Films As Time Capsules

I watched All The President’s Men recently, and it struck me: has there ever been a movie that so completely captured a lost time period better than that film?

Not only did it manage to crystallize the paranoia and confusion that the Watergate scandal inflicted on the American psyche – unsurprising considering that the film was finished a year after the event itself – but it also captured the essence of seventies Americana. Technology has changed so much of our lifestyle in subtle and unsubtle ways. Watching All The President’s Men reminds one of the society that once was, and will never be again.

In particular, it’s striking to see Redford’s Bob Woodward and Hoffmann’s Carl Bernstein thumbing through telephone books and other records in order to track leads, or dialing rotary telephones. One quickly gets a sense of the enormous effort it took a reporter in the seventies to produce even one story. Research like that today could be accomplished with a few flicks of the keyboard, yet it took them days and untold amounts of persistence back then.  

Most films don’t capture a moment in time like that, since most films deal exclusively in creating a time period rather than simply allowing it to exist. In fact, it’s difficult to really pinpoint films like All The President’s Men that really accomplish that with their respective time periods. Network did something like that with the state of televised news in the late seventies. One could argue that King Of Comedy did something similar with the state of eighties talk shows. Wall Street did a decent job capturing the late eighties era of greed and emerging technology like computers and cell phones. Perhaps Wargames did the same thing with computers in the eighties.

Are there any movies that you can think of that manage to capture the essence of their respective time periods?