Cinematic Realism Research Articles

Catharsis after the hangover

Catharsis after the hangover

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture

Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture

Rolprent, Televisie en die Omgewing

Against the background of the realist and expressionist film theories it is argued in this article that directors of films/videos on the environment should work in a more realistic style. The purpose should be to develop closer contact between the viewer and the environment. A brief descrip tion of realism and expressionism as two dominant styles in filmmaking and of Direct cinema and cinéma vérité is given, and the implications of these styles for the relationship Image/environment are discussed.

I Am the Night, Color Me Black

For me - an Afro-L’nu interdisciplinary doctorate candidate rooted in cinema and media studies - vampirism resembles cinematic realism: a visuality of authenticity effected in scene, setting, and storyline on-location respective to narrative milieux. However, what often defines reality as opposed to preferred realism is that Black positionalities continue to be afflicted by disparity, exploitation, exclusion, and inaccessibility alongside systematic anti-Blackness which extenuate our adversities. This contrasts with the avid albeit ambiguous initiative of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) sweeping through academic spaces in the wake of reconciliation campaigns. Moreover, this initiative is vampiric in its avid solicitation of efforts and insights from the very marginalized positionalities it purports to uplift.&#x0D; Too little, if anything.&#x0D; Too late, if ever.&#x0D; &#x0D; The wealth of lip service paid in comparison to what pittances we marginalized peoples are afforded. I find myself immortalized by pearls of wisdom which speak to ancestral strength and blood memory, akin to how kernels from an artifact transform Dr. Hess Green and Ganja Meda into the vampiric undead. This personal essay offers a discourse analysis of Ganja &amp; Hess (1973) that incorporates my own positionality and academic exegesis, notably revelations as to what vampiric contingency underlays my transformation, survival, and eventual demise.

Stereo revolution: Acoustic science and cinematic spaces in socialist China (1949–1966)

This article examines how the development of acoustic science changed the spatial configuration of movie theaters in China during the period between 1949 and 1966. The application of new acoustic technology not only caused a dramatic restructuring of movie theaters from the building’s material composition to the physical shapes of its walls and ceiling but also made crucial impacts on the conception of spectatorship and the discourse of cinematic realism. Taking the renovation project of Capital Theatre as an example, I show how the new cinematic space produced an immobile and individualized mode of spectatorship through the technological redistribution and management of individual bodies. Moreover, the growing technological capacity enabled technicians and recordists to imagine a different notion of cinematic realism, one that defined the verisimilitude of sonic ‘reality’ not in terms of its proximity to the empirical sound, but as the techno-perceptual effects within the sensory space of the movie theater. Drawing on sources from industry journal articles, construction reports, and academic papers by recordists, engineers, architects, acoustic technicians, etc., this article attempts to raise new problematics on the level of media infrastructure of socialist film and to promote meaningful dialogues with aesthetic, artistic and ideological issues.

Feng Xiaogang’s haunted utopia, Chinese modernity, and carnivalesque social critique in the era of Xi Jinping

ABTRACT This paper seeks to illustrate how Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang constructs and delivers social commentaries in his New Year comedies The Dream Factory (1997) and Personal Tailor (2013). These two films are unique in terms of narrative strategy compared to his other New Year films. Both films turn on the premise of temporarily granting people’s wildest wishes, out of which arise multi-layered utopian and dystopian elements that I connect to Feng having made these two films shortly after his realist films were censored. Exploring these two films, I argue that Feng employs the carnivalesque as an alternative narrative strategy to perform subversive resistance, to counter monolithic and hegemonic discourses of Chinese modernity, and to expose social issues in the context of China’s tightening of censorship restrictions. A comparative study of these two films reveals their value as visual records of Chinese modernity over the course of a decade and as important facilitators or mediators of societal self-critique.

Türk Sinemasinda Toplumsal Gerçekçi Filmlerde İstanbul Temsili: Acı Hayat ve Banker Bilo Filmleri Örneği

In this study, it has been tried to explain how and with which variables Istanbul is represented in the films within the scope of the social realist cinema movement in Turkey by analyzing the selected sample films. In this context, in the study, first of all, the social realism movement in Turkish cinema was mentioned and the films shot in line with this movement were briefly mentioned. In the study, the representations of Istanbul in Yeşilçam films were mentioned and the films selected as samples were examined by text analysis method. Sample films are films that are evaluated within the scope of the social realism movement in Turkish cinema and shot in different periods. These films are Acı Hayat made in 1962 and Banker Bilo made in 1980. As a result of the study, it has been that in both films, Istanbul is represented as a trap that alienates people from themselves and society, pushes them to loneliness and mistakes, and leads to the loss of purity and goodness. Keywords: Turkish Cinema, Social Realism, Istanbul, City, Cinema

Lúcia Nagib (2020) Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema

Lúcia Nagib (2020) <i>Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema</i>

Review: Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History, by Charles L. Leavitt IV

Review: <i>Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History</i>, by Charles L. Leavitt IV

‘What’s your dream?’ The films of femme auteur Andrea Arnold

ABSTRACT This study of British director Andrea Arnold and her award-winning films addresses auteur theory and its implications for woman filmmakers. I argue that the important difference between men and women in assuming the director’s chair has been opportunity – and not a matter of essentialized gender differences. Pivoting to readings of Arnold’s films, the analysis addresses the stylistic signatures and thematic motifs that characterize her feature films: Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), Wuthering Heights (2011), American Honey (2016) and the short films Milk (1998) and Wasp (2003). I will discuss the implications of Arnold’s film style vis-à-vis gender and the discourse on what constitutes social realist film in the U.K. As for thematic motifs, Arnold’s films return to voyeurism, primal scenes and nature’s persistence in seemingly denatured environments. The analysis further examines identities (marked by age, class and gender) as motifs that circulate through Arnold’s work; a concern with identity that, nonetheless, refuses sentimentality and essentialism.

Amphibious Magical Realism? The Shape of Water as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

Amphibious Magical Realism? <i>The Shape of Water</i> as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

Pays des brumes

Whereas the aesthetics and politics of poetic realism in French prewar cinema have been analyzed in depth, the extent to which poetic realism persisted in French cinema of the Occupation and the textual space that it created for spectators within this cultural context remain comparatively neglected. Responding to this critical oversight, this article analyzes Christian-Jaque’s Voyage sans espoir (1943) and Jean Grémillon’s Lumiére d’été from three perspectives: first, it evinces iconography in each that was central to the 1930s poetic realist films directed by figures such as Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, and Jacques Feyder; second, it illustrates how poetic realism’s characteristic focus on gender was reconfigured during the Occupation; third, it determines how these aesthetic and social aspects spoke to French society under occupation. This article ultimately argues that poetic realist praxis persisted during the war years and constituted a major vector of resistance against German rule and the Vichy government.

The Artist as Realist: Jean Mihail and the De-Alienating Effects of Socialist Film

This article offers a discussion of the aesthetics of realism, which represents a central analytic category in post-socialist debates about Romanian cinema. While many disagreements have concentrated on realism as a technique for either documenting reality or disenchantment, I deploy realism as a dialectical method to understand the work of a pioneer of Romanian cinema, Jean Mihail. In criticising current models of realism, I draw on Georg Lukács’ Marxist theory to argue that realism offers not only a strong account of historical changes but also that it provides the basis of an anti-capitalist critique. Because a materialist method can illuminate shifts in film aesthetics in their social context, I concentrate on Mihail’s evolution from his 1925 social realist film Manasse (Romania) to his corporatist works at the end of the 1930s to his 1949 socialist realist documentary Orașul nu doarme niciodată [The City That Never Sleeps] (Romania). Also, I argue that realism goes beyond rethinking cinema as a technique of defamiliarisation by insisting on the de-alienating effects of cinema. In contrast to recent reformulations of realism (Christian Ferencz-Flatz) inspired by Walter Benjamin, I show that Mihail’s films constitute an important starting point to rethink a socially conscious realism.

„Die Moskauer Sonne scheint überall“. Die sowjetische Hauptstandt als Raum der Utopie in Das neue Moskau (1938) und Die Schweinepflegerin und der Hirt (1941)

Basing on Aleksandr Medvedkin’s New Moscow and Ivan Pyryev’s The Swineherd and the Shepherd, this case study analyses the way the “new” Moscow was represented as a space of realised utopia in the Soviet socialist realist films of the 1930s and at the beginning of the 1940s. Functioning as a supranational centre of the Soviet “affirmative action empire” (Terry Martin), the cinematographic Moscow casts off all constraints of ‘Russianness’ in order to become a pan-Soviet model which, both in its architecture and semantics, could epitomize the perfect city and the perfect state. The comparative analysis of both films demonstrates that, although both directors show Moscow through the lens of the so-called “spaces of celebration” (Mikhail Ryklin), ‘their’ Soviet capital does not compensate for the “traumas of the early phases of enforced urbanization”, as Ryklin supposed. Rather, it operates as a transformation machine whose impact pertains only to periphery and can be effective once the representatives of this periphery have left Moscow. The complex inclusion and exclusion mechanisms resulting from this logic turn the idealised Soviet capital into a space which only the guests from peripheral regions can perceive as utopian. The ensuing suppression ofthe inner perspectives on ‘utopian’ Moscow is interpreted here as a manifestation of the “cinematicunconscious”, which accounts for the anxieties of the inhabitants of the capital concerning both Stalinist terror and their own hegemony in a society haunted by the purges.

‘I’m Talking But No One Is Listening’

Even though Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s term ended in 1990, the reverberations of her policies have lingered on in British politics, culture and social life. This paper discusses the legacy of Thatcher within the soundscapes present in the 2016 social realist film I, Daniel Blake (dir. Ken Loach). By looking at the effects of Thatcher’s policies and how they are made audible in working class communities, this paper ultimately questions whether her presence has truly disappeared. In employing the fields of hauntology and sound studies as an approach to Thatcherism, this study sonifies the voices of the past, and questions how they will echo in the future.

Jill Craigie, Post-war British Film Culture and the British Film Academy

This article seeks to locate the socialist feminist film-maker Jill Craigie in the British film culture of the post-war period. Long regarded in scholarly accounts as something of an outsider, a woman who was effectively shut out of the industry during the 1950s, this article seeks to position Craigie rather differently. While acknowledging the obstacles she undoubtedly faced, it details aspects of her achievements and her visibility in the British film culture of the immediate post-war period. Craigie's politically driven documentaries and realist film practice accorded with prevailing discourses of ‘quality’ and she acquired the status of what would today be termed a media personality who worked across film, radio, television and print media. Considering Craigie as a figure embedded in the British film establishment, this article gives particular emphasis to her role in the British Film Academy (BFA), arguing that the significance of this practitioner-led organisation has yet to be fully recognised in British film history. The argument draws on archives held at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to begin a discussion of how the BFA, and Craigie as the first woman to be elected to its Management Council, played its part in the development of British film culture.

Review: Contemporary Political Cinema, by Matthew Holtmeier

Review: <i>Contemporary Political Cinema</i>, by Matthew Holtmeier

On the realist aesthetics of digital de‐aging in contemporary Hollywood cinema

This essay examines digital de‐aging—a process of making actors appear younger on‐screen than they actually are that has taken a firm hold in contemporary Hollywood cinema—as a controversial filmmaking tool that raises fundamental questions about cinematic realism in the digital age. Since Hollywood’s visual effects are similar to the image manipulation that can be achieved with deepfake software, digital de‐aging is framed as a complex creative process that supports the actors’ craft in order to distinguish it from the image manipulation and misinformation that has come to characterize the post‐truth era. I will discuss the affordances and limitations of Hollywood’s “youthification” technology in terms of the shifting ontologies that characterize the transition from the photographic to the digital image, situate digital de‐aging within larger debates about synthespians and the realistic portrayal of digitally created human beings, and argue that de‐aging in films such as Gemini Man (Ang Lee, 2019) and The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) reconfigures linear temporalities and ultimately reshapes the concepts of time and memory by which we structure our life trajectories.

Kathryn Bigelow: new action realist

ABSTRACT This article argues that Kathryn Bigelow is an auteur of new action realism, a distinct sub-genre within contemporary action cinema. Bigelow’s films entail unresolved narratives and an aesthetic characterised by claustrophobic immediacy and obscuration. Through discussion of theory, genre, narrative and style in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, I argue that Bigelow problematises notions of film realism. Bigelow’s work brings the viewer into sometimes uncomfortable proximity with the violent action depicted onscreen, this proximity being a key feature of new action realism. The presentation is explicit and sudden, creating a discomforting nearness through immediacy. Such imagery, particularly evident in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, echoes footage captured by military personnel, news reporters and civilians on portable cameras and smart phones, recalling news reports of 9/11 and similar reports of crisis. With this aesthetic of intimacy and immediacy, Bigelow’s new action realism hints at as much as it explicitly presents. This incomplete visual display imbues her films with a sense of confusion and hopelessness, presenting a world of fear and paranoia that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, captured by and yet obscured by its medium.