A golden age

I watched last night, on my brother's recommendation, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. It is a weird film. OK, learned critics loved it, it has nice if nostalgic and selected shots of Paris with everything modern and ugly excised, and charming actors impersonating famous people from the past, but the satire and the nostalgia for a golden age didn't work for me.  Hemingway, Faulkner, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stern were in Paris in the 1920s because it was a cheap place to live in and you could get booze legally. Some of them were talented people, others fed of the talents of others. There was a temporary flowering of the arts, as there was in Vienna in the years immediately before the First World War, in Berlin during the Weimar Era, the Belle Epoque from 1871 in Paris, in New York in the 1960s, but I don't buy into such nostalgia. The period was overcast by the shadow of the war and the unsettled sense of injustice, resentment and disillusionment. The Belle Epoque followed the defeat of France in its war against Germany, and was marred by the ugly divisions that were manifested in the Dreyfus case. Golden ages are periods of history without major wars such as the present. There are and were bloody regional wars, Vietnam, the Balkans, Chechnya Iraq and Afghanistan, and numerous conflicts in Africa between countries and tribes many of us had never heard of and certainly had never given much thought to, but the conflicts on the scale of the two World Wars had been avoided. Compared with the history of past centuries, we live in a period of peace. Woody Allen can poke fun at Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and the rest of the notable characters of that period, and in particular, poke fun at the pompous academic know all, but spare me the nostalgia.