> I don't expect satisfaction. Simply sentences I can understand. Maybe
> I'm particularly stupid. But I do not understand. I have been thinking
> about realism and reality all my life and with each passing year the
> actual reality is that I recognize I understand much less than I thought
> I did the year before. Perhaps you are young and have the advantage.

I was made aware of the problems with the word "realism" when I was
young. After a hesitation, I started using it again, because I think
there's something important behind it, and I can't find other words that
address the same issues.

I'm not enjoying this conversation, but I think I want to put down a few
thoughts about realism.

Any movie relies on many conventions. A filmmaker might, for instance,
labor mightily to reproduce the exact intonation and phrasing of a
real-life sentence, and yet not try at all to reproduce the spacing and
overlapping in most real-life conversations. It doesn't work well to
talk about a film being realistic or not (assuming one believes in a
reality outside the film): every film seems to be striving at different
levels both to approximate reality and to abstract it. I don't believe
you can isolate any part of a film and say that it's realistic or not -
some form of abstraction seems to cling to every fragment.

Imagine two films that adhere pretty much to the same sets of filmmaking
conventions. Maybe the actors in both make their voice quaver when they
say "I love you," the way old-style actors sometimes do - we mostly know
the convention from Groucho making fun of it, but you can see it in 30s
movies sometimes. The second film does everything like the first except
that the quaver is gone from big emotional declarations. Both films
still feature a huge number of abstractions, but a great many audience
members will think that the second film is more realistic, whether or
not they like this perceived realism.

In fact, someone can go out with a tape recorder, get a good statistical
sample of people talking, quantify the amount of vibrato in people's
voices, and make a reasonable case that the one film's acting style is
in fact closer to reality at a certain time and place. In a way that
person is barking up the wrong tree, but it's very understandable that
he or she is tempted to resolve the matter by repairing to reality. In
fact, the impression in an audience member's mind is probably more the
point.

This seems to have something to do with our awareness of conventions.
When the late sixties and early seventies saw a big change in Hollywood
craft conventions, Westerns started to look browner, dirtier, more
washed out. It struck people as closer to reality, because they were
made aware that old Hollywood favored more vibrant color schemes, and
they all had a sense that the real West is sort of brown. So there was
talk of a new realism in Westerns. It's possible that the real West was
more colorful than a lot of these movies, but that didn't matter, in a
way: we saw a convention being exposed as an abstraction. Eventually
the new cinematographic style hardened into new conventions, at which
point a bit of color to break up a sepia production design could begin
to seem like a blow for reality.

Auerbach ends MIMESIS with a chapter on Virginia Woolf, and writers like
Woolf, Joyce, and Proust were sometimes called realistic for their
attempt to render the complications of consciousness by breaking with
factual description. Obviously the word needs a lot of context to have
any force.

I'm more tempted to use the word to describe something within the
boundaries of a single movie than I am in most other cases, because
there is so much context there: usually a filmmaker playing with realism
will vary only a few elements within a set of style conventions that
have already been established by the film itself.

- Dan