13,997 films · 1950–2029
Cinema keeps its nerve. The slate doesn’t.
Every film here is read on twenty emotional dimensions — how dark, how playful, how tense, how tender. Averaged by decade, those readings find the 1970s without being told the 1970s happened. They also show what has changed since: not the films, but which films get made.
Eight decades, twenty readings
Each glyph is one decade’s average across all twenty readings, on the same axes in the same order. The shape is the decade’s signature.
Axes clockwise from twelve: hope, beauty, energy, warmth, comfort, romance, tension, cerebral, darkness, intimacy, paranoia, violence, ambiguity, nostalgia, connection, melancholy, playfulness, strangeness, spirituality, existential weight.
The instrument finds the seventies on its own
Nothing in this data knows about New Hollywood, Watergate or the end of the Production Code. It is twenty numbers per film, averaged. And the 1970s come out as the bleakest decade on record in four separate readings at once: hope at its lowest (45.2), comfort at its lowest (28.7), darkness at its highest (57.5), paranoia at its highest (42.3).
The 1980s reversal is the sharpest decade-to-decade move anywhere in the dataset: hope +8.5, melancholy −6.9, existential weight −9.9.
Playfulness fell. Films did not stop being playful.
Across everything, playfulness peaked in the 1990s at 46.2 and has fallen to 37.2 — the steepest sustained decline of any reading. The obvious conclusion is that cinema got more serious. The obvious conclusion is about half wrong.
Hold the genre still and most of the fall goes away. Among widely seen dramas, playfulness drops 4.5 points from the 1990s to the 2020s. Across all genres it drops 8.6. Dramas did not become less playful than dramas used to be — roughly half the change is in what gets financed, not in what the films are like.
Both series are drawn from comparably well-known titles, so the gap between them is about genre rather than about obscurity. The earliest decades are thin on drama.
The films this is about are not lost. There are more of them than in any previous decade — they are a smaller share of a much larger pile.
What is actually leaving
Two readings fall almost without interruption across the whole period, and neither is the one the discourse about cinema getting darker would predict. Romance goes 34.4 to 21.7. Nostalgia goes 50.4 to 33.9.
Beauty is the one to distrust, and the same caution applies to the early end of every line here. A reading of how beautiful a film is will pick up cinematography, colour and restoration, and the 1950s films still widely watched today are disproportionately the ones people restore and revere. The early decades describe what survived rather than what was released. Romance and nostalgia carry no such advantage, and they fall just as steadily.
Meanwhile the 2020s are the most tense decade measured here — 57.6, above even the 1970s at 56.1 — while connection is also at its highest, 61.7. Films are more anxious and more interested in people at the same time, which is a stranger combination than either number alone. The decade is also still running, so its figures will move.