Monday 19 January 2009

How has the idea of realism been conceptualised and articulated by filmmakers?

Unlike the filmakers of the Surrealist movement, who rejected realism and attempted to transcend the real to reach a superior state, the Realists believed that the form of filmmaking that could best communicate their message was realism.

Whereas other cinema would offer its audience an escape, Realism made its viewers confront social issues unflinchingly.

It could be argued that early cinema first displayed Realism when documentary films of far off exotic locations were shown to audiences. Research has shown that before 1906 actuality films outnumbered fictional films (Gunning 1990, p. 56). However, unlike the films of Italian Neorealism and British Social Realism, the importance lay not in displaying their technology, and less in the realism of what was being shown.

The Neorealist movement was essentially a rebellion against the totalitarian control that was being exercised in Italy; film critics had a lack of creative control as they had been prevented from discussing politics in the Cinema magazine, as the editor was Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito Mussolini.
It was felt by these critics that filmmakers should be look to the influences of realist writers, and to French poetic realism to create an alternative to the telefono bianco films that they despised, that would effectively convey their message and deal poetically with the social issues that were affecting them.

Neorealism is hard to define because there does not seem to be any unanimous assent on what it is; in fact it seems that a definition of Neorealism is not desired by the filmmakers and critics of the genre, who would like us to believe that Neorealism has rejected conventions. Bazin said that Neorealism was a cinema of ‘fact’ (Bondanella, p. 31), a bold statement.
Fellini remarked that ‘Neorealism is a way of seeing reality without prejudice, without conventions coming between it and myself – facing it without preconceptions, looking at it in an honest way – whatever reality is, not just social reality but all that there is within a man’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 32)
However, it could be argued that Fellini is being idealistic when he states that Neorealism is without conventions, and that .
Certainly Neorealism has general characteristics throughout its films that have been established through the movement’s conceptualisation of realism, the most striking being the subjects the films dealt with.
Because the films of Italian Neorealism all dealt with the topics of the war, the Resistance, poverty, unemployment, the Partisan struggle and social injustice, despite being admittedly actual problems, they could not help but become generic.
There is a contrast between what Fellini says and what Armes and Bazin and note – they admit that Neorealism is ‘a cinema quite involved with artifice and had established its own cinematic conventions’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 33)
If we consider this notion then we have to acknowledge that Neorealism could not help but become a genre, and in being that films that fell into this catergory had to conform, making it disputable whether they had achieved true realism.
However, this does not mean that Neorealists had not found an effective way of articulating the real through a mixture of traditional realism and artistic intention.
As Rossellini said himself, realism is ‘simply the artistic form of the truth.’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 32).
Ironically, it is through some of the conventions of Neorealism that its dedication to the real can be asserted. For example, the use of non-professional actors that was almost universal in Italian Neorealism meant that the films seemed to be less contrived and took an air of pretence that Hollywood films suffered from away. In De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief the two main characters of father and son were both non professionals, which in Peter Bondanella’s opinion resulted in their performances being that which could have not have been ‘surpassed by even the most experience of theatrical actors’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 56). AndrĂ© Bazin said of the film that it was the ‘only valid Communist film of the whole past decade’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 58).
The less obvious filmic techniques of Neorealism, for example long shots and unobtrusive editing, also lend themselves efficiently to the cause, by not distracting us with formal aesthetics the films achieved a documentary like feel, especially in the case of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City.
The rejection of traditional cinematic conventions through not only non-professional actors and documentary effects but also on-location shooting, social content, historical actuality, political commitment, and a respect for actual duration being reflected in the screen time all makes an effective argument for Neorealisms adherence to real life and opposition to the manipulation mainstream film encountered in the cutting room.
Despite this though, even in Rome, Open City the balance between realism and artistic interpretation is noticeable. Although unobtrusive editing and long shots are utilized, there are also sequences which remind its audience that they are watching a film.
For example, Rossellini cuts back and forth between Don Pietro’s search for the weapons and descent through the building and the fascist officer’s ascent through the same building, creating suspense and drawing our attention to the construction of the scene through the cinematic device used.
Rossellini creates a narrative incorporating fact and fiction, and the Italian Neorealists certainly didn’t deny the importance the artistic elements of their films, and it could be argued that it was their willingness to have fiction and fact, illusion and reality go hand in hand that made their films so effective.
Unlike the Hollywood mainstream films the Neorealists were attempting to provide an antidote to, their films didn’t conform to sterotypical narratives, being more realistic than to hope for ‘happy ever afters’.
However, a reoccurring theme through the films that seemed to signify hope and a better future for Italy was that of the children of the country, and this perhaps at least offered the prospect of a happy ending one day.

The impact of Italian Neorealism has been undeniable, not only in Italy but in films throughout the world and especially in French New Wave cinema.

British Social Realism was heavily influenced by both French New Wave and Italian Neorealism, and like the latter was partly developed out of a struggle to develop an authentic national cinema to combat the dominance of the Hollywood cinema industry. Therefore, like with Italian Neorealism, its filmmakers believed a movement away from the escapism of Hollywood towards realism with which marginalised and unrepresented masses could relate.
However, the distinction between escapism and realism is not so easily reduced to a distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’.
British New Wave has many characteristics, like Italian Neorealism, that make it possible for us to argue the realism of the movement. One would be the typage, the casting of non-professional actors who were physically appropriate for the roles, often with regional actors, had before this been quite unheard of in British cinema.
The use of townscape and lanscape shots in real locations, also seem to suggest they are telling real stories, in real historical locations.
However, the films of the movement were quite focused on the individual, which has led to some critics saying they cannot be representative of a larger struggle.
It could be argued though, that the relationships between the dominant community and our protagonists, often unlikeable ‘angry young men’, can be representing the masses plight on a personal, more humanistic level. Higson highlights how, in a contrast to the earlier films of a decade before where the police force itself is the centre of the community, in the later films, for example The Lonelieness of the Long Distance Runner the ‘petty criminal has become the hero, while the police and borstal staff, as the offical representatives or at least managers of the community, are constructed as threats to the integrity of the individual’ (Higson, 1986 p. 92). This could be construed as reflecting the social feeling at the time, a metaphor for the working class feeling that authority had given them no voice, and an alienation in both psychological and sociological terms.
Another trait present in British New Wave that I have also commented on regarding Italian Neorealism is the desire for a poetic cinema, a poetic realism that would translate their issues in an artistic way. Although British New Wave certainly developed from earlier documentary filmmaking, they sought to do things in a completely different, new cinematic language.

It could be argued that documentaries are the closest cinematic form of realism we can achieve.
Alan Lovell claimed that ‘the importance of the documentary lies not in the quality of individual films but in the impact it had in general on the British cinema’ (Lovell and Hillier 1972, p.35).
It could be argued that this has, as Andrew Higson puts it ‘produced a film culture which has been profoundly mistrustful of anything other that a particular de-dramatised naturalistic form: ‘style’ becomes something which gets in the way of the message of the film’ (Higson 1986, p. 76)
In the past prohibition against cinematic realism by those who felt it compromised their art form had thwarted the development of documentary film making.
The emergence of documentary filmmaking allowed audiences to view a world that had previously been off limits.
AndrĂ© Bazin, said that ‘The reality that the cinema produces at will and organizes is the same worldly reality of which we are a part.’ (Gaines 2007, p. 44)
He argued for ‘objective reality’ and ‘true continuity’ in documentaries, but can we ever really be objective?
A film-maker will always have a intention and no matter whether they try to show the world as it is, they will always do so subjectively by choosing what to show and what not to show, and so we have to be aware as an audience that a documentary that looks the same as the world before the camera has still been cut or produced out of material subject to other factors, such as a film-makers bias towards one side.
The reason it is important for us to realise this is because unlike when we watch a fictional film and are aware of a subjective filmmaker who has intent, we may accept documentaries at face value and base our views on the content we see and hear within them.
Documentary seeks to manipulate reality as means to an end, but reality is a moving target, and this may mean that documentary can never truely hold a mirror up to the world.
As much as the film maker may want the camera to show the importance of the everyday in a way which is merely observational, it could be argued that it cannot help but be analytical.
Radical film maker and author Danny Schecter expressed a concern that documentary realism could reinforce a policy you do not approve of, because subjects are left to speak uncoached, however Gaines believes that if we take a long enough view on everyday life ‘the truth will out’. (Gaines 2007, p. 51)
Gaines believes that a same world sensation is necessary and that we need to return to the form of documentary that uses the world to transform the world, which motivates people into doing something, similar to the Soviet tradition when cinema provoked revolutionary bodies.
Documentary making as Peter Wyeth and Don Mcpherson state, has ‘set the very terms in which film-making is thought about in Britain’ (Higson 1986, p. 73), and this is still evident in British cinema today. Gritty social realism is the identity our national cinema has, and some contemporary examples of this are Dirty Pretty Things and the films of Paul Greengrass.

In conclusion I would argue that realism has been conceptualised and articulated into countless forms by filmmakers that seek to replicate reality, but that we will never be able to ascertain which does so most effectively as reality itself is a subjective concept that can never be consistantly defined.



Bibliography
- Bondanella, Peter (1998) ‘The Masters of Neorealism: De Sica, Visconti and Rossellini’ in Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, New York: Continuum
- Gaines, Jane M. (2007) ‘The Production of Outrage: the Radical Documentary Tradition’, The Journal of Cinema and Media 48.2 36-55
- Higson, Andrew (1986) ‘Britains Outstanding Contribution to the Film’: The Documentary-Realist Tradition in Charles Barr (ed) in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years Of British Cinema, London: BFI
- Lovell, Alan and Hillier, Jim (1972) Studies in Documentary, London, Secker & Warburg/BFI, p. 35

Monday 12 January 2009

Control Room and modern images in warfare

How do media images affect the conduct of modern warfare?
It could be argued that modern warfare is as much carried out in the media with images and words; as it is on ground with weapons and soldiers.
Media images are important because it is through them the actions of a government are portrayed to the citizens of their country, and the world, and through them we as a public can make our judgements. Media images are the only way we can be spectators of wars fought thousands of miles away, form opinions upon them, and ascertain whether we believe our governments are making the right decisions. Images are exceptionally important as they transcend language and are something people of any nationality can understand.

The Vietnam War, or the ‘Living Room war’, nicknamed so because many believed it was fought out on our television screens as much as or more so than the battleground, was impacted to such a degree by media images that it has transformed the way wars have been fought since, by the USA, as well as other countries.
The media were largely held accountable for the outcome of the Vietnam War; with many believing that it was the journalists who had ‘lost it for them’, that the enemy within had been their own media, and television was blamed for alienating public sympathy.
One side of the argument regarding the media’s importance in the outcome of Vietnam is that the media misrepresented the events taking place and the US militaries actions, leading to a lack of support for the troops from the American public in a war that should have been won.
Others would argue that the media and journalists had only satisfied their responsibilities by reporting and revealing the truth of the situation and US failures to the public who would have been otherwise kept in the dark.
Both however would surely agree that the media had been of huge significance in the war and the resulting consequences and the shift in public opinion, with governments realising that wars could be won on the battlefront but lost on the domestic front through the influence of media.
Vietnam was largely seen as a ‘war we shouldn’t have been in’ by Americans, and this resulted in anti-war feeling and pacifism that was prominent in America for many years afterwards. In the 1980’s this still present atmosphere was combated by the uber-masculine war movies starring the Stallone’s and Schwarzenegger’s of the world arguably attempting to brainwash the male public out of their pacifism and into being more pro-war, ‘curing’ the withdrawal, male shame and failure that was still felt after the ‘loss’ of Vietnam.
The media’s influence was now considered in planning public relations in future wars not only in the USA but worldwide, and in the Falklands War of 1982 the British government fought a war in, as Philip M. Taylor puts it, an ‘information vacuum’. The war was fought without televised coverage for a number of reasons, some technical, but mainly because of policy, with most of the images emerging only once the war was over.
It seemed that the British military had found a way to fight wars that would alleviate ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, and so America went about applying this to conflicts in Grenada and Panama, and later to the Gulf War.

It became obvious that if the Gulf War was going to be won, not only would American public opinion have to be harnessed but worldwide opinion as well, and so depicting the enemy as a military, economic and ideological threat was essential, portraying Saddam Hussein as a ‘new Hitler’ who was threatening the American way of life. This propaganda was crucial in psychologically preparing the American public and ensuring the government wouldn’t have another Vietnam on their hands.
In comparison the government was remarkably unchallenged by the media in the Gulf War, with journalists not wishing to be held accountable again for the militaries failure. The press didn’t fight the imposition of government censorship and the public also complied with the media’s new ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ attitude.
Research even showed that a large number of Americans would have approved of more rigorous censorship; it seems that they didn’t want to be humiliated again and wanted their wounded national pride to recover, meaning that the American military were free to wage a war as if no-one were watching, as if it were not a democratic country.
The countries media acted complicitly with the government to provide public with the reports they wanted to hear, shielding them from the ‘bad violence’ that exposed contradictions and providing only the ‘good violence’ that they felt was justified.
Images were now harnessed for a different use, utilized to justify the government’s actions, with images of atrocities becoming their own argument and supporting the deployment of American troops, which arguably made it hard to ask essential questions about the war.
In an approach that was unusual for warring leaders George Bush and Saddam Hussein exchanged blows over CNN, this surely being an eloquent synonym for the important role the media would take in modern wars. By using a television channel as the ring for their political discourse Bush and Hussein were changing the rules of international politics and altering the way in which modern warfare would be carried out, this being on our television screens.
Overt censorship, along with saturation bombing and rejection of all third part ceasefire proposals, as well as many other factors, signified a reincarnation of the US military used to completely lay to rest the anti war sentiment of Vietnam once and for all, and subscribing to the belief that if you are victorious, you don’t have to justify yourself.
Much has been said since that there seems to have been two wars taking place, the one itself that was happening, and the one that had been portrayed by the media. The degree to which journalists can ever cover any war objectively is debatable and we need to be cautious about accepting what we see as truth. War which appears to be one that if fought openly in full view of public opinion because it is televised can often be as hidden as one which is not, and when we accept images as reality and allow them to merge into one another we are susceptible to accepting propaganda as truth. As Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister puts it, ‘Television is no longer a spectator... If you observe a phenomenon, you actually change it... As you observe a phenomenon with television, instantly you modify it somewhat. And I think that what we have to make sure of is that the truth is not modified, and that it’s constantly fed to the leaders and to the publics in democratic countries’.

With the most recent war in Iraq the media have not been so obedient in complying with the government to limit negative publicity. On the whole the portrayal of the war has largely been negative, and public feeling seems to hark back to that of ‘Vietnam Syndrome.’
There has been worldwide outrage at what is undoubtedly an illegal war, and countless protests which have largely been ignored by the US and UK governments, who previous to the invasion of Iraq had claimed that weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq and were a serious threat to their security as well as that of their allies. No such weapons or evidence of them were found by United Nations weapons inspectors, resulting in criticism of the US and UK ‘war mongers’ who many believed had used this excuse out of their greed for oil and profits.
Protests were organised across the world by anti-war groups and it is estimated that 36 million people have taken part in almost 3000 of them. There have been questions raised regarding the legality of the war, with Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations saying of the invasion ‘I have indicated it was not in conformity with the U.N. charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal’, as well as Lord Bingham, the former UK Law Lord describing the war as a serious violation of international law and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a ‘world vigilante’. There has also been a large amount of negative press condemning US soldiers’ actions, such as the mistreating of Iraqi civilians.

All of this is worlds apart from the media’s collusion with the government in the Gulf War, and the backlash has arguably resulted in George Bush Jnr becoming the most unpopular American president of all time, as well as a worldwide laughing stock due to his apparent ignorance in many political and geographical matters. It could be argued this is largely down to our ‘soundbite society’, where information, images and videoclips are always at our fingertips due to advancements in technology and websites such as Youtube.com. All of this demonstrates the proximity and great importance of the media, and the image, to politics today in our modern world.
This, and more specifically the media coverage of the Iraq war could be said to have been the downfall of Bush, and the Republican Party, as we have now seen a Democrat elected into the White House.
In late 2008 a pact was approved by US and Iraqi government which states that US combat forces will be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30th 2009, and that all US forces will have been withdrawn completely from Iraq by December 31st 2011.

Control Room is a film which is certainly aware of the significance of the media image in modern warfare. The film uses images and footage to relay the Iraqi point of view that is so often disregarded in our Western civilisation.
Donald Rumsfeld appears throughout the film at press conferences, complaining about the propagandist nature of Al Jazeera, the most popular channel in the Arab nations. He surely wouldn’t be so concerned if he didn’t believe that the portrayal and reports of the war would be extremely significant in the outcome of it.
Paradoxically, another clip shows Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf himself accusing the television organization of transmitting American propaganda. The Bush administration has also called Al Jazeera ‘the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden’.

It is ironic that the makers of the film and representatives of news channels in it are so concerned, and rightfully so, with communicating truth and fact, when the war was arguably one based on lies. There is also an irony in this when you consider Rumsfelds insensitive accusations that the Iraqis lie about their casualties, ‘grabbing women and children whenever a bomb goes off and say they got hit to harness sympathy’. This clearly demonstrates Rumsfelds, and the Bush administrations lack of regard for Iraqi life, and the editing utilizes the power of the image here, as this quote is used alongside images of injured Iraqi women and children, clearly actually hurt, resulting in a very moving and tragic piece of film.

The film highlights American attempts to gain control over people’s freedom of speech, the ‘accidental’ bombing of the Al Jazeera headquarters is a synonym for American control over the depiction of the war. The image of the destroyed satellite that the film starts with connotes the destruction of freedom of speech, the absence of impartial reportage, and is an eloquent metaphor for the ‘media war’.
So what did Control Room reveal about the relationship between the war and the media? Essentially, the film brings to our attention the contrast between reality and the reality we are offered.
The media subverts reality, but as Samir Khader, the producer of Al Jazeera said ‘You cannot wage a war without channels, and without media.’
The film also reveals that all the major news channels, including the BBC, CNN, and NBC have headquarters at Central Command, again illustrating the extreme proximity and importance of media to the war.
So in conclusion, how important is the media image in modern warfare? It is of the foremost importance. The media image can be the downfall of a leader or the reason he is elected, can win a war, or lose one.


Bibliography

Boose, Lynda, ‘Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’: From the Quagmire to the Gulf’, in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds) Cultures Of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke U.P., 1993), pp. 581 – 616
Gaines, Jane M., ‘The Production of outrage: the Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition’, The Journal of Cinema and Media 48.2 (2007) 36-55
Roper, Jon, ‘Overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome: the Gulf War and Revisionism’, from Jeffery Walsh (ed.) The Gulf War Did Not Happen: Politics, Culture and Warfare post-Vietnam (Aldershot: Arena, 1995), pp. 27 – 47
Taylor, Philip M., ‘Image and reality in the Gulf War’. from War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester: MUP, 1992), pp.1-30
Control Room, dir. Jehane Noujaim (2004)
"Iraq war illegal, says Annan". BBC News 24 (2004-09-16)
‘Top judge: US and UK acted as 'vigilantes' in Iraq invasion’, The Guardian, November 18 2008