Cultural Nostalgia and the Art of Making Films
by Meredith King
The current cultural moment is filled with nostalgia. There’s recent nostalgia, reflected as 80s teen movies are recreated for Super Bowl commercials. There’s slightly older nostalgia, exposing the seedy under belly of the early 1960s in Mad Men. We’ve even taken it to a trans-Atlantic shared nostalgia for the simplicity (or not?) of aristocratic life in wealthy, Edwardian England through the critically acclaimed series, Downton Abbey.
The Oscars are not immune to this trend, naturally. Out of the ten best picture nominations, all but one, The Descendants, take place largely in another decade. Even The Descendents works in the concept of personal nostalgia with ancestry and families. While some movies, such as The Help, The Tree of Life, and War Horse are merely set within a different time period, others not only play with the cultural nostalgia, but also with the nostalgia for specific acts of artistic innovation.
The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris go beyond cultural nostalgia and move in to artistic nostalgia, during which each of these films, in their own ways, reflects back upon the history of their art forms, exploring particular innovations and game-changers from within the nostalgia framework. The first two seem to revel in the artistic process of the time that is being explored. The latter, however, somewhat suggests that the fascination of the modern-day artist with the past moment of artistic innovation, is a romanticized notion that, while worth exploring, perhaps does not have as much to teach us starry-eyed artists who long for yesteryear may have hoped.
Both Hugo and The Artist want to look at moment of cultural innovation, particularly as it pertains to film. Hugo looks into the possible life of the man who was once responsible for innovations in film effects. Mélièr, as Hugo reflects him, needs to be shown that his technical innovations matter. Clearly, they do, as they inspired director and noted film enthusiast to reflect back on them over one hundred years since Mélièr’s famous A Trip to the Moon debuted. Hugo wants the viewer to appreciate the innovation as society moves on from it, noting its importance in the development of the art of film.
The Artist brings film viewers in to familiar territory in exploring the very essential change that happened between silent film and “talkies.” Arguably one of the best films of all time, Singing in the Rain, takes place at the same cultural moment. What The Artist does so well here is completely engage the audience in that cultural moment. The film really makes the audience think about the place of noises, not just talking, in our current cinema. It is hard not to notice the lack of sound effects as one watches the film, making the transition that much more poignant. In this film, even more than the others, the audience is meant to see the difficulty that comes through the process of implementing that particular technical innovation, while still seeing how much it informs contemporary filmmaking
All three films are different stylistically, but Midnight in Paris separates itself even further with its conception of the contemporary nostalgia for past artistic innovation as a false nostalgia. It seems to suggest that if one were to travel back in time to one’s own personal high-water mark for artistic movements (Paris in the 1920s for the writer protagonist), the people who you so admire would be looking to a different, even further, cultural moment for their inspiration. In this way, Midnight in Paris accepts and plays with the artist’s need for nostalgia toward creative innovations and artistic movements of the past, while still accepting that there is validity in remembering the current cultural artistic moment outside of the romanticization of times of yore.
Moving back to the contemporary cultural moment, in which Oscar buzz is certainly important, it is worth noting that the two films discussed in this article as reveling in the artistic processes of the past are both about filmmaking, specifically technological changes that revolutionized the art form. The third, however, is about the process of writing a book, and looking to the past for inspiration. Perhaps the filmmaker gets excited by what it would have been like to be there at the time of the innovation. Perhaps the writer, more cynically, sees that the innovators, no matter their time period, are frustrated and nostalgic for a by-gone era, right up until they move forward rather than backward and find a way to push firmly in to the future.
