Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris

A Dissertation Submitted to the School of Arts and Languages

For the Award of the Degree of Master of English

By

Leechingamba Khanganba

Regd. No: 11503077

Guide

Dr. Shreya Chatterjee

Faculty of Arts and Languages

Lovely Professional University

Phagwara, Punjab, India

2017

Abstract

"Midnight in Paris" by Woody Allen demonstrates and makes obvious Paris as a kind of a unit with numerous diverse uniqueness which captures figure according to the eyes of the viewer. In actuality Paris doesn’t actually have that one proper description of it that everybody independently contributes to. In Allen´s film, Paris, survives no more than in the phenomenology of the viewer’s observation, an observation frequently disfigured and made unpredictable by an escapist require withdrawing from the current order in charge to take cover in an overestimated, utopian history. Allen accordingly disapprove of the longing inclination, the "Golden-Age thinking" (as it is identified in the film) that forces a range of characters concurrently to dwell in separate worlds, that of an innocent past and that of the collapse current. His central character´s expedition reverse along with onwards among the current and the romanticized Thriving Twenties is every person’s expedition, from time to time dreamlike journey connecting actuality with thoughts, stuck between the globes in point of fact occupied moreover the planet synthetically assembled on behalf of oneself.

Nonetheless it is at time, Allen´s leading role ultimately finds out reminiscence contained by his reminiscence, a yearning contained by his yearning, with the intention that he be familiar with the blemished viewing after his more or less mythologized awareness of the history, dazzling every person’s awareness that the history is at the end of the day the appearance of our current requirements.

Keywords: Emancipation, Memory, Nostalgia, Paris and Woody Allen.

Declaration

I declare that the dissertation entitled Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris has been prepared by me under the guidance of Dr. Shreya Chaterjee, associate Professor, School of Arts and

Languages, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab. No part of this dissertation has formed the basis for the award of any degree or fellowship previously

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I give my gratitude to God for keeping me in good health and helping me throughout my dissertation without whose help and grace I would not have been able to complete successfully.

My sincere gratitude to my beloved parents for their immense love and support it is because of them that I am able to complete my work. Thank you for believing in me.

I am very privileged to express my sincere thanks and deepest sense of gratitude to my guide and supervisor Dr. Shreya Chaterjee, Assistant Professor, Department of English,

Lovely Professional University, Punjab. It is due to her valuable advices, splendid supervision, constant practice, focus and most importantly the quality time she spent to enable and shape this dissertation the way in which it is been presented. It was her vast knowledge and her experience in this particular domain and her excellent guidance which gave me strength to complete the task. Her constant encouragement, unconditional love and guidance and her confidence in me that I can finish the task has always been a moral support for me. I will always be in debt to her for her time that she invested in me and for taking me as her student when unfortunately my previous guide left.

I am also very grateful to Dr. Ajoi Bhatta, Head of the Department of English and

Mrs. Reshu Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of English, my former guide and mentor, for their immense concern and guidance throughout the journey of this dissertation. I am also grateful to my friends for their support and concern.

Certificate

I hereby declare that this dissertation entitled Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris is a record of first hand research work done by me during the period of my study in the year 2016-2017 and that this dissertation has not formed the basis for the award of any other degree, diploma, associate ship, fellowship, or other similar title.

Place: Jalandhar Signature of the Candidate

Date:

Contents

Serial No. Title Page No.

Introduction 1-26

Chapter 1 Critical Theory and Research 26-33 Methodology Chapter 2 Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris 33-40

Conclusion 40-41

Work Cited 42-43

Introduction

19th Century Cinema: A Background

Since its initiation in the late 19th century, cinema has become one of the most popular and inspiring forms of entertainment, arts, education and propaganda. The birth of cinema is one of many interconnecting events and inventions around the world, born out of an array of new technology revolving around machinery, photography, optical illusion and a human love to be entertained and inspired.

The invention of cinema is one process that took for nearly half a millennia. A miracle called cinema developed through a series of different and unconnected inventions around the world. It all started in 1515 when Leonardo da Vinci presented a drawing of a type of image projector which will come to be known as the Magic Lantern. In 17th century, the Magic

Lantern was improved and it captivated people’s attention and soon became very popular in

Europe and North America. The Phenakistoscope was invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau. A device in which pictures on one disc viewed through slots in the other appeared to move when the two were spun and viewed in a mirror. In 1839 an English Inventor called William

Fox Talbot developed the Calotype process, a chemical photographic process. William

George Horner invented the Zoetrope. It uses the same principle as Plateau’s

Phenakistoscope but instead of disc the pictures and slots are combined in a rotating drum. In

1877 Emile Reynaud introduces the latest findings on optical reproduction of the movement.

The Praxinoscope, similar to the Zoetrope puts the illusion of the movement produced by the

Praxinoscope was viewed on mirrors in the center of the drum rather than the slot on the outside. In 1872 Eadward Muybridge, a San Francisco photographer adapted Horner’s

Zoetrope to produce a Zoopraxinoscope. In East Orange, New Jersey Thoman Edison was privately working on perfecting his favorite of all his inventions, the Phonograph. He assigned William Dixon to the project of developing a machine that could visually accompany his phonograph. For over two years and not much result they finally designed a machine the Mirror-scope that they thought might work. In 1888 George Eastman device that flexible film based covered with photographic emulsion. This was exactly what Edison and

Dixon were looking for. The result was the Kinetoscope. It is a continuous loop of film that passed over a series of rollers and in front of a lens. But it had a flaw; it allowed only one person at a time to watch the moving images being put on display. Thomas Armat found that what the camera did to hold the film stationary while the images were being photographed could be repeated in a projection mechanism itself. In 1885 in Atlanta, Georgia Armat made a vital connection. He demonstrated a projector that worked. The Lumiere family is the biggest manufacturer of photographic plates in Europe. A local Kinetoscope exhibitor as brothers

Lewis and Augustin Lumiere make films which is cheaper than the ones sold by Edison.

They designed the Cinematograph, a camera which serves as both a recording device and a projecting device. The cinematograph uses flexible film cut into 35mm white strips and used an intermediate mechanism modeled on the sewing machine. The device became the standard for nearly 25 years. The Arrival of a Train is considered to be the first motion picture presented to a large public audience.

One of the forbears to advantage and develop the creative aspects of cinematography was George Melies. He is considered by some to be the father of the narrative film and whom

DW Griffith is quoted as saying “I owe him everything.” Melies made over 500 films from

1896 to 1906. He was one of the first people to introduce cutting and chronological editing as we see in the movies today. In 1903 Edwin S. Porter made The Life of an American Fireman which displayed new visual storytelling techniques and incorporated stock footage. The movie acted as a major precursor to Porters most famous film The Great Train Robbery also made in 1903. It is considered a milestone in film making and one of the first films to tell a story. The first feature length film was made in 1906 by Charles Tate, it was called The Ned

Kelly Gang. DW Griffith is considered as the father of modern cinema. He set the way for modern movies in terms of narrative structure and editing. He developed filmic techniques and codes that brought in depth narrative storytelling to cinema. One of his most notable films is Birth of a Nation 1915. In 1927 the first ever talkie was made, it was called The Jazz

Singer. It contained synchronized dialogue sequences. From here it began the start of the talkies and the end of the silent film era. Numerous movies are being produced every year after this. Notable movies through the ages are City Lights, Casablanca, Gone With The

Wind, The Godfather, Gandhi etc.

American Dream

The American Dream is an essence for the nation of the United States, the quintessential set of ideals such as liberty and equality which gives the freedom and the opportunity to achieve success and prosper and gives the right and dream to the stairway upward social mobility for the citizens of America all adults and children alike, all people from different class and race. The American dream can be achieved through industrious labour in a society where there are no barriers in moving forward. The definition of the

American Dream is actually given by James Truslow Adams in 1931, in it he says: “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.”(Adams 67)

The Declaration of Independence actually gave birth to the American Dream ideal. In the constitution of America it is proclaimed that all men are created equal with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the real American Dream can be found amongst those people who are not originally from the land of opportunity. This Land of Opportunities is created by the dreams and hard work of the immigrants themselves. Since the Great Migration of the 17th century millions of people from across the planet have swooped into the land of promises because they believe in the Dream. This dream has triggered men and women of all ages and all nationalities to leave their country of origin and go to a place where hard work pays off still persists.

For better or worse, Americans tend to define success by accomplishment. Typically this is material accomplishment along a prescribed path: the acquiring of an education that leads to the acquiring of a job that leads to financial stability with room to improve that leads to marriage, property, children, a vehicle representative of your professional status, as well as all the accoutrements that come with your tax bracket. The more you have the more of a success you are, and the more you have fulfilled that elusive American Dream.

But there’s a dark side to this kind of success that manifests as an obsession with work that takes one away from life’s truly meaningful moments like spending time with friends and family. What we think of as success and what we want from it are two different, directly conflicting things, and often this struggle has been portrayed on film in work like Citizen

Kane, Wolf of Wall Street and The Godfather.

Film Theorist Robin Wood’s in his essay Ideology, Genre, Auteur, says that the idea of the American Dream as it is realized on screen is examined, as well as what the filmmakers in question are trying to tell us about said Dream. Often times it’s that the American Dream doesn’t exist in the extremes of success, but in the softer, everyday successes of balancing acquisition with appreciation.

The America Dream despite its frequent uses and its representation of the country and its inhabitants is not well understood and needs a more divisive way to interpret this ethos.

And to decipher this we need more subtle way of approach. Peter Muller in his essay Star Trek and the American Dream says that the American dream for is just from rags to riches, to others it is the realisation of high flying principles as old as man himself. Muller say that there can be three identifiable main roots to this ideal: first is the mythical aspects which leads us back to the archaic dream of setting up a flawless society or for the matter of fact a paradise, secondly he come to the religious aspects in which Muller describes the ideology of the first puritan settlement and their dream of a conurbation upon a hill and lastly he discusses the political aspects which emerges from the idea and the declaration of independence and the constitution of the United States of America. But amongst these three he points out that the political nature is arguably the most important one in defining the ethos of the American

Dream as many other commentators would agree as well

Martin Luther King proclaimed in his speech that “It is found in those majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, words lifted to cosmic proportions. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God, Creator, with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In The American Dream: Our Heritage of Hope by Jim Bickford, he identifies several examples and instances of the Dream in motion all through its history. He says that "America was built on dreams” (Bickford 82) and he goes discussing about the importance of the declaration of independence and within it planting the seed which would eventually grow up to the dream. He states that “Our ancestors chose to take the risk by putting their lives on the line and fighting for freedom." (Bickford 98)

The American Dream has percolated into the world of American cinema and filmmakers have somehow used its themes directly or indirectly, and in both fashion of conscious and unconscious. And so it comes with no surprise that we are constantly feed to this ideal. Today across the planet Hollywood is the commanding producer of movie.

Whatever trends it sets other countries also follows in the same path. In films the America Dream context have been presented over a lot of time as it is one of the defining values of the country. But it has been presented in its political context more than any other. The life and in particular the liberty and the pursuit of Happiness has been depicted since the dawn of cinema itself. But in all of these movies throughout the ages the depiction has not been uniform. There has been a lot of different and distinct ways of the presentation of the American Dream on the big screen and all of them have a different approach to it. The American Dream has been represented in a gratifying and glorious and in a pessimistic and cynical manner too that is constantly criticising and revolting against the

American society.

Muller says that the rags and riches story is the most commonly narrated lore of the

American Dream. He identifies this as the most essential explanation of the so call Dream and identifies that its straightforwardness as one of the most appealing factor to the filmmakers today. He pointed out some of the important features inside the American Dream like the melting pot, manifest destiny, the frontier and the land of opportunity. He pointed out these elements in some of the long running television series like Star Trek and refers to the usage of these elements in the exploration of the space the final frontier in search for new life. Even though it is practically easy and convenient for these ideas to be applied to films it would be wise to dedicate on other themes for the sake of originality and precision.

It is not only to the audience that the story containing rags to riches are appealing but also to the filmmakers as well, may it’s because of the clarity and the simplicity in the plot structure. In these stories contains the factor of optimism and hope and the feel good factor, the story of once an underdog now enjoying success is powerfully attractive to the audience.

One of the greatest examples is the 1990 movie Pretty Woman, in which a hooker (Julia

Roberts) comes in acquaintance with very handsome and successful entrepreneur and in the end falls for him. Her relationship with him let her to climb in the social strata. Actually the film is actually retelling the story of the frog turn Prince storyline, just with a couple of changes. The central theme is the story is that whoever you are or whatever you do; you can and will always be successful in America.

Pretty Woman is unarguably an uncomplicated tease to assets narrative in which

Vivian's personality was on bottom of the societal hierarchy, as a failure. On the other hand, in spite of this, she productively climbs the community hierarchy, accomplishes an intelligence of value moreover accomplish what Mueller explains as Vivian’s manifest destiny. The movie don’t make any detailed commentary leading the social order, even though it could be scrutinized leading Vivian’s dependence on a man to follow her ambition. Away from the prevailing significance that anybody can achieve something.

Nevertheless, in spite of the straightforwardness of this movie, not all tease to resources narratives doesn’t lack in social and political observation. Let’s take for example; in

Rocky (1976) the protagonist is a dark horse of a boxer but he ends accomplishing more than anyone ever thought of plus ends up with a title fight alongside the heavyweight defender of the world. Jonathon Rosenbaum says that Rocky is another rags to riches story. He adds that

“The Italian Stallion, a white sub-proletarian regular loser...thumbs his nose at a society that could not care less about him, and finds both love and self-respect in a corrupt world.”

(Rosenbaum 88) The Time Out Film Guide says that the movie’s theme is reflected by its success being a low-budget movie. Rosenbaum claims that the movie has a deeper subtext in spite of its straightforward narrative. But Rocky, and other period movies of the Vietnam War, make accessible a difference to the violence dedicated to the War. In his view Rocky make obtainable a way by which America as a whole could feel better about them. He particularly talks about the true all-American spirit of Rocky and talk about the thoughtful consequence that the movie had upon viewers declaring “Responding to the fairy tale quality of this modem-day romance... audiences stood up and cheered.” (Rosenbaum 102) However, all not all movie of this time were themed like Rocky. Movie such as Taxi Driver (1976), that cored upon, a Vietnam War veteran, Bickle, whom who might be portrayed as one more "loser hero” personality. The movie presents a substitute, rough appearance, not of the rags to riches tale but a psychologically haunting one. The protagonist is an unpleasant personality in an unpleasant world, who accomplishes achievement and appreciation in the film. Viewers at the time didn’t appreciate as much as they did for Rocky. The film plea people to react to war that were going on in Vietnam; nevertheless, they also difference the all-American strength of

Rocky to the violent content of Taxi Driver. Rosenbaum maintains that both movies “...were at once too shocking and too suggestive of certain American atrocities in Vietnam...”

(Rosenbaum 135) This dissimilarity provides an influential instance as to the contradictory appearance of the American Dream on motion picture. Both movies uphold alike subject matter, a no-hoper innermost personality, clutch an occasion that present itself to him and accomplish accomplishment and appreciation, yet in very diverse customs. Taxi Driver is a much more pessimistic film that criticises Vietnam and clue at the overwhelming blow it has had on the most important character. Rocky is other inspirational and heart upon the immensity of America and the prospect therein, Rocky's Italian-American origin also refers back to the dissolve pot talk about by Mueller, the American Dream is obtainable to everybody still settlers. The two movies demonstrate the rags to riches part of the American Dream from substitute perspective and emphasize the collision that socio-political remark and circumstance can have upon the management of the American Dream inside the motion picture.

Rosenbaum's observations upon the political position of Rocky also provide to exemplify those movies may become supporting not directly and automatically due to their framework somewhat than their substance. Rocky was seen to improve fault following Vietnam but the movie does not contract with that subject even distantly. The main point that can be taken from the difference of the two movies is that the American dream can mean varying things within the filmic world depending on the purpose of those who use it. The American Dream can be used as a instrument not only to admire the country but also to disapprove of.

One other film that makes use of the Dream as a vital tool is the 1983 Brian De Palma film Scarface. Scarface is one more film that present the nothing to everything tale, and the plot centres around another loser-hero in the sketch of Tony Montana. The movie includes abundant of the fundamentals talk about by Mueller: Montana's Cuban settler symbolises the unsteadiness of the USA's civilizing combine, the country itself arguing symbolizes the boundary and a ground of prospect for Montana at the same time as Montana himself is satisfying his obvious fortune. For better or worse, Americans tend to define success by accomplishment. Typically this is material accomplishment along a prescribed path: the acquiring of an education that leads to the acquiring of a job that leads to financial stability with room to improve that leads to marriage, property, children, a vehicle representative of your professional status, as well as all the accoutrements that come with your tax bracket. The more you have the more of a success you are, and the more you have fulfilled that elusive

American Dream.

But there’s a dark side to this kind of success that manifests as an obsession with work that takes one away from life’s truly meaningful moments like spending time with friends and family. What we think of as success and what we want from it are two different, directly conflicting things, and often this struggle has been portrayed on film in work like Citizen

Kane, Wolf of Wall Street and The Godfather.

Film Theorist Robin Wood’s in his essay Ideology, Genre, Auteur, says that the idea of the American Dream as it is realized on screen is examined, as well as what the filmmakers in question are trying to tell us about said Dream. Often times it’s that the American Dream doesn’t exist in the extremes of success, but in the softer, everyday successes of balancing acquisition with appreciation.

The America Dream despite its frequent uses and its representation of the country and its inhabitants is not well understood and needs a more divisive way to interpret this ethos.

And to decipher this we need more subtle way of approach. Peter Muller in his essay Star Trek and the American Dream says that the American dream for is just from rags to riches, to others it is the realisation of high flying principles as old as man himself. Muller say that there can be three identifiable main roots to this ideal: first is the mythical aspects which leads us back to the archaic dream of setting up a flawless society or for the matter of fact a paradise, secondly he come to the religious aspects in which Muller describes the ideology of the first puritan settlement and their dream of a conurbation upon a hill and lastly he discusses the political aspects which emerges from the idea and the declaration of independence and the constitution of the United States of America. But amongst these three he points out that the political nature is arguably the most important one in defining the ethos of the American

Dream as many other commentators would agree as well

Martin Luther King proclaimed in his speech that “It is found in those majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, words lifted to cosmic proportions. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God, Creator, with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In The American Dream: Our Heritage of Hope by Jim Bickford, he identifies several examples and instances of the Dream in motion all through its history. He says that "America was built on dreams” (Bickford 82) and he goes discussing about the importance of the declaration of independence and within it planting the seed which would eventually grow up to the dream. He states that “Our ancestors chose to take the risk by putting their lives on the line and fighting for freedom." (Bickford 98) The American Dream has percolated into the world of American cinema and filmmakers have somehow used its themes directly or indirectly, and in both fashion of conscious and unconscious. And so it comes with no surprise that we are constantly feed to this ideal. Today across the planet Hollywood is the commanding producer of movie.

Whatever trends it sets other countries also follows in the same path.

World Politics during 1930s

The 1930s knows also as the “Thirties” proceeded with many important political events.

Wars held during 1930s are-

Colombia-Peru war took place from September 1, 1932 to May 24; 1933. The war was battled among the Republic of Colombia and Republic of Peru. League of Nations determined the war.

Chaco War fought between Bolivia and Paraguay during 15th June 1932 to 10th June 1935.

The war was over the borderline province of Gran Chaco, consequential in victory of

Paraguay in 1935.

Saudi-Yemeni War was fought among Saudi Arabia and Mutawakkilite kingdom of Yemen during March 1934 to 12 May 1934.

Second Sino-Japanese War between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan was fought during 7th July 1937 to 9th September 1945. The war finished with the win of China as division of the Allied victory in the Pacific War. It was the biggest Asian war of the 20th century. World War II began from September 1 1939 to September 2 1945. It was a global war.

Conflicts began before 1939. The war ended with the Victory of the Allies.

Major political changes that took place during the 1930s are-

The rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1933 and its enhancement in Germany after the peace treaty of Treaty of Versailles on 28 June, 1919 that brought an end to World War I.

Adolf Hitler dragged Germany out of the League of Nations and spread Communism by discriminate against and exterminating Jews and other small factions from the German main land. Hitler hosted the 1936 Summer Olympics to show the better-quality athleticism of the

Aryan flock.

The then Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain (1937-1940), attempts appeasement to Hitler to avoid war and allows annexing the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia).

Neville Chamberlain was later ousted in May, 1940 in favor of Winston Churchill subsequent to the assault on Norway.

In November 1938 a German representativeby the name Ernst vom Rath was murdered by a

Polish Jew, this led to Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was carried out of Hitler Youth, the

Gestapo and the SS (Schutzstaffel). All through this time, Jewish inhabitants existing in Nazi

Germany and Austria was harassed, put to death and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Germany makes progress the Saar and remilitarizes the Rhineland between 1935 and 1936.

Austria was annexed by Germany and the event is known as the Anschluss. The Munich

Agreement in 1938 was a result of the annexation of Sudetenland. In 1939, Italy invades Albania. And Victor Emmanuel III claimed the Albanian throne. The invasion of Poland by

Germany resulted in the eruption of 2nd World War.

In 1939 numerous America countries like Canada, Cuba refused to give protection to German

Jewish expatriates on the MS St. Louis. No country accepted the expatriates. The ship proceeds back to Germany. Most people on board killed themselves, rather than to go back

Nazi Germany.

Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated as the new President of United States in November 1932.

He commences public welfare policy, the “New Deal” to reduce the destruction of the Great

Depression.

The kingdom of Italy invaded the Ethiopian Empire during the second Italo-Abyssinian War

(1935-1936).

The puppet state of Manchukuo was created in 1931 after the Empire of Japan captures

Manchuria. The last Emperor of Qing dynasty of China became the regent and sovereign.

M. K .Gandhi show the way to the Satyagraha movement in March 1930, in announcement of the freedom of India and the Salt March.

Notable Assassination

The President of French was assassinated by an emigrant of Russia named Paul Gorguloff in

1932.

In 1935 United States presidential candidate Huey Long was assassinated. Austrian Nazis in 1934 murdered the Chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, and most important figure of Austrofascism.

A member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), Vlado

Chernozemski assassinated Alexander I of Yugoslavia, during his visit in 1934 to Marseille,

France.

Government and Politics in America during 1930s

The Depression Decade

The years 1930 to 1939 in the United States were the years when the bureaucratic welfare state was created because of the devastation of economic crisis in the history of United States.

The great depression was not short lived like other economic problems. It affected all spheres of lives in the society. The government focused on how to bring to an end of the great depression. The severe economic crisis led to the conflict between Republicans and

Democrats. To end the great depression was the main motif of the government. The severity of the Depression and the emergency to transport the country back to affluence became the political affairs of the government in the 1930s.

President Herbert Hoover

The stock market crashed on 29 October, 1929. Herbert Hoover was the president of United

States. He was a republican. The collapse on Wall Street in New York created a chain reaction in terms of unemployment, deflation, credit contraction and also price dropped in agriculture. This not only affected the Americans but also affected the world economy. With the downfall of the economy the only question raised was will the government help in stabilizing the situation. President Hoover advised to allow the traditional market to come between by the government. Hoover stated, “Economic wounds must be cured by the accomplishment of the cells of the monetary body-the producers and consumers themselves.”

The measures taken by President Hoover didn’t change any of the existing crises in America and so he lost the election to the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

The New Deal

The New Deal began from 1933-938 during President Roosevelt’s first term. The laws were passed by both the political parties, Congress and the President. The programs like the three

R’s- Relief, Recovery, and Reform were response to the Great Depression to help in recovering the economy of the state, relief to the poor and unemployed and to reform the financial system so as to put a stop to a repeat hopelessness. Roosevelt take control, action based, realistic variety of policy was welcomed by the Americans. Roosevelt skillfully processed his legislative reforms by building the New Deal. Roosevelt was the first president to use the authority of administration to maintain a sequence of ceremonial organization to run new projects like social security, unemployment insurance and public housing. President

Roosevelt drew together elements from urban ethnic groups, labor, women, African

Americans and middle-class liberals. The New Deal created the better maintained state.

The First New Deal

On 4th of March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt started his presidency, and there were no centralized welfare scheme, no centralized unemployment indemnity, and no municipal accommodation. President Roosevelt commenced fifteen most important legislative bills within one hundred days of regulation. All the bills were passed. The New Deal authorized restricted agreement with the private sector in setting monetary limits and principles within a company. New Deal transfer billions of dollars into jobs and relief programs and also increases employment.

The Second New Deal

In 1935-1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the second New Deal programs.

Roosevelt introduced five most important objective- enhanced use of countrywide possessions, security against old age, unemployment and illness and slum clearance, and national work liberation program to restore direct relief efforts. The foundation of the Second

New Deal was the 1935, Social Security Act .

Isolationism of America

The memory of The Great Depression of the tragic loses in World War I made America a strategy toward isolationism. It supported non-interventionism in European and Asian disagreements and non-entanglement in the international politics. The United States did not enter the World War II in September 1939, when France and England declared war on

Germany. Towards the end of 1939, affairs between Japan and United State deteriorated and

America began to put in order for war.

Great Depression ends in War

Many problems remained unchanged and unsolved towards the end of 1930s. The economy of America somewhat resolved but unemployment remained unchanged. In 1939, 9.5 million

Americans were out of work. The Great Depression finally came to an end in 1942 with

United States joining the 2nd World War. The Great Depression ended not for the reason that of the procedures or actions of the Presidents or political organization but for the reason that of the armed forces expenditures of World War II.

Lost Generation

The term Lost Generation was created by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest

Hemingway, as an epigraph of his book The Sun Also Rises During the peak seductive time of the 1920s, America was coming of age. Developing an identity that was caught in between the old fashion values of the immigrant fathers and the growing materialistic aspiration of a younger generation. These greatly affected the writers of the Lost Generation, including T. S.

Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, etc. The Lost Generation comprised of ex- patriot who rejected the pre- war values of romanticism, love, optimism, hope and prosperity. They were also cynical of the glamour and the glitters of the 20s but at the same time they also possessed the potential of the great boom of the time. They looked at

American as the materialistic based and therefore corrupt and insincere. They were unable to harmonize with the past believes and also unable to welcome those of the present mainstream society. These left the Lost Generation on the verge of moral bankruptcy and spiritually infertile and settling to the momentary pleasures of drinking and sexual promiscuity as comfort. They made France the epicentre of literature. Their works influenced almost every writer who followed. Their lives were among the most fascinating of the twentieth century.

They spent their time in the cafes and bars of Paris, drinking and enjoying but still had the discipline in them to write or paint. For these artists America was their country Paris was their hometown.

Ernest Hemingway perhaps the most famous writer of the Lost Generation popularized the term in his book The Sun Also Rises It gave him worldwide success and cemented him as the front runner of the Lost Generation. Many of his books became viable for people who felt disillusioned with the society and the culture of the 20s. Themes of his books including alienation, moral decay and detachment reflected the attitude of the time.

During his life Hemingway published seven novels, six short stories and two non-fictional works. In 1954 he won The Nobel Prize in Literature. His time in war contributed to his writing and laid the basis of his book Farewell to Arms In the novel he wrote of war, that “it breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kill. It kills the very good and the very gentle, and the brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there is no special hurry.” Like many members of the Lost Generation he spent much of his time in Paris during the twenties and suffered from alcoholism.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a prominent author of novels and short stories in the 1920s.

His books treated the themes of abuse and promise along with despair and age prevalent in the 20s or as he called them The Jazz Age. He wrote four novels during his lifetime.

Fitzgerald was critical of the 20s and attempted to define the era through his works.

Fitzgerald view of the 20s was serious and complex for he recognised the glamour as well as the waste, the charm as well as the self destruction. Many of his novels included the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent life style, egoism, self confidence and alcoholism.

A member of the Lost Generation himself, he succumbed to the alcoholism which was prominent among the ex- patriots of the group. His writing reflected the immorality and the aimlessness of the generation of the post war period. He became very close friends with

Hemingway. Their relationship suffered many ups and downs which ended in bitter resentment.

Sinclair Lewis was the first writer for USA to get a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930.

The author wrote about American society, capitalism, socialism and modern women in the work place. His great success came when he wrote a novel about small town life called Main

Street. His next Babbitt satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. His other novels would carry the same themes of hypocrisy and the pointlessness of the American society particularly the wealthy. A raging alcoholic, he was even checked into a psychiatric hospital after a serious binge in 1937. He was in fact killed by his addiction, dying in Rome at the age of 65.

Modernism Modernism painting, modern architecture, modern music, modern poetry, etc. Are expressions that are widely found in English usage. This shows that in the West, modernism dominated life; arts and literature in the first half of the 20th century.

According to German theorists, Jurgen Habermas, the modern period in the West started with the Enlightenment, almost from the middle of the 17th century. A new faith in the power of reason emerged in the name of the so called Enlightenment project. The growth of industrialisation, science and technology, and urbanisation advocated a break with tradition, blind belief, slavish obedience to any kind of authority, and the application of reason and logic to our thinking and solution-seeking process. That is why it is called the Modernistic era.

As in the case of any wave movement, there are different shades of Modernism. Early

Modernism was more orthodox and very close to the traditional views; early modernism was marked by deep nostalgia for the either period that was full of faith and by the tone of lament for the loss of an undisputed authority. During the 18th and the 19th centuries, several schools of Modernism flourished, all of them basically glorifying the power of man; the authority of science and reason replaced the authority of faith and religion. It retained the essential the essential unity of the human race, however idealistic it was, the classical belief in universal harmony, and a universal human essence. Modernism in the west dominated life, art and culture upto the first half of the 20th century but Modernism of all shades dissolves into Post

Modernism by absorbing some aspects of it during the second half of the century.

Modernism based on the scientific spirit, reason and logic, offers system and order, unity and wholeness, stability and certainity. The confidence given by scientific explorations and successes reinforced this point of view. In Modernism, though things fall apart there is a center to hold the pieces together and deep down the artists as well as human being as a whole

Surrealism

Surrealism dates its origin back to the 1920s, evolving from Dada, an intellectual and artistic movement dating from 1916 to 1922. Dada showed objection and disagreement against the stupidity and slaughter of the 1st world war. Dada itself is a nonsensical word.

Dada was nihilistic illogical humorous, deliberately shocking and anti art. In 1924 Andre

Breton started out this revolutionary movement called Surrealism. It was more revolutionary and organised than Dada. Surrealists were known for their hatred towards the Bourgeois society. Many of them were Marxist's, some of them believed that art has the influence and change things, and some were deeply influenced by the untaught art of insanity and psychosis and some by the primeval art forms. Surrealists were well known in the scopes of painting, literature and the cinema.

Surrealism started its injection into cinema during the period 1924-30. Being more radical in its content and products than the Impressionists films, Surrealist filmmakers became an outcast of the film industry who levelled their success with box-office and commercial hits. This made surrealists cinema to rely on private patronage.

Surrealists were very much enticed by the cinema. For them cinema is an attempt to represent darkened territory of the human world, the dreamlike participation individual experience, the manipulation of space and time. They were intensely influenced by the fantastic and marvellous nature of the movies. For the Surrealists cinema is the medium through which they channelled untamed half of human desires and emotions.

Artists such as Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Antonin Artaud etc dabbled with surrealist cinema, but it was Spaniard Luis Bunuel who immersed in the genre. With themes of sexual desire, violence, ecstasy, religion and blasphemy, Bunuel’s films were very controversial in those times. Films like An Andalusian Dog (1928) and The Age of Gold (1930) which he made with Dali caused rampage when it was first released and until the 1970s it was banned.

Bunuel spoke of cinema as the perfect way to express our emotions and our dreams.

While the whole surrealist scene was breaking around the 30s, Bunuel still continued the traditional surrealist films and became one of the greatest directors of his times. Until his death in 1983, Bunuel continued his own style of surrealist films. His other notable films include Belle Du Jour (1967), That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974).

One of the important things in the apprehension of surrealism is the idea of freedom.

Surrealists thought that they were unsuccessful and restricted because of the prudent ways of the bourgeois society to which many of them belonged. Many tried to break free from the traditions and restrictions of the bourgeois life. And to attain this freedom they sought the way of art. Many surrealists held more composite and comprehensive views. Using the mystical and the magical, the instinctive, the chance encounter, automatic writing etc they challenged reason and 'modernity'.

Surrealists developed their own notion of reality. They often sought to promote this reality in the public forum and attacked logical thinking, charged against customary realist forms. Surrealist activities never confined only to the arts. They tried their hands in changing the society. They worked on changing public receptions of reality through manifestos. Their association with the communist party brought so much controversy during the time. One of the main aims of the surrealists was to liberate western customs and tradition from what they believed to be despotism and suppression of reason and bring out the real guise of reality.

They aimed to destabilize the already corrupted society, derange the meaning, to upset, disorientate and bring shock on the face of this so called civilization. They believed that liberation could be achieved only when our mind stays in a partially conscious condition. Channelling their revolutionary ideas surrealist filmmakers invented their own style of narration and rejected the conventional ones and thus trying to liberate films from the design of narration. Surrealist films focus their attention on narrative itself and upon filmic processes of establishing meaning and strengthening the relationship between the audience and the film.

There is an absence of the logic of narration and continuity and so it doesn’t allow giving any kind of meaning on actions. There is no bridge between the proceedings that are going on and character psychology is totally dissolved and virtually non-existent. For example the characters in An Andalusian Dog are unnamed, using equivocal and vague title cards. In these manners they try to derange the conventional narratives of time, space, plot, character etc. They often tried to bewilder the viewer and leave to senselessness and show the whole idea of dreams through a series of influential but unconnected imagery.

There have been a lot of conventional devices and techniques that has been used but they never wanted them to be forced to something that is easily predictable. What they do is superimposing and dissolving some traditional conventions of the editing process. Surrealists filmmakers uses a series of technique such as the startling juxtaposition of different pictures, discontinued and continued editing and point of view shots. This techniques were used so as to leave the audience disorientate view confusing but at the same time giving a seed of thought.

Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris is an American Comedy film written and directed by Woody Allen.

It was released in 2011. The movie explores the themes of modernism, nostalgia and time travel in the most surrealist way. The movie is Allen’s most commercially and critically successful one. It was nominated for the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Art Direction and won Best Original Screenplay at the 84th Academy Awards, 2012. Midnight in Paris is woven with time travel conceit and comedy giving tribute to the artists of the early twentieth century, the Lost Generation, the Jazz Age and also to La Belle Époque. But most of all it gives homage to the city of Paris, which attracted a whole lot of artists from around the western hemisphere at the turn of the century. In the movie the City of Lights is elevated as a muse of all these artists. The opening scene itself is a tribute of Paris postcard clips like Pont

Alexander 3, Place de la Concorde, L’Arc de Triomphe, The Louvre, etc to a traditional jazz song, “Si Tu Vois Ma Mere” by Sidney Bechet.

Allen’s movie is straight forward and it proceeds in a delightfully engaging manner.

His main character Gill Pander is in Paris with his fiancé and her family. He is a successful screenwriter who has a desire to write a novel. The novel that he is working on concerns a man who owns a nostalgia shop. Gill himself is very nostalgic not for the early years of his life but for what he considers to be the good old days of Paris, in the 1920s. Gil failed freshman English in college but he is one of those few who deeply understands and loves literary art. He does not want to be drowned in the world of material gain and so he wants to give up his current status and write more meaningful books. One night Gil walks the narrow picturesque side streets of Paris to think about his novel and when it struck midnight, Gill is approached by an antique taxi from the 20s whose occupants encouraged him to climb in and join them. Subsequently he meets The Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter,

Josephine Baker and many more. This turns out to be more than an isolated incident but rather a nightly excursion which results in encounters with Salvador Dali, T. S. Eliot,

Gertrude Stein, Picasso and his mistress Adriana with whom Gill begins to fall in love and she with him incidentally. One night Gill and Adriana are out together and when the clock strikes twelve, a horse carriage pulls up. The occupants of the carriage invited them to come along. They enter the carriage and they are taken to the Moulin Rouge of the 19th century. Here they encounter Toulouse- Lautrec, Edgar Dagar and Paul Gaugain. For Adriana this is her Golden Age, Paris in the late 1900s. The people that they meet in this timeline insist that they would have rather lived in the Renaissance. And suddenly Gil has an epiphany and

Woody Allen make his point. The danger of the type of nostalgia that Gil suffers from is that it creates an illusion and then a veil which prevents a person from appreciating the unique characteristics and the opportunity of his own days. And opportunities that are not seen cannot be seized. Woody Allen’s view of the universe pretty much negates any advantage, any particular age happens to have. Gil is Allen’s alter ego and he has Gill described the universe as cold, violent, meaningless place. But there is a question of the importance of the time and place in which an individual lives. Rather than being a cold and meaningless universe, The Bible tells us that it was actually created and the creator deliberately established the time and places and boundaries of our habitation.

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is in a way a dream within a dream. First Gil is being transported to the 20s, from there Gil and Adriana is transported to the Paris of the late

1900s. Using this dream in a dream sequence Allen brings out the search for The Golden Age in some of the characters. For Gil it’s the Paris of the roaring 20s. For Adriana it’s the La

Belle Époque and for Dagar and Rodin it’s the Renaissance. This is when it hits Gil with his epiphany. The movie itself is a mockery to the idea of looking back at the past as a golden age and the refusal to live dramatically in the present. What is going on in the case of these characters is denial, denial of the painful present, a present which is dull. For them the past is not dead, actually it is not even past. They have the tendency to romanticize a time in the distant past and not to live in the present. They feel that there is a danger that we live in the future. Here Allen is trying to make common cause with many of the spiritual masters.

Woody Allen Allan Stewart Konigsberg is an American artist, humorist, moviemaker, dramatist, as well as composer, whose profession duration is more than six decades. Woody Allen was born on December 1 1935 in Brooklyn, New York. He is the person who redefined comedy movie all through the 1970s.

Allen worked as an author for comedy movies during the 1950s also writing gags furthermore writing screenplays for small screen furthermore publishing numerous volumes of undersized comedy sections. In the near the beginning of 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comedian, giving emphasis to monologues to a certain extent different than conventional comic story. While a comedian, Allen urbanized the personality of an unconfident, rational, worried nebbish, which he maintains is reasonably dissimilar as of his real-life persona. In 2004, Comedy Central positioned Allen in fourth position on a catalogue of the 100 furthermost stand-up comedians of all time; at the same time a UK investigation positioned Allen as the third supreme comedian.

It was from his experiences that Woody realized that he could not work on a movie without having complete control over its production. Woody’s theoretical directorial debut was in What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966); a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the very next year in the mockumentary Take the Money and Run (1969). Woody has written, directed and more often than not, starred in any movie for a year ever since he started writing simultaneously more than a dozen plays and several books regarding comedy.

Woody Allen is prominently known for his romantic comedies like Annie Hall

(1979), and Manhattan (1979). Woody made many transitions in his movies all through the years, especially transitioning from his early funny movies like Bananas (1971), Love and

Death (1975) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to ask

(1972). These movies were different to his more appreciated and loved romantic comedies like Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Woody Allen’s movies vary from films to films. In movies like Stardust Memories (1980) and Interiors (1978) we see his subject matter was different to that of the recent ones like Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989),

Husbands and Wives (1992), and Mighty Aphrodite (1995). Finally to the last decade his work vary from light comedy to movies concerning self-destructive darkness of Match Point

(2005) and recently to the cinematically beautiful tale of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).

Although his plot lines and styles have changed over the years and he is regarded as one of the best moviemakers of present time due to the fact that his ideas on art and his mastery of filmmaking is unique.

Towards the end of 1960s Allen started writing and directing movies, first dedicating oneself to write mocking comedies before he moved hooked on to dramatic material influenced by European art cinema during the 1970s, along with flashing between comedies and dramas to the current time. He is frequently acknowledged as part of the New

Hollywood generation of cinema makers of the mid-1960s to late 1970s. Allen often acts in his own movies, characteristically in the disposition he advanced as a stand-up. Various well- known of his more than 40 movies are Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). In 2007 he assumed Stardust Memories (1980), The Purple Rose of

Cairo (1985), and Match Point (2005) were his most excellent movies. Critic Roger

Ebert illustrates Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."

Allen won four Academy Awards: three for Best Original Screenplay and one for Best Director (Annie Hall). He also won nine BAFTA.

Literature Review Rick Groen in an article for Globe and Mail says that the male protagonist i.e. Gil finds his harmonize in the middle of the Lost Generation writers and people and the public shared several delightful moments just like Gil thrills about in the movie. The viewers remarked that the movie is like stepping into a Classic Comic edition of A Moveable Feast.

Jeff Beck of Examiner.com in his re-evaluation for the picture says that the movie is a blend together of fascination, the supernatural, humour and characterization coming together to make the movie into a charming as well as rationally thought-provoking understanding. To Jeff Beck and the viewers the movie came as a fresh great film and one of the most excellent movies of the year.

Perry Seibert for TV Guide wrote Woody Allen's humour in Midnight in Paris is an advanced late-era work of art accurately for the reason that the movie come into view of that period of time and knowledge have ultimately endorsed Allen to find out with the purpose of his passionate line be able to recognize his pragmatic/contemptuous surface devoid of surrendering to it.

Simon Foster for his editorial in sbs.com.au wrote so as to the movie is a combination of vision or a romantic-comedy or a lampoon or a travel adventure. According to him Allen's boldness pronounces he is past doesn't matter what sticky label public consign on his work of art. If the viewers still sense the necessity, they can call it a mere love narrative, by means of a metropolitan, reminiscence, an art and a self.

Simon Miraudo for Quickflix re-examined the picture and remarked the movie as mesmeric, bewitching, captivating, and also enchanting. According to Simon, Woody Allen has presented a foretaste keen on his mind's eye, exorcised a number of or to a certain extent agreeable fiend along with collective by means of the persons one of the frothiest, funniest furthermore for the most part a heart-warming movie in lifetime. Matthew Turner in his article for View London describes the picture as a marvellously shot, magnificently acted furthermore excellently written; the movie is an enormously pleasurable, recurrently humorous furthermore pleasantly dreamlike humour so as to results a long-awaited homecoming to structure for Woody Allen.

Gary Thompson, in Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that the movie is a blustery comedy to be prepared of a YouTube-age author gathering the icons along with heroes of a long-gone, established period, other than Allen goes deeper, intensifying on his time-travel piece of equipment to construct unanticipated furthermore unpredictably munificent interpretation.

Scope

This work is to illustrate on the idea nostalgia in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

The different types of nostalgia involved in it and how they are used in terms of the character

Gil will be discussed. The elements of escapism in nostalgia will be investigated through the movie and its characters.

Objectives

 To explore the idea and elements of nostalgia in Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen

 To present escapism and realisation through nostalgia.

 To critically evaluate the movie and discuss its themes and compare.

 We will be looking into the background of Cinema and the American Dream in

movies.

Chapter I

Critical Theory and Research Methodology

Stream of consciousness

Stream of Consciousness is a term that is often used to talk about the way in which modernist novels get inside the consciousness of character’s head. The term comes from the work of William James who was a philosopher in the late 19th century and also the brother of novelist, Henry James. In his 1890 book, “Principles of the Psychology” he uses the term

“stream of thought,” arguing that thinking does not happens in terms of separate ideas, but in fact, there is a mingling of ideas that is often stopped and started by the things in our environment, or by thoughts that we arrive at and then stop thinking about them. May

Sinclair was a novelist herself and read a lot of psychology, and she took the term from

William James when she reviewed a novel in 1915 by Dorothy Richardson. The novel was called Pointed Roofs and it is the first volume of a multivolume book called Pilgrimage that follows a young girl, Miriam Henderson through her maturation. And Richardson was really the first to spend that many volumes chronicling the thoughts passing through a single character’s mind. Sinclair in her review used the term stream of consciousness.

Stream of consciousness is kind of broad descriptive term, and sometime it’s more useful to think in terms of more specific techniques, one of which is the interior monologues.

When the stream of consciousness is particularly extended and illogical, we often call that an interior monologue. And this can be direct when we are in the first person and have no narrator intervening between us and the character’s consciousness. Indirect interior monologue does involve a narrative presence and Virginia Woolf often uses that technique.

She actually writes about narrative thoughts method in a 1919 essay called Modern Novels and they are talking about James Joyce, she says: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected or incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”

Now in describing Joyce she was also describing her own method, which she used in 1925, in which she describes the atoms as they fall upon the minds of various characters but mainly

Clarissa Dalloway. At the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa steps outside her front door and thinks:

“What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave.”

She’s been thinking about the fact that the doors will have to be taken off their hinges in order to make space for the party that she’s giving that night. And just that thought of hinges makes her thinks about the sound of the hinges and sends her mind back to her young adulthood when she was at Bourton, where she grew up in the country and that sets off the chain of association in her mind. Wolf talked in another essay in 1925 about life as a semi- transparent envelope, a luminous halo, and what she was getting at, explains why she used stream of consciousness in her novels. To get at the core of human experience, one has to get inside people’s mind and at the complexity of what it feel like to be a human being from day- to-day, having all of our sense impressions mingled with memories and perceptions and emotional states.

One of the hardest things to be described or to be properly aware of is what it feels like to be inside our own minds. The second by second flow of images, words, feelings and sounds inside out head that philosophers called our consciousness. All day this consciousness is filled with a tangle of material that flashes by in an observing eye so fast and in so multilayered and dense array. We can generally only rest and focus on a minuscule part of what is before us. There are waves of sensations, fog-banks of moods, collisions of ideas and swirls of associations and impressions. Consciousness doesn’t just unfold on a single cinema screen of the mind either. We can think of it more like a multiplex where a dozen or more moods and emotions are projected at once in a fractured collection of images, reminiscent of a puzzling collage of Avant Garde videos. Most of what we have felt and have been, will disappear before it can ever be held and examined. Furthermore, little of the richness of the consciousness ever makes it out into public discussion. When we open our mouths and tell other people, for example: what we think or how we’re feeling. We have no option but to radically simplify the nature of experience, like a journalist filing a word piece on a battle or political revolution to an indifferent, domestic audience a continent away. We might say we’ve had a “quiet day so far” or are “fairly cheerful at the moment.” And a generous social code means we don’t remind one another of what an inaccurate portraits this must necessarily be. Part of the reason why we are not quite aware of the true nature of the consciousness is the fault of literature. In most of the novels we read, characters are attributed an utterly implausible, yet superficially beguiling, clarity of mental functioning. For example: the influential 19th century English novels: Anthony Trollope liked to offer his readers a snapshot of what was supposed to be going on in his characters’ heads. In his novel, Phineas Finn, a man is elected to parliament and Trollope described him travelling by train to the capital to take up his post and musing moodily on his political prospects. He had many serious almost solemn thoughts on his journey to London. He wondered if he would make a failure of a great matter he had taken in hand. He could not but tell himself that the chances were twenty to one against. Now that he looked at it, the difficulties loomed larger than ever. Trollope give this sincere impression that this really is how human beings think when they sit down on trains and consider their futures. The sort of novels that Trollope wrote has ever been described as extremely “realistic.” And yet the problem is that, of course, no human who has ever existed, actually thinks or feels remotely like this. It took until the early 20th century of writers to focus on and respond to this foreshortening. In 1922, in his great novel Ulysses, the Irish writer James Joyce, for the first time made the move of putting a kind of microphone inside the character’s head to pick up on what became known as “The Stream of Consciousness.” It sounded radically different from anything Trollope or past novelists had ever described. At one point in Ulysses, we hear the stream of consciousness of a heroine Molly as she lies in bed besides her husband Bloom in the middle of the night.

“Is he dreaming? Am I in it? He smells of some kind of drink not whiskey perhaps the sweety kind of paste they put posters up with, I’d like to sip green and yellow expensive drinks staged or Johnny’s drink. I tasted one with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel. He must have eaten oysters. I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel fuller. What’s the idea of making us like that with a big hole in the middle? I hate people who come at all hours, answer the door and you’re all undressed.”

We come to know more about our own consciousness via Joyce’s unusual portrait of Molly’s.

Like ours, Molly’s mind moves extremely fast from one topic to another. At one moment she is thinking of the liquors, then about an American she met at the theater, then a second later she’s wondering if her husband’s been eating oysters. Then she is thinking about his penis.

Then she wonders about her own body. Then get irked by the idea of people coming around to the house when she is not ready to open the door. There’s no dominant central theme that gets carefully explored. Despite the monstrous complexities, Ulysses, arguably, still amounts to a radical simplification of the true nature of experience. After all the novel only exists as words, whereas our stream of consciousness includes a disjointed and random streaming of films and pictures. Images constantly fit across consciousness. Sometimes we’ll see something extraordinarily specific, a door handle from 27 years ago or an image of a boat on a canal in Western France. Or remember looking out of a train on a journey through

Germany, but there’ll be no further details or real sense as to why this has come into our heads right now. Nevertheless, Joyce’s work is hugely significant because it helps us to start to see what we’re up against when we try to understand our own minds. It is not a of just opening up a hatch and finding a welter of well-formulated thoughts. When we turn our attentions to ourselves, we won’t be able to locate crystalline attitudes and precise ideas. We will discover only chaos and illusive thoughts. More significantly, it’s from the prime-evil mulch, that we will have to assemble the solid and serious plans we need to navigate through existence. We have to decide: what we care about? How we should direct our lives? Who we should try to be? Knowing more about the stream of consciousness prepares us for the work that we have to do to pull out from the stream, the decent and accurate thoughts we need. The mind won’t automatically yield clear answers when we ask ourselves what we think or where we might direct our energies. There can be naturally be a temptation to avoid the hard work and there are some alternatives to proper introspection. Some of the content we hold in our minds is coherent and very easy to grasp, but it suffers from a marked drawback: it isn’t really our own. It’s second hand, stale and a derivative bank of ideas and plans. We have certain notions in our heads that comes, not from our deeper resources of feelings and intuition but from what we have sucked in uncritically from outside, from what we read in the newspaper or heard about from parents and friends. These are: our received ideas. We don’t need to think hard at all to regurgitate them. They are just waiting in prepackaged form in the reception room of our minds. And yet, its only the thoughts and feelings that are originally unprocessed that come from the caverns in ourselves, that are the ones richest in information.

Even if they are, painfully the hardest to make sense of. Knowing a little more about the stream of consciousness shows us that our brains are a more delicate, messier organ than we are normally allowed to imagine. Many of the introspective tasks we set ourselves turn out to be more fiddly and are going to need more resources than we typically allow for. Yet the rewards for mastering introspection correctly are immense. For it is by becoming experts in our own stream of consciousness that we have the chance truly to understand who we are and thereby to align our lives with the way we really feel and with the goals that can truly satisfy us when we reach them.

Chapter II

Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris

In the movie, Gil presents to know-how two discrete categories of reminiscence existed, historical and personal nostalgia. Gil's association through 1920s Paris demonstrates chronological reminiscence, or reminiscence for a moment in time in the history, which Gil hasn't in point of fact skilled. It distinguished with individual longing, which is fixed to one's recollections. Despite the fact that Gil's chronological nostalgia is colourfully depicted in

Allen's motion picture, his individual wistfulness is other restrained, however it basis Gil furthermore eventually makes it achievable for him to come back to the current time.

Exploration point towards individual longing and may put forward reimbursement, serving individuals preserves a stable sense of self from side to side modify also disturbing understanding.

Historical longing is poles apart. A personality in the movie, Paul, refers, critically, to reminiscence as "denial of the painful present." To various degrees, this is accurate, for the reason that by classification, it actually is disappointing in the midst of the current situation in a means where the disappointment is immense adequate that somebody in reality favours an epoch or time period since the earlier period. Historical reminiscence is simultaneous to a more sceptical viewpoint and individual’s level to historical wistfulness is inclined to have a further pessimistic view of their own history and find a smaller amount of contentment in their associations — this plays out in Gil's connection with his fiancée.

In spite of this recollection of the past trips, Woody Allen's movie is, in actuality, an account about managing with the current time, according to psychology studies. It was Gil's expedition throughout the history that assisted him identifies what was absent in his current life and that gave him the audacity to take further steps to make everything right.

Gil's own individual reminiscence is deeply placed in his earlier period achievement as a playwright and his old thoughts of becoming a grand author, like those he meets in the 1920s, counting Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. These feelings keep Gil from becoming lost in so as to what went before. He comes around to saying “Maybe I could still write that great novel”. He is still trying to pursue after several of those old thoughts.

Nostalgia can be understood as a category of daydream, and desire is usually consideration of as a justification instrument that permits somebody to misplace themselves and obstruct out the shocking. The narrative culminates when Gil stops his daydream by recognizing the history was not all golden and the opportunity isn't so awful. Throughout a discussion with his love interest Adriana in Belle Époque Paris, Gil give an account of a vision that encouraged him to comprehend there were no antibiotics in the earlier period. In the unchanged discussion, Gil realises that while the current time can be unproductive, so is life itself.

Individuals go round to the history to run away in countless ways — commencing contributing in chronological re-enactments, to presenting new beginning fairs or still understanding volumes portrayed former periods. These prospects to run away into a past period hold a different appeal to different persons. On the other hand, somewhat comes alive for them that not possible to knowledge in the current time. Other cinemas Allen has made, together with Manhattan and Radio Days, make use of reminiscence as a subject matter, but

Allen equanimity the impracticality with recognition that the excellent old days weren't forever so excellent.

Woody Allen quoted, "In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party and then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities; you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap and then Voila!"

As cliché as it is, we never fully enjoy what we have until it's gone, and when it is gone, we either feel nostalgic, warm and sweet and painful, a sad reminiscent smile, or regret, which is one of the most horrible emotions possible, closely followed by panicked anxiety, and should be avoided as much as possible. Sometimes, looking back can be accompanied by feeling of relief or fear or a myriad of other thing depending on the memory.

But is there any way to simply look back happily and get rid of all other unpleasant emotions?

First off, there's the question of whether nostalgia is considered more of a good or bad emotion, and there's a whole lot of discussion around the topic floating around, and it basically narrows down to the following two points: it's good in the sense that it's allowing you to relive your memories, so good memories will never truly die. On the other hand, it can get to the point where a person is living in the past and is unwilling to face the future.

To be able to look back happily, fondly on past events, one must exist in a situation that is better than the memory. And because memories are subject to alteration over time (it's been scientifically proven that the accuracy of memories exponentially decreases over time), it's possible to simply convince the brain that the current situation is better than the memories.

In the movie, Inez, tells Gil, that he is "in love with a fantasy," (Allen 5) that the Paris that charms him so is a Paris that does not independently lives, it lives merely in the phenomenology of his own insight, an awareness blemished and completed undependable by his own escapist require to remove starting the current in charge to obtain protection in a overestimated, utopian precedent. Gil feels that the Paris of the 20s is one constant further magnificent and advantageous than the Paris of at the moment, a reality merely emphasizing the "daydream" of Gil's insight. Indeed, as soon as Gil talks about how relaxing he is in Paris, he declares that, "I feel like the Parisians get me" (Allen 6). Undoubtedly, his love concern with Paris is predominantly one-sided and to some extent invented, enlightening an excessive desire. Gil is the sufferer of what Paul, the pseudo-intellectual professor, calls the "Golden-

Age thinking," (Allen 10) the concept that the present is a collapsed, contaminated, forge description of a magnificent period of the history by which the current must be considered and found inadequate. Golden-Age state of mind is one that hopes for a fantastic history and it is generated from the strains of dealing with the agonizing current time. It is a runaway, a variety of endeavoured retreat or holiday from the present; as Paul says in the film,

"Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present" (Allen 10)

Gil's Paris is an embodiment of reminiscence and wistfulness, a point advance highlighted by the statement that the work of fiction he is functioning on is about a man who owns a nostalgia shop. “Out of the Past was the name of the store, and its products consisted of memories. What was prosaic and even to one generation had been transmuted by the mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp” (Allen 31). These lines opens

Gil's novel, and it discloses the way of thinking at the back of his reminiscence for belongings of history and his emotion of him being born too late, it also concurrently emphasizes a significant understanding that Gil thereafter in the movie that his yearning for the precedent is founded on an admiration caused to be dishonest for the reason that of its unstable dependence on the mere passing of years. His beginning outline therefore by now make known a delicate, if motionless growing, acknowledgment that modern-day depiction of the history are fundamentally untrustworthy, for the reason that their reflective look in the direction of the history does not forever adequately take into explanation the purpose authenticity of departed periods.

In the movie Hemingway tells Gil that "you'll never write well if you fear dying."

(Allen 30) No more than as Gil discovers that history is not a harmless sanctuary to escape the sufferings and problems of the present. It is like history approaches with a soldiers of confronts and uneasiness and that all is not as it is like the romanticized history.

Paul, the sophistic pseudo-individual whose recognizable nature recurs in Allen's movies, creates statements and dialogues that cannot be reliable, until now eventually also assists make available the essential lucidity for Gil to turn out to be unconventional from his wistful yearning and associated terror of his own humanity. Though his misplaced point of view with a additional well-informed explore guide, his incompetence at clearing up a

Picasso work of art, and his invariable fake diffidence that in point of fact make known a true shortage in his acquaintance bespeak a man whose announcement must not be acknowledged as well unquestioningly, his be dogmatic about "Golden-Age thinking" in point of fact undergirds the middle disapproval of longing thoughts that the movie expands. When Gil imaginings distinctly about an romanticized Paris of the earlier period, Paul unexpectedly hark back him of the non-romantic actuality of a Paris with tuberculosis, foreshadowing Gil's own understanding close to the conclusion of the movie on how in the past there were no antibiotics along with therefore can’t completely value the magnificence which Adriana admires. This will eventually guide Gil back to his time, leaving behind of his longing of the past.

Adriana, cannot see the 20s as the Golden Age as Gil does. but have a preference of

La Belle Époque, 1890s Paris as The Golden Age with its horse carriage, the maxims and immense artistry of greats such as Rodin and Paul Gauguin. The idea is that a lot of of us live at the same time in the current time and up till now within some kind of remainder of an imaginary, romanticized earlier period. Gil's expedition, the from time to time unreal journey connecting actuality and mind's eye is every individual’s expedition to one level or another, for all of us live, on some level, in fantasy worlds mainly of our own creation.

Now Gil starts to see the problem, he can see reminiscence inside his reminiscence, a yearning inside his own yearning; he discovers that his vision, his nostalgia is limited to things too. He now can see the down side to things and not completely correspondent with realism. He slowly but surely starts to liberate himself from the imaginary concept that the current time must for all time indicate a level distortion of the way things were before. It is the break out inside his mind that reminiscence is merely a daydream. Adriana wants to escape to La Belle Époque Paris, as Gil scrutinizes her attraction for 1890s Pairs, he distinguishes the disingenuousness of her ideal utopian build, and as a result the hypocrisy of his own romanticized vision about thriving 20s Paris. This is more underlined when the artist

Paul Gauguin, who is of the Belle Époque time, articulates his reminiscence for the Paris of the 16th century, which is the Golden Age for him; it intensely entrenched in a yearning for a wonderful, romanticized earlier period in olden times, therefore enlightening one more escapist desire introducing Gil and the observer into a never-ending go back of displeased yearning. Gil unexpectedly realizes that the utopian precedent does not survived after all;

Paris in the 1890s is yet to be introduced to antibiotics. The earlier period consequently turns out to be an appearance of our discontented requirements and reminiscence turn out to be the representation of individual yearning.

Gil does travel 1890s Paris with Adriana, and here again, two personalities starting a dissimilar point in time appear to go into as well flawlessly with the difference in terms of communal, language, and cultural worlds of a preceding, along with therefore fundamentally unfamiliar, age. The people they meet at the coffee bar not Toulouse or Lautrec, not Edgar

Degas, not Paul Gauguin comments or still gives the impression to become aware of their out-of-place manifestation, gesture, or other strange sights of socio-cultural pointer. Adriana's

Flapper manifestation, sated with horrifyingly jogged locks, should have draw out at slightest a few remark, still in the middle of the possibly favourable fin-de-siècle bohemian location, however only momentary suggestion are made about her in very contemporary wisdom of approach, with nary a point out of Gil's overlong locks, twenty-first-century reposeful attitude, or his Californian pseudo-youngster everyday cadence, speeding, and quality added be relevant the near the beginning of than 1890s French coffee bar civilization.

Fascinatingly, Woody Allen had built his version of the 21st century Paris, the Paris that he imagines to be and is presented in the movie. Allen assured of his movie, "I just wanted it to be the way I saw Paris--Paris through my eyes" (Bagnetto, 2011).

Conclusion

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, taking the example of Paris presents a perception frequently damaged / ruined and performed unreliably by an escapist’s need to retreat from the present to take refuge in a glorified, utopian past. This paper criticizes the nostalgic impulse, the idea of the "thought of the golden age" (as it comes to be called in the film). As we see Gil having his epiphany when finally discovers nostalgia within his nostalgia, a longing within his longing, we are made to realize our misconception behind our almost mythological perception of the past, thus reflecting the realization of any man That the past is nothing more than the expression of our needs in the present.

Midnight in Paris takes nostalgia as its theme, but the difficulty with any exploration of nostalgia is that in common usage the word indiscriminately names too many sensibilities, unfortunately dismissing appropriate and enriching ways of being with the past. Altogether, the film helpfully suggests that there is more than one way to have a disordered relationship to the past. We may succumb to the “Golden Age” fallacy and refuse the present, or we might also reject the past altogether uprooting ourselves from that which gives depth of field to lived experience. While Gil chooses the present, it is clear that the past nourished and educated him. While he has chosen not to live in the past, he has not abandoned it either. He will not live in it, but he will live with it.

In order to substantiate my claims I quote J.K. Rowling, “Imagination is the only unique human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” In the words of Albus Dumbledore, “Of course it is happening inside your head… but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Works Cited

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 Groen, Rick. Midnight in Paris: Feathery light but still satisfying. The Globe and Mail. 2011

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 Thompson, Gary. With magical realism, Woody Allen steps into Paris’ literary past.

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