*uninfluenced
Corollary to this: I often wonder about period-accurate body hair.
Right off the top of my head, I don’t know when the custom of saving legs and underarms became the fashion, but watching things like 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire, The Odyssey, and Noah, I expected to see more body hair on the females.
That was a lot better than I vaguely remembered from when that movie came out. Thank you!
The patron saint of historical accuracy in movies has to be Robert Eggers. Listen to his commentary for The Witch, wear he points out that one particular shot of the exterior of a cabin drives him crazy because the edges of some of the logs were “clearly” cut with a modern-day saw. Or how his crew tried to remove all of the grass that wouldn’t have been growing in 1600s New England, but that you can still some they missed in a few shots.
The man is a stickler.
I’ve watched a couple of military series lately: “Seal Team” and “The Last Ship”. Mistakes in military uniforms jumps out at me, naval in particular. In “Ship”, they got insignia wrong several times. At one point they had an officer who had been elevated to admiral in a previous episode wearing commander collar insignia. In “Seal Team”, they’ve had a master chief wearing dress blues with NO sleeve insignia. That series does an excellent job with weapons handling and procedures, so it’s a glaring error for me. Also, a master chief with red hashmarks on his dress blue sleeve is unlikely, though not out of the realm of possibility (red hashmarks means he would have had some sort of disciplinary action in his past).
He seems like the equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis and his famous method acting.
Or the camera is facing South?
A camera facing south can’t see a Sun rising in the east, nor setting in the west. It’d be out of the frame to the side.
I don’t think you can communicate that to modern audiences with a hairstyle, but I don’t think you need to try. Tens of millions of 21st-century readers of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility have managed to figure out when a character of hers is being a “free spirit”, without seeing them in a modern hairdo.
Good writing and directing can show a modern audience how a period character was viewed in their own period, without needing to fall back on modern visual cues that are meaningless, or carry a very different meaning, in the period context. Screenwriters and directors who can’t manage to portray character in historical settings without relying on anachronistic “modernized” dialogue or mannerisms are just not doing a very good job, sorry.
And the “modern” “young” “new generation” audiences they claim to be trying to “reach” with their “bold” anachronism hacks don’t seem to appreciate it very much. (Look at the unenthusiastic audience response to the 2022 film of Austen’s Persuasion, for example, with snippets of 2022 dialogue mixed in with half-sentences of original Austen text, like the period 1810s dresses topped by the 2020s bare ungroomed heads. Critics and audiences alike thought it was dreck.)
If this sort of halfassery were really working well for any substantial audiences, I would shut the hell up and just not watch it, since as per the thread title, in the grand scheme of things it really is pretty trivial. But AFAICT there’s nobody who actually wants this approach. Compare with the smash hit 1995 Sense and Sensibility film by Ang Lee, where director Lee and screenwriter (and lead) Emma Thompson worked very hard to tell their story within the basic parameters of Austen’s universe, and it paid off. Kate Winslet’s Marianne wears period updos and bonnets, but the audience has no difficulty figuring out her tendency to exaggerated romanticism and the trouble it’s going to land her in. Yes, that takes more work than just saying “let’s have this character connect with a modern audience by talking and behaving like a young woman of today who for some reason likes wearing Regency dresses”, but IMHO it’s worth it.
I’m going to have to disagree a bit with this argument. If you are using a visual medium, you need to actually use the visual medium. Arguing that it’s not done in books (which are not visual) is not a good argument to me. I can absolute see wanting the period accuracy, don’t get me wrong, but I strongly disagree with the argument of not considering what visual things mean to the actual modern audience that is viewing the the modern work.
I totally see @Kimstu’s point.
But for these new movies of old classic books, I suspect the directors also have to assume substantially the entire audience has never read that book, nor much of anything else from that period.
Yes, all Dopers have read all the classic literature of the 1800s & 1900s. But we’re smart, hip, and old. The 2026 movie-going audience is not.
A second issue common to book → movie transitions is that a book that takes 12 hours to read needs to be condensed into 90-120 minutes of screen time. Not all of which can be dialogue. Holy Reader’s Digest version, Batman!
Everything, including character development, needs to be very telegraphic and immediately obvious because there simply isn’t time for anything else.
From Wikipedia
Ancient Rome also associated hair removal with status: a person with smooth skin was associated with purity and superiority. Removing body hair was done by both men and women.[2][3][5][6] Psilothrum or psilotrum (Ancient Greek: ψίλωθρον) and dropax (Ancient Greek: δρῶπαξ) were depilatories in ancient Greece and Rome.[7][8][9] An alipilus (Ancient Greek: παρατίλτριος) was a slave who attended bathers, removing unwanted body hair. The same practice applied to women, who were served by female slaves called παρατίλτριαι (the plural of παρατίλτρια, the feminine form of παρατίλτριος).[10][11]
In Ancient Egypt, besides being a fashion statement for affluent Egyptians of all genders,[3][12] hair removal served as a treatment for louse infestation, which was a prevalent issue in the region.[13] Very often, they would replace the removed head hair with a Nubian wig, which was seen as easier to maintain and also fashionable.[13] Ancient Egyptian priests also shaved or depilated all over daily, so as to present a “pure” body before the images of the gods.:
It annoys me when a character is almost never shown working evenings, nights, weekends, or holidays - yet they have a job that definitely involves working at those times in real life. Store employee or manager (most managers do work weekends and late shifts), police officer, chef, restaurant server, etc.
But actual free spirits like Caroline Lamb or Lady Oxford did actually buck the convention. Maybe it’s just Byron’s women…
Depends on the time and place…
Toplessness - Wikipedia two-click for boobies.
Incroyables and merveilleuses - Wikipedia
Also, slight nit - Sense and Sensibility is set just a little pre-Regency proper and is 18th C..
Nitting your (valid) nit: True that Sense and Sensibility is internally more late-1790s than its 1811 publication date, which is when the future George IV began his decade of regency in place of his incapacitated father George III. But as a historical (and sartorial) “period”, the term “Regency” is frequently applied from about 1795 to late 1830s.
Oh sure, sorry if I was unclear: I don’t mean that you shouldn’t use visual cues to present character in a film, just that the cues don’t have to be “translated” into so-called “modern equivalents” to enable modern audiences to understand them. Any more than Jane Austen’s own text needs to be “translated” into 21st-century colloquialisms to be comprehensible to modern readers.
Interesting. Thanks. I thought it came into fashion much later, like 19-20 century
I know. It’s just that the fashion style would be more Directoire than Empire or Regency, even in England, and that’s not quite the “Regency” fashion people picture from Bridgerton and Austen movies.
To directly answer the OP: When the movie is filmed in the wrong place, and all the plants and birds are wrong for where it’s supposed to be. That’s pretty common, especially if there are outdoors scenes and it’s outside a city.
Sometimes it’s obviously filmed in the wrong city, too, and i recognize things from a different city.
Fair point, especially for “decayed gentlefolk” families of limited means like in Sense and Sensibility where they’re not going to be updating their looks with the newest fashions every season. (That said, I’m not sure that Austen didn’t do some updating on her own between writing the first draft as a teenager in the 1790s and the 1811 publication of a heavily revised version; e.g., one character remarks on another’s wearing a delicate “spotted muslin”, which sounds textbook early Regency fashion to me.)
(See, this is why it can be so frustrating when filmmakers just ignore or are oblivious to significant historical details. It takes so little to make history nerds happy, and it’s not taking anything away from other audiences either! It would be like literally a three-figure investment to get some starving postdoc period aficionado onboard as a consultant to absurdity-proof your movie! But it does require the director, screenwriter etc. to care enough about this historical universe that they’re willing to work within its parameters to figure out how to construct a meaningful and relatable narrative. Rather than just lazily grabbing for any present-day colloquial language and styles and manners that will “read” the desired way to a modern audience, and pretending that the result is an intentional “reimagining” to make the material “fresh” and/or “edgy”. Yeah, pull the other one.)