Historical or costume film is a feature film genre depicting specific historical eras, events and personalities of the past. Distinguish historical and biographical films about real historical figures, illustrating their life path ( Spartak , Alexander Nevsky ), and historical and adventure films about fictional characters of past years, often with action-packed intrigue ( Count Monte Cristo , films about Indiana Jones ). Historical films are often an adaptation of historical novels (“ War and Peace ” by L. N. Tolstoy ).
Content
- 1 Genres
- 2 Screen adaptations of classic novels
- 3 Author movies
- 4 See also
- 5 Links
Genres
Costume cinema often intersects with the genres of adventure films and action films , as most often the dramatic and fateful events, wars, coups and the like become the subject of the film. The time and nature of the action distinguish several specific varieties of the historical film:
- Battle cinema - films about the Great Patriotic War were especially widespread in Soviet cinema.
- Western is a genre of historical adventure cinema born in America, which takes place in the Wild West in the 19th century. Subsequently, westerns adapted to national characteristics began to be removed in other countries (see spaghetti western , western ).
- Eastern is a Soviet adventure film that takes place in the East - in the Asian parts of the USSR, mainly during the Civil War.
- Peplum - high-budget films about the ancient world with lush costumes and scenery, often with impressive extras. The genre originated in Italy , but reached its peak in Hollywood in the late 1950s and early 1960s ( Ben-Hur , Spartak , Cleopatra ).
- Tyambara - Japanese cinema about samurai , the greatest master of which was Akira Kurosawa (" Seven Samurai ", " Throne in the Blood ").
- Wuxia is a Chinese historical and adventure movie with fantastically exaggerated martial arts ( Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , House of Flying Daggers ).
- The film of the cloak and epee is a costume movie with a dynamic development of action and fencing fights. Often this is a film adaptation of adventure novels by authors such as Alexander Dumas , Robert Stevenson and Mine Reed about musketeers , pirates and other adventurers. On the roles of brave heroes and noble robbers specialized in Douglas Fairbanks , Errol Flynn , Jean Mare , Mikhail Boyarsky .
Screen adaptations of classic novels
In the 1930s, the legendary producer David Selznik made a name for himself on ambitious adaptations of literary classics. The film “ Gone with the Wind ", financed and produced by him, has long remained a box office record holder. In the post-war period, large-budget technical - color adaptations in the Selznik tradition continued to be filmed by Hollywood maestro David Lin ( Lawrence of Arabia ), French directors led by Max Ofyuls and Italian Lukino Visconti ( Leopard , Feeling ).
A special group of historical films is made up of numerous adaptations of the novels by Jane Austen (the action takes place during the Napoleonic Wars ) and Charles Dickens (the main scene is London Victorian ). They are especially characteristic of UK cinema, which is generally famous for its delicate, tactful adaptations of literary classics, from the Oscar-winning Tom Jones to Dangerous Links by Stephen Frears .
The elegance with academic sophistication is distinguished by the adaptations of British classics performed by the international duet Merchant and Ivory .
Author's movie
In the field of historical cinema, the largest masters of pre-war cinema preferred to work, including David Griffith ( Intolerance ) and Sergey Eisenstein ( Alexander Nevsky , Ivan the Terrible ). In the 1950s and 1960s luminaries of author's cinema more than once transferred the action of films to the ascetic setting of the Middle Ages , since it predisposed to reflection on moral and religious topics (“ Tales of the Foggy Moon after the Rain ”, “The Seventh Seal ”, “Andrei Rublev” ).
In terms of the accuracy of historical reconstruction in the cinema, two approaches have been outlined. In the 1970s, Roberto Rossellini's archival-documentary approach (“ The Coming of Louis XIV to Power ”) was popular, which reached the apotheosis of Stanley Kubrick's “ Barry Lyndon ” (1975). In the 1990s, modernization of historical realities came into fashion, sometimes discreet (like in Queen Margot by Patrice Chereau ), but in some cases completely erasing the boundaries between periods ( Edward II by Derek Jarman ) or deliberately rewriting historical events (example - Hitler's burning in a Parisian movie theater in Tarantino 's Inglourious Basterds ).
See also
- Epic