Period Film

A dramatic film set in a time period other than contemporary, with a great attention to period detail but, unlike historical films, often dealing with fictional characters or events and using period settings and costumes to increase visual attractiveness. The necessary requirement is that the portrayed period should have its own marked appearance and style -- hence among the most popular are the Victorian era, the turn of the century, and the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the most well-known and successful progenitors of this form are the triumvirate of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Usually crafting their stories from works of great literature, especially the writings of E.M. Forster, the trio lovingly evokes the mood of an era, adding the tensions of class and the delicate transgressions of 19th-century English ballrooms to often rather traditional romances. While the image brought to mind for most when hearing the term period drama is the English countryside and the 19th century, give or take a decade, the Merchant-Ivory films are far from the only period dramas. Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, based on the Edith Wharton novel, depicts New York City in the late 19th century, while the BBC series, I, Claudius is set in the courts of the Roman Empire. As the ability to reproduce time periods effortlessly has increased, along with cinema's boredom with the fashions of our time, the ‘90s have seen a great swelling in the popularity of these films.

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