This article addresses the ways in which two recent works of digital cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) revive classical (photochemical) cinema through what is termed ‘nostalgic remediation’. Rather than seeing nostalgia as ironic, ahistorical pastiche, as in Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodern nostalgia films, this article asks: how can we understand nostalgia as part of our own lived, affective experience of film within today’s new media ecology? To answer this question, it draws on theories of post-celluloid adaptation and remediation to demonstrate the ambivalent relationships between historical and current media platforms seen in digital cinema. These ambivalences, it is argued, reflect the broader anxieties and aspirations that arise in times of technological and social transition, such as the changes brought about by the digitization of media at the turn of the twenty-first century. Hugo and Paprika perfectly illustrate the delicate tension of nostalgic remediation, which shifts between transcending celluloid cinema and longing for its return; between the recovery and loss of cinema’s historical memory; and between the concepts of old and new media themselves.

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