lies in dialectical opposition to that of LGSM. When LGSM first decide to contact the mining community by picking it on the map, a change of pace immediately occurs in a cut to an empty hall, generating comic suspense because it seems like the old woman Gwen might be too slow (‘too late’) to answer the telephone which sits bathed in a shaft of sunlight. The air of almost heavenly quiet is emphasised as a harp plays the notes of ‘Solidarity Forever’, its first return since the archive footage of the opening credits. Another rousing sonic transition changes the pace back again as the harp is replaced by drums, heralding our return to the bookshop and the LGSM members jumping up and down singing. When LGSM first arrive in Onllwyn, a country and western band called Falling Leaves is playing, their autumnal name recalling an already dated American music which would have been old fashioned even in the 1980s, and that furthermore dwells on a mythical and now vanished West. Dai repeats several times how the miners’ banner is ‘more than a hundred years old, mind’ and as an example of craft, it is distinct from the modern (but now obsolete) printing technology used by LGSM. They are taken out to a Welsh castle— ‘none of your Norman rubbish’, thus predating the 11th-century invasion—and their guide Cliff recites a poem of Onllwyn’s originary legend. The miners’ existence even has a geological basis, as Cliff recalls that the mine is built on the ‘The Great Atlantic Fault’ that ‘our fathers used to talk about’ as ‘the dark artery’. with the same title by James Oppenheim published in 1911, and became the popular name for the Massachusetts textile strike of 1912. The song has been recorded many times and is referred to in various guises including as the inspiration for the logo of the Democratic Socialists of America, the name of a London-based theatre company and the title of Ken Loach’s 2000 film about the ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign in Los Angeles. Bayman: Can there be a Progressive Nostalgia? Layering Time in Pride’s Retro-Heritage 15 These uneven temporal dynamics are replicated spatially. The villagers’ lives are governed by regularity, community, family and stability, and are limited to a few terraces bounded by the surrounding natural landscape. The gay scene in London is instead a realm of impulsive decisions, random hookups, coming out, leaving home, emergency meetings, live performances, life-changing diagnoses and sudden attacks. The journey to Onllwyn is long, shown each time through snaking roads and rolling green, then later snowy, hills in panoramic vistas and an aerial view of the expanse of water underneath the Severn Bridge (a grandeur that is finally movingly recreated in London by the camera movements that show the miners arriving in Hyde Park, to one further, instrumental, return of ‘Solidarity Forever’). When villager Cliff eventually quietly comes out as gay to Hefina while they make sandwiches in the village hall, Hefina’s response—that she’s known since around 1968—contrasts with the more comic scene in which miner’s wife Gail passionately kisses LGSM member Steph after their night out in London. Spatio-temporal categories oppose spontaneity and openness to insularity and tradition, and they stand in for more intricate political realities, repeating the commonplace geographical conception of the coalfields as ‘the antithesis’ (Kelliher 2017: 110) to London’s cosmopolitan diversity – a conception which as Diarmaid Kelliher (2017) notes overlooks the dynamic political and organisational trajectories of the miners, including South Wales miners, in the years leading up to the strike.7 Just as the film erases Mark Ashton’s political context and active Communist Party membership (see Jackson, 2018) for a narrative of spontaneous awakening, so the ‘mutuality of solidarity’ (Kelliher 2017: 112) of miners and post-68 liberation movements is overlooked in favour of a narrative of neighbourly support and family history. To analyse the film in terms of temporal layering thus demonstrates how time functions as not solely a unit of measurement but a source of meaning. Such meaning ultimately determines the political function of nostalgia in any given artefact. The film’s structure of repetition with transformation ends on a triumphant closing 7 Including solidarity actions with the 1976–8 strike of mostly Asian women at Grunwicks, antiApartheid groups, and the Anti-Nazi League. Bayman: Can there be a Progressive Nostalgia? Layering Time in Pride’s Retro-Heritage 16 march over Westminster Bridge one year later on the attendance of the NUM en masse at the next gay pride march. The march stages the miners physically giving way to LGSM (Figure 3), thei

Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change. By combining nostalgia, retro, and heritage, Pride manifests an artistic practice I refer to as temporal layering, which draws attention to how any single moment implies potential relationships with numerous interacting others. I use this notion to understand both the role that the 1984-5 miners' strike assumes in cultural revisions of the 1980s, and the kind of cinematic past that Pride presents. This past can be understood as a development in the heritage genre appropriate to reimagining modern British history, especially that of the 1980s, that could be called retroheritage. By paying attention to the varied temporal layers thus present in Pride, a new perspective is offered on how nostalgia's presumed conservatism sits alongside the 'left-wing melancholy' (Traverso, 2017) that has dominated in the era of defeats since the 1980s. My ultimate aim is to ask what potential nostalgia may have when envisaging a different future. 1 In telling how a derided minority makes its way to the centre of public acceptability, Pride imparts a message of the importance of unexpected change. Its narrative elaborates the question of what constitutes the mainstream, and what transforms it; for at the same time that the cause of lesbian and gay rights finds unforeseen proponents in the mining communities, the latter's class consciousness loses its definitive place in political identification. But while Pride takes up the cause of the marginalised, it does not do so by adhering to the alternative ethos of the 1980s left. Nor does it belong to established artistic traditions in the representation of the manual working class. Pride instead employs the two ways of contemplating the past, retro and nostalgia, whose cultural significance lies primarily in their desire to please. If Pride offers an example of political filmmaking then, it is as part of the attempt to build a left populism, distinguished by the endeavour to be accessible, engaging, and widely appealing. 2 Retro and nostalgia produce more intimate ways of feeling about the past than is conventional in historical accounts. They help Pride's campaigning purpose by embodying the notion that the personal is in fact political, and their interaction is part of the film's highly dynamic treatment of time. This dynamism allows us to consider the multiple timeframes potentially inherent to any single moment, whether as memory, repetition, reference, anticipation, emergence or regression. It also suggests that change occurs not according to a pre-determined course, but by a process of interacting-one might say dialectically transformative-forces.
Such opening considerations establish the aims of this essay as firstly, to understand the treatment of time in Pride as key to its status both as entertainment and what Raphael Samuel has defended as popular history (see Samuel, 1994). It puts Pride at odds, however, with a general critical hostility to indulgence in the past as a source of pleasure. Indeed criticism has tended towards what Alastair Bonnett calls an ' anti-nostalgic position', that situates nostalgia as 'the antithesis of radicalism' (2010: 1) and finds that 'regret is a dangerous sentiment … induc [ing] resignation about the present, and so a certain acceptance of its evils' (Richard Sennett, 1977); 'in all its manifestations nostalgia is, in its praxis, conservative' (Susan Bennett, 1996); and '[ideologies] of resistance to progress hardly deserve the name of systems of thought' (Eric Hobsbawm, 1962. All citations from Bonnett, 2010: 2). As Bonnett points out, such positions do not represent ' analyses but gestures of disdain' (2010: 3). Secondly then, this essay proposes a way to analyse what it means to be simultaneously nostalgic and progressive (which not coincidentally is my own position on watching the film, as both a leftist and a child of the time when the film is set).
For in condemning longing for the past, the left condemns significant sections of its own thought and practice, as a champion of both modernity and (albeit alternative) tradition, progress and (albeit oppositional) conservation. It would be better then to acknowledge that nostalgia has a ' constitutive and inescapable nature' (Bonnett, 2010: 3), and that left wing culture has never limited itself to cosmonauts, Bauhaus living, and the benefits of technological change, but also Luddite revolt, arts and crafts, and folk music. Such acknowledgement seeks not to exempt nostalgia from criticism, nor ascribe to it some supposed predetermined political effect. It focuses instead on determining the kind of nostalgia being elicited in any given moment, and how it is elicited. The following discussion of Pride will thus ask what nostalgia has to offer beyond proof of the moribundity of the 21st-century left.

The Strike and Time
If it seems bizarre that mining imagery should repeat itself-first as activism, and second as fashion item-this reminds us that the retro interest in history is more as a repository of cultural than factual material. The continuing resonance of the strike may nevertheless be considered surprising, given that received wisdom holds it to be a relic of a bygone age. The enduring fascination the strike holds can be seen precisely in how it illuminates the curious way that incompatible and apparently irreconcilable ways of life come into relief during moments of profound change. If the alliance of miners and gay activists may appear as the ultimate unity of opposites, then a further mismatch occurs between their community-based solidity and the individualism of the Thatcher era, as well as between principled opposition and The strike's place as the emblematic event of the British 1980s helps demonstrate that time itself can be a source of meaning, and a material factor in modern politics.
The strike was both a sudden breach in the national fabric and a prolonged period of suspended animation, which had already achieved the character of a unique dramatic turning point while still ongoing, billed as a decisive confrontation between government and the trade union movement both in journalistic accounts (Crick, 1985) and in the desperate appeals for support by the miners' leader Arthur Scargill. 'no real parallel-in size, duration, and impact-anywhere in the world' (Milne, 1994: ix), victory became a question of endurance itself, of who could hold out the longest.
When impasse became finality and the miners eventually did go back, it was not to the same world, but to devastated communities and the eradication of the entire industry (Rustin, 2015).
These swirling currents of rupture, repetition, and continuity deepen through the cultural afterlife the strike has achieved. has come to act rather in the way that the 1950s did for a previous generation (see Bayman, 2016). Retro is defined by its 'half-ironic, half-longing' (Guffey, 2006: 10-1) gaze upon the bygone novelties and passing fads of the recent past, and might seem to signal a certain loss of purpose or commitment to more substantial issues of To position the 1980s as the decisive decade of the post-war era broaches a feeling that the left's own time is up, and returns us to the moment when the defeats of the left became intractable crises, or even the historic victory of free market capitalism.
These defeats saw not only the destruction of vital heavy industries, but a permanent blow to the working class as a coherent political force, receding from its primary position as the agent of change envisaged by socialism. Deindustrialisation in the UK has been cited as the cause of a range of processes from the triumph of Thatcherism and rise of New Labour, the eclipse of trade union power and the decline in popular political participation, to most recently Britain's decision to leave the European Union (Barnett, 2017). Yet these ongoing effects are signs not of new life, but decay.
In this context, Pride can be seen as one instance of what Enzo Traverso has diagnosed as the contemporary proliferation of 'left wing melancholy' (2017).
Since at least the second half of the 19th-century, the call to turn over the productive forces of industrial modernity to the common good meant that to be progressive was to belong to the left. Contemporary attempts to reassert this link by writers like Srnicek and Williams call for a 'post-work society', that uses information technology, automation, and communications to transcend wage labour to reach a 'fully post-capitalist economy, enabling a shift away from scarcity, work, and

Time and Pride
Nostalgia does not alter the sequential arrangement of events as in flashbacks, or the more experimental forms of the flashforward or montage, but it draws attention to the potential multiplicity of temporalities within a single moment via a practice I shall call temporal layering. Temporal layering can be seen already in Pride's publicity material (Figure 1).
The megaphone in the background echoes constructivist art of the 1920s, most specifically Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova's 1924 'Books!', whose suggestion of noisy movement pronounces the aim to break through conventions of formality, as it also refers to the megaphone painted on the side of the minivan used in the film. The film's many references to Soviet imagery recall 1980s radicalism, for example in Red Wedge's (1985-) appropriation of its name and logo from the not-dissimilar Lissitzky poster of 1919, and the Soviet vogue in 1980s pop culture (Guffey, 2006), exemplified by the cover design of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Two Tribes' single, which appears on the film's soundtrack. This is futurism however as a period style. Its associations of utopian possibility and the disposability of fashion act simultaneously as a retro reclaiming of the exuberant revolutionary moment of the early 20th-century by the 1980s to which the characters belong; an announcement of the trends current in the film's period setting; and a signal of the characters' place  boxes, while photographs are shot on film and developed later at a chemist. Like Proust's madeleine, the retro experience makes past and present simultaneous in sensuous terms. While retro thus animates past habits, it also acts as an audiovisual museum of subcultural bric-a-brac (Figure 2). But by bringing us back into the past at a level of everyday experience, retro invites if not so much a suspension of disbelief, then a suspension of the inescapably retrospective aspect of our position.
The spectator is invited to identify nostalgically with motivations whose eventual frustration we, unlike the characters who hold them, always know will occur, and encourages a wish for things to have been different; producing both the melodramatic longing of the 'if only…' (Modleski, 1984), and the fantasy common to history's losers of 'what if' things had turned out differently (Carr, 1961 is not solely a play on words, but another temporal layering-for not only must Joe  Perverts gig who has already learned of his diagnosis; and Joe's mother withholds the news that Gethin has been hospitalised in a homophobic attack.
Although stopping short of avant-garde abstraction, the film's temporal layering nevertheless reaches a bewildering degree. During the first visit of LGSM to Onllwyn, a local picket, Carl goes to shake Jonathan's hand after Jonathan's legal advice gets him released from jail, replicating the image on the miners' banner of 'two hands shaking' which has just been the topic of conversation, part of a wider motif of handshaking, which will also be depicted in the film's final image. Playing in the background is 'You Can't Hurry Love', whose lyrics bear ironically on the situation; but rather than The Supremes' 1966 original, it is the less well-remembered 1982 Phil Collins cover version-a more precise marker of the historical setting and itself a painstaking reproduction of the by-then outdated studio sound of Motown. It segues into 'Karma Chameleon' (a song about transformation) by Culture Club, whose lead singer Boy George introduced the idea of a 'gender-bender' to the language but who  (Figure 3), their defeat transformed into the victory of gay rights and achievement of legal equality. This finale emphasises that those who fight for a cause will never find themselves truly alone, and visualises the unexpected nature of progress in the midst of loss. The meanings produced in Pride's temporal layering thus concern the old giving way to the new, which the film specifically conceives in identity politics taking political precedence over class, performative transformation over elemental existence, and the rapid turnarounds of spontaneity over the utopian potentials of planning.
When the film opens the strike has already been ongoing for four months, with Mark watching news of its progress on TV. Its place on the news establishes its public importance as it also suggests our distance from it, and identification instead with the perspective of Mark, and by extension, LGSM. Thus the different temporalities of the film are layered so as to identify the miners with tradition and the past, and LGSM with change, and therefore the present-not solely the present of the film's action but eventually that of the viewer. The film's temporal dynamics stage the supersession of the legacy of socialist culture by a politics based more in Figure 3: Tradition giving way to change, defeat transforming into victory (screengrab from DVD).
sexual and personal identities than the economic collectivities of class. Change itself is furthermore no longer conceived as a planned march towards a utopian future but the unexpected consequence of a liberation of energy.

Left Heritage
Temporal layering can be seen at work within Pride's narrative, and it can also be employed to place the film within its contexts. Indeed, the opposition between LGSM  India (Lean, 1984), A Room with a View (Ivory, 1985) and Maurice (Ivory, 1987), which were finding particular success around the time that Pride is set (see Higson, 1993;Monk and Sargeant, 2002;Monk, 2011;Vidal, 2012a (Hampton, 1995) and Orlando (Potter, 1993). Retro-heritage takes this development further, altering both the class and historical focuses to the working and lowermiddle classes of the more recent past. The route of cultural transmission is from cinema to musical theatre rather than through the adaptations of novels, with Made in Dagenham (Cole, 2010), Billy Elliot and Pride all staged as musicals subsequent to their cinematic production. Other differences to 1980s heritage include how retroheritage focuses on conflict or rupture over accommodation and gradualism, is set in the more recently lived, rather than pre-war, past, and privileges an unofficial over official attitudes to history while embodying the uncontained emotionality of the lower orders over the restraint of their social superiors. These differences exist alongside important similarities: like 1980s heritage, retro-heritage concerns the effects of historical transformation on the personal realm, and more specifically, of the eclipse of a certain class-based lifestyle by something recognisably newer.
It is a form of popular feel-good film that is more unabashedly entertaining than the novelistic 1980s heritage, but it replicates however heritage's polished, even 'mannerist', visual style (Vidal, 2012b: 27). It also displays the personal interactions of ordinary people rather than history's great or glamorous personalities (Dyer, 2002). Heritage cinema is so called due to a perceived affinity for Thatcher's decision to make the national heritage into an industry. Critics such as Patrick Wright (1985), Robert Hewison (1987) and Andrew Higson have levelled the charge that heritage is 'symptomatic of cultural developments in Thatcherite Britain' (Higson, 1993: 93), producing an idealised image of Britain's past to draw attention away from the contemporary reality of heightened class conflict. informality of New Labour's Cool Britannia policy. But this would not be sufficient to deflect the charges frequently levelled against heritage film, in which, according to Higson, 'the past is displayed as a visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively by these films ' (1993: 91). Such criticism institutes a binary: nostalgic pastiche or social comment; display or critique; and 'in most cases the commodity on offer is an image, a spectacle, something to be gazed at. History, the past, becomes, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, "a vast collection of images" designed to delight the modern-day tourist-historian' (Higson, 1993: 95).
Once again however, the anti-nostalgic position poses inconsistencies. Indeed, Wright's literal starting point in writing On Living in an Old Country was returning to the UK after living in Canada and noting the proliferation of nostalgia; if there is anything more nostalgic than realising that the country of your birth wasn't like it used to be when you left, one would be hard pushed to find out what. Industrial conservation is, of course, conservative, of a certain kind-emerging from the fear that post-war consumerism was effecting a kind of ' corrosion from within' (Lovell, 1996: 160) on the working classes, as articulated in its most influential form in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), which seeks instead to preserve the authenticity of an independent working class culture. Mining reminds us that heritage applies not only to stately homes but also to a working class whose lives are continually uprooted by the tendency of capitalism to transform production.
A.L. Lloyd's stewardship of the National Coal Board-funded competition that led to the collection Come All Ye Bold Miners in 1951-2, aimed at preserving the folk traditions of mining culture, which was the first example of industrial heritage (Samuel, 1994). The alternative British cinematic tradition to the period costume drama can be found in the social realism of the 1960s like Room at the Top (Clayton, 1959) or This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963), films which are inspired by the spirit of Hoggart's cultural critique (Lovell, 1996) and whose nostalgia lies in what John Hill describes as their ' anxiety about the demise of the "traditional" working class, associated with work, community, and an attachment to place, in the face of  itself, as it also gives the LGBTQ community a sense of truth to their authentic selves.
Pride thus offers a more emancipatory response to deindustrialisation than the loss of male virility (Monk, 2000) or Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past … And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their and 'history' should not be taken over by the right (Monk, 2011: 12). Whether as retro, heritage, history, nostalgia or melancholy, tribute towards the past can also be a reminder of the heroism within working class history, an image of solidarity, and a desire for greater harmony than exists in the world of today.
If there is a political problem with Pride, it is not only its erasure of difference in its image of a lost homogeneity and a male dominated manual working class.
It lies also in its final conclusion that the future is unexpected. The greatest anachronism associated with the miners in Pride is their belief that they may one day consciously construct a better world system. Mark's leadership is instead governed by spontaneous inspiration and off the cuff speeches, differently to the official procedure and formal meetings of the miners. His decision to start collecting for the miners is justified with 'I know it's not been planned, it's not been thought through,

Back to the Future
This returns us to the idea I introduced near the start of this essay, that, in Svetlana Boym's words, the 20th-century 'began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia' (2001: xiv). Yet my analysis of Pride as an example of temporal layering has intended to show that nostalgia, like any way of treating time, renders its particular moment as pregnant also with others. The critics of heritage state as much when they consider its longing for the past to express reactionary ideas about the present; but if that is true, then it may equally imply a vision of a different possible future.
Like other examples of retro-heritage, Pride dramatises a cultural as much as an economic shift from working class tradition and the primacy of industrial labour into a group belonging based more on pleasure, performance, and identity. family. In social realism, the rural workers of La terra trema (Visconti, 1948) or O Canto do Mar/Song of the Sea (Cavalcanti, 1953), or indeed the miners of strike narratives such as Matewan (Sayles, 1987) and the TV serial Days of Hope (Loach, 1975), have a timeless bond with the land, which offers consolation for the deficiencies of the present through hopes of future change. In Pride, this bond is subject to a final rupture. The miners aim for a future collectivity that was never to be; LGSM live only for today, but precisely this improvisatory energy forms the basis for the actual change that the film recounts.
If we are to take seriously the criticism that nostalgia offers a vision of the world we would desire to enter into (see Hewison, 1987), then we might want to think more about not only the loss that nostalgia mourns, but the future possibilities it may hold out. I began by detailing the division between the anti-nostalgic modernists on the left, and the contemporary prevalence of 'left-wing melancholia' (Traverso, 2017). Yet by applying the notion of temporal layering, and the different potentials within any represented moment, they may not be so irreconcilable as they first appear. Srnicek and Williams, we may remember, call to 'invent the future', a task they envisage in: The The film's starting point is the commonality between two meanings of prideclass pride and gay pride. Together, the miners and LGSM represent lifestyles that are defined in opposition to neoliberal modernisation, as two communities motivated by the welfare of all, rather than an atomised or competitive individual. In dramatising a shift away from the world represented by the village labourers of Onllwyn to that of LGSM, Pride envisages tradition giving way to creativity and expressivity-thus glimpsing the ideal of a future, as Srnicek and Williams put it again, 'that frees us to create our own lives and communities ' (2016: 175). For if it is the privilege of those who control the past to determine the future, then retro, nostalgia, and commemoration also have their parts to play in forging the world anew.