It seemed pretty intentional AND clear to me. He was saying the filmmaker wasn’t (just) evoking a specific decade, but rather evoking a general (and, yes, subjective) feeling of ‘old-timiness.’ It didn’t read to me as the documentarian being vague (especially since he DOES mention the specific decade right before the…

Do you know what it means? Does everyone else reading this article know what it means? That is all that matters.