Unlike Liberal Arts, people in the movie Midnight in Paris want to go back in time instead of thinking that growing older is being wiser. Gil indeed traveled back in time, to the 1920s and 1890s. However, as the professor has pointed out: he has somekind of of a “Golden age thinking”.
Nostalgia is denial of the painful present.
Woody Allen, apart from his personal affairs, is a great director to my eyes. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is also a favorite — the reason why I want to go to Barcelona so much.
The following are the celebrities appeared in the film.
Scott Fitzgerald, a member of the “Lost Generation”, is an American novelist whose works includes The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise and Tender is the Night. He was in Paris in 1920s and influenced by Ernest Hemingway (Wrote The Old Man and the Sea.). He claimed that, Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, who was violent and emotionally distressed, was distracting Fitzgerald from his work on his novel.
Cole Porter (1891–1964) is also an American composer and songwriter. Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love is one of his best-known list songs, introduced in Porter’s first Broadway muscial Paris.
Josephine Baker is an American-born French singer and dancer who has known as the “Black Pearl” and “Bronze Venus”. She became a world-famous entertainer and helped with the French Resistance during World War Two.
Gertrude Stein, a member of the Lost Generation in Paris as well, has helped to develop modernism in Art and Literature. She was born in United States but moved to Paris in 1903.
She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures in modernism in literature and art would meet, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse. Henri Rousseau (painter) and Guillaume Apollinaire (poet) are also Picasso’s acquaintances who frequented the Saturday evenings.
Pablo Picasso, with a fictional character Adriana and his painting La Baigneuse (The Bather) also appeared in the film. The Bather is also a name of the painting by De Vergnette Francois.
T.S. Eliot was an American-born British poet and social critic.
The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock:
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Man Ray are three Surrealists, who connect art with dreams and subconsciousness. Other surrealism painters includes Andre Breton and Rene Magritte.
Other people appeared in the films, such as Jean Cocteau, Mark Twain, Modigliani, Georges Braque, Miro, Madeleine Brissou, Caillebotte, Archivald MacLeish, Djuna Barnes and Lautrec.
It is also very interested to see how Picasso’s mistress has learnt all the tricks from a prostitute.
