Realism And The Cinema

This reader brings together the principal arguments in the long-standing and often tortuous debate about realism in the cinema, linking them with a critical commentary which elucidates their dramatic and political character.

Subjective Realist Cinema looks at the fragmented narratives and multiple realities of a wide range of films that depict subjective experience and employ “subjective realist” narration, including recent examples such as Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The author proposes that an understanding of the narrative structures of these films, particularly their use of mixed and multiple realities, enhances viewers’ enjoyment and comprehension of such films, and that such comprehension offers a key to understanding contemporary filmmaking.

This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of 'world cinema' with the more substantive concept of 'realist cinema'. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. The volume is structured across three innovative categories of realist modes of production: 'non-cinema', or a cinema that aspires to be life itself; 'intermedial passages', or films that incorporate other artforms as a channel to historical and political reality; and 'total cinema', or films moved by a totalising impulse, be it towards the total artwork, total history or universalising landscapes. Though mostly devoted to recent productions, each part starts with the analysis of foundational classics, which have paved the way for future realist endeavours, proving that realism is timeless and inherent in cinema from its origin.

Rites of Realism shifts the discussion of cinematic realism away from the usual focus on verisimilitude and faithfulness of record toward a notion of "performative realism," a realism that does not simply represent a given reality but enacts actual social tensions. These essays by a range of film scholars propose stimulating new approaches to the critical evaluation of modern realist films and such referential genres as reenactment, historical film, adaptation, portrait film, and documentary. By providing close readings of classic and contemporary works, Rites of Realism signals the need to return to a focus on films as the main innovators of realist representation. The collection is inspired by André Bazin's theories on film's inherent heterogeneity and unique ability to register contingency (the singular, one-time event). This volume features two new translations: of Bazin's seminal essay "Death Every Afternoon" and Serge Daney's essay reinterpreting Bazin's defense of the long shot as a way to set the stage for a clash or risky confrontation between man and animal. These pieces evince key concerns—particularly the link between cinematic realism and contingency—that the other essays explore further. Among the topics addressed are the provocative mimesis of Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread; the adaptation of trial documents in Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc; the use of the tableaux vivant by Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway; and Pier Paolo Pasolini's strategies of analogy in his transposition of The Gospel According to St. Matthew from Palestine to southern Italy. Essays consider the work of filmmakers including Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Mike Leigh, Cesare Zavattini, Zhang Yuan, and Abbas Kiarostami. Contributors: Paul Arthur, André Bazin, Mark A. Cohen, Serge Daney, Mary Ann Doane, James F. Lastra, Ivone Margulies, Abé Mark Normes, Brigitte Peucker, Richard Porton, Philip Rosen, Catherine Russell, James Schamus, Noa Steimatsky, Xiaobing Tang

World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism is a highly original study. Traditional views of cinematic realism usually draw on the so-called classical cinema and its allegiance to narrative mimesis, but Nagib challenges this, drawing instead on the filmmaker's commitment to truth and to the film medium's material bond with the real. Starting from the premise that world cinema's creative peaks are governed by an ethics of realism, Nagib conducts comparative case studies picked from world new waves, such as the Japanese New Wave, the French nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Russo-Cuban Revolutionary Cinema, the Portuguese self-performing auteur and the Inuit Indigenous Cinema. Drawing upon Badiou and Rancière, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism revisits and reformulates several fundamental concepts in film studies, such as illusionism, identification, apparatus, alienation effects, presentation and representation. Its groundbreaking scholarship takes film theory in a bold new direction.

Compares Once were warriors with other films that have similar themes.

This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures – art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson – drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality. Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema – moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand – that emerges from these ideas. This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-philosophy.

British Social Realism details and explores the rich tradition of social realism in British cinema from its beginnings in the documentary movement of the 1930s to its more stylistically eclectic and generically hybrid contemporary forms. Samantha Lay examines the movements, moments and cycles of British social realist texts through a detailed consideration of practice, politics, form, style and content, using case studies of key texts including Listen to Britain, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Letter to Brezhnev, and Nil by Mouth. In discussing the work of many prominent realist filmmakers, the book considers the challenges for social realist film practice and production in Britain, now and in the future.