Midnight in Paris - A meditation on the past

What is the past? How do we imagine and live in the past?




Woody Allen's 2010 movie Midnight in Paris has a few things to say about history, and I suppose digital history - or at least the way we imagine history on the screen - analog or digital. In the movie, the protagonist Gil Pender travels in time to the 1920s. Gil has romanized the '20s, and lives through his fantasy when he fall for a women from the era. However, she too is unsatisfied with her current condition and travels with Gil to the 1890s. It's here that Gil comes face to face with the nature of history.
As Gil puts is "If you stay here and this becomes your present then pretty soon you'll start imagining another time that was really the golden time. That's what the present is. It's a little un-satisfying, because life's a little un-satisfying."