The realism of cinema is the artistic movement to recreate and replicate life as accurately and objectively as possible on screen. This statement is clearly defined in the chapter of Basic Concepts in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Siegfried Kracauer. The author explains that film is essentially a more elaborate form of photography, where as a whole, they record and reveal physical reality through the medium of photographic technology. Kracauer deemed realism to be a very important factor in film, more so in the content than the way it is conceived. He rejected the introduction of formative tendencies in filmmaking, which in a way imposed meaning on the images. He believed that films should just be about picturing movement …show more content…
We see street scenes of everyday life, reproductions of theatrical scenes and abstracted realities being produced in films over the years. It is rather inaccurate of Kracauer to determine that film should only resemble the limitless occurrences of life itself. Film was and is not only “a sense of observation”, but also a combination of that as well as a whole other universe.
In this paper, we present an analytical framework of Kracauer and his unique film theory, and go into how cinema of the past and present responds to it. We seek to find out what is it about the formative tendency that Kracauer so strongly rejects in his definition of film. And what is it about the craftiness of fantasy and contrived plots that Kracauer strongly opposes? Will such theory of his survive in the world of cinema?
Basic and technical properties
Film, as mentioned by Kracauer, is an extension of photography itself. Thus, the basic properties would include the properties of photography. Its main purpose is to record physical reality as it happens. The photographed world will be the physical world as we see, know and recognise. But this world is not to be confused with the staged world. Despite film being a reproductive medium, such that our physical world and the staged world are being recorded and produced again and again, the staged world is not like the physical world. This is in the sense that the physical world would continue on with life while the staged world would crumble were it to relate to real-life
Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2004.
the relation of what is filmed and what truly is real. In an inspection of The Thin
Beginning the mid 1920s, Hollywood’s ostensibly all-powerful film studios controlled the American film industry, creating a period of film history now recognized as “Classical Hollywood”. Distinguished by a practical, workmanlike, “invisible” method of filmmaking- whose purpose was to demand as little attention to the camera as possible, Classical Hollywood cinema supported undeviating storylines (with the occasional flashback being an exception), an observance of a the three act structure, frontality, and visibly identified goals for the “hero” to work toward and well-defined conflict/story resolution, most commonly illustrated with the employment of the “happy ending”. Studios understood precisely what an audience desired, and accommodated their wants and needs, resulting in films that were generally all the same, starring similar (sometimes the same) actors, crafted in a similar manner. It became the principal style throughout the western world against which all other styles were judged. While there have been some deviations and experiments with the format in the past 50 plus ye...
Phillips, Gene D. Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995.
The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.
We can start off with something that we all easily take granted for in movies and that is the imagery. We all have imaginations that can produce an accurate image depending on what we read or see, but something the books or plays couldn’t accomplish is give the image to us. So we wouldn’t have to seco...
During the course of this essay it is my intention to discuss the differences between Classical Hollywood and post-Classical Hollywood. Although these terms refer to theoretical movements of which they are not definitive it is my goal to show that they are applicable in a broad way to a cinema tradition that dominated Hollywood production between 1916 and 1960 and which also pervaded Western Mainstream Cinema (Classical Hollywood or Classic Narrative Cinema) and to the movement and changes that came about following this time period (Post-Classical or New Hollywood). I intend to do this by first analysing and defining aspects of Classical Hollywood and having done that, examining post classical at which time the relationship between them will become evident. It is my intention to reference films from both movements and also published texts relative to the subject matter. In order to illustrate the structures involved I will be writing about the subjects of genre and genre transformation, the representation of gender, postmodernism and the relationship between style, form and content.
Realism is a style of writing which shows how things are in life. It showed how mostly every person thought life was just perfect. They were not seeing the
According to historians like Neil Burch, the primitive period of the film industry, at the turn of the 20th century was making films that appealed to their audiences due to the simple story. A non-fiction narrative, single shots a burgeoning sense
Stanley, Robert H. The Movie Idiom: Film as a Popular Art Form. Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 2011. Print
Realism in film is significance in actual and present things, and how things actually come out. now, it is afar the capacity of this part to converse the extent of realism, we support are description upon things such as sanity, experiences, believes, manner and extra communal things such as olden times, political affairs, and finances. No matter how we identify authenticity, realism in film can be judged by administrating what we observe in own world and the world of others. Realism is also a way of conducting subject matter that follows everyday life. Practical characters are anticipated to do things that are conventional to our prospect of real people.
Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.
In the 19th century, the Realism Movement started which was when people started to see life in a realistic way and did not look past all the negative aspects. The realism movement had an effect on music and literature. Famous plays like The Cherry Orchard, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler, were heavily influenced by Realism. Musicians like Dmitry Bortniansky, Alexander Scriabin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Vasily Alexeievich Pashkevich, and Lera Auerbach from the 21st, 20th ,19th, 18th century were influenced by the Realism Movement. From the 18th century to the 21st century, the Realism Movement has changed the way that musicians and writers compose their works, which caused people to go from thinking that life is perfect and it does not have any negative aspects, to seeing that life is not perfect and acknowledging the negative aspects of life.
‘Then came the films’; writes the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, evoking the arrival of a powerful new art form at the end of 19th century. By this statement, he tried to explain that films were not just another visual medium, but it has a clear differentiation from all previous mediums of visual culture.