Realism

Realism has become one of the most contested terms in the history of cinema. Cinematic realism is neither a genre nor a movement, and it has neither rigid formal criteria nor specific subject matter. But does this mean that realism is simply an illusion, and that, as Werner Herzog has declared: "the so called Cinéma Vérité i?rité?" Probably not, as realism has been an extremely useful concept for asking questions about the nature of cinematographic images, the relation of film to reality, the credibility of images, and the role cinema plays in the organization and understanding of the world. Realism, at the very least, has been a productive illusion.

In film history, realism has designated two distinct modes of filmmaking and two approaches to the cinematographic image. In the first instance, cinematic realism refers to the verisimilitude of a film to the believability of its characters and events. This realism is most evident in the classical Hollywood cinema. The second instance of cinematic realism takes as its starting point the camera's mechanical reproduction of reality, and often ends up challenging the rules of Hollywood movie making.

MAKING MOVIES REAL

In spite of the fact that contemporary film and Greek drama are radically different modes of representation, one model for the rules for realism in movies comes to us from Aristotle's Poetics. In the Poetics, Aristotle staked the success of dramatic representation on what he called the play's probability (eikos). For Aristotle, dramatic action was a form of rhetoric, and the role of the play-wright was to persuade the audience of the sense of devoid of ve reality, or verisimilitude, of the dramatic work. From here flowed rules about characters, the words they speak, and the actions they perform on stage. For characters in a tragedy to be believable, for instance, they must be noble, that is to say slightly more virtuous than the citizens watching the play, and they must act and speak in accordance with their rank in society. If the characters were not more virtuous than the spectators, and if their actions were not consistent with their rank, the audience would feel neither the pity nor the fear, which, for Aristotle, justify the creation of drama. As for events, to be believable they must meet three criteria: 1) they must be logically justified, what today we call this motivation; 2) they must conform to the rules of genre; and 3) they must have, as Aristotle famously said, a beginning, middle, and end.

Aristotle's Poetics is a brilliant defense of the art of fiction and at the heart of this defense is a plea for the importance of verisimilitude. Small wonder, then, that Hollywood plots are so closely tied to Aristotelian notions of believability. As David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson have shown, verisimilitude in Hollywood cinema is supported by very specific forms of filmmaking that have remained remarkably consistent over the years. From George Cukor's Dinner at Eight (1933) to John Ford's The Searchers (1954), the "excessively obvious" style of the classic Hollywood period is bound up with modes of production and with technical or stylistic elements that insure a film's continuity and stylistic transparency. First and foremost, the films that constitute classical Hollywood cinema are driven by narrative causality. More often than not, they center on individual characters, who are often subject to the whims of fate and who undergo dramatic reversals of fortune, even if the films end happily. In Hollywood films, narration is determined by a rigorous chain of cause and effect, with scarcely any room for events that do not, somehow, announce future actions.

Ultimately, for narrative causality to seem real, it must be ushered in by a series of technical elements that maintain the film's continuity. The historical accuracy of wardrobe has long been a key to the realism of Hollywood's period pieces. Extra-diegetic music plays an important role in narrative causality by announcing on-screen action and smoothing over gaps in the narration. Irises, fades, and dissolves serve to mark the passage of time and maintain narrative flow. Match-on-action editing, shot/reverse-shot, the 180 degree rules, and synchronized sound serve to create the illusion of spatial continuity. All these technical elements that dominated classical Hollywood but also regularly appeared throughout the cinema of the world work to make cinematic fiction more believable. Even the star system served to maintain the verisimilitude of a film—central casting and spectators came to expect stars to play certain roles—hero, villain, femme fatale—and attempts to get beyond typecasting were often met with skepticism.

Within the confines of this verisimilitude, Hollywood films have defied the laws of nature, challenged scientific objectivity, and promoted a vision of life as an unending melodrama, but this matters little. Once verisimilitude is established, spectators enter into a rhetorical contract with a work of cinematic fiction wherein, to reprise Samuel Coleridge's formulation, they temporarily suspend their disbelief. Rules of verisimilitude may change over time, but this rhetorical illusion nonetheless helps to explain why spectators in the 1930s felt the frisson of evil when watching The Invisible Man (1933), which seems so dated to contemporary audiences. Understanding the rules of verisimilitude is a key to understanding audience reactions to films.

The term "realism" was first applied to painting and literature in the 1830s to describe new forms of art that developed in parallel with the rise of nineteenth-century democracies and claimed a privileged relation to material reality. If Romanticism glorified the imagination, realism, as Peter Brooks has said "makes sight paramount." Thus the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), George Eliot (1819–1880), Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), and Émile Zola (1840–1902) emphasize description and luxuriate in the details of everyday life. But realism also brought with it new subject matter, in particular the everyday existence of ordinary people, and it closely linked character development to social factors. In painting, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) first developed this new form of realism, bringing to his canvases a concern for the present, a representation of the working class, a refusal to slavishly reproduce established genres—there are no historical or mythological scenes in Courbet's paintings—a move away from neoclassical idealization of the human body, a representation of bodies at work, and an emphasis on description at the expense of narration.

Nineteenth-century realism was an immensely successful artistic movement. Dominating literature and painting, it spurred scientific positivism and encompassed the invention of photography and film. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the invention of these forms of mechanical reproduction was less a great technological leap than a symptom of an age when representation of the real became tantamount. Many of the scenes of the early films by Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948), such as the workers leaving the factory, men playing cards, a middle class family having breakfast, or a barge on a river, could have figured in the pages of a realist novel or the paintings of Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte, or Courbet.

THE REALIST TENDENCY

Realism in painting and literature passed on many aesthetic preoccupations to what Siegfried Kracauer called cinema's "realist tendency." First, realist films often define themselves in opposition to dominant commercial cinema. "The American position is the antithesis of our own," wrote Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989) in 1953. "While we are interested in the reality around us … reality in American films is unnaturally filtered." This means that films that inscribe themselves within the realist tendency often challenge the rules of verisimilitude that dominate Hollywood realism. In this sense, realism is often situated somewhere between the codes of classical cinema and the innovation of the avant-garde. Though these kinds of realist films do not entirely do away with plot and plausibility, they often bend the rules of continuity, motivation, and genre that characterize commercial filmmaking. In particular, realist films often include moments of narrative ambiguity that would never be allowed in the classical Hollywood narrative. The scene in Vittorio De Sica's (1902–1974) Umberto D (1952) in which Maria Pia Casilio grinds coffee in the boarding house kitchen does not establish the setting, develop her character, or further the plot; rather, it trades plausibility, motivation, and narrative continuity for what André Bazin called "visible poetry," the lyricism of everyday life.

Wary of Hollywood's "filters," filmmakers in the realist tendency are also suspicious of Hollywood's budgets. One would be hard-pressed to say which comes first, the realist aesthetic or the low budget, but the results are the same. In 1995, the Danish filmmakers of Dogma swore to what they called, in all seriousness, their "vow of chastity," a vow to reject what they considered the technical screens that cinema has imposed between the spectator and "truth." This "vow" serves well to characterize the realist tendency's desire to do more with less. In a sense, the films and manifestos of the realist tendency hark back to the famous imperative of Henry David Thoreau to "Simplify, simplify."

Realism brings to the screen individuals and situations often marginalized by mainstream cinema and society. This is what Raymond Williams has called the "social extension" of realism, its intention to represent not just people of rank but also the spectators' "equals"(p. 63). Realism makes visible unseen groups, and makes audible unheard voices. In this sense, realism has been considered a fundamentally political art form. If cinema participates in the construction of what a society knows and says about itself, realist films make visible individuals and situations previously left unseen. Like the avantgarde, realism invents new configurations of the visible and new forms of representing the real. It is for this reason that a proponent of cinematic realism such as Bazin could tie realism to techniques such as the long take, depth of focus, and panchromatic film. These techniques provide viewers with new ways of seeing the world. So too with the use of non-professional actors. Showing actors, faces, people who had rarely or never been shown on the screen, or who had only been seen through stereotypes, was part of cinematic realism's way of reconfiguring the world. Realism situates its characters socially and economically, and economic hardship is often one of the motivating forces of the realist films' plot, from F. W. Murnau's Tabu (1931) to De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948) to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999).

Finally, while realist films are not documentaries, they claim a privileged relation to a reality outside of the movie theater. This reality can be defined in a Marxist sense as the economic structures of society or ontologically as the presence of a physical and visible world, but in all cases realism bases its claims on the camera's ability to reveal to the spectator something outside of the screen. Hence, realism's concern with the present. Realism foregoes historical dramas and period pieces in order to focus on the actions of the contemporary world.

REALISM IN FILM HISTORY

For Kracauer, the realist tendency begins with the very first cinématographes of the Lumière brothers. Kracauer opposes the Lumières' realism to the "formative" tendency of their contemporary Georges Méliès (1861–1938), but he also insists that the Lumière films are not just documentaries. Many of these short films, such as L'Arroseur arrosé, were staged performances. Still, Kracauer was making a "medium specific argument" in that the Lumières not only invented cinema but exploited its specific attribute: to record and reproduce the world around us.

Bazin traces the origins of the realist tendency in fiction films to the works of Erich von Stroheim (1885–1957) and F. W. Murnau (1888–1931), films that he opposed to the more formalist works of Soviet cinema and to the polished works of 1930s Hollywood. Murnau began his career as one of the leading innovators of German expressionism, directing the classic Nosferatau, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) in 1922. Despite its melodramatic quality, Tabu relied on non-professional actors, including Tahitians in important roles, location shooting, and a sparse use of titles. In addition, Murnau weaves into the plot the economic reality and colonialist exploitation of the pearl trade.

While Murnau was filming Tabu in the South Pacific, a movement known as "poetic realism" began to take shape in France. Starting in the early 1930s, films such as Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934); Marie Epstein's La Maternelle (Children of Montmartre, 1934); Jean Renoir's Toni (1935), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1935), and La Bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1938); Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937); and Marcel Carnés Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939) constituted one of the most successful movements in European cinema. Poetic realism may be seen as realist in its refusal of some of the conventions of Hollywood (most notably the happy end), its strong sense of place (which included both location shooting and the sets of designers such as Alexandre Trauner [1906–1993]), its tackling of the social questions of the day (such as unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism), and its depiction of the lives of the working poor. As early as 1930, Jean Vigo (1905–1934), director of L'Atlante, had called for a social cinema that would reject both the Hollywood romance and the "pure cinema" of the avant-garde and instead be "continuously replenished by reality" (p. 60). The skipper of a river barge, Italian immigrant workers, laundresses, mechanics, a melancholy sand blaster, were the subjects of poetic realist films. The actor Jean Gabin (1904–1976) was in the paradoxical position of having become the most famous male star of French cinema in large part thanks to roles where he played downtrodden and ill-fated workers. Poetic realism may sound like a contradiction in terms, but for its advocates and practitioners the French movement exemplified realism's basic tenet that creating new, lyrical forms of representation was the best way to create new forms of visibility and new ways of thinking about the world.

Certainly this credo was one of the forces behind Italian neorealist cinema. As different as the Italian neorealist movies were, films such as Roberto Rossellini's (1906–1977) Rome, città operta (Rome, Open City, 1945), Paisà (Paisan, 1946), Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1948), and Europa '51 (The Greatest Love, 1952), De Sica's The Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952), Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (Obsession, 1942) and Terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), and Alberto Lattuada's Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948) all clearly belonged to and helped reignite the realist tendency in post–World War II Europe.

With few exceptions, Italian neorealism set its characters in the historical and economic reality of postwar Europe: Germany Year Zero shows us the effects of Hitlerism on a young boy in a rubble-filled Berlin. De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoe-Shine, 1946) builds its plot around the American occupation of postwar Europe. The very plot of The Bicycle Thieves is driven by the poverty of postwar Italy. If Antonio Ricci, the main character of The Bicycle Thieves, is so distraught when his bicycle is stolen, it is because this bicycle is the key to his livelihood. In this movie, De Sica and his screenwriter Zavattini (1902–1989) insisted upon giving us the figures we need to understand the poverty affecting Antonio: we hear that a bicycle costs 6,500 lire and that Antonio receives 6,000 lire for the first two weeks of work. Italian neorealism was an intensely materialist mode of filmmaking.

Some scholars have argued against understanding Italian neorealism as a radical break with the past. After all, Cinecittà, the famous studio where some of these films were shot, was inaugurated by Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937, and the Alfieri Law of 1939, which granted government subsidies to filmmakers, was still in effect after the war. Furthermore, De Sica, Zavattini, and Rossellini all got their start in the film industry under the fascist regime, and some of their films still have recourse to the standard techniques of melodrama that dominated pre-1944 Italian cinema. Still, it is difficult to confuse neorealist films with the high society dramas that preceded them. Neither the so-called telefoni bianchi ("white telephone") films nor, for that matter, the Hollywood films that replaced them on Italian screens after the war, had much patience for economic depression and gloomy outsiders. Neorealist films quite consciously set themselves in opposition to more mainstream cinema, a tendency metaphorically expressed in the scene in The Bicycle Thieves when Antonio never quite manages to do his job of putting up Rita Hayworth publicity posters.

JEAN RENOIR
b. Paris, France, 15 September 1984, d. 12 February 1979

French director, screenwriter and actor, Jean Renoir is one of the most original filmmakers in the history of French cinema. A poet of realism and a master of artifice, a revolutionary and a classicist, he is a key figure in the history of European modernism. Renoir has influenced filmmakers as varied as François Truffaut and Robert Altman, Satyajit Ray, and Wes Anderson.

Though he made some ten silent films, Renoir hit his stride with the arrival of sound. The savagely witty Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved From Drowning, 1932) was a biting satire of the duplicitous French bourgeoisie. With the creation of films such as Toni (1934), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1936), and La Marseillaise (1938), Renoir participated in the struggle for workers' rights that culminated in the Popular Front in June 1936. But even at their most political, Renoir's films are also meditations on artistic performance. He often preferred actors trained in the music hall tradition and his films often include a theatrical representation of some sort. Even as politically committed a film as The Crime of Monsieur Lange, which depicts the creation of a worker's collective, centers around a fantasy cowboy melodrama titled Arizona Jim. La Grande illusion (The Grand Illusion, 1937), starring Jean Gabin and Erich von Stroheim, remains Renoir's most widely seen film. A condemnation of war, this film also reveals Renoir's ideas about the role of performance in the construction of national and social identities.

With La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) Renoir created one of the great works in the history of cinema. Often cited as a masterpiece of realism for its use of dolly shots, depth of focus, and outdoor photography, Renoir's film is a complex portrait of a society ruled by social masks and illusions. It was an incredibly bold film to make on the eve of World War II.

Exiled from Nazi-occupied France in 1940, Renoir made several films in Hollywood, including The Southerner (1945) in collaboration with William Faulkner. In India after World War II, Renoir filmed The River (1950), which although it has been criticized for its colonialist point of view, nevertheless, is intent upon showing the complexity of human relations caught in a moment of national upheaval.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Nana 1926, La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931), Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), Toni (1934), The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), Une Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country, 1936), Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths, 1936), La Bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1938), La Grande illusion (The Grand Illusion, 1937), La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), The Southerner (1945), The River (1951), The Golden Coach (1953), French Can Can (1955), Elena et les hommes (Elena and Her Men, 1956), Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir, 1970)

FURTHER READING

Bazin, André. Jean Renoir. Edited with an introduction by François Truffaut. Translated by W.W. Halsey II and William H. Simon. New York: De Capo, 1992.

Bergan, Ronald. Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1994.

Braudy, Leo. Jean Renoir, The World of His Films. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Faulkner, Christopher. The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Renoir, Jean. My Life and My Films. Translated by Norman Denny. New York: Atheneum, 1974. Translation of Ma vie et mes films (1974).

Phil Watts

It is not just the glamour of Hollywood that Italian neorealism defied. This movement also challenged the laws of verisimilitude that dominated commercial cinema. The Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D both rely upon the thinnest story lines. About Umberto D, Zavattini said that he had wanted to make a film about nothing. In Germany Year Zero there is no plot to speak of, and viewers can only speculate about the motivation for Edmund's suicide at the end. Plot is not entirely absent from these films, but they all de-emphasize the logical sequence of events in order to develop the characters' discovery of the material reality that surrounds them.

The realist tendency, while international in scope, develops within national cinematic contexts. Certainly this is the case with the British New Wave and social realist cinema. British realism, which harkens back to the documentary movement of the 1930s, has flourished from the 1950s to the present in films as varied as Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1958), Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1967) and Career Girls (Mike Leigh, 1997). These films tend to have relatively low budgets and to share such qualities as an emphasis on location, the use of unknown and non-professional actors, an intention to educate, and a focus on marginal characters and social problems. For all their differences, Ken Loach's (b. 1936) made-for-TV film Cathy Come Home (1966) and Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) have in common the desire to show the faces of individuals that had been kept off the screens of Britain up to that point: a woman and her family pushed into poverty and homelessness in Cathy Come Home, and the son of South Asian immigrants in love with a British punk in My Beautiful Laundrette. These claims to a privileged relation to reality have been contested, however. Scholars have criticized British social realism of the 1960s for its masculine, patriarchal point of view.

The idea that cinematographic realism is tied to political struggle has inspired national cinemas emerging in the wake of European colonialism. The Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene (b. 1923), for instance, perceived his work as a tool for representing the new African reality, seeing film as a mirror for self-understanding and empowerment. In place of the Hollywood and French jungle melodramas through which colonialist ideology imposed itself, Sembene made pared-down films in which characters are set in the economic and social reality of contemporary Africa. Films such as La Noire de … (Black Girl, 1966), Xala (Impotence, 1975), Guelwaar (1992), Faat Kiné (2000), and Moolaadé (2004) are not strict realist works. Sembene often includes elements of melodrama and even musical comedy that might irk purists. But the films' sparse style, their open-ended plots, their refusal of standardized forms of cinematic production, and especially their intense social criticism, situate them within the realist tendency.

The same desire to counter colonialist representations motivated the early realist work of Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) in India. According to what has now become legend, during a trip to London, Ray saw some 90 films in two months. Of all the films he saw, De Sica's The Bicycle Thieves left the greatest impression and pushed Ray to start making his own, based on the credo that "the filmmaker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica and not Cecil B. DeMille, should be his ideal." And so, in films such as the "Apu Trilogy"—Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959)—Ray's camera reveals the daily life of a family struggling against poverty in post-independence India. His straightforward style shared neorealism's openness to the everyday world.

THEORIES OF REALISM

Film critics and theorists have long given their intellectual support to the practice of realist filmmaking. For Rudolph Arnheim, writing in the early 1930s, film offered the possibility of "the mechanical imitation of nature" in which original and copy become indistinguishable in the eyes of the public. Yet it was Bazin who, a decade later, would transform the mechanical reproduction of the cinematic image into a prophecy. A prolific critic, Bazin is best known for his defense of cinematic realism. For Bazin, what filmmakers as different as Robert Bresson (1901–1999), De Sica, Renoir, Rossellini, and Orson Welles (1915–1985) had in common was a desire to put cinema at the service of what Bazin called a fundamental faith in reality. The credibility of a film did not come from its verisimilitude but from the identity between the photographic image and its object. In "The Ontological Realism of the Photographic Image" (1945), Bazin sketches a brief history of art, in which he identifies cinema as the fulfillment of the human craving for realistic representation. Cinema's mission was thus to fulfill this goal. For Bazin, realism was a style whose chief elements were the long take, deep focus, limited editing and, when possible, the use of non-professional, or at least relatively unknown actors. Realism for Bazin was both the essence of cinema—its ontology—and a rhetoric whose keys were simplicity, purity, and transparency.

In 1960, two years after Bazin's death, Kracauer continued and radicalized Bazin's project in his book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Like Bazin, Kracauer argued that of all the arts, film is uniquely qualified to record physical reality. Kracauer conceded that many films combine realist with formalist tendencies, but he concluded the films that make us "experience aspects of physical reality are the most valid aesthetically." Thus for Kracauer, the best moment in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948) is not Shakespeare's text, or Olivier's acting, or even his direction, but a moment when the camera, almost by inadvertence, frames a window of Elsinore castle and lets us see the "real ocean" in all its force (p. 36). In his previous book, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Kracauer traced the rise of Nazism through the psychological terror of German expressionist cinema. It is possible his conclusions for the redemption of physical reality through cinema were a reaction against films whose formalism he deemed tainted by its association with totalitarianism and racism. For, in the end, the realist tendency is a form of humanism. In Kracauer's vision, cinema's ontological realism reasserts the fundamental equality of all before the camera.

Philosopher Stanley Cavell also has argued for the ontological realism of cinema, even though his main references are the films of classical Hollywood. For Cavell as for Bazin and Kracauer, the basis of the film medium is photographic. A photograph, and by extension film, always implies the presence of the rest of the world. Film "displaces" people and objects from the world onto the screen. This is not only proof, for Cavell, of film's ontological realism, it is also the beginning of our reconciliation with the world. Movies permit us to view the world unseen, at a distance, and this sets in motion the intellectual process that will bring us back to the world and will reaffirm our participation in it. More than any other film critic or theorist, Cavell insists that film's fundamental realism makes it an art of contemplation, an intellectual and spiritual exercise meant to restore our relation to the world.

Also among the proponents of the realist tendency are a number of figures associated with left-wing politics. From Williams to Zavattini, from Walter Benjamin to Loach, the realist tendency has often been tied to forms of democratic thought for two reasons. First, realism tends toward a Marxist critique of illusion. The Marxist critique of forms of art that obfuscate economic and social inequalities resonates with filmmakers, technicians, and writers for whom cinematic realism is way of cutting through the artifice of standard cinema. This does not mean that Communist filmmakers had a privileged access to truth, but rather that because they put their faith in what Bazin called the "ontological realism" of the image, realist films could perform the type of demystification often associated with leftist intellectual goals. Not coincidentally, two of Bazin's wittiest articles—"Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl" (1946) and "The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema" (1950)—are clever attacks on the ideological mystifications in films coming from Hollywood and Moscow, respectively.

The second reason to associate the realist continuum with a reflection on democracy is its tendency to give equal time to anonymous voices and unknown faces. Hollywood films may have regularly put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, but did so through a codified system of well-known actors and stereotypes. Realism's desire to show what had heretofore remained invisible challenges such images and the values that underlie them. To take just one example, Gillo Pontecorvo's La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1965) is considered by many to be one of the last instances of Italian neorealism. But of all the realist techniques that Pontecorvo (b. 1919) uses, the most radical departure of the film, at least for European audiences, was his decision to show the faces and amplify the voices of the Algerian men and women who had led the Algerian revolution. The realist tendency is not sociology; rather, it sees itself as a democratic form of art.

REALISM'S DISCONTENTS

In the 1850s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) condemned realism as a "war on imagination." In the 1960s, cinematic realism came under sustained attack for being an imaginary construct. This attack took several forms, all of which argue against the ontological realism of cinema. Realism, in these views, was nothing more than the product of what Roland Barthes called a "reality effect." The realist tendency may very well have been associated with leftist politics, but for all these critics and scholars its insistence upon the transparency of the cinematographic image was little more than a pernicious bourgeois illusion.

ANDRÉ BAZIN
b. Angers, France, 8 April 1918, d. 11 November 1958

Fifty years after his death, André Bazin remains the world's most important film critic and theorist. Bazin started writing about film in Paris in 1943 and went on to produce an extremely varied and prodigiously enthusiastic body of work. During his short career, he authored nearly 3,000 articles, published in a variety of journals, including, most famously, Cahiers du cinéma, which he cofounded in 1952. An indefatigable defender of filmmakers such as F. W. Murnau, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, and Roberto Rossellini, Bazin also influenced a generation of French filmmakers who cut their teeth as critics at Cahiers du cinéma and went on to become the French New Wave, including François Truffaut to whom he was mentor and adoptive father.

Bazin wrote about such varied topics as Hollywood westerns and musicals, theater, film, and animation, but he is best remembered for his spirited defense of realism. In his famous article, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" (1945), Bazin presented his core argument for cinematographic realism: photography and cinema allow a mechanical reproduction of reality unseen in any previous art form. Photography differs from painting in that it produces not a likeness, but the object itself snatched from "the conditions of time and space that govern it."

For Bazin, this realism was enhanced through certain stylistic techniques and choices, including its tendency toward on-location shooting, which helped confirm the existence of a world beyond the screen. Deep focus and minimal editing promoted an ambiguity of vision that more closely resembled the spectator's perception of reality. According to Bazin, films that use depth of focus allow the spectator's eye to wander around the picture and to determine the importance of each object on the screen. Starting in the late 1960s, theorists under the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Louis Althusser's Marxism argued that what Bazin called realism was nothing more than an illusion. More recently, the philosopher Noël Carroll has judged that Bazin's realism is based on logically inconsistent assumptions about resemblance.

Throughout his essays, Bazin tied the films he loved most to a form of asceticism. This austerity was a way of cutting through the rhetorical artifice that had invaded commercial cinema and modern life itself. The cinematic image, for Bazin, allows just enough detachment for us to contemplate the mysteries of the world, whether they take the form of "a reflection on a damp sidewalk," the pockmarks on a character's face, or Ingrid Bergman walking through the ruins of Pompeii.

FURTHER READING

Andrew, Dudley. André Bazin. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Bazin, André. Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties. Edited by Bert Cardullo. Translated by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo. New York: Routledge, 1997.

——Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock. Edited with introduction by François Truffaut. Translated by Sabine d'Estrée. New Haven: University of Connecticut Press, 1985. Translation of Cinéma de la cruauté (1982).

——French Cinema of the Occupation and the Resistance: the Birth of a Critical Esthetic. Translated by Stanley Hochman. New York: Ungar Press, 1981. Translation of Cinéma de l'occupation et de la résistance (1981).

Phil Watts

Perhaps the most systematic questioning of the premises of realism came from Christian Metz, a film scholar who had studied with Barthes. Metz argues that realism and its attendant belief in the transparency of the photographic image is an illusion. Borrowing from semiotics and psychoanalysis, Metz sets out to show that the cinematic image brings together a series of visual, musical, and verbal codes that the spectator then deciphers in an attempt to make meaning. Film and the photographic image do not provide any type of direct access to the real, according to Metz, but are rather one instance of a symbolic system whose model is language. Resemblance, in this view, is based upon codes and conventions; the screen is not a window onto the world, but a mirror, reflecting back to spectators their own ideologies and sense of identity. Metz's radical reformulation of cinema spectatorship coincided with the writings of Marxists, working at Cahiers du cinéma and of feminist cinéphiles associated with the British journal Screen. For critics such as Jean-Louis Comolli, realism was simply a bourgeois ordering of the world that served to maintain capitalist ideology, while for British feminist scholar Laura Mulvey realism, as all film forms, is structured by the unconscious of patriarchal society. Mulvey insists that film should not be understood as a record of reality, but rather as a reorganization of reality in a way that is fundamentally unjust to certain people, most particularly women and minorities because of its informing patriarchal ideology.

A more formalist questioning of the tenets of the realist tendency has been offered by theories of intertextuality. Basing themselves on the findings of Russian formalists and French theorists, proponents of an intertextual approach see film not as an opening on the world, but as a series of references to other films and other works of art. Michael Iampolski, for instance, describes films as a series of "quotes" that interrupt the narrative and send the spectator back to other texts. Spectators understand what they are watching by patching together all these references, not by referring to a world off-screen. For the analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman, realism is entirely relative to the culture from which it issues. "Realistic representation," writes Goodman, "depends not upon imitation or illusion or information but upon inculcation." Bazin's belief that cinema's ontological realism opened up the world as it is, reveals itself, in Goodman's argument, to be a culturally biased conception.

The most recent questioning of the realist tendency has come from cognitive film theory, in particular its consideration of digital images. A strictly Bazinian approach would view computer-generated imagery (CGI) as a form of animation or painting. But for Stephen Prince, CGI poses new challenges to realism and the theories of resemblance on which it is based. For Prince, it no longer makes sense to think of an image or a sequence in a film as either realist or formalist. Whether they are watching documentaries, epics, or romantic comedies, individuals make meaning out of films in much the same way, basing their evaluations on the same set of assumptions, visual cues, and experiences.

All these critiques of realism have almost put the ideal of film out of reach as a threshold to the world. Still, certain movies have recently renewed with the realist tradition, while at the same time developing reflection on the status of the image. The American director Charles Burnett (b. 1944), whose works include Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990) claims that the films of Italian neorealism and the work of Renoir made possible his own filming of the stories of African Americans today. In films such as Bread and Roses (2000) and Sweet Sixteen (2002), Loach has maintained a fidelity to the political project and the stylistic innovation of British social realism, all the while foregrounding the politics of representation. In Belgium, the Dardenne brothers have made films such as La Promesse (The Promise, 1997) and Rosetta, effectively employing the hand-held camera, minimal makeup, relatively unknown actors, and the natural lighting of cinéma vérité. Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991) is a series of seemingly random long takes offering both a portrait of Austin, Texas and a subtle reflection on how images organize the world around us. And in films such as Nema-ye Nazdik (Close Up, 1990) and Ta'm e guilass (Taste of Cherry, 1997), Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (b. 1940) has tied realism's revelation of the world to a meditation upon the filmmaking process by which this world is framed, captured, and constructed.

SEE ALSO Expressionism;Ideology;Marxism;Narrative;Neorealism

FURTHER READING

Arnheim, Rudolph. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Barthes, Roland. "The Reality Effect." In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Bazin, André. What Is Cinema, 2 vols. Edited and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Iampolski, Mikhail. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960; reprinted, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

MacCabe, Colin. "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure." Screen 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1976): 7–27.

Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor, New York, Oxford University Press, 1974, reprinted by University of Chicago Press, 1991. Translation of Essais sur la signification au cinéma.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16, no. 3 (Fall 1975): 6–18.

Nelson, Goodman. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968.

Prince, Stephen. "True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory." Film Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 27–38.

Williams, Christopher, ed. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1980.

Williams, Raymond. "A Lecture on Realism." Screen 19, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 61–74.

Zavattini, Cesare. "Some Ideas on the Cinema" (1953). In Film: A Montage of Theories, edited by Richard Dyer MacCann, 216–228. New York: Dutton, 1996.

Phil Watts