Realist Cinema as World Cinema

Abstract

This book proposes to replace the general appellation of ‘world cinema’ with the more substantive concept of ‘realist cinema’, all the while valorising world cinema as an invaluable reservoir of diversity and inclusion. Arguing that an ethics of the real has bound world films together across history and geography at cinema’s most creative peaks, the book veers away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, locating 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 questions the film medium, aspiring to be life itself, in constant, and often self-defeating, competition with the medium’s inevitable manipulation of world phenomena; ‘intermedial passages’, or films that incorporate other artworks in progress as a channel to historical and political reality; and ‘total cinema’, or films relying on long duration and monumental landscapes with a totalising historical and geographical impetus akin to what Bazin had defined as the human desire for ‘integral realism’. Though mostly devoted to recent productions, each part starts with the analysis of foundational classics, which have paved the way for future realist endeavours, thereby reasserting the point that realism is timeless and inherent in cinema from its origin.