Correlating Historical Events and Cinematic Releases Using Web Information

Abstract

Mimesis is a term created by Aristotle and Plato in which art imitates life. Mimesis has been studied since ancient Greece and governed the theatrical and sculptural creations of the time. In this context, our work aims to study the effect of mimesis in the current cinematographic scenario, correlating historical events of the 20th and 21st centuries to the great cinematographic productions that follow. The question that guides our work is “Is there an increase in the release of films with a certain theme after a historical event?”. To answer this, we propose a methodology that uses two distinct data sources: one related to descriptions of historical facts from the 20th and 21st centuries extracted from Wikipedia and another with descriptions of films extracted from TMDb. Using topic modeling strategies, we automatically find the main themes related to historical events, and later, we evaluate how the description of a film is associated with the themes found. Temporal analysis is done to assess the popularity of each of the themes over time. In the results obtained by our methodology, there was a significant increase in the popularity of films that addressed themes related to historical events that occurred in an immediately preceding moment in time, corroborating the concept of mimesis.