Every decade has a story to tell, and these films can certainly attest to that. The criteria for this list is simply that the films must take place prominently within one decade. So, because they inhabit multiple decades, don’t expect to see Love & Mercy, Steve Jobs or Straight Outta Compton on this particular list. Today, I look at ten films of 2015 and more importantly, the ten decades which they depict.
[tps_header]1900s: Crimson Peak[/tps_header]
Starting this list is the underrated Crimson Peak, a nineteen-hundreds ghost story romance which captures the decade with its distinct production design and denotative allusions (e.g. antiquated cameras, medical utensils, etc.). Perhaps the most powerful of these cultural indicators is simply the depiction of a dying aristocracy and the mysterious haunting of the dilapidated manor giving these ideas weight.
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[tps_header]1910s: Testament of Youth[/tps_header]
What better way to capture the nineteen-tens than to remind us of one of the century’s great tragedies. This film’s depiction of the war subverts the cold bloodbath and innumerable death count of its preceding war dramas, opting instead to provide crushing context to the personal loss of not only its central character, but to the nation of Britain as a whole.
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[tps_header]1920s: The Danish Girl[/tps_header]
For the nineteen-twenties is The Danish Girl, which depicts a landmark event concerning an issue that is widely discussed to this day. Perhaps not so much a film about the nineteen-twenties as much as it is a film about the ills of societal norms stifling individuality. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing film whose historical context is as important to the decade as it is to the psychology of its transgender protagonist.
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[tps_header]1930s: Assassination[/tps_header]
Assassination takes a period in the nineteen-thirties marked by cultural and political complexities of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea. Assassination turns these complexities on their head as a rambunctious actioner about a group of Korean assassins who team up to take out a Japanese governor.
[tps_header]1940s: Son of Saul[/tps_header]
Films set in the nineteen-forties are almost always synonymously placed with the Second World War. Son of Saul specifically centres on the notorious Auschwitz, only one of multiple stages of the decade’s — and perhaps the century’s — most massively scaled, institutionalized tragedy. Son of Saul recounts this as a mere backdrop — literal background noise — but its context remains a gaping reminder of one of humanity’s great failures.
[tps_header]1950s: Carol[/tps_header]
Not as palpably indicative of nineteen-fifties’ aesthetic culture as maybe Brooklyn, which would probably make it a more ideal candidate visually. However, Carol powerfully evokes the nineteen-fifties’ American middle-class culture exactly as it was: a cultural tyrant of repressed gender roles, oppressive culture conformity and the veritable bondage known as the “nuclear family.”
[tps_header]1960s: Legend[/tps_header]
A true-life gangster biopic about the Kray twins, whose meteoric rise and fall had taken place in the club scene of nineteen-sixties pop and psychedelia. With that, also a plethora of drug consumption, corrupt government officials, warring gangster factions, anarchic power struggles in city streets, mythologizing of criminal subcultures and brotherly hatred.
[tps_header]1970s: The Stanford Prison Experiment[/tps_header]
Unlike the other entries on this list, The Stanford Prison Experiment is probably the most contained. But as modern context would suggest, the eponymous experiment remains one of the most intriguing accounts of human psychology in a hypothetical, anarchical prison environment. Like the experiment, the film itself seems to be a model, addressing the very nature of detainment and authority.
[tps_header]1980s: McFarland[/tps_header]
Of the ten decades, this cinematic entry is unfortunately the least discussed. Very little would indicate this to be a film set in the nineteen-eighties (the sharper viewer could point out the subtle indicants), but McFarland nevertheless reminds us of the societal crutch of the lower-class minority which had existed then as it still does today, whilst telling a predictable but moving true story of a cultural struggle on and off the track.
[tps_header]1990s: The End of the Tour[/tps_header]
We end the century not with a bang, but on a more quiet, meditative retrospective on two individuals. The End of the Tour is a low-key depiction of the real life encounter between Rolling Stones editor David Lipsky and the late David Foster Wallace, prior to the publication of his colossally successful novel, “Infinite Jest.” It’s not showy or bombastic, but The End of the Tour remains one of the years most interesting screenplays and conversational pieces. It’s a remarkable film, exposing the very mind behind a novel which had defined a postmodern nineteen-nighties for a great many people.
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