Film & Reality
Taken from 2nd part of Film Theory & Criticism (6th
Ed. by Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen)

Art Imitates nature?
• Aristotle
• Renaissance
• Impressionism
• Realists (Tolstoy & Balzac)
• Naturalism
• Dogma 95

Anti-realist Tradition
• Abstract Art
• Avant garde
• Modernism
• Post-Modernism
• ‘Why should these images not liberate the
imagination from the tedium of reality,
introducing us to the world of abstractions
or of dreams instead?’

Siegfried Kracauer
• A leading exponent of realism in cinema
• ‘Kracauer argues that because film literally
photographs reality it alone is capable of
holding the mirror up to nature.’
• His seminal work ‘From Caligari to Hitler’
is an analysis of Caligari’s landscapes as
German cinema turning away from a reality
which is ‘haphazard, incalculable and
uncontrollable.’

Kracauer Realism &
Leni
Riefenstahl
Ideology
• Interestingly, Kracauer argues that by
adopting fantasy rather than realism,
German cinema helped fuel the rise of the
Nazis by not attempting to mirror the
reality of what was going on in society.
• ‘German cinema achieved the damnation,
not the redemption of German life.’

Bazin- Cahiers du
Cinema
• Founded the crucial French film magazine
• Pinpointed the technological power of the
camera (still and motion-picture) to satisfy
a human desire throughout time to
‘recreate the world in its own image.‘

Bazin- Realist Aesthetic
• Jean Renoir
• Orson Welles & William Wyler
• Italian Neorealism
• Non professional actors (normal people)
• Natural Setting
• Simple, believable narrative

Rudolf Arnheim- Art?
• Questioned whether mere mechanical
reproduction of reality is art.
• Describes the true artistic urge as- ‘not
simply to copy, but to originate, interpret
and to mold.’

Independent, Experimental
or Avant Garde
• Maya Deren & Stan Brakhage
• Deren fused both traditions together by
photographing reality and then using slow
motion, reverse motion and the freeze
frame.
• ‘She attempts to undermine what we know
about these realities.’

Brakhage- ‘Liberation of
the Eye’
• ‘An act of seeing previously unimagined and
defined by conventions of representation.’
• Described cinema as ‘new, unrealised
magic,’ and subsequently challenged the
realist tradition.

Jean-Louis Baudry- Film
as Dream
• Observes that film resembles a dream
• Audience’s movements are inhibited
• Sits in a darkened room
• Images projected on a screen
• Psychoanalysts refer to this as a
‘regression to a state of primitive
narcissism.’

Noel Carroll
• Challenges Baudry by pointing out that
many spectators leave the cinema for a
smoke and that images are publicly available
not individual.
• He also points out that we understand film
far better than dreams

Gilles Deluze
• Points to post WW2 cinema and in
particularly neorealism as more important
than the advent of sound.
• Rational cuts are ignored in favour of a new
art which is more concerned with
fragmentation and discontinuity of the
narrative structure. (ASA structure-
‘Actions create situations which create new
situations, rather than in traditional
Hollywood where SAS dominates)

Stephen Prince- The Coming of
CGI
• So how do we provide CGI within the
context of this debate? ‘When faced with
digitised images, will we need to discard
notions of realism in the cinema?’
• Prince believes that actually, we need both.
The links between fictional reality visual/
social co-ordinates of our own 3D world
are crucial. ‘Unreal images have never
seemed so real.’