Films are made by people living in a particular time and place, so they inevitably reflect its values, fears and hopes. Sometimes they also change those values. Looking at cinema this way turns any film into a window on the society that produced it.
A mirror of its time
- Post-war American science fiction such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is often read as a reflection of Cold War paranoia.
- Italian neorealism, with films like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), showed poverty in post-war Italy using real locations and non-professional actors.
- 1970s American films like Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men reflected urban decline and distrust after Vietnam and Watergate.
What could not be shown
From 1934 to the late 1960s, Hollywood followed the Production Code (often called the Hays Code), which restricted depictions of sex, crime and religion and required that wrongdoing be punished. It was replaced by the rating system in 1968. Censorship tells us as much about a society’s values as the films themselves.
Films that changed things
- Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988) helped free Randall Dale Adams, who had been wrongfully convicted of murder.
- Blackfish (2013) increased public criticism of keeping orcas in captivity; SeaWorld announced in 2016 that it would end its orca breeding program.
- Films about civil rights, AIDS, climate and other issues have raised awareness, though measuring their direct effect is difficult.
Identity, time and the human condition
Cinema also explores questions that go beyond a specific era: who we are, how we deal with loss, love and death. Films like Moonlight (2016) explore identity; others, like Boyhood (2014), filmed over twelve years, play with time itself; still others, like the work of Ingmar Bergman or Yasujirō Ozu, focus on family, faith and mortality. Storytelling on screen creates a shared experience that can build empathy between very different people.
Watching with this lens
When you watch a film, ask what it assumes is normal, who is at the center and who is missing, and what it fears or hopes for. Older films may look dated, but that is part of what makes them revealing.
Cinema’s role in how we understand the past is explored in film and history, and its power to connect cultures in understanding other cultures through film.
