All Movies Are Modern

Akira Kurosawa always claimed that he didn't make "period" films. No matter what the characters were wearing or what historical period they seemed to be inhabiting, Kurosawa always saw his films as modern-day films, dealing, perhaps somehwat metaphorically, with modern-day issues. This is obviously not a new idea, but it is interested to view historical films as metaphors for their period of production. Film scholarship is all about context (this is also true of Art History and many other scholarly pursuits of the arts). You can't view "Ben Hur" and "Gladiator" as period films in quite the same way, even though the period of history they ostensibly cover is comparable. Their production context was completely different, politically, economically and historically. "Ben Hur" would never be made today, or if it were, it would be substantially different.

People often comment that modern movies are "more realistic" than historical films of the past. The production systems certainly have made it easier to suspend disbelief, but let's think about what we mean by "realistic" for a moment. Any Western that portrays the white settlers as the "good guys" would be considered "not realistic" by today's audience, but entirely believable by an audience in the mid-1940s. It's all about the politics of today, not of the 1880s. Besides that, the attention to historical detail would be different today (even though the "wild west" is myth, not history, but that's another discussion...), allowing a modern audience to more readily plug into what's being presented as being "realistic". As an audience, our physical burden of proof has increased enormously from the 1950s to today, thanks to modern special effects. So, realism in film really consists of two things: how well the behavior of the characters reflects the social norms (and politics) of the production time (not the historical time) and how much attention is paid to the physical re-creation of the world the characters inhabit.

So, the next time you're watching a period film (or, for that matter, a science fiction film), think about when it was made, not when it's set. That's really its historical period.