Cine histórico con valor documental"La edad de la inocencia" (M. Scorsese, 1993)

Resumo

The educational quality required by the implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has been one of the major challenges for university teachers in the past years. If we add to this premise the reality of a society in which media use is strongly prevalent, with students who are highly receptive to the media and social networks, it has become indispensable to resort to information and communication technologies (ICT) as tools. But such social reality has – or shows – a not so positive side: the tendency to ‘presentism’ of many of those students, which limits the meaning of historical events. This communication is intended to convey the author’s experience as teacher of the subject of History of the Contemporary World, taught in the first year of the Bachelor’s Degree in Geography, in which we have used the film The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993) as educational tool to explore the world of New York’s bourgeoisie in the last quarter of the 19th century. By resorting to the technique of superimposing public and private spaces, the film has attained documentary value that helps and emphasises our understanding of the actual meaning of the habits and customs, as well as the cynicism and the double standards, of the upper classes of New York’s society, holding on to Victorian attitudes that still look at modern, innovative Europe warily. The author’s ultimate objective is to assert the usefulness of historical cinema as a historical and practical document on the basis of Scorsese’s adaptation of the novel of the same name by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), published in 1920.