The Age of Innocence
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toward immediacy that Bolter and Grusin identify as having been part of
Western visual culture for centuries.
Scorsese’s The Age o f Innocence as a Work of Immediacy
Martin Scorsese’s 1993 retelling of The Age o f Innocence was
released amidst expectations for cinematic depictions of the past
established by “heritage cinema,” a cycle of films which, as Ginette
Vincedeau notes, began in the 1980s with such European period films as
Chariots o f Fire (1981), Jean de Florette (1986), and Babette’s Feast
(1987), followed by a number of films based on British novels, such as
the Merchant-Ivory adaptations of the works of E.M. Forster. A second
source of the cycle were 1980s British “quality television” adaptations,
such as Brideshead Revisited (1981), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), and
Pride and Prejudice (1980, 1995). Heritage cinema “thus refers to
costume films released [since the early 1980s], usually based on ‘popular
classics’ (Forster, Austen, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Zola)”
(Vincendeau xvii). They are generally “shot with high budgets and
production values by A-list directors and they use stars, polished lighting
and camerawork, many changes of decor and extras, well-researched
interior designs, and classical or classical-inspired music. Their lavish
mise-en-scene typically displays the bourgeois or aristocracy . . . (xviii).
One major difference between this heritage cinema and earlier
costume films is a shift from the Classic Hollywood practice of using
sets and costumes often merely evocative of the represented period, with
no undue concern for authenticity, to “the careful display of historically
accurate dress and decor, producing what one might call a ‘museum
aesthetic’” (xviii). In Bolter and Grusin’s terms, this heightened attention
to authenticity, in its attempt to make audiences “feel that they were
‘really’ there” (5), is an example of the medial impulse toward
immediacy or transparency. The typical heritage films of the late 1980s
and early ‘90s, in fact, are the epitome of the cinematic effort to satisfy
the desire for an ostensibly unmediated experience of the past.
In this regard, Scorsese’s film is entirely in keeping with both
heritage cinema and Bolter and Grusin’s concept of immediacy.
Fascinated with Wharton’s descriptions of the social rituals and physical
environments of 1870s New York society, Scorsese hired nearly a dozen
consultants to ensure period accuracy throughout the film. Robin
Standefer, Scorsese’s visual research consultant, spent two-and-a-half
years researching the minutiae of New York social life during the last