Disco Nostalgia

Emerging from a work-hard-party-hard culture of the late 70s and early 80s, discotheques captured the popular — and therefore filmic — imagination like few other venues. It was foremost the locale where artists became household names, such as Gloria Gaynor, The Bee Gees, and Donna Summer. Their commercial and critical success inevitably demanded disco’s rendering on film, allowing individual films to become monuments to respective artists. The discotheque was also home to some of the most prescient topics of its era: the rise of cocaine and the state violence that accompanied it; the persistence and transformation of segregation; and the increasingly unstable nature of employment. While the dance floor embodied the dominant insecurities of post-New Deal America, it at the same time became a place of refuge from those very problems, providing dancers and audience members alike with a romping time. In the 90s, as the nostalgia film eventually directed its gaze towards the 70s and 80s, we get films preoccupied with the loss of the dance floor and its social cohesion, but also acutely aware of the aforementioned forces that underlied disco and the fleeting nature of any cultural moment.