Realism in the arts is an attempt to represent the world in an objective and truthful way. Realism became prevalent from the mid-1800s in English theatre and French painting, and has reoccurred in various movements such as social realism (kitchen sink drama), documentary film and Italian neo-realism.
Realism is also the technical and philosophical basis of Western society. The world exists outside of our subjective understanding of it. Empirical science, for example, is a process of the observation of that world. ‘Document’ means evidence, and may be traced to ‘documentum’, a medieval term for an official paper – evidence not to be questioned, a truthful account backed by the authority of the law.’ Through the photographic process documentary photography retained an the indexical link to reality through the capturing of light reflected from an actual object in the world (Barthes). Therefore photography confers authenticity through its supposed transparency. It suggests a factual reflection of reality. Documentary photography is ‘coded’ as a form of realist artistic practice. The ‘pure’, objective reflection of reality that is the basis of the idea of the photograph as document is extremely problematic as documentary photography constructs ideas of truth, transparency, evidence, and authorial objectivity – through camera distance, angle, framing, lighting, timing, cropping and editing.
Andre Bazin (1918-1958) – film theorist and critic. Co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951. Argued that realism is the most important function of cinema. His call for objective reality, deep focus, and lack of montage are linked to his belief that the interpretation of a film or scene should be left to the spectator.
Bazin argued for films that depicted what he saw as “objective reality”, such as documentaries and Italian neorealist films. Viewed cinema and photography as media that an artist can use to find the deeper meanings behind the phenomena of existence. Advocated the use of deep focus (Orson Welles), wide shots (Jean Renoir) and the “shot-in-depth”, and preferred what he referred to as “true continuity” through mise-en-scène over experiments in editing and visual effects…
The Bicycle Thieves follows the story of a poor father searching post-World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose the job which was to save his young family from poverty. The juxtaposition of the main characters, Antonio and his son Bruno, against a setting of empty and crowded streets is what shapes the characters’ psychological and social state of isolation and alienation.
In spite of the least possible interference with physical reality, the world seen through the perspective of the camera lens tells us more about the filmmaker’s subjectivity than the reality he or she tries to address. Rosen’s view on Bazin’s position is that “the ‘objective’ is always infected by the ‘subjective’, never available except through the processes of the latter.” Bazin saw in the Italian neorealists a type of cinema that strangely fused together both mindsets. Their narratives deal with a perceptual drama that exists independent of the characters but at the same time present a conceptual drama that is completely self-enclosed within the characters’ own personalised experiences.
The potential for image control and manipulation provided by digital technology has stirred a great interest in post-production, particularly in the areas of digital compositing and digital editing.
Reality is seen not as something to be captured in the purest way possible by the camera lens but rather as something to be constructed (simulation).
For Prince, the viewer’s interest is no longer in how the film expresses its realism, whether it is highly stylized through the usage of technology or not, but “about the kinds of linkages that connect the represented fictionalized reality of a given film to the visual and social coordinates of our own three-dimensional world. Such focus need not reinstate indexicality as the ground of realism”
On the one hand, “a perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audio visual experience of three- dimensional space” (Prince 1999: 400). In other words, realism is rooted in the object’s primary visual characteristics or visual representation.
On the other hand, a realistic representation “need not reinstate indexicality as the ground for realism… even unreal image can be perceptually realistic”.
From this perspective, digital imagery technology as a theory of film realism brings to the forefront the clear distinction between a realism that is representationally artistic and a realism that is representationally realistic.
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