Cinematic Realism Research Articles

Note from the Editors

Note from the Editors

Viewing I, Daniel Blake in the English Regions: Towards an Understanding of Realism through Audience Interpretation

This article examines focus group responses to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016). Situated in four English regions (North East, North West, South West and Yorkshire and Humber), the focus groups were structured around a process of film elicitation that gathered a set of plural and richly textured responses to the film. Focusing on the participants’ understanding of realism within the film, the article complements existing textual analyses of realism in order to understand better the kinds of interpretive resources that audiences bring to their engagement with films such as I, Daniel Blake. We examine in detail how participants drew on different interpretive resources as a set of personal, emotional and intellectual anchoring points that they used to situate and articulate their readings of the film. These resources ranged from related life experiences and personal memories to emotional responses and political views. In particular, we examine how participants interpreted the film through differing degrees of personal familiarity and empathy with the narrative, characters and places depicted, how the participants dealt with the emotional labours of realism and the feelings evoked through representations of place. Using film elicitation to understand the plurality of interpretations of realism has allowed us to develop a located and multifaceted understanding of the affective dimensions of realist film, and to extend the reach of audience studies to a hitherto under-explored genre.

Roger Leenhardt’s world, viewed: rethinking colonial film and realist film theory in 1930s France

ABSTRACT Of his mentor Roger Leenhardt, André Bazin once stated, ‘There is in all phenomena a primary level, that of basic understanding. There is a second level, where the subtleties lay. And the third level, that belongs to Roger Leenhardt’ (cited in Roger Leenhardt ou le dernier des humanistes, André Labarthe, 1965). Though the influence of Leenhardt’s realist film theory on the Cahiers du cinéma generation of filmmakers and theorists is widely acknowledged, the contexts that served to germinate his ideas about cinematic realism remain understudied. This article links Leenhardt’s theories pertaining to film’s indirect or understated interpretation of reality, first articulated in his pioneering ‘Petite école du spectateur’ (1935–1936) series, to his search for a subtle approach to ethics, politics and colonial documentary within the same era. If scholars have tended to account for sparse cinema in France by turning to aesthetic traditions, Leenhardt’s 1930s career reveals that the conceptualisation and reinvention of cinema as a medium of subtle suggestion also arose within a political setting, namely nonconformist, Popular Front-era thought, which encouraged Leenhardt to embrace a Personalist-humanist stance towards the ‘other’. His film L’Orient qui vient (Roger Leenhardt and René Zuber, 1937) puts these ideas into practice, endeavouring to restrain the excesses of pro-colonial ideology and media.

Archaism and Hegel in the Supply Reel

André Bazin’s notion of cinematic realism has been either denigrated as “naïve” or been deformed to fit lines of thought in film studies that are at variance with the nature of his thought. However, as this article shows, there are strong influences of what one might call “archaic thought” in Bazin’s conception of realism. However, there is another influence on his thought: a substratum of Hegelianism, which often ignored in the reception of his work, contributing to its misrepresentation. At the end, we conclude if we forfeit this residual Hegelianism, not only we can have a better grasp of what realism truly is, but we also can have a more synchronous relationship between cinema and other art forms.

Realist Cinema as World Cinema

Realist Cinema as World Cinema

Interpellation of Clones: Unveiling the Social Realism in Films based on Human Cloning

Interpellation of Clones: Unveiling the Social Realism in Films based on Human Cloning

Time to Revisit Classical Film Theory

Abstract Film audiences are no longer in a position to know for certain which images, or features of images they see on the screen were created by photography and which were created in a computer. Yet they are reacting to the advent of computer graphics as if it is merely a technical improvement, not a change in the nature of film itself. This would mean that one of the most influential early theories of film—realism—is wrong. It held that film is by nature photographic and that its unique value is to afford the audience the physical connection with reality that photography, uniquely among pictorial media, brings. I argue that the audience is right about this. Even as applied to purely photographic films, realism was simply a mistake.

REALISM AS RESISTANCE

This paper explores the potential of realist cinema to portray resistance to oppression and restrictions on people’s lives. Wadjda (2013) presents a special case in world cinema in being made in Saudi Arabia, which until recently had no film industry or distribution system. The director, Haifaa Al Mansour, has been praised for making the film there at all. Yet this ignores the film’s power in taking a slice of time in the life of a young Riyadh girl, Wadjda, and focusing on her desire to own a bicycle. The film’s realism depicts restrictions on women’s lives in Saudi Arabia and at the same time affirms hope in gradual change through the natality, in Hannah Arendt’s sense, of a child who does not see these constraints as insurmountable obstacles. I argue that realist films can demonstrate the importance of gradual political progress and can anticipate those advances.

Armenian cinema in the late Soviet years: desexualisation as a narrative convention

ABSTRACT This article addresses Soviet-Armenian love narratives in cinema in the Soviet political and cultural context, revealing the negative impact of ideological restrictions on Armenian romance films between 1970 and 1990. On the one hand, the state censorship of film production and, on the other hand, the local conventions on social and sexual mores were detrimental to the development of Armenian romance films through a sanitisation of the subject-matter, particularly sexuality. The article examines Armenian love narratives through the philosophy of the being of love and with reference to the principles of realistic narratives and the romance genre. In a range of aspects, from cinematic articulation of heterosexual love, through a variety of theories of cinematic realism to features of visual narration, Armenian love narratives are shown to make use of a set of features aimed at the desexualisation of male and female love interests. Using a selection of films from the 1970s and 1980s with desexualised love narratives, the argument is made that characterisation and narrative are deficient inasmuch as they refrain from realistic representations of Armenian men and women in psycho-sexual terms.

Ghastly Results: The Banning of Children of The Wasteland (1953) and The Stellar Rise and Demise of Its Maker The Boy Bishop

In 1953, the Australian film censor and the New South Wales Chief Secretary’s Office simultaneously banned a locally produced dramatised documentary Children of the Wasteland from exhibition and export. This article investigates the films interdiction and the events following that governmental action. It also explores the role of the films maker, the newly enthroned Anglican bishop of North Queensland Ian Shevill, in the propagation of a racial conversion theology that defined Indigenous peoples as inferior and exalted the cause of the ‘civilising process’. For the most part, his non-fiction films intended their audiences to perceive them as accurate representations of reality. This article argues that they instead presented a skilfully concocted filmic reality designed to garner credence for a social engineering project: to transform ‘pagan natives’ into compliant Christian citizens who would eventually be absorbed into a wider homogeneous community. It will elucidate the representation of Indigenous Australians in these films within a contesting socio-political context and the communication of racial ideology via the media, a site of hegemonic struggles over meaning.

New Sincerity andFrances Hain Light of Sartre: A Proposal for an Existentialist Conceptual Framework

There is a growing discourse on “new sincerity,” and related terms like “quirky” and “metamodernism,” as a movement or sensibility in contemporary cinema developing from the late 1990s onward, exemplified by the work of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman. However, what this new concept means in the context of cinema has so far remained under-defined and requires further philosophical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by offering a reconceptualization of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist-phenomenological notions of good faith and sincerity, which will be connected to developments in film and elaborated in relation to Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012). I propose, against Sartre's own preference for the problematic term “authenticity,” to understand sincerity as the reflective resumption of good faith's pre-reflective acceptance of human-reality. This conception of sincerity as reflective allows us to accurately understand the combination of self-awareness and affirmation that characterizes new sincerity cinema: its self-awareness does not serve the postmodernist strategy of endless self-ironization; instead, its portrayals affirm the meaningfulness of its filmic reality, while also being aware of film as a medium. An analysis of Frances Ha illustrates how this concept of sincerity might be seen to function both on the level of story world, characters and themes, and on that of narrative structure and audio-visual style, thereby showing how we can meaningfully speak of sincerity in and of film.

Docudrama for the emerging post-war order: Documentary film, internationalism and indigenous subjects in 1950s Mexico1

This article focuses on the productive tensions between the competing ideological discourses of post-war internationalism, Mexican post-revolutionary nationalism and local indigenous representational paradigms in the activities of the film unit of the UNESCO-sponsored adult education centre (CREFAL) in the town of Pátzcuaro, Mexico in the 1950s, which combined village screenings of educational, promotional and informative movies from the world over, with the local production of pedagogical documentary shorts by non-professional filmmakers from across Latin America. Inspired by the work of British documentarian Paul Rotha, whose United Nation picture World Without End (Mexico/Thailand/United Kingdom, 1953, codirected with Basil Wright) was partly filmed at CREFAL, these films frequently resorted to a docudrama format that enabled amateur documentary filmmakers to engage with the agendas of their indigenous subjects even as they subordinated them to the United Nation’s call to hygiene, progress and civic values. In doing so, they responded creatively to appeals by theorists such as Kracauer and Grierson for a critical realist cinema. They also acted as a link between the so-called ‘classical’ pre-war documentary movements in the United Kingdom, North America and elsewhere, and the later, socially committed new cinemas.

National fantasy, impossible gaze: the Kurdish question in popular Turkish cinema

ABSTRACT This essay explores representations of the Kurdish question in the new popular films of Turkey including Eşkıya/The Bandit, Vizontele, Deli Yürek: Bumerang Cehennemi/Wildheart: Hell of Boomerang, Kurtlar Vadisi: Iraq/Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Güneşi Gördüm/I Saw the Sun, Nefes/The Breath and Mucize/The Miracle. I use the notion of ideological fantasy to explain how filmic reality is constructed within these films. I argue that popular films of new Turkish cinema addressing the Kurdish question are national fantasies reconstituting the social, historical and political realities of the problem in accordance with the changing state discourse.

The piano mécanique in 1930s French cinema

ABSTRACT Several French poetic realist films in the 1930s featured player pianos or other kinds of pianos mécaniques. Their visual and narrative presence often carried with it the potential for aural disruption: mechanical instruments like the player piano were ideal anempathetic musical sources, creating music that was both uncanny in its inhumanness and threatening in its indifference to on-screen events. The piano mécanique held additional extra-diegetic significance in France: its importance as a tool for modernist composition. This article traces the history of the piano mécanique in 1930s French cinema. It places the player piano’s presence in several iconic films of the decade within a broader history of early twentieth-century avant-garde composition. The article additionally considers its role as a reflexive commentary on cinema’s transition to synchronised sound in the early 1930s. It concludes with an analysis of scenes from two iconic films: Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937) and La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939), which demonstrates the evolving reception of the player piano in 1930s France. The analysis reveals a strong connection between cinematic and modernist musical practices and demonstrates the effect of rapid technological and cultural change on the evolution of 1930s French film music.

Realism about Film and Realism in Films

Realism has a significant place in the history of film theory. The claim that film is essentially a realistic art form has been employed to justify the art-status of films as well as the distinctness of film as a form. André Bazin and others once used realist ontologies of film to try to establish realist teleologies and universal critical standards. I briefly sketch this history before considering the prospects for various versions of realism: Bazin’s, as well as Kendall Walton’s and Gregory Currie’s less ambitious but more plausible accounts. I argue that these theories, though they are the best cases we have for realism, are not adequate ontologies of film. However, while prior realist philosophers and critics were wrong to think that realism can provide a critical standard for all films, realism is nonetheless a praiseworthy filmic achievement - one that the opponent of ontological realism should not dismiss.

Cesare Zavattini’s Poetics of Objectivity

Cesare Zavattini was an acclaimed neorealist screenwriter and a theorist of neorealism. He has played a pivotal role in the critical rethinking of the new postwar Italian cinema although many of his concepts were considered avant-garde for that period. He stood for a direct, spontaneous, and immediate cinema with real people and real events. Despite his desire to eliminate all that was fictional from his films, Zavattini’s concept of new realist cinema cannot simply be described as a documentary approach. He was not so much interested in making documentary films but in making documentary-like fictions. He believed in the potential of cinema to reach a wide audience and in its capacity to be aesthetically subversive. The aspiration for an avant-garde cinema that would reach the masses was a naïve attempt that was too radical for the Italian cinema at the time. Most of his ideas were not accepted in Italy, but he was admired by young filmmakers all over the world. Some of his ideas were realized a few decades later in the works of the famous cinéma vérité and independent avant-garde filmmakers. Throughout his career, Zavattini argued that cinema should be socially committed art. He believed that neorealist films should direct the viewer’s gaze toward specific social issues and voice a subjective judgment on it. In neorealist films, fictional style and documentary rhetoric make the illusion that the experience of characters stands for the experience of the audience.

Human Reality: Action and Perception in Italian Audiovisual Narratives between Serial Drama and Realist Film

Human Reality: Action and Perception in Italian Audiovisual Narratives between Serial Drama and Realist Film

Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 by Christopher Rea

Reviewed by: Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 by Christopher Rea Ling Zhang (bio) Christopher Rea. Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. xvi, 381 pp. Hardcover $120.00, isbn 9780231188128. Paperback $30.00, isbn 9781231188135. Christopher Rea's Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 is a timely introduction to extant Chinese fiction films made before 1949. Rea analyzes fourteen films according to their "artistic accomplishment, critical reception, historical significance, and availability" (p. 4), situating them in relation to their broader tumultuous historical, sociopolitical, and cultural context. Differing from but building on previous significant scholarship about early Chinese cinema, such as Zhang Zhen's An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 (2005) and Weihong Bao's Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (2015), Chinese Film Classics is a valuable addition to the field that makes early Chinese film history and analysis accessible, and familiarizes general readers with the diverse styles and creative vitality of early Chinese filmmakers. The book is divided into two parts, with each of the fourteen chapters offering production information, a synopsis, and analysis of one film. The films [End Page 130] are discussed in chronological order, and Rea focuses on each work's "artistic accomplishment and cultural significance" (p. 1). Therefore, unlike conventional academic books, Chinese Film Classics does not feature an overarching argument, though certain motifs recur from chapter to chapter. Rea's attention to themes such as slapstick comedy, play fulness, and gags in his analysis also reflects a continuity with his previous book, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (2015). A list of further reading and viewing material at the end of each chapter contextualizes these analyses vis-à-vis relevant academic discussions and provides a bibliography for readers new to the field. The first part of the book, which addresses silent films, contains six chapters and focuses on silent and partial-sound films made between 1922 and 1935—including the earliest extant Chinese film, Laborer's Love (laogong zhi aiqing, Zhang Shichuan, 1922) and three films by the accomplished filmmaker Sun Yu (1900-1990): Little Toys (Xiaowanyi, 1933), Queen of Sports (Tiyu huanghou, 1934), and The Great Road (Dalu, 1934). The latter is a partial-sound film with added sound effects and interlude songs. Two other chapters examine Wu Yonggang's acclaimed silent film Goddess (Shennv, 1934) and Cai Chusheng's post-dubbed New Women (Xin nv xing, 1935). In the next eight chapters, Rea turns to sound films made between 1937 and 1949, including three produced in the late 1930s: Ma-Xu Weibang's Song at Midnight (Yeban gesheng, 1937), a horror film with strong political messaging; Yuan Muzhi's sarcastic urban tragicomedy Street Angels (Malu tianshi, 1937); and Bu Wancang's costume drama Hua Mulan (Mulan congjun, 1939). Five films from the 1940s illustrate the situation of chaos and anguish after the War of Resistance against Japanese invasion (1937-1945), with the pathos of the civil war (1945-1949) looming large. These include the urban family comedy based on writer Eileen Chang's screenplay, Long Live the Missus! (Taitai wansui, Sang Hu, 1947); the epic melodrama depicting Chinese people's collective trauma produced by the Japanese occupation and spirit of resistance, Spring River Flows East (Yijiang chunshui xiangdongliu, Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, 1947); the melancholic masterpiece Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhichun, Fei Mu, 1948); as well as two social realist films made during the 1949 regime transformation, Wandering of Three-Hairs the Orphan (Sanmao liulangji, Zhao Ming and Yan Gong, 1949) and Crows and Sparrows (Wuya yu maque, Zheng Junli, 1949). Rea has been developing this project for several years through various media platforms and has translated these films' intertitles and subtitles into English, making the subtitled versions freely accessible on YouTube. He and his team have also launched the website chinesefilmclassics.org, which contains an open-access, self-paced course on early Chinese cinema that complements this book (p. 2). As Rea mentions early on, he envisions Chinese Film Classics as [End Page 131] "a film-viewing companion for multiple readerships, especially people new to Chinese cinema history or to...

Cinema as Falsehood: On Cinema’s Media-Specificity

바쟁이 영화가 필연적으로 위조의 뉘앙스를 가진다고 말한 것은 어떤 의미일까? 이후 현대철학자들의 평가도 흥미롭다. 들뢰즈는 영화의 “거짓으로서의 역량”을, 바디우는 영화의 “거짓된 움직임”을 이야기했던 것이다. 20세기를 대표하는 리얼리즘의 장인 영화가 이와 같이 ‘거짓’과 연결되는 이유는 무엇일까? 흥미롭게도 이런 평가들은 영화가 문법적으로 창의적인 서사를 창조하는 힘을 가졌다는 것과 동시에, 그것이 얼마나 현실의 모습에 닮아있는지를 역설적으로 재확인하고 있다. 다시 말해, 영화는 현실의 일부이지만 현실이 아닌 모습으로 드러나는 복제이미지로 구성됨으로써, 어떤 식으로든 겉보기와는 다른 말을 건네고 있다는 것이다. 이 논문은 영화이미지의 구성과 영화적 스토리텔링의 특징들을 문학, 연극과 같은 기존 예술과 매체와 비교하여, 현실에 가장 가까운 듯한 실사영화가 바로 그런 이유로 가장 거짓에 가까워지는 역설을 지니고 있음을 드러내고자 한다. 여기서 거짓은 사실관계에 따라 검증가능한 결과로서의 팩트를 지시하는 것은 아니다. 그러나 이 ‘거짓’은 상상이나 드라마와 같은 예술적 차원의 창작 요소로서의 픽션을 의미하는 것 또한 아니다. 이 글에서 ‘거짓’은 보이는 것과 다른 위조, 꾸밈과 감춤이라는 이중적 의미의 위장, 그리고 표면적으로 드러나는 서사적 의미와 다른 넌지시 작동하는 또 다른 텍스트 등, 다양한 의미, 그리고 타자성을 매개하는 영화의 다층구조를 이해하기 위한 개념이다. 본고는 영화의 거짓된 조각들에 영화가 구성하고 해체하는 다양한 시공간을 ‘연극적인 영화’ 속 대립적 시선을 통해 살펴봄으로써, 영화가 서사적 파편화와 경험적 완전성 사이에서 불순한 종합을 추구하고 있음을 증명할 것이다. 영화의 현존성은 타 매체와 달리 매개와 무매개의 교차 구성을 통해 드러난다. 마지막으로 이 글은 자기 동일성을 넘어 불가능한 타자와의 공존을 보여주는 것이 영화의 허구의 역량이라 주장하고, 이것이 결국 진실의 역량임을 보여준다. 이 역량은 결국 이미지와 영화의 운명이기도 하다.With this study of cinema as falsehood, I examine the cinematic media-specificity through analyzing various aspects of cinema in comparison with literature and drama. My discussion of the falsity of cinema ranges from Bazin, Deleuze, Ranciere, Badiou to Benjamin. With these representative thinkers in the 20th century, I will show the way in which cinema gains the power to create fictional world by taking real images from the world, which in turn explains a sense of incongruity and impurity to cinematic realism. Specifically, Badiou’s elaboration of false movements and Ranciere’s idea of the power of the film fable will help us clarify some important problems of thought-image raised by Deleuze. On the textual level, I will focus on some cases of cinematic construction of novels and theaters in order to prove the power of the Other as cinematic media-specificity. The cinema produces its own presentness with a multiple type of camera’s mediation so as to create a space for viewing subject. In the viewing experience or within the cinematic space, the subject fulfills his/her ambivalent need to see the world from the center and at the same time to be seen from the side of the world in a reversed way. From these false spaces and movements, this essay provides the ways in which cinema constructs and deconstructs congruous space, which is equivalent to the impure power of philosophical of thinking: that is the ability to embrace the Other. In this sense, the cinematic power of the false is in fact its power of truth. This power determines the future of images and cinema.

Border aesthetics and catachresis in Ali Abbasi’s Gräns/Border (2018)

ABSTRACTGräns/Border by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi won Un Certain Regard at Cannes as it was proclaimed an ‘instant cult classic’. This paper argues that the ambivalent status of Border – seen as both an audacious genre bender and a social realist film addressing issues of migration – bespeaks its articulation of the borderscape as a catachrestic locus that challenges familiar representational modes in border aesthetics. In doing so, the film, this paper contends, de-structures our perception of alterity, forges a new sensory cognition of the world, and new aesthetic experiences of migratory transitions. Most contemporary films engage migrant and border ecologies through their thematic content, where the border emerges either as a vulnerable space in need of protection or as a hopeful place of politically exciting hybridity and moral possibility. Instead, Border rearticulates generic signifying practices to imagine the border not as spatial ‘fact’ but as an epistemological ground or ‘border effect’ that incites new modes of geopolitical attunement. At stake here is not just a different concept of borders, but the possibility of film form to restructure our sensory perception of the world to offer new figurative possibilities for migratory and border cinema.