Cinematic Realism Research Articles

The Dilemma and New Development of Chinese Realistic Film Creation in Contemporary Era

In 2023, realism has emerged as an essential and influential theme within the Chinese film industry. Films that employ a realistic approach have not only achieved significant box office success but have also demonstrated that there is a widespread and substantial market for this genre in China. Despite the burgeoning popularity and commercial success of realistic films domestically, they have not yet achieved the same level of influence on the global stage, particularly when compared to cinematic works from overseas. This discrepancy poses a significant challenge for Chinese filmmakers, who must navigate a new and rapidly changing living environment and seek effective strategies to address and overcome these market dilemmas. This article delves into the trajectory of Chinese realist films, employing theoretical research and case analysis to address market challenges and suggest future development strategies. Through an in-depth examination of "Beyond the Furious Sea," it navigates the challenges and opportunities within Chinese realist filmmaking, shedding light on the genre's current landscape. This article identifies ongoing issues in China's realist film industry, notably concerning authenticity and diversity. The author provides recommendations for future advancements in Chinese realist filmmaking.

Korean Realist Cinema's Reflection on Society: College Students' Perspectives and Insights Through Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite

Korean Realist Cinema's Reflection on Society: College Students' Perspectives and Insights Through Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite

Приключения дорожников (1974–1980): национальный колорит грузинской троицы

The author focuses on a series of short films about road workers, created in 1974–1980 by different directors of the Georgia Film studio based on the scripts by Rezo Gabriadze. Despite the light comedic structure, each of the films in the cycle correlates with traditional art forms and is a kind of a parable about the important work of three friends who continue the work of their great ancestors in an already built-up world. This comedy cycle turns to the aesthetic foundations of Georgian cinema, which allows drawing conclusions about transformations in cinema, the processes of irony over the established film traditions, and nostalgia for the national cultural heritage. There is no large-scale epic background in the cinematic reality; it is introduced by a thin visual-semantic layer, paying tribute to national pride and history with the winding road surface, hills, endless fields, and the temperament of the characters. In the narrative and visual form, the three road workers can be interpreted as a homage to the Coward, the Fool and the Pro — the famous characters of Leonid Gaidai. With their undoubted masculinity, the Georgian trio paradoxically corresponds not only with Gaidai’s characters; it also represents a family where a strict ‘mother’ energetically raises a fidgety ‘child’ under the stern and gloomy gaze of a ‘father’. The spatial design of the filmic reality is dominated by road; most of the troubles happen when the characters consciously or forcedly deviate from the asphalt road itself. Overcoming the boundaries of this extended field, the characters find themselves in a moderately hostile world, salvation from which lies in returning to their road ‘Eden’.

Pema Tseden (1969–2023)

By the time of his sudden and unexpected death in May 2023, the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden had changed the face of cinema from China. He was not only China’s first ethnic Tibetan feature filmmaker, but also an internationally awarded and recognized auteur. Furthermore, his films corrected the existing cinematic imagery of Tibet by countering both Chinese and Hollywood exoticism with a cycle of realist films that articulate the view from within the Tibetan lifeworld. In this essay, Chris Berry argues Pema had recently embarked on a second phase that explored the interior world of Tibetans with explorations of subjectivity, including the visions and thoughts women characters, who were more central than in his earlier films. Finally, by supporting the careers of other Tibetan filmmakers and inspiring a younger generation, Pema’s legacy will continue to grow beyond his own films.

Digital Image and Perceptual Realism in Films - Forrest Gump and Encanto

Digital Image and Perceptual Realism in Films - Forrest Gump and Encanto

Imagined reality, the liquid, dystopia, and virtuality in science fiction cinema: Don’t Worry Darling, a case study

The history of cinema has never shied away from the representation of the future, and beyond the abstract nature of the contemporary concept and its temporal fluctuations, the sheer profusion of scenarios and their different links to the very concept of the real have generated a wide range of futuristic film references, especially those conceptually linked to the dystopian. This article presents a case study of Don’t Worry Darling, directed by Olivia Wilde in 2022. It is a contemporary science fiction film proposal that condenses retro aestheticism and the American Way of Life with the historical proposals of science fiction and its forecasts about humanity’s connection or disconnection with sensory reality and the birth of virtuality. The analytical methodology, which links patriarchal dystopia, virtual reality and gender studies, is based on the analysis of differentiating elements that provide signs with which to question the reality of the experiences of the film’s main character and the environment that surrounds her. This research employs a qualitative analysis by means of case analysis with a dual approach: the audiovisual language and signs of gaps in the filmic reality created. Firstly, the audiovisual language will be analysed through the use of the decoupage technique and, secondly, the sequences that generate gaps in the filmic fiction and lead the spectator to realize that he or she is facing a simulation of reality will be organized. The anomalies identified and inferred have been subdivided for analysis into: unrealistic space/time (synchronizations and repetitions, duplications, spatial incongruities, logical errors and perfections), mediated reality and the eye metaphor and, finally, diegetic technological analysis.

Communication Strategies of Realist Films in the Threshold of Interculturality

Communication Strategies of Realist Films in the Threshold of Interculturality

Cinematic Views on Critical Representations of the Economic Policies of the Democrat Party Era: Social Realist Film Initiatives in Turkish Cinema

The Democrat Party era (1950-1960) sparked radical changes in Turkey. The economic practices of the party administration during the country's administration, as well as some of the negativities it created in the political and social field, have long been on Turkey's agenda. This agenda continued even after the May 27th 1960 Military Coup removed the party from power. The Turkish Constitution of 1961, which was put into effect after the coup, created an environment suitable for looking at various problems of society from different perspectives. This environment was also reflected in the cinema, paving the way for the birth of a movement called Social Realism in Turkish Cinema. It is thought that the Social Realist Movement (1960-1965) and some of the films shot under the influence of this movement mirror the economic policies implemented during the Democrat Party era and the adverse developments it brought with it. In the study, the reflections on the harmful effects of the Democrat Party's economic policies on social realist films in Turkish Cinema are discussed. The films selected within the scope of the study were criticized through critical discourse analysis, historical, sociological, and ideological criticism methods, and the political, sociological, and class aspects of the Democrat Party's policies, as well as their economic aspects, were analyzed.

Tondo as a mythic urban space in real and reel: The Tondeños’ point of view

This research locates heroism in a cultural context and offers insights into the Filipino concept. It introduces the "FPJ Hero Arc," a novel framework for analyzing cinematic heroic performances that is applicable to both Philippine and non-Philippine contexts. This framework draws from Edward Soja's Trialectics of Being and André Bazin's Cinematic Realism. Through in-depth interviews, the researcher explored how Tondeños perceive their personal and communal identity in Tondo and its representation in cinema. The portrayal of Tondo as a place of danger and poverty reflects the real experiences of its inhabitants. It is seen as challenging yet resilient, shaping values such as pakikisama (harmony) and katapangan (courage). For Tondeños, Tondo and the late Filipino actor Fernando Poe, Jr. (FPJ) symbolize Filipino identity. Tondo is a reminder of the challenges faced by Filipinos, while FPJ symbolizes hope and inspiration. This message of hope and empowerment resonated with Tondeños and helped them overcome the challenges of their daily lives. Meanwhile, the construction of FPJ as a hero reflects the people's need for a protector; he embodies Tondo's best qualities: courage, righteousness, and willingness to help those in need. The study emphasizes addressing real problems with practical solutions, recognizing the role of fictional heroes like FPJ's characters in inspiring communal success in addressing societal challenges.

The working class in contemporary British cinema

This article examines depictions of class and precarity in a number of representative films, including TwentyFourSeven (Meadows 1997), The Navigators (Loach 2001), This Is England (Meadows 2006), It’s a Free World (Loach 2007), Fish Tank (Arnold 2009), I, Daniel Blake (Loach 2016), Ray & Liz (Billingham 2018), Sorry We Missed You (Loach 2019) and Bait (Jenkin 2019) in order to illuminate the subtle changes that the tradition of British social realism has undergone over the last few decades and to rethink its political potential. The article poses the following questions: do social realist films endow their precarious subjects with agency or do they depict them as passive victims of socio-economic and political forces beyond their control? What new potential conditions of solidarity (if any) do the films envision? What are the dominant affective states that capture the dynamic of precarity in these films: anxiety, frustration, depression, anger, resentment or resignation?

Material Culture as an Index of Modernity in Spain’s Silent Film Era

Abstract This essay examines the display of technological objects, consumer goods, and other materials within the earliest Spanish realist cinema, as well as the manipulation of things in pioneering fantasy films, to reveal how Spanish filmmakers projected the modernity of Spain and thereby addressed foreign objectification of their nation as exotic or different. Through an analysis of several actualities, point-of-view rail films, and factory films produced in Barcelona between 1900 and 1930, as well some key Segundo de Chomón trick films shot in the city, this article shows how this early Barcelona film culture deployed material forms to mark the agency and cosmopolitanism of turn-of-the-century Spain and to contest the “cabinet of curiosities vision” that French actuality filmmakers in particular had once imposed on the nation.

How to care about coral rubble: deep sea cameras, cinematic realism, and mourning via mediated encounter

ABSTRACT This article analyses camera systems utilized in deep sea science, focussing on surveys and representations of deep sea coral devastated by trawl fishing in the South Pacific. Various custom, advanced camera technologies are used by governmental and non-governmental science agencies, including Australia’s CSIRO and Aotearoa New Zealand’s NIWA, to record footage of the deep water and the ocean floor in aid of monitoring marine ecosystems and tracing environmental transformation. This footage is often also deployed in science communication, being utilized in promotional videos and livestreamed online. This article locates such camera systems among an array of cinematic antecedents, adjacent contemporary camera technologies, and film-theoretical notions including underwater cinemas, naturecams, and Bazanian realism in order to investigate their capacities as a technology of and for discovery, documentation, and exploration that also manages affective aspects of human-nonhuman encounter. A film studies approach to the work of the camera makes possible an understanding of how, by mediating an encounter for human viewers with abyssal lifeforms on the edge of ecological extinction, it sets in motion the potential for an ethics of care to emerge across time, space, and species.

A Review of The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture

A Review of <i>The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture</i>

The aesthetics of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival: Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank as cinema of precarity

ABSTRACT This article reads Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant’s conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold’s work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist cinema or the phenomenological representations of female experience. Situating Fish Tank within the broader framework of the cinema of precarity helps articulate a position from which to problematise the overemphasis on movement in critical writings on the film – which, as I will discuss, is also predominant in both affect theory and film phenomenology. I argue that with its simultaneous focus on movement and impasse, realised through framing and composition of the shot, camera movement, and repetition of visual tropes that convey confinement, Fish Tank is able to capture and aesthetically re-enact the impact of neoliberalism, while simultaneously paying attention to class and gendered styles of bodily adjustment to crisis ordinariness. I conclude that Berlant’s critical apparatus illuminates the formal and affective complexity of Fish Tank in new ways, and creates space to address larger questions of affect, aesthetics, and the profilmic body.

Cinema of Senescence: Old Age, Slow Cinema, and Form

AbstractIf speed is a cornerstone of contemporary life, then one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in the fight against agism is the fact that senescence entails a slowing down of the human body and mind. The question this essay asks is whether this form of life can afford epistemological and moral benefits within a productivist culture of speed that stigmatizes slowness and inactivity. In order to pursue an answer to this question, the essay turns to what critics have begun to call “slow cinema” and examines two films about people suffering from senescence-related slowness: Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Lee Chang-dong's Poetry (2010). The essay treats the slowness that can accompany age as an experiential form and places it on the same plane of formalist inquiry as slow cinema, an aesthetic form characterized by a decelerated pace, long takes, minimalist editing, and an emphasis on the temporality of quotidian life. The essay establishes its methodological approach by bringing Caroline Levine's formalism into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and André Bazin's writings on cinematic realism. Ultimately, the essay contends that Ozu's and Lee's films associate the value of slowing down our thinking and expanding our attention spans with the perceptual potentialities of age-related slowness within a culture of speed.

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Research on the Construction of Female Characters in Realistic Films: Path, Method and Classification

The dominance of consumer ideology and the prejudices of the patriarchal discourse system have kept women in a "low-dimensional prison" where they have been stared at for a long time. Since the growth of "her power", more and more public spheres are showing female consciousness and female discourse. The portrayal of women's roles and the construction of meaning in realist films express the "absence" and "resistance" of women's image in contemporary society. The young girls who want to break out of their cages, the mothers who are burdened by their families, and the women of the underclass who have a dual nature are the objects of their expression. "The absence of the family", the growth of the self and the "motherly nature" are the deep-seated "references" to which the female characters are trapped in the "prison".

The Evil of Human Nature Under Class Division—Based on the Metaphorical Interpretations in the Film Parasite

As the winner of the 72nd Palme d’Or at Cannes as well as the Best Film of the 92nd Academy Awards, the Parasite is a critical realist film directed by Bong Joon-ho from South Korea. Through a variety of simple images, the director has formed a metaphor system of interrelation, mutual restriction and dramatic tension, which makes the film not only have multiple interpretations, but also rich in deep connotation. Based on the analysis of parasite metaphor, odor metaphor and space metaphor in the film, this paper interprets and analyzes Bong Joon-ho’s creative intention and shooting techniques.

Minority Views: “Liberator”, American Cinema, and the 1960s African American Film Criticism

The article reconstructs the discourse of film criticism in Liberator – a radical African American magazine published between 1961 and 1971. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field, the author situates Liberator within the context of the 1960s, civil rights movement, and Black Arts movement, and analyses the magazine’s role in film culture of the era, as well as the links between the magazine and important black filmmakers and film writers. Four aspects of Liberator’s film criticism are explored: cultural memory of past representations, criticism of genre filmmaking, the need for cinematic realism, and the possibility of creating a distinct black cinema. The case study of the critic Clayton Riley’s career presents an author who wanted to continue his radical criticism in the mainstream press (The New York Times). Liberator’s legacy is framed as essential in understanding the tradition of African American film criticism.

“The very palpitation of life!”: “The Leaves Are Stirring” in Context

Abstract This paper describes the history of the writing and the intellectual context for Nicole Vedrès's essay “The Leaves Are Stirring.” It places Vedrès's claims about cinematic realism and montage in dialogue with canonical theorizations of film theory in France at this pivotal postwar moment, including the writing of André Bazin, André Malraux, Roger Leenhardt, and Alexandre Astruc. It draws out the points of contact between Vedrès's text and these better-known studies of film aesthetics, placing the piece in the context of contemporary aesthetic discourse and arguing for its singularity in the landscape of postwar French film writing. Opening out from this historical context, it closes by gesturing toward the modernity of Vedrès's essay in terms of more contemporary archival filmmaking, as well as thinking on the relationship between cinema and history.