These last two years will be remembered as a time when filmmakers returned to their childhood and adolescence. Two weeks ago, James Gray’s new movie ‘Armageddon Time’ (2022) was released. In ‘The Night is Ours’ the author continues adventures and misfortunes of a childThe youngest of a Jewish family in Queens in the 1980s. That boy is Gray as a kid, even if he has another name.. Brighter and more pop, the animated movie ‘Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Childhood’ (2021) Childhood memories of the author. The landing of man on the moon forms the backdrop for a movie. Richard Linklater (“Childhood. Moments of a life”) remembers Childhood spent in Houston, Texas in the late 1960s: his relationship with his family, his exploration of popular culture, his fascination with private careers.
Another filmmaker who chose this moment to remember past times Paul Thomas Anderson In the movie ‘Liquorice Pizza’ (2021), about A teenager’s awakening to love (and adult life) in the San Fernando ValleyLos Angeles in the early 1970s. For a matter as simple as the inconsistency of dates (Anderson was born in 1970 and the adventures of the protagonist of ‘Licorice Pizza’ are set in 1973), The Invisible Thread’s director is less autobiographical than the other two. still feeding director’s childhood and adolescence memoriesHis producer friend, Gary Goetzman, who also grew up in the San Fernando Valley, was a child actor like the lead role in Licorice Pizza. As an example of how personal the movie is, it is useful to remember a detail shared in the promotion: family in the plot of the movie. dominating the fieldThe movie’s co-star is his real-life family. Y her mother was Anderson’s art teacher in college (and she was in love).
We must add one of the most anticipated titles to these three autobiographical films: ‘Los Fabelman’ (2022), lnew movie Steven Spielberg, It will be released in Spain on February 10. It is true that the producer’s childhood memories, especially family memories, sneaked into a significant part of his filmography. But he directly recreates his childhood in ‘The Fabelmans’: from his parents’ divorce to the moment he discovered cinema.
It’s four very different films, but all have nostalgia, a chronicle of certain moments in United States history (more or less in the background), and an awakening to the life and art of the United States—own or foreign. authors. But even more interesting than these coincidences is why everyone chose this moment to remember their childhood and turn them into a movie.
It’s not just them. bard. The ‘false histories of several truths’ (2022) are not exactly the same: Autobiographical work by Alejandro G. Iñárritu encompasses a broader spectrum that mainly speaks of identity and immigration. But even so, it includes that journey into childhood and youth. And outside the American landscape, ‘It was the hand of God’ (2021), the most mundane of quotes ever quoted, It was also inspired by the adolescence of its author, Italian Paolo Sorrentino.
impossible to know the cause of this collective and masculine melancholy. Maybe it’s just a matter of arrogance. maybe Another pillar of the age of nostalgia we live in. Perhaps, although some of these projects are many years old, the experience of the pandemic has meant that all these filmmakers, feeling vulnerable, use art to assess their lives early. It’s precocious because these aren’t farewell movies called to complete or support the closing of a career: With the exception of Steven Spielberg, the writers of these movies are between 50 and 60 years old and a few years old.
Or maybe and there must be many other possible explanations, they all decided to go back to the past, mostly in very classic proposals and enemies of urgency, in the face of vertigo from the profound (and perhaps irreversible) changes that cinema has undergone in recent years. Paradoxically, although some of them were designed for platforms (“Apollo 10 1/2, Bardo” and “Hand of God”), all these films A cinema of resistance against uncertainty and change… And they all imply the (own) rightness of their authors at a time when the director’s name no longer even appears on the poster.