Great looking historical period films

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

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Multiple periods and genders: Orlando (1992)

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Picnic at Hanging Rock is a great call up thread - watched it recently and it's one of the most evocative movies I've ever seen visually. Many scenes in the school are packed with almost occult symbolism (including lots of mirrors). A treat for the eyes really.

really love Monty Python & The Holy Grail's mucky, foggy medieval England.

The Duellists

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Duelists is good. But better if you fantasize about the young Keitel.

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The Conformist

Getting into fantasy again, Duke Of Burgundy and Morgiana have a really great look. Tale Of Tales too.

Barry Lyndon is such a great choice not just cos it looks great and has good costume design, it was shot with natural light, meaning it more or less looks exactly how it would have looked before the electric light.

i like Amadeus's glam baroque style

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FrockFlicks, a stirringly opinionated site on these films, has a few choice words on Amadeus

Admittedly, I probably wouldn't have nearly as great an interest in period film if it didn't provide an excuse for heaving bosoms on film. Does this make me a bad person?

Barry Lyndon is great because it was shot with an amazing camera that gives "natural light" which, because light is a quantity in all films, doesn't look like natural light on film.

Not so much a camera, but a f/0.7 lens originally made for the NASA Apollo lunar program to capture the far side of the moon in 1966. Basically it lets in 8 times as much light as a typical lenses around f/2.0.

As someone who cherishes a Summilux and craves a Nocticron, I would gawk at a Noctilux and worship the Zeiss f/0.7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmSDnPvslnA

I geek out over all those lenses and considered, being a photographer who *could* improve his craft on the cheapest lens, how to get a noctilux.

it's a great look but really given any camera and a focused directorial vision you could do a historical look. lots of smoky inside times back then, the uncorrected nearsightedness, and the subjectiveness of time

really the light limit was on film able to capture it all on top of the lens

The Godfather is obviously a great looking recreation of the '40s--can't vouch for its accuracy, but I think you can see a Jake LaMotta poster at some point in the film.

Was trying to think of a relatively recent film that gets the '50s or '60s right, and nothing immediately jumped to mind. (American Graffiti's close enough to its historical period to make it fairly easy.)

Maybe Something in the Air for the '60s?

(I hate 97% of all costume dramas...I'm trying to hijack the thread.)

Carol for the fifties? Wong Kar-wai for the sixties.

Rossellini's The Taking of Power by Louis XIV is very lush for a tv movie. I love the court scenes at the end where he has risen to such olympian status that people even have to courtesy his food as it is wheeled past them.

xxxxpost

Did Far From Heaven get the 50s right? I do know it looked gorgeous.

I thought "The Founder" did a good job of evoking the '50s.

^^^ I was going to suggest Far From Heaven yesterday. I don't know if the film gets much love around here, but yeah I think its hyper-stylized Sirkism looks beautiful. xp

Ed Wood does good 50s

Far From Heaven definitely got Sirk right... But it's quite stylized and pastichy. Carol more inspired by photography, somehow seemed more 'right' to me. Both films good, Carol better.

yes FFH struck me as an accurate representation of what '50s cinema looked like.

favorite period evocative:

Hard to be a God
Winstanley
Puce Moment

beautiful 60's, though otherwise flawed:

A Single Man
Llewyn Davis
The Dreamers

And Lean's Zhivago and Lawrence

I'm not the greatest fan of Llewyn Davis, but as an evocation of time and place, its impeccable.

Flowers of Shanghai also. I mean, every Hou, but Flowers of Shanghai especially. Pure visual opium.

I think what Deleuze writes about Visconti in his chapter on crystal images is some of the best writing on historical cinema ever, btw. So evocative. The whole idea is hit and miss, I still don't really understand what Ophuls and Renoir has to do with anything, but borrow the book, and just read that couple of pages.

Was trying to think of a relatively recent film that gets the '50s or '60s right, and nothing immediately jumped to mind.

That Thing You Do! does some good 60s. (Shot by Tak Fujimoto.)

A Field in England

most of these films just make me wonder what the poor people of the time were doing/looked like

Field in England is gorgeous

(specifically referring to European elite costume dramas listed)

A Serious Man evokes a very different '60s feel too

to Llewyn Davis I mean

A Serious Man evokes a very different '60s feel too

They filmed scenes in my (downscale) neighborhood grocery as it hadn't been updated since the 60s.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

another Kubrick: Paths of Glory

perfectly captures an era still caught between 19th & 20th centuries

Les Enfants du Paradis
Lola Montes
The Scarlet Empress
Forever Amber maybe?

loads of Ken Russell films, esp The Devils, Lisztomania + Savage Messiah

A Room With a View

and, I assume but haven't seen, other Merchant-Ivory films

Partie De Campagne

Pialat's "Van Gogh"!

(I can watch that one over and over)

I never saw that one - I watched the Altman Van Gogh which came out roughly at the same time. Might have to check that one out.

Is Altman's Van Gogh flick worth a look? The biopic is generally my least favourite film genre but, although it directly preceded The Player (officially his big 90s comeback, after a decade spent in the wilderness), I do remember it getting a good deal of praise at the time.

I liked it a lot at the time. The Gauguin character is probably more spot on than Roth's Van Gogh. But it still seemed quite moving at the time. It's more about his caring brother's essential patronage and his mental illness than the overwrought genius stuff.

I lied it a lot also. I don't think it looked all that good though. I supposed it was doing s now looks like then thing.

The Altman is good but Pialat's is on a whole 'nother level.

Pialat's Van Gogh is fantastic - and when Jacques Dutronc puts on a hat in the film, he looks a lot like Jandek!

I seen Corrdior Of Mirrors, it looks lovely, a shame that Edana Romney had such a short acting career and it seems like it was a fight to keep this role (and she co-written it). It's Christopher Lee's first big screen appearance (he's an acquaintance at the night club)

Enki Bilal did a movie on the moon set in the future but went way retro for visuals

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Alain Corneau & Pascal Quignard's All The Mornings Of The World. Good classical music film.

^ Good film, singlehandly reintroduced Marais' music to the non-French world.

I recently watched Rohmer's "Marquise of O", and that definitely goes here. It's a brilliant and faithful adaptation of Kleist's novella to begin with, definitive really. Rohmer captures the vogueish "classical" fashion - "Greek" hairdos for women, curled at the front, tied up in a bun at the back, long white dresses resembling a chiton. The bourgeois white-walled house environments are also perfect. I feel Rohmer learned from Barry Lyndon how to exploit natural light for maximum effect and clarity, but the candlelit scenes are well done too. There is a particular candlelit scene, possibly the most horrifying, which is reproduced exactly as it is in the book, and you feel that historically this was as it was.
Herzog must have been paying attention to this, he cast Bruno Ganz (the count in this film) in Noseferatu a couple of year later, but it's a consciously different tack, romantic taste prevails over the classical in the home, hair and clothing.

Rohmer always made sure he got clothes, hair, art direction 100% correct.

I'll keep an eye out for that but not sure there's a good dvd for me right now. All the blurays seem to be region A.

Have people not figured out how to bypass those restrictions in 2026?

Cattedrale, do you? I accidentally bought a blu-ray from the UK thinking all blu-rays are region-free

Loach’s “Black Jack”

It might be a decade ago that I bought a bluray player and at the time all-region players were expensive and there was the threat that updating it online can remove its mutliregion capability (is this real? haven't heard of such a thing since)